A Woman to Blame

by Nell McCafferty

  Mary had pointed out the hurt to the feelings of Jeremiah’s wife. Joanne had countered that the marriage was over, resisting responsibility. Mary had cautioned that he was still with his wife, scarcely evidence of a commitment now to Joanne. Joanne had shrugged her shoulders. The conversations were as brief as that, and so, Mary thought, had been Joanne’s affair with Jeremiah.

  Increasingly their conversation had been about babies. Mary’s first baby was due in December, five months after Yvonne. When she took maternity leave from the complex she did not know that Joanne was pregnant once more. While Mary O’Riordan was giving birth, Joanne was learning that Mary Locke was as pregnant as she was.

  A woman who wrote to Joanne during the subsequent tribunal brought imaginative empathy to bear on that situation: ‘I used to think you didn’t care about the baby you killed. Now I know, after thinking about you, and living with you through those hours on the witness stand, that you hadn’t a baby at all, you had a pregnancy. It’s not the same thing.’

  After the birth of her son Wayne, Mary O’Riordan decided to take a year off work. Her contact with Joanne was sporadic and usually by telephone through the winter. ‘Joanne didn’t come to my house to see my baby.’ As the spring of 1984 approached, she heard for the first time of Joanne’s condition. ‘We talked about it when we finally met. She was wondering about a flat in Tralee, with the cheap council rent for unmarried mothers, and the allowance and the free milk.’

  It was by no means a secret pregnancy. It was common knowledge at the complex, though there was no sense of urgency. ‘Talk of doctors, booking into hospital, telling her family, that was all in the future,’ says Mary. ‘You take things with Joanne in stages. It was nowhere near that stage. She was miserable and withdrawn. I was standing by.’

  Then she got a call. Joanne rang up to say that she had been in hospital, that the baby had miscarried. ‘I was puzzled. We met and sat out in my back garden. I said “How could a baby miscarry at seven or eight months?” I was wondering rather than questioning. Joanne was sad, and I was sad for the loss of the baby. It was that kind of wondering.’

  In that atmosphere of sadness Mary did not press for details, nor did she ask how in God’s name Joanne did not know whether the miscarried child was a girl or a boy. ‘Anyway, I never got a good run at the subject with her, though we sat out on the grass from one in the afternoon till eight in the evening. Women kept calling at the house.’ In that young, upwardly mobile, thriving housing estate, the new mothers spent much time calling on each other, sharing the work of child-rearing.

  Mary drove Joanne home that night, delivering her to a farmhouse that was full, she said, of shy disquieted people. There was sadness and disturbance and reticence everywhere in the family.

  The next week, on 1 May, towards three in the afternoon, the guards called at Mary’s house. They were in civilian clothes. Her son needed a change of nappy. He did not get it for another hour. Joanne, the guards said, had had a baby and they wanted to know a few things. Cahirciveen was never mentioned and Mary in fact asked most of the questions. ‘Why are you asking me about Joanne? What do you have to do with her? She miscarried her baby and if you want to know more, shouldn’t you ring the hospital?’

  When the guards left, Mary rang the sports complex to speak to Joanne. Irene McGaley told her that Joanne was down in the station answering for the Cahirciveen baby. Later that day, Martina Rohan called to her house. They talked in puzzled circles, mainly to the effect that the guards were ‘out of their trees’. Around 10 pm they drove down by the station and around it, again and again, puzzled beyond comprehension, wondering was she in there, unable to do anything, not knowing what to do about their friend who had miscarried in hospital and was facing accusations of stabbing a baby to death, which they knew she was totally incapable of.

  Towards midnight, Mary’s husband Tom, who sells life insurance to the guards, rang the station and the police told him that Joanne was to be charged with the murder of the Cahirciveen baby.

  Next morning Mary went to court. She found a seat beside Kathleen Hayes.

  ‘Kathleen, what in God’s name is going on?’

  ‘I don’t know, I’m not sure. They say Joanne killed a baby, and I’m going out to Abbeydorney now to look for it.’

  Look for what? Mary thought this whole family had gone funny in the head. Joanne was brought down a corridor in the company of a ban gharda (policewoman). Mary stepped forward. Joanne looked up – she always has to look up to six-foot Mary – her eyes full of tears, but she registered no impression at the sight of her friend. ‘She was in a totally different world by then.’

  On the six-o’clock radio news Mary heard that ‘an unknown infant’ had been found at Abbeydorney. ‘I knew more than the newsreader at that stage. I knew from Kathleen that this was Joanne’s baby. Now I was totally confused. I didn’t know what to make of anything. She hadn’t stabbed the Cahirciveen baby, but a baby turns up on her farm that I thought she had miscarried in hospital.’

  Two weeks later, when Joanne had been released from the mental hospital to which she had been transferred from Limerick prison, she rang Mary and they went out together. ‘We spent the summer going out together. I’d arrange a babysitter or put Wayne in the baby-seat in the back of the car, drive out to the farm, pick her up and we’d go driving round. They wouldn’t say much to me in the farmhouse. I’d arrive, say are you ready, she’d say she was ready and off we’d go, driving round and round, talking about nothing really. Joanne didn’t want to talk about what had happened.’

  The friendship between these two women survived the endless hours of meaningless small talk as they drove round literally, and conversationally drove round, the abyss that had opened up under the feet of the Hayes family. ‘She wouldn’t talk about the birth or the baby she’d had. She’d talk a lot about the guards, ask her anything you like about those twelve hours in the garda station and she’d frighten you with a description of what went on in there, but about that night in Abbeydorney, nothing.’

  Sometimes Mary would blurt out, ‘But what was it like, giving birth in a field? Why did you? Were you out of your mind? Why didn’t you call for somebody?’ Joanne would always reply that it happened so quickly, a few minutes of labour . . . she’d get tense and distressed and they’d veer away from the subject, driving round and round the countryside.

  At the tribunal, lawyers were to make much of the fact that neither Joanne Hayes nor her family had talked throughout the summer to their solicitor about garda brutality to them. They didn’t ask Joanne’s women friends if she had talked to them about it. The women were asked only what they knew about Joanne’s pregnancies and her love-life. The guards had been very interested in that, too, when they interviewed her and her family.

  9. Behind Closed Doors

  I

  The police had not come for the Hayes family early in the morning on 1 May. People on the dole and pension do not have to rise at dawn. It was assumed that Joanne would still be on sick pay. Detectives Gerry O’Carroll and P.J. Browne waited in a car on the main road outside the farm to watch the family drive down to the village to sign on at the garda station for their state benefits.

  Ned and Kathleen drove out alone shortly after ten. Below in the village, hidden in a room behind the public area, waited extra guards, specially drafted into the one-man police station for the occasion.

  The Hayeses saw all the garda cars in the street. After doing their business they returned to the farm. Guard Liam Moloney drove up after them, asked where Joanne was and heard that she was at work. He left, saying he’d be back later. Shortly after midday, two detectives went to the sports complex, found Joanne and brought her down to Tralee station. At the same time four garda cars swept into the Hayes farmyard. Detectives got out and some spoke with Ned and Mike, who had come out to see them, some spoke to Aunt Bridie at the back door and others went inside the house.

  Kathleen was interviewed in the kitchen and her mother was bro
ught into the disused parlour that lies between the kitchen and the bathroom. After an hour Kathleen was allowed to serve up the dinner. Bridie was missing. She went out to the yard to call Ned and Mike and discovered that they weren’t there.

  Aunt Bridie, Ned and Mike had been taken to Tralee garda station. Kathleen and her mother ate their meal, then Kathleen gave cups of tea to the detectives, after which she was brought to Abbeydorney garda station. She was later transferred to Tralee garda station.

  Her mother was left alone in the farmhouse with Yvonne, not yet a year old, and two detectives. Eventually she would be left totally alone with the baby, and she would not see the other members of the family until half past one the following morning. She could not drive and there was no telephone in the house. Guard Liam Moloney had arranged that two male neighbours would milk the cows while the Hayeses were being questioned in various locations, and the sight of the police posted at the gate daunted would-be visitors.

  The only clues available to the police when they started to interview the family were the information that the hospital had doubts about Joanne, and the assumption that the Cahirciveen baby had fallen out of a brown plastic bag which was inside a torn fertiliser bag. The 0-7-30 fertiliser bag was one of a batch of two hundred thousand.

  Initially every single member of the family denied that Joanne had been pregnant. Within half an hour, though, of her first experience of police questioning, Joanne stopped the denials. She told Guard Moloney that she had given birth in a field and concealed the baby’s body. She was greeted with incredulity and the Dublin detectives were brought in.

  She told them that she had miscarried and flushed the miscarriage down the toilet. Gerry O’Carroll said that, if that were so, the foetus would still be in the septic tank. Joanne then told them exactly where the baby was hidden, out on the farm.

  Two guards who were sent out to search for it came back saying they had found nothing.

  Ned was next to start talking, elsewhere in the station, around 2.30 pm. ‘Whatever happened, happened in the house,’ he said. He had slept up in the cottage. He knew, he said, that Joanne had had a baby, but did not know where it was, and he thought Kathleen and Mike had taken it away.

  Then he started making an admission that placed a stabbed baby in a fertiliser bag that was marked 0-7-30. Detective Dillon produced to him the 0-7-30 bag in which the Cahirciveen baby had been found and he agreed that it was similar to the one he had used. He had tossed the bag off the cliffs of Slea Head, standing at the outer edge of a peninsula which is separated by eleven miles of water from the opposite peninsula, around the corner of which is Cahirciveen.

  Mike started agreeing, around four o’clock, that Joanne had had a baby. He did not know where it was, he said, because he thought Kathleen and Ned had taken it away. Then he started making a confession that placed a baby, which had been stabbed with a kitchen knife, in a manure bag in the water off Slea Head.

  Their mother insisted, in a five-o’clock statement, that Joanne had miscarried in hospital and then guards arrived to make a forensic examination of Joanne’s bedroom. Guard Liam Moloney spoke with one of the men interviewing Mary Hayes. Detectives Coote and Smith were new to the Cahirciveen case, having missed the conference the night before. They had driven other detectives out to the farm at noon and had been left behind with the mother and grandchild, Yvonne. After speaking with Guard Moloney the detectives took a second statement from Mary Hayes at six o’clock. Joanne’s mother now placed a baby, beaten to death with a toilet brush, in a turf bag that Ned and Mike had taken away. She did not mention stabbing.

  Detectives Smith and Coote took a turf bag, bath brush and carving knife from her home and brought them into Tralee station along with the confession.

  Joanne was apprised of her mother’s second statement at eight o’clock and now she, too, changed her original statement. She placed the birth in her bedroom, and the corpse in a turf bag which Ned and Mike took away. She had beaten the baby with the very bath brush and stabbed it with the very knife which the detectives showed her.

  While Joanne was making this statement Detective Smith moved on with the carving knife to the room where Kathleen was still denying all knowledge of a birth. Shortly after nine o’clock he and guard Liam Moloney took from Kathleen a statement which had herself and Ned and Mike taking the stabbed baby away in a turf bag which was thrown into the water at Slea Head.

  Joanne was brought downstairs to talk with Bridie towards 10 pm, after which Bridie made and signed a statement in which she had helped deliver a live child about whose fate she knew nothing more.

  The state solicitor, Donal Browne, was called to the station as Bridie was speaking. After reading the typed statements of Joanne, her mother and Mike, and listening to a summary of the others, he recommended that charges be brought. A local peace commissioner convened a midnight court in the station and the family was arraigned before him, one by one, and charged.

  Joanne was accused of murdering the Cahirciveen baby, and the others accused of concealment of its birth. The guards felt that they could always charge the mother, Mary Hayes, who was still out at the farmhouse, on another day. There would be time enough for that.

  II

  Joanne’s initial confessions on that Mayday were as follows:

  Date: 1/5/84. Tralee Garda Station.

  Interview commenced: 12.35 pm.

  Present: Ban gharda Ursula O’Regan. Garda Liam Moloney. Memo of interview with Joanne Hayes, after caution.

  Admission: 1.25 pm: ‘I had the baby boy at home. I delivered the baby myself on the 12/4/84. I panicked and hid it. The baby is dead, I buried it at home.’

  After caution, 1.35 pm:

  ‘On Thursday night 12/4/84 sometime around half-eleven or twelve o’clock, I gave birth to a baby boy of six to seven months in a field at my brother’s farm. I delivered the baby myself with my own hands. I delivered the baby standing up. I panicked and then I put the baby down on some hay. I went in home and said nothing. I went to bed and couldn’t sleep. I got up at 5 am, I sat down and had some tea and went back to bed until 7.30 am.

  ‘I got up and went out to the baby. I put my baby into a blue and white plastic bag. I think it was a bag from O’Carroll’s chemists, Tralee. I then put the baby into a brown paper bag first and then into the plastic bag, I mean. I put the baby down in the river, it’s a pool of water.’

  Relevant extracts from all subsequent incriminating statements are given below.

  Ned Hayes said:

  I went to bed straight away after going home and I was reading a book called The Great Hunger until about twelve midnight. I turned off the light and fell asleep.

  Sometime during the night, around 2.30 am, I would think, I was awakened by my sister Kathleen knocking on the front room window where I sleep. She asked me to come down quick. She sounded excited and she left.

  I got up, had a drink of water and went down to the farmhouse after about fifteen minutes.

  I met my mother walking out the boreen outside the house to meet me. She said that we had big trouble here at the moment.

  She told me that Joanne was after having a child and that she, Joanne was after doing away with the child. She was crying and looked very upset.

  We went into the kitchen and my brother and sister Kathleen were inside. The two of them were bawling crying and they were very upset.

  I was shattered and I was shaking all over.

  I sat on a chair beside the table with my back to all the bedrooms. I took a drink of orange to cool my nerves.

  I went up into Joanne’s room. I met my Aunt Bridie just coming out of the room. She was crying and shaking all over.

  I stood at the door of the room.

  I saw Joanne lying on the bed with just a nightdress on. I saw the body of a newly born child at the foot of the bed.

  I have drawn a sketch of the room and what I saw when I went into the room.

  Ned Hayes drew a sketch for the guards that showed his
sister Joanne in the bed, at the foot of which was a baby.

  The infant was lying face downwards naked on the bed. I said to my sister ‘Why in fuck’s name did you do it?’ I said to her that surely we could have kept the child and reared it.

  She did not answer as she was crying away.

  I went away from the door and went back up a couple of minutes afterwards. I repeated what I said the first time and she said that she didn’t want to bring shame on the family. She said that six months ago Locke said they would go away together and set up house.

  I went back down to the kitchen where there was a cup of tea ready. We all had tea. There wasn’t a word spoken about it.

  I went out for a breath of fresh air for about ten minutes and when I came back in, my mother suggested that we would have to get some way of getting rid of it. We talked for about three-quarters of an hour of getting rid of it.

  I was in favour of burying it on the land, but my mother and Aunt Bridie weren’t in favour of it. Aunt Bridie was in favour of us throwing it in the sea.

  My brother and I went outside to get a plastic bag. My brother picked up a plastic bag from the gable end of the house. I shone a torch for him to find it. The bag had some sand in it for putting on top of silage. He emptied out the sand.

  We went into the kitchen and up into Joanne’s room.

  I emptied out a brown plastic shopping bag of clothes which I found beside the shopping bag in the room.

  We caught a leg each of the infant and put it head first into the brown shopping bag.

  As we lifted the dead infant I could see blood on its chest. It was stabbed in the chest. I couldn’t see how many wounds were in the chest.

  When we had placed the dead infant in the brown plastic bag, Joanne asked to be left alone in the room with the child for a few minutes.