This particular case was only one such example, umpteen experts had pronounced upon it, it was about to draw to a close, and the announcement was made that the superfecundation expert was flying in on 9 May.
26. Tribunal Concludes
While awaiting the arrival of the superfecundation expert, the judge drew on his sporting background – he is a tennis enthusiast – to solve a couple of outstanding problems. How could the police have failed to locate the baby in the pool of water on the family farm? He ordered the police photographer to go out and do now that which the police had failed to do when Kathleen first brought them to the scene – take a picture of the area. He told the photographer to use a rugby ball to simulate a baby.
The photographer returned to tell the tribunal that the rugby ball refused to sink below the surface. He had filled the bag instead with clay and sods of grass.
The judge then asked the photographer to solve the second problem. Could, the judge asked, Joanne Hayes have really made her way to the pool by crossing a bedstead-cum-gate, given that she was ‘four foot eight and three-quarter inches, weighing seven stones and nine pounds, carrying a parcel weighing about half a stone?’ The photographer thought not.
The judge went out to the farm, accompanied by the media, to try for himself. He approached the gate head on, attempting the bars from ground level, and cleared it with some considerable difficulty. When a newspaper photograph subsequently appeared, showing Joanne avoiding the bars and using the more sensible method of stepping up on the ditch alongside to clear the reduced height like a gazelle, the judge returned to the farm. He did not invite the media along to watch his second outing.
When winter had turned to spring and the tribunal had moved from Tralee to Dublin and the superfecundation expert had still not arrived, the tribunal decided to kill time by dealing with anonymous letters that the judge had been receiving. These letters claimed that the mother of the Cahirciveen baby had been found dead and her death hushed up. The superintendent in charge of Kerry’s police force was called to tell the tale of the Dutch woman who had hanged herself in the county around the time that Joanne Hayes was arrested.
The unprecedented revelation of a confidential suicide report was a measure of the lengths to which the tribunal was prepared, and forced, to go in order to bolster flagging public confidence. The Dutch woman, with a master’s degree in Chinese culture, had been a leading member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Amsterdam. A motorcycle accident left her mentally unstable. She tried to kill herself by lying on railway tracks in front of an oncoming train. The train cut one of her legs off. She came, crippled, from Holland to County Kerry and rented a house. She tried to emulate the life of a character in a popular Dutch work of fiction. This character, Momo, had withdrawn from a society corrupted by materialism.
The Dutch woman also withdrew and lived a vegetarian life in Kerry. Then she hanged herself. The autopsy showed that she was not pregnant nor recently delivered of a pregnancy. Her diaries showed no information about a love life. Besides, said the inspector, the landlord would have noticed if she were pregnant, he being a father of six.
The judge hoped that the woman’s identity would be kept secret. The newspapers revealed her name. Once in a while it had to be shown that this tribunal came up with facts. Yet another expert had testified that the facts as believed in Ireland were anything but. For instance, said Dr Peter McCabe, the admiralty charts of Irish coastal waters were never within three hundred per cent of accuracy.
Dr McCabe had helped to build the Aswan dam in Egypt. He came to the tribunal to declare that Professor Peter Barry, an oceanographer from University College, Galway, who relied on those charts, was totally wrong to suggest that the Cahirciveen baby could not have floated from Slea Head to White Strand. Irish waters went clockwise round the island, true, and moved in that clockwise direction from White Strand up to Slea Head, true, and the police were claiming that the baby had floated anti-clockwise, from Slea Head down to White Strand, incredible, but the police were right. It was a matter of currents. He had no evidence to show that the currents went anti-clockwise from Slea Head to White Strand, he agreed.
Spring was showing hints of summer, and there were no rumours left to kill, when the superfecundation expert finally arrived at Dublin airport. The tribunal had a subpoena served on him to make sure that he would testify, regardless of his findings. He was a witness for the police after all, and he had not yet tested Joanne Hayes’s blood, and the police might choose not to call him if his findings were unfavourable to them, besides which the lawyer for the Hayes family had expressed reluctance at having her blood sample released to him.
The superfecundation expert said that the possibility that Joanne Hayes might have had twins by two different fathers was so rare that it could be ruled out.
‘The bastard shot us down,’ Martin Kennedy said afterwards. In June the six-month saga of sub-pornographic scenarios, which saw Joanne Hayes regularly coupled, in brutal graphic seamy sleazy detail, with unidentified men in numbers unknown, came to an end. ‘There were times when we all thought she had twins,’ said Judge Kevin Lynch.
As lawyers made their closing submissions, Marguerite Egan of the Tralee women’s group stepped up to the judge’s bench and placed a sealed envelope upon it. What was in the envelope, he asked her? A submission on behalf of the women of Ireland, she replied. The submission lay unopened between them as they faced each other. It recommended, among other things, the abolition of all-male tribunals.
The judge with all his legal powers faced the woman with the yellow flower in her lapel. He could jail her for contempt, he said. Then he told her to go away and have some sense. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘have I got to do with the women of Ireland in general? What have the women of Ireland in general got to do with this case?’
27. A Woman to Blame
Bridie Fuller died in a geriatric home on 29 September 1985. She had been transferred directly there from the hospital in which she gave evidence. Her deteriorating condition required permanent medical supervision. She never recovered sufficiently to return home. The Hayes family visited her faithfully right up to the end, showing a palpable and unwavering affection that the events of the tribunal did not impair. Though they increasingly accepted that her testimony might damn and would certainly taint them for ever more, they mourned the loss of her, and the death of her, in tears, at her graveside.
Two days after she was buried, on 4 October, Judge Kevin Lynch released his report on the Kerry babies inquiry. He rained blow upon blow on the heads of the surviving members of the family. Joanne Hayes, he found, was not the mother of the Cahirciveen baby. But he exonerated the police from any major blame in charging her with its murder. She and her mother, her sister and her brothers were ‘barefaced liars’ who had misled the police and perjured themselves before him in an attempt to cover up the death of Joanne’s baby. He did not answer clearly the central question and reason for the setting up of the tribunal – how did a family come to confess to a crime they could not have committed, and supply corroborative details known only to the police, and add imaginative details of their own?
The report stated that the family had in fact confessed to the police the true story of the death of their own baby ‘with additions as to stabbing, and a journey, to fit involvement with the Cahirciveen baby’. Judge Lynch did not explain the source of those additions. He dismissed out of hand the explanations offered by the Hayeses. No member of the family was beaten. No member of the family was terrorised. By implication, though the judge does not spell out the incredible scenario, four members of the Hayes family – Joanne, Kathleen, Ned and Mike – seated in separate rooms in a police station, each spelled out the exact same fantasy, differing only in their estimation of the numbers present at and partaking in the fantasy. Joanne Hayes imagined, all by herself, that she stabbed the Cahirciveen baby to death, that the knife was brought to her by Kathleen, that she plunged the knife repeatedly into the baby and
that Kathleen, Mike and Mary Hayes, plus Bridie Fuller, watched her do it.
Kathleen Hayes independently imagined that she carried the knife from the kitchen to the bedroom, placed it in Joanne’s hands and watched Joanne plunge the knife into the infant. She also imagined that her mother, Mike and Bridie Fuller were present, that she and Ned and Mike had taken the corpse to Slea Head and that she had seen it float away.
Mike Hayes, a twenty-seven-year-old man with the intellectual and emotional development of a child, imagined and described in fluent detail how he, Kathleen and his mother and aunt had watched Joanne stab a baby to death, and how he and Ned had then driven the corpse away. Though he seldom in his life ventured off the farm, he managed to give clear details of the journey to the remote Dingle peninsula and was able to pinpoint a landmark bridge in Dingle town that guides the visitor wishing to go to Slea Head into the correct exit from a maze of exits. Ned Hayes imagined that he had taken a corpse from his sister’s bedroom, that he and Mike had placed that corpse in a car and that they drove to Slea Head and threw the corpse into the water. He particularly imagined that they had shrouded the corpse in a specifically marked 0-7-30 fertiliser bag, an amazing coincidence, since the Cahirciveen baby’s corpse was associated with just such a bag. The police were the only ones aware of that, and no such brand of fertiliser was ever used on the family farm. There was also the amazing coincidence, that only the police knew that the Cahirciveen baby was stabbed to death. The newspapers had not reported the nature of its wounds. It might have been kicked to death for all the public or the Hayes family knew, yet the Hayes family correctly fantasised a stabbing.
The report suggested that the fantastic confessions had resulted from a combination of the ‘guilty conscience’ of the Hayes family with ‘pressure’ from the police. It found no fault with police pressure. ‘This was not a tea-party’, the judge pointed out. The police had ‘a strong suspicion that progressed into positive and certain belief’ that they had on their hands a family which was lying about the death of some baby. The report does slap police wrists for an inadequate and cursory search of the farm after Joanne Hayes had supplied accurate details of the location of this dead baby, but invited sympathy for the police dilemma. Who could believe a story of birth in a field (three months after Anne Lovett)? Twenty-eight experienced police officers were up against a barefaced lying conspiracy, concocted by people who denied pregnancy, then admitted birth and death, then claimed not to know where the corpse was, then placed the corpse in the sea directly opposite Cahirciveen. Joanne Hayes was ‘persuaded into believing’ that she was the mother of the Cahirciveen baby, though Judge Lynch does not locate the source or describe the nature of the persuasion. The conclusion is invited that she persuaded herself and that it was her own guilty conscience which drove her to shout aloud that she was ‘insane’ and a ‘murderess’ who had ‘killed her baby with a knife’. She was by then, after seven hours of interrogation, ‘convinced’, wrote the judge, that the Cahirciveen baby was hers. He did not find that the police convinced her of this. The irresistible conclusion is invited that her own family convinced her in various statements which the police merely brought to her attention.
In support of this the judge pointed out that no one but Joanne Hayes knew where the baby had been buried. The family, he wrote, had refused to help her dispose of the corpse and had asked no questions when it disappeared. A conclusion is invited that in their self-imposed state of terror in the police station, with by now only hazy memories of a night of terror on the farm, and in terrified ignorance of the finale of that night, the family convinced and falsely convicted each other, and misled a naive police force. The judge wound up his report of events in the police station by saying that the family had misunderstood that they were free to leave the station at any time, and the police had not made this adequately clear to them. He found no great fault with this breakdown in communication. It’s the kind of thing that happens, the report implies, when cups of tea are supplied by the police to people who do not understand that they are voluntarily at a tea party which is no tea party at all. The judge recorded that
Detective-Sergeant O’Carroll said to her that her baby would haunt her for the rest of her life. Whether or not he said this is of no great importance. It was not a tea-party they were at. The Gardaí were investigating the death of a baby that (inter alia) had been stabbed 28 times and had had its neck broken.
The judge did find that the police were to be faulted somewhat after the non-tea-party ended, charges were preferred and Joanne Hayes’s baby was found. They had then resorted to ‘unlikely, far fetched and self contradictory theories about twins to justify themselves’. The judge was quite scalding about this, though he had presided over a tribunal which had seemingly considered these theories.
Things are never what they seem, he conveyed in the most disingenuous sentence of the report. It was the statements made by the family to the police, and ‘the family’s insistence throughout the tribunal of a birth of a baby outside in the field’ that ‘made one wonder from time to time were there twins’. The judge knew perfectly well, this sentence invites the assumption, that the police and the lawyers and the experts were talking through their hats.
He did find that the police had ‘gilded the lily’ when testifying under oath to the tribunal. His attitude to this is quite playful, suggesting that boys will be boys in court, and that he knows when to take a tall tale with a pinch of salt. The police, he wrote, have to appear regularly in court and ‘there is a danger that the Oath may become for them largely a matter of form. This does not mean that such a person is likely to tell completely groundless lies on Oath.’
This gilding of the relatively perfect police lily happens, he wrote, because ‘familiarity breeds contempt’. Judge Kevin Lynch does not express undue upset at the contempt which the police showed for the oath, and for him and for the law when they presented their bunch of lilies to him during the tribunal. The police had merely engaged in a little ‘exaggeration over and above the true position’. They had ‘elevated wishful thinking to the status of hard fact’. The report does not ponder the awesome possibility flowing from such police attitudes: that if the Cahirciveen baby had been, perchance, blood-group O, such wishful thinking and gilding of the lily might have resulted in the imprisonment, upon conviction of murder, of Joanne Hayes and her family. The report has in fact laid grounds for fear – fear of the law itself, and of the courts, and of the police, because all that stands between the innocent and the opinion that the police are ‘unlikely to tell completely groundless lies’ is chance. Should chance dictate otherwise, people could end up in jail.
Having failed to satisfactorily solve the riddle of the ‘additions’ to the Hayes’s confessions, the judge turned his attention from the million-pound central question of the tribunal to the secondary question that had clearly absorbed him – What happened on the farm that night? He confirmed at the outset that he was only surmising.
This Chapter contains fewer references than most of the other Chapters in this Report, to the Transcripts of the Evidence given at the hearings of the Inquiry. The reason is that most of the facts found in this Chapter are so found by inference from other facts found in this Report, or by inference from evidence not directly supporting such facts, but indirectly doing so to the satisfaction of the Tribunal.
He distanced himself retrospectively from the completely contradictory evidence given by Bridie Fuller in the hospital – ‘She is a suggestible witness and therefore her evidence must be approached by the tribunal with caution’ – and found that in one respect she had been accurate. Bridie Fuller had cut the cord in the bedroom. Michael Hayes, he repeated, had grasped the explanation of the solemnity of the oath ‘and immediately thereafter admitted’ to witnessing birth in the bedroom. The judge then drew heavily on statements made in the police station to depict the scene.
Joanne Hayes’ mother, Mrs Mary Hayes, was very annoyed with Joanne Hayes and expressed her
annoyance at the prospect of having to rear another child for Jeremiah Locke, especially when the child did not appear to be strong. Bridie Fuller and Kathleen Hayes also showed their displeasure to Joanne Hayes at her having another baby by Jeremiah Locke. Bridie Fuller left the room and went either to her own bedroom or to the kitchen.
Joanne Hayes got into a panic and as the baby cried again she put her hands around its neck and stopped it crying by choking it and the baby did not breathe again. At some stage during the course of these events, Joanne Hayes used the bath brush from the bathroom to hit the baby to make sure that it was dead. None of the family tried to stop Joanne Hayes from either choking or hitting the baby.
The whole family now got into a panic. Bridie Fuller had already left the room before the baby died. Ned Hayes was still sleeping below in the cottage and it was decided that he should be sent for, as the eldest son and a person of considerable intelligence and imagination.
A Woman to Blame Page 18