The lawyers reminded her that her sister Bridie had subsequently said otherwise and Mary Hayes then yielded up the details of a night to which she had closed her eyes, changing those details as they pressed her for exact recall, each man cross-checking what she had told the other. She had not been in bed but in the kitchen; no she had been on her way to bed, between the kitchen and the bedroom, when Joanne went outside; no she had been in bed when Joanne went outside.
Finally she said that she had just gone to bed in Mike’s room, which is the middle one of the three bedrooms, when Joanne got up. Joanne had to come down the corridor, past Mike’s room and then Bridie’s room to go into the kitchen, where the front door gave directly onto the garden path. She heard her daughter come down the corridor and go out of the kitchen into the night.
After a while Mary Hayes called out to Kathleen that she should see what was keeping Joanne. She heard Kathleen open the kitchen door, heard her call ‘Are you all right?’, did not hear the reply, and heard Joanne come in some time later.
When Joanne finally came back down the corridor to go to bed, she paused at the open door of Mike’s bedroom and said in response to her mother that she was all right. It was dark, said Mary Hayes, and from her bed she could not see.
Next morning she saw the blood on the kitchen floor and Joanne told her that she had had a heavy period. While Joanne was in hospital, Aquinas confirmed that it was a miscarriage.
Had she changed her testimony, the judge asked her, because she was anxious to place the birth in the field?
‘You are a religious and pious woman,’ Anthony Kennedy addressed her. ‘Should you by any chance commit perjury and die on the spot . . . do you not believe that you would be condemned for eternity, having died after committing a mortal sin. You believe that as part of your religion? You have taken an oath to have God come down and witness what you say is true and if you then swore false, it is eternal damnation and perdition. And in the teeth of that warning are you sticking to your story? There is not one ounce of truth in what Bridie Fuller was saying?’
Kevin O’Higgins read out to her the oath that James Duggan had read out to her son Mike. Was she calling both her son and her sister perjurers? Was she in bed or in the kitchen on that night? ‘I am going to press you on it. I’m going to stay here as long as necessary until you answer that question.’
‘I was between the bed and the kitchen,’ she said. The birth hung between the house and the field.
Joan Fuller couldn’t enlighten them. Surely, she said, it was secretly done, in the field. A Christian family would have helped had they known. Her family had never discussed the birth in detail. It was not necessary. They were Christians. She stumbled and slipped as she left the witness box. She and Mary Hayes left the court and wandered arm-in-arm with an Abbeydorney neighbour out onto the concrete platform that flanked the steps. There was a sheer ten-foot drop to the street. As they walked blindly forward, Detective Sergeant Gerry O’Carroll called frantically to them to step back, step back from the edge.
In Abbeydorney a woman got up in the middle of the night, sleepless, and hung her washing out in the dark.
22. Cords
The fourteen-and-a-half-inch umbilical cord that was found on Joanne Hayes’s dead baby strangled the million-pound six-month enquiry from beginning to end. There was as much evidence assembled around it as was gathered around the deaths of Pope John Paul I and President Kennedy, and still the questions remain unanswered. Who killed Kennedy? How was the baby’s cord severed?
Like the ancient mariner, Justice Kevin Lynch carried the cord wherever he went, from Tralee to Dublin, through all the seasons, asking of all and sundry and the most unlikely – Sister Aquinas – how the severing of the cord had come to pass. His most plaintive exchange took place with the elderly nun.
‘How did the umbilical cord get cut if the baby was born outside? . . . Have you ever found out who cut the cord? . . . Assuming I find that the baby was born in the field, how was the umbilical cord cut? . . . Would it be possible for a mother to break an umbilical cord? . . . Would it be possible for a person – when I say a person, I mean the mother – to break an umbilical cord which I assume to be very greasy and slippery?’
She was gentle with him and with the chorus of men who echoed him. She did not know what a mother was capable of. All she knew was what Bridie was capable of. ‘Bridie was not a maternity nurse. I doubt if she ever cut a cord in her life.’ She told them fondly of the time when Bridie, on night duty at the hospital, was asked by the ambulance men to come and attend to a woman who had given birth in a field.
Bridie absolutely refused to go to the field unless a maternity nurse came along.
Long before Bridie or Aquinas or Joanne Hayes herself had taken the stand, in the opening week of the inquiry in fact, the state pathologist, John Harbison, had declared that the cord on Joanne’s baby ‘appeared’ to have been cut with an implement. Joanne Hayes, fully aware of his statement, said again and again that she had broken the cord with her hands.
The conflict between the mother and the expert gave rise to much speculation. If the expert was right, why would Joanne Hayes tell a lie? Was she afraid to admit to premeditation – to going deliberately into a field with scissors that she would use to part herself from a baby which she then intended to abandon? Was she afraid that, if she admitted to scissors, the tribunal might make a connection between scissors and the stabbed Cahirciveen baby and seriously consider that she had indeed had twins? Was she protecting some other member of the family who had helped her deliver in the field, or all the members of the family who had helped her deliver in the farmhouse?
Or was she in fact telling the truth, and was the expert wrong?
The men of the tribunal and the succession of male experts who were called in to help pitted their wits, their implements and their experience against each other on the question of the cord. On two occasions it emerged that one simple test could prove decisively whether it had been severed by an instrument or pulled part by bare hands. ‘The telling factor,’ said Professor Robert Harrison, lecturer and consultant in gynaecology, would be a microscopic examination of ‘the blood vessels, because they are rigid’. The outer flesh of the cord might be soft and its appearance misleading after severance, but the three minute veins which the flesh enclosed, pumping blood from the mother’s womb to the baby’s heart, lungs and kidneys, were strung with continuous, rigid blood vessels, whose appearance when severed would not mislead. Mr John Creedon agreed with him.
When the state pathologist was subsequently recalled to the witness stand, where he repeated that in his opinion the flesh had been cut through with an implement, he did not mention the blood vessels, nor was he asked about them. Long after the tribunal ended he acknowledged that he had not done that test. Had this been a murder trial, he explained, he would have examined the blood vessels in order to remove all possible doubt, but this was only an inquiry.
The judge brought his own unique testing methods to bear. He had acquired a reputation for accuracy and grasp of detail during his long years in commercial and civil litigation, and his reputation survived such blunders as announcing during Bridie Fuller’s testimony that the by now fabled fourteen-and-a-half-inch umbilical cord was a precise six inches long, and insisting, much later, that the Cahirciveen baby’s umbilical cord had been tied with thread, though it had been sheared off flush with the navel.
The judge used a pocket calculator, a magnifying glass and a piece of string to help him come to a decision about the cord. He was precise to the point of obsession about exactitude, insisting that the tribunal even estimate the length of that part of the cord which was missing. To this end, Sergeant Coughlan was made to describe a piece of material found in the field, which Kathleen had pointed out to him. It could have been either the afterbirth or the remains of the cord. It could have been something else entirely. Forensic scientists had been unable to determine whether this material was animal or human.
But supposing it were human, and supposing it were the cord, the judge wanted to know – what length was it? It was about two and a half to three feet in length, the sergeant said. ‘How does it compare with the width of that witness box which is three feet four inches?’ the judge asked. The sergeant was given a piece of string, asked to select that length of it which approximated to the length of the remains which he had found and instructed to place the selected length of string along the edge of the box, while the judge and his team of lawyers made visual calculations.
The sergeant opted for the full width of the box, and then again for slightly less.
The tribunal’s junior, Mr Duggan, embarked on the mathematical elucidation. Professor Harrison, he said, had pronounced the average umbilical cord to be approximately three foot four. Mr Creedon had opted for around three feet. If one added the known length of the cord on the Tralee baby, fourteen and a half inches, to what, for the sake of argument, might be considered the remains of the cord, which the sergeant estimated to be on his biggest measurement four foot two and a half inches, and ‘on your smallest measurement, three foot eight and a half inches’, that would give either a five-foot-five-inch cord, or a three-foot-eleven-inch cord.
‘That,’ said Mr Duggan, ‘would make it more than the average length as given?’ Supercord!
Unless, the judge mused later, ‘you are dealing with two cords. If that is so . . .’ Take one cord from the room, marry it with the cord in the field and hey presto! Twins!
The tribunal considered whether a woman could, in any case, tear a cord apart. Almost impossible, given the cord’s tensile strength, said Dr Harbison. ‘It would be difficult,’ doubted Professor Harrison, ‘unless you stood on one end and pulled.’ A woman could ‘just about’ do it, said Mr Creedon, though it would slip out of her hands, unless she had rough gloves on.
Would the cord be long enough, asked the judge, to wrap around each hand, taking for example the fourteen-and-a-half-inch part and ‘presumably a bit more to the placenta?’ Mr Creedon said he remembered the exact same question from the judge on his previous occasion in the witness box, ‘and I felt like going and trying it. I have not.’
He could still do so, he offered.
There was no need. The state pathologist had been tearing cords apart in anticipation of a recall. He announced during the closing stage of the tribunal that it could indeed be done. He had also invited women students to engage in the trial of strength. Were the women able to do it? Easily. Not only that, but the lightest of the students, at seven and a half stone, lighter even than Joanne Hayes, was the strongest. ‘So much for the guidelines of what a small female can pull,’ he said.
Dr Declan Gilsenan, who acts as state pathologist when Dr Harbison is unavailable, had also been experimenting with umbilical cords. He queried his colleague’s assertion that the cord had been cut. He had spent a weekend cutting cords up, with both a knife and scissors. The knife ‘invariably cuts the cord straight across, perhaps slightly raggedly.’ The photograph of the Tralee baby’s cord showed such a straight cut. However, that cut had been made by Dr Harbison when slicing off a piece of the cord for examination.
The other end of the sample, showing the break presumably made by Joanne Hayes, was clearly diagonal. One could not make a diagonal cut by simply snipping a cord that floated freely between a woman and her baby. To achieve that diagonal cut one would have to deliberately place the cord on a hard surface and then cut through, said Dr Gilsenan. This he had done, repeatedly, in order to be sure of his conclusions.
Judge Lynch lent Mr Creedon his magnifying glass that he might study the photo of the cord. ‘It does not look like a cut end, does it, my lord? I don’t think it looks like a cut end.’
Justice Lynch: Dr Harbison said it appeared to have been cut, on microscopic examination.
Creedon: Under microscopy he should be able to tell if the vessels are severed or broken.
The men delved ever deeper into the mystery. If Bridie Fuller had indeed cut the cord and tied it with cotton thread to prevent blood loss, should not the piece of thread still be on the cord? There was no knotted thread on the cord, nor indeed the slightest indentation on the flesh to suggest that a knot had ever been there. The judge again lent Mr Creedon his magnifying glass, that both men might double-check the findings of the state pathologist.
Young Mr Duggan put forward a theory. ‘Are you familiar, Mr Creedon, with the way they castrate young bulls?’ He explained that a winching device was affixed to the bull’s testicles and left in place for a few days, during which time the winch gradually cut through, until both winch and that which it was supposed to sever fell right off.
‘A live bull?’ winced Mr Creedon.
‘A live young bull. It is the constant pressure,’ explained Mr Duggan. Might not the thread have similarly tightened on the umbilical cord of Joanne Hayes’s baby until it cut right through? There would not have been time, Mr Duggan was reminded. The baby had died almost instantly, and was placed within hours in a bag. Even if the thread had cut through, both it and the severed remains would have been found in the bag.
In any case, the state pathologist, John Harbison, had concluded that the cord was cut after death.
‘After death?’ the judge asked.
‘After death,’ Mr Harbison repeated.
The possibility existed that Joanne Hayes had been telling the truth. That she had given birth in the field, panicked and put her hand over the baby’s mouth, killing it instantly. That she had then separated herself from her dead son by tearing the cord that bound them together. The tribunal never asked her to give specific details of the manner of that dreadful separation. Detail was the preserve of the experts. And Bridie Fuller.
Joanne Hayes was only the mother.
23. Twins
The tribunal turned its attention to the possibility that Joanne Hayes might have had twins. Doubtful though they were that a woman could be strong enough to tear an umbilical cord apart with her bare hands, the men devoted serious attention to the possibility that this woman had been strong enough to deliver herself of a baby in a field, go in home and be delivered within the hour by Bridie Fuller of another, which she then stabbed in panic, and manage all the while to stay calmly secretive about the first. Should the police discover the corpse of the second twin, which Joanne Hayes instructed her brothers to bury at sea, and should the rest of the family subsequently sing like frightened canaries about that child, this woman would produce a small but perfectly formed alibi – the baby in the field.
Diabolically clever!
But then, as one psychiatrist told the tribunal, he had once treated a woman who not only claimed to have had sexual intercourse with the devil, but persuaded her family of the fact.
Diabolical!
And then again, learned men sitting on tribunals long before this one, catholic holy men at that, had found that the women brought before them did indeed have sexual intercourse with the devil. The devil, found these holy men, had a penis that was cold as ice. The women they convicted were burned to death.
Diabolical!
Martin Kennedy put the case succinctly for the superintendents, who claimed that Joanne Hayes had conceived twins by two different men, each of whom had different blood groups. ‘Is it possible,’ he asked the experts, ‘and it is the kernel of this tribunal, that a man may have intercourse with a woman and deposit semen in her vagina, and within ninety-six hours another man might have intercourse with the same woman and deposit semen in her vagina, is it possible if that happened . . . that a woman could be impregnated in one ovum from the semen of the first one and in another ovum from the semen of the second man?’
‘Or in the same ovum?’ added the judge.
It was a very rare possibility. He had heard about it in conversation, said Dr Harbison.
The conversation about Joanne Hayes went on in public and in private for months. There was open speculation about the kind of woman she was. In a national
daily newspaper a journalist declared that she did not have the kind of personality that would attract him. ‘Probably a matter of chemistry,’ he wrote. Another journalist who had never met her wrote that he had heard that she was ‘a cheeky strap’.
While they waited for the real expert to arrive from England and pronounce upon the possibility of superfecundation, the tribunal tried to establish whether Joanne Hayes had carried twins by debating the way she had looked while pregnant in 1984.
Her workmate, a nurse, testified that she had looked as though she were only carrying one baby. Anthony Kennedy objected that the evidence of ‘a mere nurse’ could not be accepted. (He had not yet made the acquaintance of Bridie Fuller, whom he described as ‘a great nurse’.)
Detective Smith recalled receiving a visit at home from a man who lived up his road. This was after Joanne Hayes had been charged with killing the Cahirciveen baby. They both heard the radio newsflash about the finding of her Tralee baby. The visiting electrician had immediately solved the conundrum. ‘My God, she has had twins; the size of her! She was huge.’
Tralee gynaecologist John Creedon was invited by the judge to speculate on Joanne Hayes’s probable appearance had she been carrying both the Tralee baby and the Cahirciveen baby. First they considered her normal appearance.
Mr Creedon: She is one metre forty-four centimetres tall. That’s four foot eight and a half inches.
Judge: Four foot eight and three-quarters. I am sure we will not quarrel with a quarter of an inch.
Mr Creedon: And weighs forty-six kilos and 300 grammes. Approximately seven stone.
Judge: And three and three-quarter pounds.
Add twins of 5.26 pounds and 6 pounds, total 11.62 pounds, plus three pound for two placentas, Mr Creedon calculated aloud. The court waited while he thought. ‘She would certainly have looked very large indeed. She would be grossly distended. She would have to compensate by leaning back and her attitude would be very military. Her spine would be extended backwards in order to maintain her sphere of gravity. It would not have been possible to miss noticing.’
A Woman to Blame Page 16