The Cold Case Files

by Barry Cummins

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  At the Forensic Science Laboratory, in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, Dr Martina McBride is the official liaison with the Cold Case Unit, and it is through her that many items have been submitted for forensic re-examination. As well as investigating all unsolved murders since 1980, the Cold Case Unit has also decided to re-examine many unsolved sexual assault and rape cases. Detectives have found that there is a possibility that semen or blood which an attacker left at a crime scene in the 1970s or 80s may still be available to be retested. At the time of these attacks, all that could be identified was a person’s blood group, but with advances in forensic science those same samples may now unmask the DNA of each attacker. A special Cold Case investigation, known as Operation Fiach, has been established to see if any long-term unsolved rape cases may finally be solved.

  The possibilities that forensic science now provides for catching killers is immense. Every contact leaves a trace, everything from sweat, dandruff, saliva, nasal discharge, ear wax, hair, skin, blood, semen. It is a certainty that, in the future, more criminals will be caught as a result of their DNA. The work of the Cold Case Unit, and that of detectives around the country, could only be made easier by the establishment of a DNA database of all known criminal offenders. Such a database has long been promised by successive governments.

  As well as liaising with the Forensic Science Laboratory, the Cold Case Unit also works closely with State Pathlogist Dr Marie Cassidy and with Clinical Anthropologist Laureen Buckley. The Unit has asked Dr Cassidy to review medical notes and crime scene photographs on a number of unsolved cases, and on two occasions has asked her to carry out post-mortem examinations on bodies which have been exhumed. The Unit also works with a forensic psychologist. Unlike fictional television programmes, real-life cold cases are never solved in a day, or even a week. But real-life cold-case investigations do avail of all the latest investigative methods, including profilers.

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  There are dozens upon dozens of unsolved murders from the 1990s which the Cold Case Unit is tasked with reviewing. Among those cases are a number of murders of men who lived alone and who were killed during robberies. Late on the night of 31 December 1990 66-year-old John Kennedy was stabbed to death during an apparent robbery at his home at Pearse Park in Drogheda. It’s believed that after killing his victim the culprit stole John’s bike to make his getaway. There was widespread revulsion in Drogheda at the murder of a quiet and well-regarded man. The possibility that the murderer was local to Drogheda has always been a strong possibility. The Cold Case Unit is currently reviewing this case.

  In June 1995 a man who lived alone was murdered at his home at Stapleton Place in Dundalk and the following September a Co. Limerick farmer was shot dead outside his home. In May 1998 83-year-old Eddie Fitzmaurice was beaten, tied up, gagged and left to die in his home by a gang who broke into his home at Bellaghy, Charlestown, on the Sligo-Mayo border. Eddie lived alone above his drapery shop. He was attacked sometime on Friday evening 1 May 1998 or early on Saturday morning 2May. The investigation by Gardaí in Mayo was massive, with 59 people being arrested and questioned in connection with the case. It’s believed Eddie was targeted by a gang of travelling criminals.

  One of the most shocking aspects of the murder is the suffering which Eddie Fitzmaurice was subjected to. His attackers had tied his wrists together and his ankles were also bound so tightly that his circulation was severely restricted. Over a number of hours if not days Mr Fitzmaurice used his elbows, knees, buttocks and shoulders to slowly move himself along the ground towards a window in an attempt to summon help. By the time his body was found, five days after the attack, he had managed to move from one bedroom, across a hall and into another front-facing bedroom close to a window looking out on the street below. However, having made it that far, Eddie simply had no more strength. Because his killers had dragged him from his bed, Eddie was dressed only in his pyjamas and at some stage during those five days and nights, as he lay on his back with his hands tied behind him, Eddie Fitzmaurice froze to death.

  Another attack on a man who lived alone was the murder of 70-year-old Tommy Casey, who died after suffering an horrific beating at his home at Oranmore, Co. Galway, in January 1996. The bachelor and retired farmer had been targeted for robbery by a four-person gang of travelling criminals made up of two men and two women. The women’s role was to distract the victim at the front of his house while the men entered through the back. A mother and daughter from Co. Tipperary were later jailed after admitting burglary charges relating to the incident and one man, also from Co. Tipperary, was given a six-year sentence after pleading guilty to the manslaughter of Tommy Casey. The court heard how Tommy had been found dead on the floor of his kitchen eight days after he had been attacked. The four members of the gang had actually been arrested by Gardaí in Galway city some hours after the attack on Tommy Casey when officers found housebreaking implements, a dagger and a balaclava in their car. However, Gardaí were unaware of the attack on Tommy Casey and none of the occupants of the car raised the alarm, and it was eight days later before Tommy’s body was found. If the gang had owned up to what they had done, Tommy’s life might have been saved.

  In terms of discussing crime statistics and whether a case is solved or unsolved, the Tommy Casey murder is an important one to consider. It’s believed that four people were involved in the gang which targeted Tommy Casey. The two female members who never entered Tommy’s home were jailed for burglary, and one man was jailed for manslaughter. However, the other man left Ireland and his whereabouts are not known. He is still wanted for questioning about the murder of Tommy Casey. So is the Tommy Casey murder solved or unsolved? Three out of four members of a gang were brought to justice for their roles. To say it is totally unsolved is not doing justice to the good detective work that went into the case, but similarly to say it is totally solved ignores the fact that a very dangerous individual skipped the country and could now pose a danger elsewhere in the world.

  A similar situation exists in the murder of 68-year-old bachelor farmer Paud Skehan who lived alone and who was attacked by at least two people who broke into his home at O’Briensbridge in Co. Clare in April 1998. Paud was dragged from his bed, and was punched in the face and kicked. He was then bound and gagged and doused in lighter fluid as his attackers screamed at him to tell them where he kept his cash. Finally his attackers fled, leaving Paud lying on his concrete sitting room floor with a blood-soaked blindfold on his face, his hands bound, and his feet tied to the bannisters. Paud suffered fatal brain damage, but his suffering was not over. For hours he lay shivering in sub-zero temperatures and he developed bronchial pneumonia.

  For almost eight weeks Paud Skehan fought for his life. For those 54 days he was in a coma as his family kept a bedside vigil at the Mid Western Regional Hospital in Limerick, but Paud never recovered. His only recognition of sounds or voices was on the day he was rushed to hospital, but that was it. Paud’s injuries were fatal, and in early June 1998 his life-support machine was turned off.

  One of Paud’s murderers is now serving a life sentence for the crime. Career criminal William Campion from Limerick specialised in ‘tie-up’ jobs where he and accomplices would break into people’s homes and tie up the terror-stricken occupants while stealing their cash. He was caught and convicted for Paud Skehan’s murder because when arrested he was still wearing the FILA runners he was wearing when he stepped in Paud’s blood while attacking him. The good work of Gardaí and the Forensic Science Laboratory led to the identification of Campion’s runners as being the very pair which had been present at the murder. Campion was given a life sentence for murder and a concurrent nine-year sentence for burglary at Paud’s home.

  So is the murder of Paud Skehan solved? Certainly, the capture of one of Paud Skehan’s attackers was Garda work at its very finest. Utilising good detective work and capitalising on some good luck, an extremely dangerous random attacker was put behind bars. But what about his accomp
lice, the one who got away? From an analysis of the crime scene, Gardaí believe there were two people involved in the attack on Paud Skehan and that second person is still out there somewhere and has never been identified. To say the murder of Paud Skehan is unsolved does not do justice to the successful prosecution of one of his killers, but to say it is solved ignores the fact that only one of his killers was taken off the streets. Like so many crimes, the murder of Paud Skehan might be better described as both partially solved and partially unsolved.

  A similar situation could be applied to the murder of publican Tom Nevin at his Co. Wicklow pub—Jack Whites—in March 1996. His wife Catherine is currently serving a life sentence for Tom’s murder. The jury also found her guilty of asking three men on three separate occasions to murder her husband. But while Catherine Nevin was caught and convicted and jailed for life, she did not pull the trigger. The hitman who murdered Tom Nevin and then tied up Catherine Nevin, so as to make the killing look like a robbery and attack on both husband and wife, has never been identified and never been brought to justice. The conviction of Catherine Nevin represented policing at its finest, but even still, the gunman got away.

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  Throughout the 1990s there were a number of murders of women which would eventually become cold cases. In June 1992, headlines had been dominated by the discovery in the Dublin Mountains of the body of Patricia Doherty. A native of Annascaul, Co. Kerry, Patricia Doherty was last seen alive on 23 December 1991. She lived with her family at Allenton Lawns in Tallaght, and had travelled to The Square to get Santa hats for her children. Patricia’s disappearance was totally out of character and her family reported her missing, but it was only in June 1992 that a man out cutting turf at Killakee in the Dublin Mountains found Patricia’s body. She had been strangled, and her body had been left in a bog drain. No-one has ever been arrested in connection with this unsolved murder.

  On 16 December 1993, mother-of-one Marie Kilmartin vanished from Port Laoise. It was from a phone box across the road from her flat that an as yet unidentified man made a call which led Marie to her death. Gardaí have established that a two-and-a-half minute call was made at 4.25 p.m. to Marie from that phone box. She left her flat soon afterwards and was never seen alive again. For 176 days her body lay hidden beneath water in a bog drain on the Laois-Offaly border. A large concrete block was on top of her chest. She was fully clothed, dressed in her matching jacket and skirt, double-breasted herringbone overcoat and lace-up boots. Whoever had killed her had used their bare hands to strangle her before throwing her body into the bog drain and putting debris on top of Marie. In September 2008, detectives arrested a man and questioned him about the murder. Another man and a woman were questioned on suspicion of withholding information. The three were later released.

  The 1990s witnessed a number of baffling disappearances of women. In March 1993 American woman Annie McCarrick disappeared after going for a walk in the Dublin-Wicklow Mountains. In July of that same year Eva Brennan disappeared in south Dublin. Imelda Keenan vanished in Waterford in January 1994. Jo Jo Dullard vanished in Co. Kildare in November 1995 and Fiona Pender, who was six months pregnant, disappeared in Tullamore in October 1996. Seventeen-year-old Ciara Breen is missing from Dundalk since February 1997 and mother-of-one Fiona Sinnott was last seen in Co. Wexford in February 1998. In July 1998, a teenage woman vanished from Droichead Nua in Co. Kildare. Despite significant Garda efforts to try and solve these cases, no trace of any of these missing women has yet been found.

  The Cold Case Unit utilises the Violent Crimes Linkage Analysis System (ViCLAS), a computer system operated by the Garda Behavioural Analysis Unit. Information from every violent crime, including murders and sexual assaults, is loaded into its database. The system is continuously searching for possible links between crimes and is of particular benefit in Operation Trace, which is investigating the spate of unsolved disappearances of women in Leinster in the 1990s. ViCLAS compiles thousands of pieces of information on every single violent incident and highlights possible links between crimes. It might be something as seemingly innocuous as the same make of car seen at two crime scenes, or something more definitive such as the same description of an attacker involved, the same modus operandi; everything from speech pattern, facial tics, clothing worn, weapons used, is all input into ViCLAS. The system assesses all information about the time, date and location of crimes, allowing for any similarities to show up. Such an analysis might red-flag a particular person who works in a particular location, or who lives in a particular place, or who drives a particular route at a particular time every day or week or month.

  One major attraction of the ViCLAS system is the very fact that, because all significant details of violent crimes are preserved forever more on computer, it ensures that there is a ‘corporate memory’ within An Garda Síochána of historic unsolved crimes. The three-member team which operates the system has assisted Gardaí right around the country, but their work was particularly beneficial to the Cold Case Unit and in late 2009 a decision was taken to amalgamate ViCLAS into the Unit. The three Gardaí who worked with the system all transferred into the Cold Case Unit. Detective Sergeant Noel Mooney had been part of the Serious Crime Squad since 1985 and was also a psychologist. Detective Garda Mary Fallon and Detective Garda Tony Keane had also many decades of experience in investigating serious crimes. As the newest members of the Cold Case Unit they helped to enhance Garda links with both the FBI and Canadian police, including profilers. “ViCLAS and behavioural analysis are employed by many law enforcement agencies around the world,” says Detective Sergeant Noel Mooney.

  There are fewer borders around the world than in years gone by, the world is a smaller place. Police forces share information about both solved and unsolved crimes. ViCLAS looks for patterns, it looks for the minority of people who commit the majority of crime. We are looking to identify both local and cross-border criminals. We look at victimology, offender-victim interaction, assessing everything we know about the victim of a crime and how they might have become a target for a violent person. We study crime scene dynamics, geographic profiling and forensic and autopsy reports. ViCLAS was initially spearheaded by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the system is similar to the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program.

  In an article for the Garda Review magazine published in 2009, one of Noel Mooney’s colleagues in the Cold Case Unit, Detective Sergeant Alan Bailey, described the many different areas considered by detectives during the course of a cold-case review. “A review examines and considers all facets of an investigation,” he wrote.

  Details surrounding the reporting of the crime; the initial response of Gardaí; crime scene identification and preservation; fast track actions; forensic, arrest and search strategies; house to house and other main lines of enquiry; interview strategy; exhibit handling and storage; witness support; liaison; interview and protection. A weighting matrix is applied to assist in determining prioritisation of cases for root and branch review. The matrix ranges on a table of high to low. The highest case prioritisation will have the complete original case papers, significant original exhibits with potential for DNA and other forensic and technical evidence. The cases at the lower end of the matrix will have no case papers, no exhibits and no new forensic opportunities.

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  One unsolved case at the higher end of the weighting matrix is the murder in December 1992 of 56-year-old Grace Livingstone. Grace was shot dead in her home in Malahide in north Co. Dublin (see Chapter 5) and among a number of areas which may be advanced in the case is the possibility that Grace’s killer left his DNA on the tape used to bind and gag her. Grace’s was one of a number of murders of women who were attacked in their homes in the 1990s. In December 1996 French film-maker Sophie Toscan Du Plantier was beaten to death during a sustained attack outside her holiday home at Schull in west Cork. In June 1997 28-year-old Mandy Fong was strangled to death in her home in Crumlin in south Dublin. Just three months before
that murder, two women were stabbed to death after someone broke into their sheltered accommodation at Grangegorman on Dublin’s northside. Fifty-nine-year-old Sylvia Shields and 61-year-old Mary Callinan suffered multiple injuries when they were attacked as they slept in their beds in early March 1997. Even before the setting up of the Cold Case Unit, this double-murder has been the subject of a cold-case review in recent years.

  The failure by Gardaí to solve the murders of Grace Livingstone and Sophie Toscan Du Plantier led to the families of both victims separately taking matters into their own hands. Grace’s husband Jimmy and her children Tara and Conor brought a case to the High Court on the basis that Gardaí had failed in their ‘duty of care’ to the family. The case was settled to the family’s satisfaction after four days, and Jimmy then contacted the Garda Cold Case Unit and asked them to fully re-investigate the case. A team led by a senior investigating officer is currently working on the unsolved murder. Meanwhile in France, Sophie Toscan Du Plantier’s family and friends have been behind recent efforts by authorities there to mount an investigation into her murder. Although the brutal killing took place in Ireland, French officials agreed to the family’s request that, in the absence of any current action by Irish authorities, a French judge should investigate the case. As part of subsequent enquiries Sophie’s body was exhumed in 2008 and French investigators have met with senior Gardaí to study the unsolved murder file.