The Nothing Man

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  There were five Nothing Man targets in all. In two of them, we had visits prior to the attacks from a lone guard warning of a recent burglary in the area – but one of these was based on my own very vague memory of a man at the door who made my mother call my father and grandmother by their first names. In four of them, we could confirm that burglaries had taken place nearby, prior to the attacks – but burglary was a fairly common crime and if we picked five Cork homes at random at any date in time, we would probably find similar incidents to connect to them.

  If this really was the connection between the Nothing Man’s victims, if this was the key that would unlock the mystery of why us, it was still just a blurry shape in the distance.

  But we still had Linda O’Neill in Fermoy to check out.

  We had only recently made contact with Linda O’Neill after months of unanswered calls, emails and even a handwritten letter sent to her place of work. Shortly before Ed and I met Tommy at Dublin Airport, I had given up on her and resigned myself to completing the chapter about her attack with the materials I had, namely Garda reports and media interviews she’d given at the time. Then Ed tried in an official capacity and finally got her on the phone, but she only stayed on it long enough to tell him – and me – that she had no interest in being involved in this book. It wouldn’t be fair to contact her again, now, to ask if she’d ever had a visit from a guard at the house in Fermoy, and honestly even if that didn’t present a moral problem for me, I just couldn’t stomach another six months of trying to track her down. Instead, Ed went to someone else who had spent a lot of time at the house in the weeks leading up to the attack and who was happy to talk to us: Johnnie Murphy, the foreman.

  Johnnie was still in the construction business, although he was now the head of his own firm and was, as he so poetically put it, no longer freezing his balls off on building sites but burning them on space heaters in Portakabins. And as soon as Ed asked, ‘Do you remember any Garda calling to the O’Neills’ house before the attack?’ Johnnie said, ‘Yeah, I do – that little prick.’

  He didn’t know the exact date of the visit, but he thought it wasn’t long after he and his team had started on site. That would’ve made it early March 2001, around the time the O’Neills’ planning application had been approved. It had been late in the day, maybe five or six o’clock, and Johnnie was in the utility room on the ground floor, off the kitchen. He was using it as a make-shift office. That evening he was staying late to sort some paperwork and was the only person left on site. Linda and Conor were gone to Cork to collect some bathroom fixtures. When he heard a noise in the kitchen he thought it was them, back earlier than expected. But when he went to investigate, Johnnie found himself face-to-face with a uniformed guard.

  Johnnie had lived in Fermoy all his life and was a regular face at committee meetings, on the sidelines at GAA games and holding fort in the local pubs. He knew the guards who worked out of Fermoy station just from seeing them around and running into them at these same places. But he didn’t recognise this guard and didn’t like the fact that he’d found the man inside the house. When he flashed his badge, Johnnie made a point of studying it and committing the name on the identification to memory: Garda Ronan Donoghue. He thought the ID looked a bit fishy but he’d never actually seen one up close and didn’t know what they were supposed to look like, and the badge sitting next to it in the guard’s little flip-up wallet seemed legit. Johnnie had had a bit of trouble with the guards when he was a teen, a time in his life he deeply regretted, and as an adult his default setting with them was deferential, obedient and polite.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ Johnnie had asked.

  Donoghue said there’d been a burglary in the area. He was looking to speak with the owners about securing their property, especially while building work was going on and ‘all sorts of people’ would be coming and going. Case in point: he’d just been able to walk right into the house through the open front door. (Johnnie didn’t think he’d left the door open but he wasn’t sure, so he said nothing.) Donoghue asked about the owners – who they were, whether they were new to the area, if they had kids, whether or not they were living there while the work went on.

  Johnnie felt like Donoghue was criticising him, that he was intimating that Johnnie and his team were doing a shoddy job of securing the site, and he didn’t like it – especially when the man was clearly new around town and Johnnie was a permanent fixture in it. The more Donoghue talked, the more annoyed Johnnie became. But he had to hold it in. He felt he couldn’t say anything antagonistic. By the time Donoghue left, steam was practically coming out of Johnnie’s ears. Who the hell did this prick think he was, eh? Who did he think he was speaking to? The fucking cheek of him.

  Johnnie doesn’t think he ever mentioned this visit to Linda or Conor, but he did say it to Gerard Byrne, a friend of his who taught at the primary school. Byrne said he thought Johnnie was paranoid and totally overreacting. But he also said that as far as he knew – and he tended to be a man who knew such things – there was no Garda Donoghue working out of Fermoy station.

  Johnnie did nothing with this information. He didn’t call the station to check. He didn’t report that someone was impersonating a member of An Garda Síochána. He didn’t mention the visit to anyone other than Gerard Byrne – even after Linda was attacked when, in my opinion, the visit could only have taken on a greater and worryingly sinister significance. Johnnie just forgot about it. He told us he didn’t think he’d ever even thought of it again until Ed called and asked him specifically if such a thing had happened.

  I desperately wish I could rewind the clock and set off alarm bells at the point in this story, when someone claiming to be Garda Ronan Donoghue leaves the house in Fermoy while Johnnie Murphy stands in the doorway and watches him go. Forget alarm bells – let’s have air-raid sirens. Because that’s the moment. That’s the point at which two paths diverged in a wood and had we chased him down the other one, my family would still be alive.

  But I am armed with the knowledge of what’s to come. I know that someone will enter the O’Neills’ house to move things, to interfere with things, and to take something – Linda’s diary – away. I know that Linda will suffer a heinous attack in her own home that will almost kill her. I know that in a few months’ time Ed will link that case to four others, including the murder of my own family members, and that nearly two decades after that, he and I will find another connection that involves a man pretending to be a guard.

  But Johnnie didn’t know any of that. He had an annoying five-minute conversation one day and complained about it to a friend who mentioned that he didn’t think there was a guard by that name in the local station. So what? It was a minor detail in an unimportant event on an unremarkable day, and it soon fell straight out of Johnnie’s mind.

  You open your door one evening to find a uniformed police officer standing outside. Nothing’s wrong, don’t worry. This is just a courtesy call. There’s been a burglary in the area and they’re just letting you know so your home isn’t next. Lock your doors and windows. Keep valuables out of view. Think about installing an alarm. You chat for a few minutes. You might mention the door at the back that doesn’t lock. Or that fact that you live here alone. Or that the couple who owns this construction site is living here while the work goes on – or, well, one of them is, because her husband is going back to San Francisco for a few weeks next week. Maybe you don’t reveal any information, but while you speak he’s still gathering it. The integrity of the front-door lock. The layout of the ground floor. Whether or not he likes the look of you. If he’d like to do to you what he’s already done to the others.

  That’s how he was choosing them, we felt sure. Donning a Garda uniform and doing door-to-door calls in the aftermath of a real burglary. But was he really a guard?

  Neither Tom nor Johnnie could remember seeing a Garda car, and we thought it would be relatively easy to convince a member of the public that you were wearing a Garda uniform
when in actual fact you were wearing an approximation of one. He could’ve also easily got hold a real uniform – if he was prepared to murder innocent people, he was probably willing to steal items of clothing too. Moreover this behaviour would have been an incredible risk for a serving member to take, when one phone call to the local station would’ve been all it took to bring his little rogue scouting missions crashing down.

  Ed never said this to me, but I felt he had another objection to the theory that our Ghost Garda was the real deal: he thought there was no way a Garda could do this. Would the kind of man who’d rape Linda O’Neill and then leave her for dead also want to work in the force that protected civilians from men like him? Ed couldn’t bring himself to believe the answer was yes.

  I have to admit that I found it easier. A real guard would do a much better job of acting like one. He would have access to reports and operational details, so he’d know where there’d been a residential burglary and when his colleagues would be out officially knocking on doors. He’d also be familiar with investigative methods and know the importance of leaving no physical evidence behind him. And he’d already have a real uniform and badge.

  We arranged for a sketch artist to meet with Johnnie Murphy so we could get some picture of ‘Garda’ Donoghue, but Johnnie’s memory of the man’s face wasn’t as detailed as his memory of their conversation. He did, however, remember a lot about the man’s uniform. He mentioned epaulettes with numbers sewn on and although he didn’t remember what they were, he could recall that one of them was askew, hanging – literally – by a thread.

  This made Ed think that even if the man wasn’t the real deal, the uniform was. Numbers coming loose was a common problem that Ed himself had suffered when he was in uniform, keeping a supply of paperclips on him just in case. (They were the best way to reattach them in a hurry.) Rank-and-file Gardaí have to report to superiors if any issued items go missing or get misplaced, but looking for such a thing nearly two decades later would be a fool’s errand. However, spit-balling about this scenario made Ed think of another kind of missing property report: the evidentiary kind.

  It wasn’t common, but sometimes things went missing between crime scenes and the evidence room. Money and drugs, mostly. Corruption plagued the force just as it did every other area of society. If it was noticed, it took a brave and principled member to report it, but it did happen. Ed went to his Superintendent, Kevin Taylor – who had already helped us so much – and, through him, managed to get a look at such reports for Cork county for the twelve months before the Nothing Man’s first attack. Taylor wanted the same thing Ed and I did: to finally solve this case.

  In October 1999, a handgun, one of thirteen weapons seized in a raid in Ringaskiddy, disappeared somewhere between the farmhouse in which it was found and the evidence room to which it should’ve been delivered. There was no way of knowing if that gun was the same one the Nothing Man had used, but the model didn’t clash with the description of the gun as provided by Linda O’Neill. Had the Nothing Man got a gun by stealing it from a crime scene? If he had, then we had our answer: he was a real guard. But investigating every member of An Garda Síochána who theoretically had access to that gun nearly two decades ago was a step too far for Ed, if not morally or logistically then certainly legally and procedurally, when we had no evidence that the missing gun and the gun used at the O’Neills’ house were one and the same.

  And just like that, we found ourselves at another dead end.

  What else could we do? Put a call out asking people if twenty years ago they’d had a five-minute visit from a uniformed guard? Even if anyone remembered that they had, we’d need a team of people not only to get the word out there, but also to effectively collect and deal with the responses.

  I couldn’t quite believe it – I refused to, at first – but after the dust had settled on this heady rush of new information, Ed and I were stuck once again. We had run our Ghost Garda lead down and it had led us absolutely nowhere.

  Burglary. After nearly twenty years, we thought we finally had the password that would unlock the entire Nothing Man case.

  But we didn’t.

  – 11 –

  The Nothing Man

  Dr Nell Weir is associate professor of forensic psychology at Trinity College Dublin. She is in her mid-forties and was born in Port Talbot, Wales. If you visit her profile page on the university website, you will not find the kind of professional headshot her colleagues have all opted for. Instead, Dr Weir has chosen what looks like a holiday snap, taken outside the Lizzie Borden House in Fall River, Massachusetts, where the bodies of Borden’s father and stepmother were found covered in axe wounds in 1892. Today it is both a macabre tourist attraction and a thriving bed and breakfast. It’s only a tiny glint of light in the photograph, but Dr Weir is wearing one of her favourite accessories on her coat’s lapel: a small pin in the shape of a pair of pursed, full lips that says, Let’s talk about serial killers. That’s what Dr Weir does on a freshman module called ‘Ordinary Monsters: Inside the Mind of the Serial Murderer’. The course is so popular that she teaches it twice a year to keep up with demand and, even then, enrolment has to be decided by a lottery of student numbers to keep things fair. ‘It is surely the only class on campus,’ Dr Weir told me via email, ‘where we have to station someone outside to stop students from sneaking in.’

  On a Tuesday morning in January 2017, I sat in on the introductory lecture. It was held in a theatre that seated at least a hundred people, but by the time I arrived – early, I thought, a good ten minutes before Dr Weir was due to – it was already standing room only. I hovered by the doors until a gaggle of teenage girls took pity on me and squeezed up so I could fit on the end of their bench. The room was overheated and I felt slightly sick with nerves, although Dr Weir had assured me the next forty-five minutes would be free from gory details and that she wouldn’t be talking about the Nothing Man.

  The girls beside me were trading the names of their favourite true-crime podcasts (‘That’s the one about the kids who went missing. It’s so good, oh my God, I was obsessed!’) when Dr Weir arrived and descended the central stairs to the front of the room. When she turned on the projection screen, we were treated to an extreme close-up of Anthony Hopkins in his most famous role, as the food and wine and human flesh connoisseur, Hannibal Lecter.

  Dr Weir took her place behind the lectern and smiled at us. She didn’t have to wait for everyone to quieten down; that had happened automatically when she’d entered the room. The air buzzed with giddy anticipation.

  Before she began the lecture proper, Dr Weir announced, she wanted to gauge our existing knowledge. She asked anyone who knew the name of a serial killer to raise their hand and keep it up until she called on them, or until someone else she’d called on said the same name first.

  Almost everyone in the room put up a hand and Dr Weir started pointing at random.

  Ireland’s own Will Hurley, aka the Canal Killer, was back in the news, so it was unsurprising that his was the first name said aloud. Then came all the usual American and British suspects. Ted Bundy. Jeffrey Dahmer. John Wayne Gacy. Ed Gein. Fred West. Peter Sutcliffe. Harold Shipman.

  ‘The Nothing Man,’ one student said, ‘but we don’t know who is he yet,’ and I silently thanked her for that yet.

  After those names, barely half the raised hands were still up. Then came the ones whose nicknames were better known than their given ones. Gary Ridgway aka the Green River Killer. Richard Ramirez aka the Night Stalker. Dennis Rader aka BTK. Ted Kaczynski aka the Unabomber.

  Now, only three hands remained. When Dr Weir called on them, she got Arthur Leigh Allen, suspected of being the Zodiac Killer; Andrew Cunanan, the man who shot and killed Gianni Versace; and Aileen Wuornos, executed in 2002 for the murders of six men and famously played by Charlize Theron in the movie Monster.

  ‘Well,’ Dr Weir said, ‘I’m very impressed. Give yourselves a round of applause.’ The students were happy to oblige. ‘Now l
et’s do the same thing again, but this time, I’m looking for names of their victims.’

  Silence – and not a single hand.

  ‘Even just a first name,’ Dr Weir said.

  The students shifted in their seats. Some of them turned to their neighbour to exchange nervous smiles. There were a few throat-clears and coughs.

  ‘Anyone?’

  Dr Weir waited them out and, eventually, the student who’d named Andrew Cunanan tried to offer her Versace, but Dr Weir said that didn’t count because he’d already mentioned it and Versace was famous for other things. A girl in the front row put up her hand and said the name Caroline Ranch, uncertainly, phrasing it as more of a question. Caroline Ranch …? Dr Weir told her good try, but she was thinking of Carol DaRonch who had had a miraculous escape from Bundy’s car and later testified against him at trial. Another student thought the Canal Killer’s victims might have included a ‘Paula Something’ (they didn’t), while another, who had recently watched David Fincher’s Zodiac, said the name ‘Paul Avery’. That was the crime reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle played by Robert Downey Jnr in the movie and definitely not a victim of the Zodiac.

  ‘And that,’ Dr Weir said, ‘is the problem.’

  Dr Weir knows exactly what she’s doing with her Lizzie Borden house picture and her funky lapel pins. (Others in her collection include Hey! Ted Bundy isn’t hot! and Talk true crime to me.) She puts things like Psycho, The Stranger Beside Me and The Silence of the Lambs on the module reading list for a reason. They reel the students in. Once Dr Weir has them in her class, she can proceed to tell them the truth: that everything they think they know about serial killers is wrong.

  ‘It’s fine to be fascinated by serial killers,’ she tells me in her office after the lecture. ‘I am myself, obviously. They are fascinating because even though they look just like the rest of us, they do things the rest of us would never, ever do. But they are not especially intelligent. They don’t outsmart authorities. You know David Berkowitz? Son of Sam? They caught him because he got himself a parking ticket at the scene of one of his crimes. They are boring, ordinary, failures of men – not always men, of course, but predominately – who can’t even manage to live, love and process their feelings in a world where the rest of us have all managed to master it by the time we’re in our teens. These are no dark magicians. They have no special skills. People seem to forget that we know their names because they got caught. In fact, the only remarkable thing about them is what they took from the world: their victims. It’s their names we should know.’