A Woman to Blame

by Nell McCafferty

  Late one evening in the month of May, Kathleen heard shouting coming from the main road and then a knock came to the farmhouse door. Kathleen opened it to find a group of agitated women standing there. They wanted to speak to her mother.

  Kathleen roused her mother, who was sleeping by the range, and they listened at their front door to the three women, who were all related to a man called Jeremiah Locke, who worked as a groundsman in the sports complex with Joanne. Neither Kathleen nor her mother had ever heard of him. The three angry women who faced them were Jeremiah’s mother, wife and sister-in-law. His wife Mary was eight months pregnant. The sister-in-law did the talking. Joanne was having an affair with Jeremiah and they wanted the affair stopped. Of course they knew what they were talking about! The three women had, only minutes before, down on the main road, pulled Joanne out of Jeremiah’s car. Joanne had walked away and Jeremiah had followed her. God knows where they were now.

  Joanne did not return home that night. Jeremiah did not return to his home. They stayed with friends in a suburb of Tralee. Joanne told Jeremiah that she was two months pregnant.

  The following day Jeremiah Locke returned home and was reconciled with his wife. Joanne Hayes went back out to Abbeydorney to face her affronted family. There were tears, recriminations and promises of amendment. She would see this married man no more.

  Mary Locke had a baby on 25 June. Joanne Hayes miscarried on 30 June. Her relationship with Jeremiah Locke resumed in August. Her family had taken what steps they could to prevent her seeing him. There was a problem, they realised, as he used to bring her home from work of an evening. Joanne’s shift work and the infrequent bus service to and from Abbeydorney did not coincide, even if the bus could have been afforded. She had relied on Jeremiah, or neighbours who used the sports complex, or hitch-hiking, or Ned on occasion. Ned used to ring her at the end of every day’s shift and if she had a lift, fine, if not, he would drive in to fetch her.

  Now that they were fully apprised of the situation Ned was delegated to ring Joanne daily and daily to fetch her home. This family did its best. There were days, though, when Joanne assured them that a lift had been arranged. On one of those days, towards the end of that summer of 1982, she became pregnant again by Jeremiah.

  The misery of her watching family was tersely summed up by Aunt Bridie during the following Easter 1983. She met Aunt Aquinas, home for a visit, at the front door and said ‘Joanne’s pregnant. He’s a married man.’

  There was little else to be said. Joanne was happy, her family was not.

  When the baby, Yvonne, was brought back in May from St Catherine’s hospital, the others were slightly embarrassed. They didn’t know what to say to the neighbours who called in. There was no conventional way to end the halting introduction of the child: ‘This is Joanne’s daughter Yvonne . . .’ and the unfinished sentence would trail off into the unspeakable distance.

  The neighbours quickly took up the slack, concentrating speedily, with ohs and aaahs of delight, on the infant and the mother, and never a sentence was uttered in that house about the father. Gradually Yvonne became their collective heart’s delight. It had been twenty-two years since a baby’s cry had been heard on the farm and the sound was as lovely as it was regenerative. She was the new generation and she belonged to all of them.

  Jeremiah Locke did not belong and his continued association with Joanne was a source of heartfelt trouble to all but her. The troubled family turned, as it had helplessly turned when Aunt Bridie’s drinking troubled them, to Guard Liam Moloney. Mary Hayes went down to the station and spoke with him. ‘I always thought the guards were there to help you,’ she said.

  The young guard did help. He assured Mary Hayes that Joanne would never know who had put him on to her and, indeed, this was Joanne’s first question to him when he drove up to the house one night and asked her to come outside and sit in the car with him and have a chat. He had put on a civilian jacket over his police trousers to indicate his friendly intent.

  Who had asked him to talk with her about Jeremiah Locke, Joanne wanted to know. No one, he said. Who had told him? No one in particular, he said, but it was a well-known fact that she was having an affair with a married man, that this had been a cause of disturbance on the public highway some time ago, that he wanted no trouble on his highways and that he wished to discuss this with her as a friend. There was no future for Joanne in that set-up, he said. Jeremiah Locke had a wife and a child.

  Joanne told him three things in short order: that Jeremiah was unhappy with his wife Mary; that he would one day set up a home with Joanne, who was passionately in love with him; and that the whole thing was none of Guard Moloney’s business.

  The meeting between them took place in August, three months after the birth of Yvonne. Joanne became pregnant again by Jeremiah in or shortly after that month, though the exact date was difficult to determine, since she menstruated only once every three months. In any case she was fairly pregnant at the Christmas office party when she learned that Mary Locke was also fairly pregnant again.

  Her relationship with Jeremiah Locke effectively ended that night. In their twenty-two-month relationship she had become pregnant by him three times. Joanne Hayes faced into 1984 severely burdened in mind and body. Her heart was broken, she was expecting a baby and, in February of the new year, she learned that her job was about to end.

  In the early hours of Friday morning, 13 April, she gave birth in secret and hid the body of her child on the farm. All that the neighbours and Liam Moloney knew was that she had been pregnant, had been taken into hospital, and was pregnant no more. Some assumed that the baby had been adopted; some assumed that there had been no baby, but a miscarriage.

  A cousin by marriage of the Hayes family, Mary Shanahan, certainly thought that Joanne had miscarried. Kathleen had been down to visit her on the night of Wednesday 11 April and had miserably confided that Joanne was pregnant ‘again’.

  Mary Shanahan said that she knew that. Sure most people knew that, though it wasn’t their place to mention it until the family should, officially. They watched Hill Street Blues on television and then Kathleen went glumly home. Forty-eight hours later, on the night of Friday 13 April, she arrived down at Mary Shanahan’s again to say that Joanne was bleeding heavily. ‘Christ, she’s had the baby,’ said Mary Shanahan, and she and Kathleen and the friend who had been visiting Mary, a nurse called Elsie Moore, got into Elsie’s car and drove the short distance to the farm.

  They did not go inside, for fear of upsetting Mary Hayes. Kathleen fetched Joanne out to the car and watched the women drive back to Mary Shanahan’s house. The doctor was telephoned. The message they gave him was necessarily garbled. In the car Joanne had said that her last period was in November, which would make her six months pregnant, but no one was sure.

  The doctor was sure of one thing. If the pregnancy had been at an advanced stage and now was no more, he said, he would have to inform the police. This was his response to an emergency telephone call about a woman who was haemorrhaging. Dr Aidan Daly was one of the seventy-four Kerry doctors who had signed the anti-abortion statement.

  When Joanne heard, on the way in to his surgery, that Dr Daly had mentioned the police, she was frightened. She also needed help, so she overcame her fright and went in to see him. He palpated her stomach, felt her uterus, diagnosed a threatened miscarriage, wrote out a letter, sealed it, told Joanne to hand it in at the hospital and recommended that she go there at once. Joanne did not go to hospital.

  She went home that night to her family.

  The following day she went into hospital. Sister Aquinas saw her before she left the house that Saturday morning. The nun had come to see how Mary Hayes was recovering from the flu that had confined her to bed for several weeks. ‘I did not notice anything particularly amiss. I was very anxious and very tense myself. I found my sister Mary very sick. I found Joanne getting ready to go to hospital, possibly to stay. My sister Bridie was not well and, I think, needing a bi
t of care and there was a child, eleven months old, to be minded. I was wondering how Kathleen could cope with it.’

  After Ned drove Joanne away, she was told how Joanne had been bleeding, with a heavy period, since the night she had gone out into the field. ‘They told me she went out and she stayed out for a long time . . . no, I did not consider that mysterious.’

  Next day, Sunday, Aquinas rang her friend Sister Mechtilde, assistant matron at the hospital. ‘I told her that Joanne would probably be getting blood transfusions and I wanted to know would I go to the medical floor or the consultancy floor to see her and Sister Mechtilde said that Joanne was in the maternity ward . . . it was dreadful.’ Sister Mechtilde brought her that evening to the maternity ward. ‘I saw Joanne was in a corner lying down and it was a public ward. There were three or four other young mothers there. I sat beside Joanne’s bed and I asked her how she was.’

  Their sparse painful conversation was confined to the number of ‘units of blood’ that Joanne had received, and the ‘scan’ that would be done on the morrow. The implication was beyond doubt. The imagination did not need to transform words into flesh. The nun left the matter delicately there.

  Subsequently, said Sister Aquinas, ‘The scan showed that whatever . . . that there was nothing in the womb.’ She recalled Sister Mechtilde’s words exactly. ‘Her words to me were that whatever was there, there was nothing there now and that is what I took from that, that there had been a miscarriage.’ Joanne did not correct her impression.

  IV

  Joanne lost the baby in hospital, Mary Shanahan now told Guard Moloney over the phone. Guard Moloney put the phone down and told Detective Dillon, who had been standing beside him in the Abbeydorney police station. Detective Dillon told Guard Moloney that Joanne had not lost a baby in hospital and had not necessarily had a miscarriage. Guard Moloney then told Detective Dillon and Mossy O’Donnell what he knew about Joanne Hayes. Her profile as a suspect was classic.

  The detectives went to gynaecologist John Creedon that night, spoke with him again over the weekend, and on Sunday night the head of the murder squad, John Courtney, came down from Dublin. Next day the entire investigation switched from Cahirciveen to Tralee. On that Monday morning, 30 April, Joanne Hayes woke to her twenty-fifty birthday and went back to work. She met Jeremiah Locke on her way into reception, sat in the car with him briefly, congratulated him on the baby that had been born to him and his wife on 25 April and said that she herself had had a miscarriage. She worked and went home.

  That night John Courtney outlined to his assembled team what he wanted them to do next day with the unsuspecting Hayes family.

  4. The Guards

  John Courtney felt that Joanne Hayes was a woman of ‘loose morals’. At his first conference he therefore advised the guards to find out if she had any boyfriends other than Jeremiah Locke. He also advised them to approach this woman with care. ‘Women’s minds are very peculiar at that stage, before or after giving birth,’ was his opinion. He had dealt with one woman who had murdered her husband on the eve of childbirth, had been hysterical, and then was utterly calm four days later in hospital with the child in her arms.

  There was another reason for caution: ‘In all my years I’ve never yet seen a person tell the full truth about a murder.’ As well as that, he had experience of people confessing to murders they hadn’t committed, and he was able, from his experience, to discount their confessions, though the available evidence incriminated them. There had been, for example, the case of a child in Cork, eleven years old, raped and murdered, and, though there were six points of forensic evidence to tie a certain suspect in with the crime, ‘quite a good case’ in fact, he ruled the suspect out. Correctly. He had investigated thirty-six people over that one, including a couple who confessed, falsely, before he charged the thirty-sixth person.

  Rape, murder, political crime and kidnapping had come within his ambit as a professional policeman of thirty-seven years’ standing before he got involved in the Kerry babies case. As for seeing it all, this detective had seen things people would never know about. He had personally supervised the Malcolm MacArthur case, which had introduced a new word, ‘Gubu’, into the language.

  Gubu is an acronym for ‘grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented’, which is how the taoiseach (prime minister) of the time, Charlie Haughey, described the discovery of a murderer who had been given shelter in the flat of the murderer’s unsuspecting friend, the Attorney General. Superintendent Courtney never did tell anyone about the look on the Attorney General’s face. He just moved on to the next job and returned faithfully to the place where he was born every time his holidays came around.

  He grew up in the Irish-speaking Kerry village of Anascaul in the depressed thirties. A child of that time described it vividly in the local newspaper, The Kerryman. Occasionally they would come late to school, because, as was explained to the teacher, ‘We had to go to the railway station to see someone off.’ To America. It was like saying goodbye to someone sentenced to ‘ten years’ hard labour abroad’. At the station ‘We all wept and were speechless with sorrow and sadness.’

  For teenage boys, though, in the forties, there was occasional light relief, especially in nearby Killorglin, to which the entire countryside repaired after the harvest for three days and nights of merrymaking, which a priest of the time described as ‘the orgy of Puck Fair’. In Killorglin, then as now, a he-goat was hoisted thirty feet up in the air onto a platform, was clothed in purple and crowned king. The people fell to celebrating his coronation with feasting and drinking. The animal looked down upon this and the clergy despaired.

  John Courtney left it all behind in 1948, when he joined the guards and went to live in the big cities of Cork and Dublin. Always, though, he would spend his holidays in Anascaul, working on his brother’s farm, and he eventually built himself a holiday home there. Now he was home again, working on a case involving a mother and baby, father possibly unknown. He had always had problems linking men to cases involving women of the type he considered Joanne Hayes to be. For instance, ‘the violent death of a girl with loose morals is one of the most difficult to investigate, because no man will come forward and say they had an association with them. If there was a man who had an association with Joanne Hayes,’ apart from Jeremiah Locke, who had been positively identified, ‘it would be almost impossible to locate him.’

  Detective Sergeant Gerry O’Carroll, a long-time colleague of Superintendent Courtney, had his own jaundiced view on paternity. Far from finding it difficult to locate the father of some other woman’s child, he knew that many a man had reason to doubt the paternity of his own children. ‘We live in a promiscuous society. There have been umpteen cases of neighbours getting pregnant by their next-door neighbour.’

  He would not wish to cast a slur on the neighbours of Joanne Hayes, but ‘all I am saying is that casual sex takes place; it doesn’t have to be an affair; it doesn’t have to last all night; it doesn’t have to last an hour.’ In Ireland today there was a promiscuous society, though of course that had always been so; it was just that, maybe, ‘everything is more out in the open now’.

  Eighteen years as a policeman in the city had shown him this. Also people had told him things. And he was a reader of ‘letters in some of our Sunday papers in agony columns’. He was firm in his views. ‘It is happening, has happened, and continues to happen.’ Besides which, he had Germaine Greer’s Sex and Destiny under his arm.

  To this wide range of experience and learning, Gerry O’Carroll also brought knowledge of his native Kerry, and keen eyesight. ‘I have this curious idea that native Dublin women look hugely pregnant always, while I have noticed that a lot of countrywomen just don’t look pregnant at all.’

  An Irishman could scarce afford to blink his eyes then, lest his women have sexual intercourse with the fellow next door, and it would take a sharp-eyed fellow indeed to notice that she was pregnant, never mind know if she was pregnant by him.

 
Detective Sergeant P.J. Browne, fourteen years in the force, who was to interrogate Joanne Hayes next day in partnership with Gerry O’Carroll, also had a sexual philosophy. Joanne, he said, was ‘the willing concubine of Jeremiah Locke’. A concubine, in his opinion, was ‘a person lying down with another’.

  Sergeant Browne had come down to Tralee with Superintendent Courtney the previous night and been appraised en route of the situation. He was about to deal with what he described as ‘a sad tale. It occurred because a young girl in her mid-twenties was scorned by the married man she loved, had children for and wanted for herself. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’

  Looking back, he described the whole thing as ‘grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented’.

  Joanne Hayes and her family were about to come into sustained, intense, individual contact with these men, behind closed doors.

  5. The Moral Policemen

  Long before she met these men, Joanne Hayes’s life had been controlled, as the lives of all Irishwomen had been controlled, almost exclusively by men. The preserves of church and state were predominantly male. The country’s Constitution spelt out the hope that women would always know their place: ‘The State shall endeavour to ensure that no woman shall be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour outside the home.’

  In 1970 a movement for the liberation of women was launched. Its primary task was to ensure that women could control their own fertility and the Constitution became the Trojan horse of their fight for freedom.

  At that time contraception was totally prohibited in Ireland. The promotion, advertisement, distribution and sale of contraceptives was illegal and punishable at law. Mary McGee, a woman whose life was threatened by further pregnancies, went to court in 1976 and won the constitutional right to use birth-control devices.