A Woman to Blame

by Nell McCafferty

  The baby died from the choking and the stabbing and it was dead when my mother and I left the room to go up to our other house, which is about 50 yards away from my house, to call my brother Ned who is sleeping there.

  It was 3 am when we went to call Ned. It was dark and I was using a flash lamp to give us light on the way up.

  We knocked up Ned and I told Ned to come down, Joanne had a baby and the baby was dead. Ned hopped out of bed and came down to our house after us. He went to Joanne’s room and he saw the dead baby with stab wounds on Joanne’s bed.

  Joanne was in the kitchen when Ned came to the house.

  After Ned had seen the baby he was very upset.

  He said ‘Why did you kill the baby?’

  We were all upset at that stage and we didn’t know what to do. We thought we might bury it on the farm. Mike said ‘Will we bury it back the field?’ but Mom and Bridie were against that. So then we decided we will have to dump it somewhere.

  Mike went to the back kitchen to get a turf bag and I went to a drawer under the television and got a white plastic bag with two handles, like the ordinary shopping bag you would get in supermarkets.

  I held the white plastic bag and Ned put the dead baby into it. We done this in the bedroom and then Ned put the white plastic bag containing the baby into a turf bag which Mike had got in the back kitchen.

  I have been shown a bag by Detective Garda Smith and I believe that it was a bag of similar colour and material as the bag in which the white plastic bag containing the baby was put into.

  The bag containing the baby was then brought out to the back kitchen by Ned, and Mike tied the bag with a piece of twine. Ned then took out the bag and put it into the boot of our car.

  Ned, Mike and I left our house at about 3.50 am in our car. We drove through Tralee, on through Dingle town for about six miles, and we stopped at a place where the road runs beside the sea, and Ned, who was driving, got out and opened the boot of the car containing the baby and threw it into the sea.

  It was about 5.30 am on Friday 13 April 1984 when Ned threw the bag into the sea. You could see the water from the road where we were parked and when the bag was thrown in, it sank, and re-surfaced and floated on the water.

  We arrived back home at 7 am.

  Ned drove the car that morning when we were disposing of the baby. I was in the front passenger seat, and Mike was sitting in the back seat.

  We told my mother, Joanne and Bridie that we had thrown the baby into the sea back around Dingle.

  Joanne Hayes said to Bridie Fuller:

  O my God what did I do it for. I don’t know what I got ye into at all. I don’t know why I did it. Tell them I killed the baby. I don’t want to see anyone, just put me into jail.

  I made a statement telling them all about it and what happened. I did it myself and I don’t want to blame anyone else. I told all the truth in the statement, oh I did, I did. I want to see no-one, just leave me alone.

  You were in the room Bridie, I told them.

  It was sometime in the night.

  I was talking to Liam Moloney and I told him the truth.

  Bridie Fuller said:

  I am telling you the truth about what happened to my niece Joanne, the night her last baby was born in April of this year. I think the baby was born on the night of Tuesday 7 April or early the Wednesday morning.

  I went to bed that evening early as I usually wake at about twelve or so. I must have been awake about one and Michael was up also.

  I went down to Joanne’s room and she was getting in and out of bed. I suspected that she was after going into labour.

  I sent Michael up to the cottage where my sister Mary and her daughter Kathleen and son Ned were living. Kathleen and Mary come down to our house and I told them that Joanne was in labour.

  Someone else went for Ned, I’m scattered about that, I think it was Michael.

  It was now about half-past two and Joanne was at an advanced stage. We went up to see her and I helped break her waters. The baby was then born and I did the best I could to help her, it was a baby boy.

  I saw it move and it was bubbling with mucus.

  I was not in the room when the baby cried.

  I think I made tea in the kitchen.

  After this I don’t know what happened but I remember it was light before I got back to bed.

  Joanne got up late and I don’t know what happened the baby.

  She told me tonight that she had killed the baby the night it was born, and I’m so bothered by it all that I can’t say any more.

  III

  There had been discrepancies and contradictions in their statements. Joanne had said that no one was present when she stabbed the baby. Aunt Bridie said she didn’t know about the baby’s stabbing or death, but Kathleen and Mike said she was present with them at the killing. Their mother had not mentioned stabbing at all. Ned and Mike claimed to have driven alone to the sea, while Kathleen said she was also in the car.

  The police, however, were used to discrepancies. Had there been perfect accord between the statements, it would have looked suspicious, Superintendent Courtney said.

  There was one outstanding discrepancy. The day after Joanne Hayes confessed to the murder of the baby found at Cahirciveen, her own baby was found on the farm.

  When the midnight court had finished, and just before she was led away to the cell, Joanne spoke to Kathleen. It was the first time they had seen each other since being brought in by the police. Joanne told Kathleen that she had had a baby and that it was hidden on the farm. She told her sister where to find it.

  Kathleen, Ned, Mike and Bridie were driven home by the guards, arriving there around one-thirty, and they sat up with Mary Hayes until 4 am recounting their experiences. The family did not treat Joanne’s claim of burial of a baby on the farm seriously enough to take a torch and go out and look for it.

  It was not until they had slept, milked the cows and breakfasted that Kathleen led her brothers, at 9.30 am, to the place indicated by Joanne. They found nothing and went on into Tralee to attend a formal court hearing. Joanne was remanded to Limerick prison and the rest were given bail.

  Just before Joanne was taken away, and while she was talking to her solicitor Patrick Mann in a private room, Kathleen came rushing in to say that she couldn’t find the baby. Her head had been too muddled to take in the information in the police station. Joanne repeated it.

  That afternoon Kathleen, Ned and Mike went searching again. Mike found the bag in a water hole almost at once. They didn’t touch it or open it. ‘Fingerprints,’ said Kathleen. Ned drove her into Tralee, where she spoke with Patrick Mann and he told her to contact Guard Liam Moloney in Abbeydorney about the find.

  Kathleen went to see him. He was about to have his dinner and he was sceptical. He didn’t want to get into trouble with a wild goose chase, he said, and he asked her to sign a declaration of responsibility on the back of an envelope. She couldn’t be in any more trouble than she was, she said, and she signed his envelope. He rang Tralee station and a posse of guards arrived on the farm to accompany Kathleen to the water hole. They tore open the bag and found inside the dead baby to which Joanne had given birth on the night of 12/13 April.

  Apart from some discoloration round the neck – ‘I delivered the baby myself with my own hands’, Joanne had said – her son was unmarked.

  Joanne Hayes was in the mental hospital in Limerick when news came through that evening that her baby had been found on the farm. She had been transferred to the hospital within hours of being lodged in jail, after psychiatrist John Fennelly confirmed the fears which the prison governor had expressed for her mental stability.

  She was watching the tea-time news on television and the final wrap-up, accompanied by subtitles for the hard of hearing, spelt out what she had spelt out to disbelieving police officers. ‘Now they’ll believe I’m not the mother of the Cahirciveen baby,’ she said, and she lay down on the floor before the television set and went into a
deep sleep.

  The nurses let her lie there, unwilling to disturb the most precious slumber of all, that which is achieved without drugs. As darkness fell they carried her to her bed, choosing not to remove her clothes lest they disturb her peace. She did not awaken until ten-thirty the following morning.

  When she did, she tried repeatedly to relive the moments of her son’s birth and death, crouching and showing how she had pulled him from her womb, wondering aloud if her hands on his throat had killed him, or had she put her hand over his mouth.

  Those who cared for her did not put questions to her. Their job was to listen, soothe and let be, until shock had passed. There would be time enough for questions. There had been many mothers in shock in that hospital.

  In the same ward as Joanne was the woman who had been found five days after childbirth dangling her infant by its feet. There had been the woman who demonstrated, again and again, how she sat on the toilet bowl to relieve pressured kidneys and got up to find that she had delivered herself of a baby. The baby lay dead in the bowl, its skull smashed on the porcelain. A woman would come and stay in the hospital for months before admitting the nightmare of birth through an incestuous relationship with her father, who had taken her to his newly widowed bed when she was twelve.

  To such women, who are admitted weekly to that one hospital, is denied what the French writer Colette calls ‘the beatitude of pregnant females . . . my feeling of pride, of banal magnificence as I ripened my fruit . . . This purring contentment, this euphoria – how give a name either scientific or familiar to this state of preservation – must certainly have penetrated me, since I have not forgotten it and am recalling it now, when life can never again bring me plenitude.’

  In the Limerick hospital Joanne Hayes was promised that she would be released in time to go home for the first birthday, on 19 May, of her beloved daughter Yvonne.

  On the night her baby was found, however, 2 May, Superintendent Courtney had another conference with all the police who had been involved in the investigation. They all agreed that Joanne Hayes had had twins. ‘By a strange twist of fate the body of the first-born was not discovered until after the charge’, Detective P.J. Browne wrote in the police report which was forwarded to the director of public prosecutions (DPP). The lengthy report outlined the case against Joanne Hayes which the police proposed to bring into court. On the strength of this document they hoped to successfully prosecute her with the murder of the Cahirciveen baby. ‘This report is based solely on fact’, appended Superintendent Courtney. ‘It does not enter the realms of speculation.’

  The report admitted to one central difficulty regarding forensic evidence on blood groups. Joanne Hayes, Jeremiah Locke and their dead son, found on the farm at Abbeydorney, all belonged to blood-group O. The Cahirciveen baby was blood-group A. One of its parents would have to be blood- group A. The guards proposed that Joanne Hayes had had twins by two different men, one of whom was blood-group A. Both men had had sexual intercourse with her during a forty-eight-hour period. She had become pregnant by both.

  This phenomenon, known as superfecundation, is so rare that it is a footnote in rarefied medical journals. The police report wished it to be taken into factual consideration. It was possible, wrote P.J. Browne, that Joanne Hayes was the mother of the Cahirciveen baby.

  He added a note of caution: ‘The converse probability that she is not is more likely.’

  Given the probability that she was not the mother of the Cahirciveen baby, the police put forward another theory. The baby which she had stabbed, and which her brother had thrown into the sea, had simply never been found. By a strange twist of fate, the police argued, two stabbed baby boys had been thrown into the waters off Slea Head on the same night, one of which had been found, identity of mother unknown, the other of which was still missing, its mother identified as Joanne Hayes.

  The report cited a precedent for laying a charge of murder where the victim was missing: in a special non-jury court in Northern Ireland some IRA men had been convicted of murdering British army captain, Robert Nairac, though his body was never recovered.

  There was another difficulty. Irish tidal waters flow clockwise round the island, and the baby found at Cahirciveen would have had to float eleven miles in an anti-clockwise direction, in twenty-four hours, if it had been thrown off Slea Head.

  Doubt also surrounded the evidence connecting the Hayeses directly with the Cahirciveen baby. Ned had identified an 0-7-30 fertiliser bag as the shroud of the baby he threw into the sea off Slea Head. The police forensic scientist Louise McKenna had established that the 0-7-30 bag found near the Cahirciveen baby bore no signs whatever of contact with a baby, bleeding or otherwise. Nor had the brown plastic bag found within it. Nor the clear plastic bag found within that. The police subsequently lost all three bags.

  Dr McKenna also found that the mattress on which Joanne Hayes slept bore no traces of human blood. The sheet from her bed yielded minute samples which were identified as the blood of insects. The paint flakes taken from the walls and floor of her bedroom showed no trace whatever of blood. One nightdress, the bottom half of which was heavily stained with human blood, was strewn with stalks of hay. Another nightdress was less heavily stained, and bore no trace of hay. Her panties were stained with blood.

  Before forwarding his report to the director of public prosecutions, Superintendent Courtney discussed it with the Kerry state solicitor, Donal Browne. The solicitor told him to ‘scrub’ the entire case ‘fast’.

  John Courtney then speculated about the possibility of charging Joanne Hayes with the murder of the baby found on the farm. The solicitor pointed out the difficulty of proving that that baby had been born alive, never mind prove that it had been killed. Superintendent Courtney quoted the provisional verdict given by the state pathologist, Dr Harbison, at the post-mortem, which an unusual number of guards had attended. He liked his men to learn, Courtney explained. One of them, Gerry O’Carroll, had even been able to help the pathologist. When Dr Harbison expressed puzzlement at the bruise on the baby’s neck, Detective O’Carroll had read out Joanne’s statement that she had delivered the baby herself.

  The pathologist had then declared, ‘Gentlemen, we have a separate existence.’

  Dr Harbison had later revised this speculation to say in a written report that an examination of the baby’s unexpanded lungs led him to doubt whether the baby had ever come breathing out of the womb at all, but the police ploughed on regardless of him and the state solicitor.

  They forwarded their complete report to the Director of public prosecutions. The DPP read it and wrote a letter to the Kerry state solicitor in September. The letter instructed Donal Browne to withdraw the charges in ‘this amazing case’ at the first opportunity.

  IV

  On 10 October 1984 the Hayes family learned in court that the case was now dropped. This came as complete news to them and to their solicitor. The charges had been kept hanging over them until the last possible minute. Two journalists, Don Buckley and Joe Joyce, had known for weeks beforehand that the police had been ordered to drop the case.

  The two journalists had revealed, in the mid-seventies, the existence of a police ‘heavy gang’ which specialised in extorting confessions by force. Though no policemen had ever been sacked as a result of the revelations, the existence of the heavy gang was accepted by the government and opposition parties of the day and a retired judge had been instructed to draw up guidelines for proper police procedure. His recommendations were never implemented.

  Now the two journalists had been alerted to the possibility of strange happenings in County Kerry involving dead babies and confessions. Their report appeared two days after the police withdrew the case.

  The public anger which followed was fuelled by another scandal that had boiled up during the summer. In Shercock garda station in County Cavan, a man had died of injuries inflicted in police custody. There had been only four policemen in the station. They testified against each other i
n court. The state failed to obtain a conviction.

  The Hayeses now alleged extortion of confessions by force and psychological terror.

  The police held an immediate internal inquiry into the affair. The Hayes family said they had had enough of police interviews and sent in written statements via their solicitor, who demanded immunity from any possible charges of concealment of birth in connection with Joanne’s dead son. Bridie Fuller, now hospitalised with a stroke, was unable to say or write anything.

  Joanne claimed she had asked repeatedly, about once every half-hour, in the course of her interview with the police on 1 May that she be taken out to the farm to show where her baby was hidden. He was worried that the sight of a dead child would drive her mad, said Superintendent Courtney. Just when he had decided to bring her out anyway, her mother’s incriminating statement had come in from the farm and he changed his mind. Besides, said one detective, a suspect had once confided that he would have thrown himself off the cliff had they brought him to the scene of the crime. Similar fear existed in this case about a possible suicide attempt should the police bring Joanne Hayes out to her lowland home.

  They had told her, said Joanne Hayes, that Yvonne would be put in an orphanage, her mother jailed and the farm sold if she did not confess. She had felt nauseous and Detective P.J. Browne had spread a newspaper on the floor, telling her to vomit onto it. He had then put her ‘sitting up on his lap’ while Detective O’Carroll took down her statement.

  She had wept ‘bitter tears’ onto his shoulder, said Detective Browne. His colleague had put a fatherly arm around her, confirmed Detective O’Carroll.

  Detective O’Carroll had told her that infanticide was no longer treated as murder and a suspended sentence would result, she alleged. He had told her that, he confirmed.

  There was no question of a newspaper on the floor, said Detective Browne. If ever he found himself helping police with enquiries he would wish to be treated as Joanne Hayes had been treated that day.