The Irish Scissor Sisters (12 page)

Each of the women had changed in their own way since Farah’s murder and they were all battling internal demons to one degree or another – Linda was on the brink of suicide, Kathleen was running away from her problems and Charlotte was in denial that anything was wrong at all.

The two eldest Mulhall brothers, James and John, were both serving prison sentences in Wheatfield Prison, in Clondalkin. Kathleen, Linda and Charlotte paid them several visits in the three or four months after Farah’s murder. Both men were serving sentences for road traffic offences. Thirty-three-year-old James was in the middle of a three-year term for dangerous driving, causing the death of a fellow motorist in January 2002. John Mulhall Jnr, who was nearly five years younger than his brother, was on remand on two counts of being a passenger in a stolen car in Cork. An arrest warrant had been issued for him after he failed to appear in court. Charlotte went to see her brothers with Kathleen two or three times but Kathleen also went alone most weeks and was a regular visitor to the jail. Linda was especially close to James, as they were the two eldest in the family, and she saw him on several occasions. The brothers also had access to a mobile phone in prison and were probably in telephone contact as well.

Some time between April and July 2005, Kathleen, Linda, and possibly Charlotte, confessed to John and James about the murder. Kathleen went to visit the pair one day and broke down. She told James that Linda and Charlotte had murdered her boyfriend after he made a move on Linda. She went into minute details about the murder and told him about the body being dumped in the canal and said that their father had come over in his van and removed bloody clothes from the flat.

James Mulhall didn’t believe her and thought she was telling lies. Linda then went to see him and confirmed the story but did not go into any great detail. She asked him to look after her kids if anything happened to her.

Charlotte hasn’t admitted telling her brothers anything but detectives believe that she could also have got the murder off her chest.

The Mulhall women didn’t realise it at the time but opening up to John and James would prove to be a very costly mistake.

on the evening of 30 March, senior gardaí attached to the Dublin Metropolitan Region (DMR) North Central Division had been informed of the discovery of the body. They converged on the scene to take control of the investigation. The headquarters of DMR North Central is Store Street Garda Station in central Dublin but the body was found in the area covered by Fitzgibbon Street Station, which meant that the investigation would operate from that station. The detective then in day-to-day charge at Fitzgibbon Street was Detective Inspector Christy Mangan. DI Mangan (now Detective Superintendent) is a highly experienced and respected officer who would go on to take charge of the investigation into the Dublin Riots in February 2006. When he arrived at the scene he saw the limbs floating in the canal and directed that a murder inquiry be commenced. He ordered that the area be preserved as a crime scene.

Garda Ronan Hartnett is a member of the street crime unit at Fitzgibbon Street Garda Station and was on mobile patrol with Garda Tom O’Brien when they were called to assist at the scene. He spoke with Garda Kieran Brady and Fire Station Officer Frank Kiernan and was brought down to the water’s edge to examine what were now clearly human remains. The firemen were pointing lights and torches at the scene and Garda Hartnett observed two arms cut from the body at the shoulder, two parts of a lower leg cut from the body just above the knee, two thighs and a part of a pelvic area covered with white clothing. He noticed that the skin was very discoloured and it was hard to make out if the remains were those of a black or white person. All the body parts were lying submerged in the water close to the canal wall. A vest and pair of underwear were lying beside a torso that was covered with what appeared to be a white football jersey. The two legs had socks on the feet and all the body parts covered a distance of about ten feet. Garda Ronan Judge told him that they’d found another object around 150 feet up-water. Garda Hartnett could just barely see something visible protruding from the water further down the canal and went to check it out with fire fighter Pascal Proctor. They climbed down the ladder from the fire tender and onto the railway side of the canal. About sixty feet past the bridge a bag was visible in the neon light. Fifty-four-year-old Proctor had a drag tool with him. He slowly pulled the bag about five feet, towards himself and Garda Hartnett. Before the package reached dry land the contents spilled out and the fire fighter was horrified to see a torso floating on top of the water. He picked up the plastic bag and was struck by the terrible smell coming from it. He gave the bag to Garda Hartnett and they labelled it with yellow plastic markers and left the torso where it was. It was very discoloured and it was impossible to make out whether the victim was black or white.

Detective Sergeant Colm Fox from Mountjoy Garda Station rang Garda Control in Harcourt Square at 7.42 p.m. to inform them that the Garda Technical Bureau and Water Unit would be required at the Ballybough scene. A garda technical team arrived at 9.07 p.m. and at 9.55 p.m. Detective Gardaí Geraldine Doherty from the ballistics section of the Technical Bureau and Liam Lynam from ballistics and photography arrived. The two officers were shown around by Detective Sergeant Mick Macken from the fingerprints section. All three stayed to assess the crime scene and realised that they would need to return the next morning.

Dr Y M Fakih, who has a doctor’s practice in Whitehall, received a call from Fitzgibbon Street requesting that he come to the canal to examine the remains and pronounce the victim dead. He was brought to Ballybough Bridge where he met with Detective Sergeant Gerry McDonnell. He was shown the mutilated limbs and pronounced the victim dead at 9.30 p.m.

Three gardaí took it in turns to monitor the canal for any movement of the body parts while they waited for first light to come and a murder probe to begin. The locations where the eight body parts had been found were marked using white A4 sheets on the bank, in case any of them moved with the flow of water.

Gardaí preserved four areas around the murder scene in the days following the discovery. Summerhill Parade/Ballybough Road, beside the canal bridge, was closed until the evening of 1 April. The bridge on the Croke Park side was closed until 2 April. The scene at the Royal Canal Bank was patrolled by uniformed gardaí until the beginning of April and Sackville Gardens, which overlooks the canal, was also preserved as a crime scene.

Over the next few hours gardaí began the standard procedures that take place during all murder investigations. Everybody at the scene who witnessed anything was preliminarily interviewed and their names and address were noted so that they could be contacted about formal statements. Uniformed officers carried out house-to-house inquiries to see if local residents had noticed anything unusual in the last few days and weeks. The scene was also policed throughout the night to prevent anyone contaminating the crime scene.

The two gardaí in overall charge of DMR North Central were Superintendent John Leahy and Detective Superintendent John McKeown, who were based at Fitzgibbon Street and Store Street respectively. At 10 p.m. on the night of the 30 March 2005, gardaí held the first of well over fifty conferences about the murder. The investigating team discussed the day’s events and decided on how the investigation should progress. All were in agreement that a lengthy and difficult inquiry lay ahead. They knew that the key to solving it was to find out the identity of the man who had met his grisly end in the lonely waters of a canal in the centre of Dublin.

At 1 a.m. all the investigators went home for a night’s sleep and planned to reconvene at the scene at 8 a.m. the following morning.

Although the remains of the man who would eventually be identified as Farah Swaleh Noor were not officially found until 30 March 2005, it later emerged that they could have been discovered many days before, because several, possibly even dozens, of people had inadvertently seen them.

A local woman, forty-three-year-old Margaret Gannon, who lives near-by with her husband and three children, was bringing her seven-year-old son, Evan, to school at North William Street on Monday 21 March. She stopped at her sister’s house to collect her two nieces and was walking over Ballybough Bridge just before 9 a.m. when little Evan said, ‘Ma, look at that.’ Margaret looked into the water and saw a black bag with plastic and lots of brown tape wrapped around it. The bag was between two trees, close to the bank, and was resting against a grassy area towards the North Strand. Margaret immediately thought it looked like a body with no head. She was sure it wasn’t a dog drowned in a bag, something she often saw in the canal. Her niece, said, ‘Oh Margaret, is that another body?’ but she said it wasn’t and they continued on to school. She saw the bag again the following morning but the kids never mentioned it after that, so she forgot about it. She later remembered the date she had seen what could have been Noor’s body because it had been her husband’s birthday the day before. After she heard about the discovery of the dismembered body, Margaret contacted the gardaí and told them what she’d seen.