The Irish Scissor Sisters (14 page)

While Dr Curtis was determining the cause of death, a massive garda inquiry aimed at identifying the remains swung into action. Hundreds of residents in the Summerhill and Ballybough areas were canvassed and each filled out a questionnaire with the help of gardaí. The results were collated at the incident room in Fitzgibbon Street.

Gardaí realised that the help of the media would also play a key element in identifying the murder victim. The media took an immediate interest in the grizzly case and in the few weeks following the discovery scarcely a day went by when it wasn’t mentioned in the national press. The day after the remains were found, a press conference was held at Fitzgibbon Street and was attended by dozens of newspaper, TV and radio reporters. Detective Inspector Christy Mangan and Superintendent John Leahy put the items of clothing that were found with the remains on display. Gardaí especially focused on publicising the white long-sleeved Ireland-away jersey because it was so distinctive.

There was also a huge interest in the case among members of the public, and Superintendent John Leahy made an appearance on RTÉ’s
Crimecall,
appealing for public help in the case. Little did he realise that Linda Mulhall was watching the programme. It was around this time that she moved the head from its original resting place so the guards would never find it. Officers made special pleas to landlords to check their accommodation for missing tenants and many did come forward offering potential names. Crimestoppers, an anti-crime agency funded by the Department of Justice and working in co-operation with An Garda Síochána, put up a reward of €10,000 for anyone who could help identify the body. Gardaí assured members of the public that all information they received would be treated in the strictest of confidence.

Members of the African community were also heavily canvassed for information, with special pleas being issued to immigrant media outlets, such as the
Metro Éireann
newspaper. These publications ran articles on the discovery of the body parts and also printed posters in a number of different languages, featuring the distinctive soccer jersey found with the victim. Gardaí also made church appeals and spoke with the pastors of all the African Churches in the Greater Dublin Area. African community leaders were later praised for the co-operation they gave in trying to identify the remains. It would be an African man who read a newspaper article about the body, who would give gardaí their first breakthrough.

Much of the newspaper reporting focused on the possibility that the victim had been murdered as part of a ritual sacrifice, and gardaí did give this theory real consideration in the absence of anyone coming forward to identify the body. Investigators were conscious that members of the African community were flocking to Dublin and little was understood about their religious beliefs or traditions. Ritual sacrifices are relatively common in parts of West and Southern Africa where it is thought that an increase in wealth or brainpower must come at the expense of others. The most powerful way of acquiring another person’s wealth or intellect is to consume medicine made from their body parts and this belief has existed for centuries. Certain parts of the body are believed to offer different benefits. Testicles are thought to bring virility, fat from the breast or abdomen brings luck, while a tongue will smooth the path to a girl’s heart. A businessman might sacrifice a hand in order to attract more customers. The organs have to be removed while the victim is still alive and their screams enhance the power of the medicine. Human sacrifice is thought to please the gods and gives special powers to those conducting the ceremony.

On the face of it, the discovery of a dismembered corpse with the head and penis missing would set the alarm bells ringing in any police force. But many detectives privately felt sceptical that they were dealing with black magic, or
muti
as it is known. Only two ritual murders have taken place in Britain over the last forty years and none have been recorded in Ireland. The lack of a head and penis were seen as a possible attempt by the murderers to throw investigators off the scent and to divert time and resources away from discovering the real motive for the crime.

Despite these reservations, gardaí examined similarities between the Ballybough case and a 2001 case involving the discovery of a body floating in the River Thames in London. An unidentified torso of an African boy, who was named ‘Adam’ by British police, was found in the river. His head and limbs were severed and the calabar bean (a toxic plant found in West Africa), pellets and gold particles, were found in the child’s gut.

Detectives also spoke to an Irish priest who had spent several decades on the Missions in Nigeria. His opinion was that the canal murder bore remarkable similarities to cases he had encountered in Africa. Gardaí then made official contact with Detective Superintendent Gerard Labuschagne of the South African Police Service’s Investigative Psychology Unit (IPU) based in Pretoria. Dr Labuschagne has a doctorate in clinical psychology and has studied serial killers since 1994. He is a renowned international expert on
muti
killings and has had plenty of practice dealing with cases involving black magic. He estimates that there are between fifteen and three hundred ritual killings in South Africa each year. Most deaths go unreported or are treated as ordinary murders. As well as black magic, his unit also investigates mass-murders, baby-rapists, extortionists and all the unusual crimes that baffle detectives. Dr Labuschagne’s three-person unit has been in existence for over ten years and has been responsible for putting some of South Africa’s most dangerous criminals behind bars. Its main job is to profile the offenders. The unit conducts research into psychologically motivated crimes and has the largest database of serial murderers in the world. The South African Police Service (SAPS) has a 100 per cent success record in solving serial murder investigations in which Dr Labuschagne’s team has been involved. The SAPS also catches serial murderers faster than any other police force in the world.

The Detective Superintendent is in regular demand throughout the world and has assisted agencies such as Scotland Yard, the Finish National Bureau of Investigation, the Royal Swazi Police and the Netherlands National Police Agency. During his brief contact with gardaí he told them that it is usually quite easy to distinguish a
muti
murder because body parts are removed in a functional manner, while the victim is still alive. This is in contrast to serial murderers, who take a sick pleasure in torturing and mutilating their victims. It is far more difficult to track down the people behind
muti
killings because the culture of silence around those who believe in and practice black magic is so strong. He confirmed that the removal of the genitals is a strong characteristic of a
muti
murder, because they are seen as a source of good luck. In many ways the body in the canal case did not really seem to fit the
muti
criteria but Dr Labuschagne nevertheless agreed to assist detectives in their investigation. Arrangements were being made to fly Detective Sergeant Gerry McDonnell to South Africa to interview him, when the identity of the corpse was discovered.

Another theory scrutinised was that the dismembered body could have been that of Paiche Onyemaechi’s husband. Her headless remains were found at the side of a riverbank in Kilkenny City, in July 2004. Chika Onyemaechi has not been seen since his wife’s disappearance. Paiche was the daughter of the Malawian Chief Justice and had lived with her thirty-three-year-old husband and two children in Waterford before they separated. The remains loosely fitted the description of Chika Onyemaechi, and gardaí were open to the possibility that he was murdered by associates of his dead wife, but they quickly ruled out any link in the cases. Nobody has ever been charged with Paiche’s brutal murder.

In the early part of the new millennium hundreds of asylum-seekers managed to sneak into Ireland, taking advantage of our lax immigration laws. Most of these refugees lived within their own communities and never came to the attention of the authorities. They were effectively invisible. The number of African men in their twenties and thirties who had come to Ireland and then vanished was so vast that gardaí were offered sixty-two names of possible victims matching the description of the body found in the canal. All these individuals’ families and friends had to be interviewed and it was a time-consuming exercise that involved a massive amount of garda manpower. Specialist detectives from the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation (NBCI), whose job it was to investigate serious crime, were also drafted in to help the dozens of gardaí from Fitzgibbon Street, Mountjoy and Store Street stations who were involved in the case. Most of the names on this list were not even in the country but every lead had to be checked and every line of inquiry ruled out.

CCTV footage also proved to be very important. Hundreds of tapes, containing thousands of hours of footage were handed over by local businesses around the north innercity. Garda CCTV footage and traffic cameras also had to be scrutinised in fine detail. A special unit with around twenty video monitors was set up and gardaí viewed the footage around the clock. Charlotte and Linda Mulhall would later be identified on a number of traffic and security cameras around Ballybough, and Farah Noor’s last hours were filmed by a camera on O’Connell Street.

The incident room at Fitzgibbon Street was manned by Detective Gardaí Daniel Kenna and Michael Quinn. They received literally hundreds of calls from helpful members of the public, offering leads and suggestions as to who the canal victim might be. All these suggestions, however unlikely, had to be checked out and investigated thoroughly.

As the victim was a non-national, who might only have entered Ireland a short time before his death, gardaí had to liaise closely with their colleagues on the continent. Fingerprint and DNA databases were checked through Interpol, the worldwide policing agency. A description of the dead man was also issued and checked through Interpol. The gardaí also contacted police forces in the UK, Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa for help and assistance.

Detectives attempted to establish the victim’s identity through isotope analysis, which was undertaken by a forensic scientist who was based in Belfast. Every garda station in Dublin collected a sample of water from their area and the investigation team forwarded the samples to the scientist for analysis. From examining the density of the victim’s bones and the minerals present, the scientist was able to determine, with near certainty, that the dead man had lived in the area covered by Fitzgibbon Street Garda Station for the last six months of his life. Gardaí did not take these results as definitive and kept an open mind, but the scientist would later prove to be accurate in his findings.

The first breakthrough in the case came on 16 May, when a Somalian man living in Dublin, Mohamed Ali Abubakaar, made a statement to gardaí. He reported that his friend and fellow countryman, Farah Swalah Noor, had been missing for well over a month. Abubakaar and his girlfriend Deirdre Hyland went to Malahide Garda Station where they informed Inspector Eddie Hyland, Deirdre’s cousin, of their suspicion that Farah Noor could be the canal murder victim. Inspector Hyland passed this information on to the Fitzgibbon Street investigation team who interviewed the Somalian.

Abubakaar told detectives that he had last seen Noor in the company of his girlfriend, a woman named Kathleen Mulhall, and two other women on O’Connell Street on Sunday 20 March. It was St Patrick’s weekend and Farah Noor had appeared very drunk to Abubakaar, while the other three also looked like they had been drinking heavily. He had known Noor from working with him on fishing boats in East Africa and was sure he had seen him at about 6 p.m. that Sunday. Abubakaar said that the group accompanying Farah had bags of cans and that his friend seemed very unsteady on his feet.

He told gardaí, ‘I call him to talk to him because I know after a few drinks anything can happen to him.’ Kathleen Mulhall had intervened and told Abubakaar that Farah was fine and the group kept on walking. Ali knew Kathleen from his job in Dublin Bus. He was a driver there and operated the 77 route from the city centre to Tallaght. He’d met her two or three times on the bus and had been on nights out with the couple, including one night in Shooters bar on Parnell Street. Ali was certain that he’d run into the group on the Sunday of St Patrick’s weekend, because he and his girlfriend had been in town to visit a multi-cultural fair they were interested in that was being held on O’Connell Street. That was the last he saw of Noor.

Ali explained that over the next few weeks he had tried to ring his friend but the phone was mostly switched off. It was answered by an Irish voice on one occasion but the caller said he had the wrong number. He also began asking mutual friends in the Irish Somalian community if they’d seen Farah, but nobody had. On 9 May 2005, just over a month after the remains were found, Abubakaar had seen an advert placed by gardaí in
Metro Éireann
, looking to identify a man whose body had been found in the Royal Canal. Abubakaar recognised the white Ireland-away jersey that was pictured in the advert as belonging to his friend. He also remembered that Noor had been wearing it on O’Connell Street the last time he had met him. He started to fear that the man found in the canal might be Farah. All the pieces of the jigsaw seemed to fit and when he told Deirdre she had advised him to contact the gardaí.

Officers were initially sceptical that it was Farah Swaleh Noor who ended up in the canal, because he did not match the profile of the victim given in the post-mortem report. The post-mortem had determined that the man was in excess of 6 ft in height and aged between twenty and thirty years old. Farah Swaleh Noor was 5 ft 6" and was aged thirty-nine. Nevertheless, a post-mortem result is only an estimation, so Farah Swaleh Noor’s name was added to the list of possible victims.

Garda inquiries into Farah Noor revealed that he had arrived in Ireland from Somalia in late 1996 and had had a son with an Irish woman from South Dublin. On 20 May officers interviewed the woman who was the mother of Noor’s six-year-old child.