The Irish Scissor Sisters (15 page)

This woman, called Paula to protect her identity, had ended her relationship with Noor in April 2001 because he was violent towards her. She hadn’t seen him since September 2002. Paula told the guards that Noor also used the name Sheilila Said Salim and post had arrived for him in that name. Four days later she gave permission for detectives to take buccal swabs from her son for DNA comparison, which would be tested against the remains. The results of the DNA tests would not be known for about six weeks and investigations into Noor continued.

The investigating team discovered that the last known address of Farah Noor was 17 Richmond Cottages, Ballybough, where he shared a flat with his partner, Kathleen Mulhall. On 21 May Detective Inspector Christy Mangan and Detective Sergeant Colm Fox called to Richmond Cottages and spoke with Kathleen Mulhall and her flatmate, a twenty-four-year-old Russian named Alex Ibramimovich. Alex spoke no English but one of his friends confirmed that he had only been in the country for about four weeks and gave details of his whereabouts during that time. Kathleen told the two men she had only recently moved into Flat 4 in the building, having previously lived downstairs, in Flat 1. She was asked about her boyfriend Farah Swaleh Noor and said she didn’t want to talk about him in the flat. She said she would get dressed and call down to Fitzgibbon Street.

Kathleen arrived at the station shortly afterwards and told Det Sgt Fox that she hadn’t seen Farah since February. She said that he came to her flat one night and took all his stuff and said he was leaving. Kathleen said she didn’t know where he was or who he was with and she’d had no contact with him at all since then.

This struck gardaí as being very suspicious, considering that she told them that she had left her husband of twenty-nine years to be with Farah and had moved to Cork to live with him.

Kathleen said she was happy to see him out of her life because she’d had enough of his violence and had ended up in hospital three times when they lived in Cork. The couple had had to move ‘a good few times in Cork because Farah caused trouble everywhere’. She said: ‘He was on heroin, grass, hash, crack cocaine, E. He had a bad habit. He did not get on with people when he had drink or drugs taken and would fight with anybody.’

Gardaí already knew that Kathleen Mulhall did not tell her landlord that Noor had moved out of the flat until 25 March and her story did not make much sense. They took a statement from her and decided that her background deserved further scrutiny.

On 26 May Detective Garda Geraldine Doherty accompanied Detective Sergeant Mick Macken, also from the Garda Technical Bureau, to Flat 1, 17 Richmond Cottages, Farah Noor’s last known address. They recorded that it was a two-roomed, ground-floor flat, consisting of a kitchen cum living room, a bedroom with shower and an en-suite toilet. In the bedroom the concrete floor was covered with pieces of carpet and rugs. It looked to the gardaí like the original carpet had recently been removed. The tenants in the flat, Caroline Hanley and her niece Martina Norton, gave their permission for the gardaí to carry out the technical examination. Eight swabs were taken from the dressing table and two swabs from the bunk beds. A further swab was taken from a stain on the edge of a mirror behind the bunk beds, which had originally been part of the dressing table unit. All the exhibits were handed over to the Forensic Science Laboratory for testing but it would be a number of weeks before the results were available.

Gardaí went to Dublin District Court and applied for permission to examine a bank account held under Farah Noor’s name at AIB in Southmall, Cork. The assistant manager at the branch, Catherine Lynch, subsequently gave the details to Garda Ian Brunton. The records revealed Noor’s financial transactions for the last four years. They were surprised to discover that Noor’s bank account had been used only twice in the last few months, the last time being on 30 March. If Noor was alive and well he wasn’t taking any money out of his bank account.

Gardaí also determined Farah Noor’s mobile phone number and contacted Vodafone to check whether it had been used. The phone had not been used from the end of March up until June 2005. In early June it was used a total of eight times in the first few days of the month. Detectives tracked down the individual who was using the phone. It was not Farah Noor but a man named Florian Williams. At the end of May, Williams had bought a phone and SIM card in good faith from his work colleague, John Mulhall.

John Mulhall was interviewed and told the officers that at the end of March he had been given the mobile phone by one of his daughters. He didn’t know who had previously owned the phone. Further detective work revealed that John Mulhall was the estranged husband of Kathleen Mulhall, Farah Swaleh Noor’s girlfriend. John Mulhall had somehow come into possession of the missing man’s mobile phone. Detectives immediately knew that something was out of place.

In the meantime other friends and associates of Noor had also begun contacting the authorities, saying they had not seen him. Mohammed Ali Noor knew the Somalian and had last seen him on St Patrick’s Day. He’d meet Farah most days around town and had become very worried when he hadn’t encountered him over the previous few months. He told his friend Rashid Omar Ahmed of his concerns and asked Ahmed to make enquiries about Noor in Cork, where he had lived for over two years. Ahmed was close to a Somalian named Hamed Salim Miran who had moved into Noor’s old flat in Cork. Miran was in Dublin three weeks after the body was pulled from the canal and met Ahmed and Ali Noor. They began talking about the missing Farah and agreed that if any Somalians living in Ireland had seen Farah anywhere in the country they would have heard about it. They feared that it could have been Noor’s body that was pulled from the canal. Lots of Farah’s friends in Dublin were saying the same thing. Ahmed eventually contacted the guards with his suspicions.

On 8 June, Sergeant John Malone was working in Abbeyleix, Co. Laois when he received a call about a suspicious car at the local petrol station. The blue Nissan Micra was listed as stolen and he stopped it at about 8 p.m. The three African men in the car agreed to go to Abbeyleix Garda Station. They told Sgt Malone that they’d bought the car in good faith. Their story checked out and while they were talking, the men said they knew the identity of the body that had been recovered in the canal in Dublin. They named the victim as a Somalian, Farah Swaleh Noor. The way Farah’s name kept coming up was beginning to intrigue the garda investigators.

2005 the investigation into the torso in the canal murder, which had been ongoing with only limited success for 102 days, suddenly sprung to life and was effectively solved in four days. A combination of forensic science and family betrayal led to the confirmation that Farah Swaleh Noor was the man who had ended up with the waters of the Royal Canal as his final resting place. Gardaí were determined to establish who was responsible for putting him there.

Garda Damien Duffy was on duty at the Communication Centre at Harcourt Square on 11 July when he received a call from the Dublin Emergency Exchange at 7.47 p.m. The male voice at the end of the line told the operator that he had information about the so-called ‘body in the canal’ case and wanted to talk with gardaí. He said his name was John Mulhall and he was serving a prison sentence in Wheatfield Prison with his brother James. He said he was in a position to name the victim of the canal murder. He claimed he could also identify who had carried out the crime and where it happened. When Garda Duffy finished talking with Mulhall he rang the Dublin emergency operator. The supervisor informed him that the 999 call had come from a mobile phone. He immediately entered the details of the conversation on the Garda Command and Control system.

Both John and James Mulhall were well known to gardaí in Tallaght and had amassed a series of convictions. Thirty-four-year-old James first got into trouble in 1991. He had three convictions in as many years and was given the benefit of the Probation Act. He had largely remained clean until a road traffic accident in 2002.

At the time of the murder investigation, James Mulhall was serving a three-year jail sentence for dangerous driving causing the death of a fellow motorist in January 2002. Mulhall had pleaded guilty to causing the death of fifty-two-year-old Tony O’Brien. He crashed Mr O’Brien’s BMW into the wall of a house on the South Circular Road, Dublin, in the early hours of the morning. The pair had been drinking in a city centre hotel and were going to drive home together, but after O’Brien could not turn off his car alarm he had agreed to let Mulhall drive them home. Following the fatal accident, James Mulhall fled the country and went on the run to England, which prolonged the torment for Mr O’Brien’s wife and family. The court heard evidence that there was a high level of alcohol in the dead man’s bloodstream and he was probably asleep in the back of the car when the accident happened. Garda Laurence Collins gave evidence that after arriving on the scene he realised that Tony O’Brien was dead in the back seat because the Dublin Fire Brigade crew were concentrating their efforts on the front. They were tending to Mulhall and his girlfriend, Tanya Whelan, who had been travelling in the front passenger seat.

James Mulhall had no tax or insurance and caused significant damage to the passenger side of the car and also demolished a garden wall. Judge Frank O’Donnell said he ‘must have been driving at considerable speed to have lost control’. The judge took into account Mulhall’s previous convictions, which included assault causing harm and a string of other road traffic offences. Judge O’Donnell jailed James Mulhall for three years and banned him from driving for twenty-five years, saying that James had a ‘disregard for the structures of road traffic legislation’. James began his prison sentence on 12 November 2003.

Twenty-eight-year-old John Mulhall had over twenty convictions for a huge variety of offences, including assault and theft. In early 2005 he was given a two-year suspended sentence for assaulting a man on a bus in Tallaght in April 2004. John was a regular heroin user and often spent hundreds of euro a day on his addiction. He moved between various addresses and stayed at Kilclare Gardens for long periods.

John Mulhall was in Wheatfield Prison as a result of his failure to appear in court in Co. Cork. He was due to appear before a judge on 29 November 2004 because of an incident involving a stolen car. When he failed to show, a bench warrant was issued. He was arrested in Dublin on the same day but was subsequently bailed. He was back in prison on remand on 4 March 2005, two weeks before the murder took place. He was then sentenced to eight months’ imprisonment on 30 May 2005, on conviction of two counts of being a passenger in a stolen car

On the morning following the mobile phone call, two uniformed gardaí, Sergeant Bobby Cooper and Garda Kevin O’Connell, went to Wheatfield Prison in Clondalkin and spoke with the two Mulhall men. The pair claimed that their mother and two sisters had murdered their mam’s boyfriend, an African by the name of Farah, and had cut his body up and dumped it in the canal.

Gardaí at the Fitzgibbon Street murder headquarters were immediately informed and Detective Sergeant Colm Fox and Detective Garda Terry McHugh went to the prison, where they met with Sergeant Cooper and Garda O’Connell. The uniformed men told the two detectives that the prisoners had potentially vital information about the canal case.