The Irish Scissor Sisters (21 page)

Farah Swaleh Noor, however, was not a man who was put off easily. The fact that Paula had walked out and wanted to build a life without him only made him angrier. He was determined that he would get her back. From the end of February 2001, and for the next nine months, Noor stalked Paula. He made abusive phone calls in the early hours of the morning, turned up outside her parents’ house and threatened to kill her. He followed her when she went outside and also phoned Avril, warning her that he would kill her for taking his child away from him. Farah used to take pleasure in following the two women into town on the bus. He would sit there grinning maniacally at them, making them both feel uncomfortable and in fear for their safety. He was very aggressive and threatened both women, saying he would murder them. The pair had met and began dating two South African men in the meantime and this made Noor even more jealous. He bombarded both women with telephone calls, leaving them with little option but to change their numbers.

One night in May 2001 the two friends were drinking in a Southside pub when Noor arrived in a drunken state just five minutes after they’d walked in the door. He bought himself a drink and sat down beside them uninvited.

Farah started shouting and abusing the women. He told Avril that she had ruined his family and lost his temper completely when she tried to ring her boyfriend for help, pushing his face into hers and screaming loudly so the whole pub could hear him. He then picked up the glasses on the table and started smashing them on the floor. The girls got up and ran away but he followed them, saying he would kill them both.

By chance, Avril’s father happened to be meeting a client in the same pub and witnessed what was going on. He went over and called Noor to one side. He warned him to behave himself and leave his daughter alone or there would be trouble. The drunken African apologised profusely and left.

He didn’t end his sick campaign of intimidation, however, and a couple of months later he followed Paula into Dame Street where she was meeting Avril and a male friend from South Africa. The South African had heard all about Noor’s unacceptable behaviour. He confronted him in the middle of the street and ended up punching the Kenyan. A brawl ensued, with Noor taking a bad beating until the gardaí arrived. They arrested both men for public order offences.

Avril moved away in October 2001 and the harassment stopped, but Paula was still regularly stalked by the violent alcoholic. Although Farah was officially out of Paula’s life he still had parental access to her son. She became very concerned that her boy might be getting abused while on these unsupervised visits, which took place every second Sunday. The youngster came home from one two-hour visit with what his mother thought were cigarette burns on his body. The round burns were causing her son serious discomfort but Noor couldn’t explain them. He said he didn’t know what had happened. The Kenyan had a history of self-harm and often burned himself with cigarettes to ‘relieve the pain and the stress’. If he was having problems at work, in his relationship or if he missed his family back home he would put a lit cigarette to his arms and chest and let it burn through the flesh. Every time someone he knew passed away he would slice a mark into his wrist to remember them by.

Worrying marks to her son’s body were not the only thing concerning Paula about Farah’s relationship with the lad. Her son came home from visits ‘overly sexualised and acting in a sexual way’. Paula had never spoken with her son about sex and believed that her former partner was putting sexual ideas into the young boy’s head.

After a few more months of stalking her, Farah eventually accepted that Paula had met a new man and he finally left her alone. Farah never again attempted to see his child and didn’t contact Paula again either. He contacted Adecco Recruitment Company and informed them that he was leaving Dublin to go to Cork and would not be available for any more jobs. Farah had met somebody else – Kathleen Mulhall.

While he was still going out with Paula, Farah Swaleh Noor’s name had been linked to one of the most infamous and serious murders in Ireland – the unsolved slaying of seventeen-year-old Dublin teenager, Raonaid Murray. At one stage Noor was a bona fide suspect and he even admitted carrying out the murder, during drunken ramblings. He seemed to match all the hallmarks of the Murray suspect – he carried knives, was familiar with the Dun Laoghaire area where the killing occurred and had shown a propensity for violence towards females.

Raonaid Murray, a pretty blonde teenager, was viciously murdered after leaving Scott’s pub in Dun Laoghaire on the night of 4 September 1999. She left her friends at around 11.30 p.m. and started the fifteen-minute walk back to her family home in Glenageary. She was going to collect some money and return to meet some old school friends at Paparazzi’s nightclub in Dun Laoghaire Shopping Centre. The student was seen by witnesses arguing with a man on Corrig Avenue at 11.55 p.m. A local woman heard a scream fifteen minutes later, which was probably when Raonaid saw her attacker and realised that she was about to be killed. The mystery man lay in wait for her in a dark lane between Silchester Road and her home at Silchester Park, a plush middle-class estate. She was brutally stabbed four times, with a one-and-a-half-inch sharp knife. The attack was extremely violent. Her murderer escaped into the safety of the dark night on foot, and Raonaid desperately staggered about 200 feet before she collapsed and died from her injuries. Her body was found by her sister Sarah, less than thirty minutes after the assault. Sarah and her two friends had got a taxi home after a night out and they were devastated when they made the grim discovery. She ran the short distance to her parents’ – Jim and Deirdre’s – house and raised the alarm.

A huge garda investigation was immediately launched. Detectives feared that a random psychopathic killer was on the loose because the contents of Raonaid’s Sally West bag were untouched and her clothing had not been tampered with, meaning that rape was not the motive. The overwhelmingly middle-class community of South Dublin demanded a quick arrest and a team of fifty experienced detectives were assigned to investigate the case.

The day before the Raonaid Murray murder, Farah Swaleh Noor was out in Dun Laoghaire with Paula and one of her friends. They spent the afternoon drinking cans of beer on Sandycove beach and, as usual, Farah had a fair amount to drink. At about 5 p.m. the group headed back to Farah’s accommodation at the Rosepark Hotel in Dun Laoghaire. Paula went into the communal bathroom to have a shower and she got undressed and started to wash herself. Noor came into the room a minute or so later, got undressed and climbed into the shower, trying to have sex with his girlfriend. She rejected his advances, saying that their son was only down the hall. The Kenyan became angry and snapped, throwing her into the bath and attempting to force himself on top of her and rape her. Paula started screaming and Noor punched her in the face and body with a closed fist and wouldn’t stop. He shouted at her, calling her a slut, but she managed to get out of the bath and grab her clothes and make it to Noor’s bedroom. Her friend heard all the commotion and was waiting at the door with the couple’s five-month-old son. Paula was in floods of tears. She got dressed and gathered her belongings, before leaving the hotel and jumping on a 46A bus that was passing by. Farah Noor came running out of the hotel and chased the bus, shouting that he was sorry, but Paula was in no mood to make up. She went into the city centre and caught a bus back to her South Dublin home.

She arrived in shortly before 9 p.m. and received a call from Noor who sounded very drunk. He apologised for trying to rape her and said he was sorry and it would never happen again. He told her he was drinking in Dun Laoghaire town but she hung up the phone and told him their relationship was over.

She didn’t talk to him again for a few days. Paula remembered reading about the Murray murder in a newspaper over the next few days while she was deciding whether to take Farah back for the sake of their son. She met up with him a day or two later and he was in good form again. He matter-of-factly told her that he had been questioned by the guards about the teenager’s murder. He had a big grin on his face and was boasting about the fact that he was a suspect in the murder. He told her he had spent the night of the killing drinking in a pub in the middle of Dun Laoghaire with two men. He used to spend many evenings doing this. Paula also remembered that Noor spoke about losing his dagger around the time of the murder but she thought no more about the sad killing of Raonaid until the couple broke up in April 2001.

Paula was out with her brother and her friend Avril in the Pennyblack Pub in Tallaght one night when Noor came in looking for her. Avril had been in school with Raonaid Murray in St Joseph’s Cluny, in Killiney. She had been in the same class as Raonaid all the way through their secondary education from 1993 onwards. They were good friends and socialised together outside school and would have moved in the same circles. The two girls had lost contact after Raonaid left to study in the Institute of Education on Leeson Street but a few weeks before the tragic killing in September 1999 they had bumped into each other in Dun Laoghaire. On the Saturday before Raonaid’s murder, Avril had met her friend in Scruples with four other girls. They’d had a few drinks together and said they’d meet to go out again but left without making any arrangements. Avril was devastated when she heard about the murder but didn’t make any statement to gardaí because she didn’t know about Raonaid’s private life and had no information that might help catch her killer. She put the shock of the tragedy behind her and met Paula in January 2001, through a friend of hers who was living with Paula and Farah. After Avril had moved into their house and one day after an article about Raonaid had appeared in the paper, she had confided in Paula that she had known the dead girl.

Noor started shouting at Avril in the pub telling her that she was the reason why Paula had left him. He said that Avril was also responsible for her ‘friend’s murder in Dun Laoghaire’. The group took this to be referring to Raonaid Murray and Avril ran from the pub in floods of tears. Paula left as well and they went to Tallaght Garda Station and reported Noor for breaching the barring order she had taken against him. They didn’t tell them about what he’d said about the dead Glenageary teenager. Paula had never told her former boyfriend that Avril and Raonaid had been close. Following the incident in the Pennyblack pub, Avril thought that Noor had been trying to hurt her by saying things that he knew would get to her. She didn’t think that the Kenyan had killed her friend even though she had seen the results of Farah’s violent temper first-hand. Paula never actually believed that Noor was responsible either. It wasn’t until September 2002 that Avril phoned the gardaí with her concerns about Noor. She did not give an official statement but warned them that she and her friend had their suspicions about him. In late 2005 she again contacted the gardaí when she heard reports that Noor had been a suspect for Raonaid’s murder, before he himself had been brutally butchered.

The Murray investigation was one of the most extensive ever seen in An Garda Siochána’s history. Some of the country’s most senior and distinguished detectives were assigned to it, including Detective Superintendent Martin Donnellan, who would go on to be one of the senior officers in the Noor case. The investigation was based in Dun Laoghaire Garda Station and some of the most experienced investigators in the force, such as Assistant Commissioner Tony Hickey and ‘The Sheriff ’, Detective Inspector Gerry O’Carroll, worked countless long days trying to get justice for Raonaid. Over 8,000 people were interviewed and more than 3,000 witness statements were taken and it took a long time to eliminate all the various suspects named by concerned members of the public. Nevertheless, when Farah Swaleh Noor’s name came up again it had interested gardaí. When the murder had occurred he lived in the vicinity and was known to have a propensity for violence. He had even been arrested in Dun Laoghaire with a knife. It was decided that he should be interviewed again about his movements on the night of the murder. He had originally offered gardaí no information about Raonaid’s death.

On 29 May 2003, Detective Gardaí Don Griffin and Dominic Hearns travelled to Cork to interview Farah Swaleh Noor about the Raonaid Murray murder. He was picked up in his house at 9 Wellington Terrace, taken to Anglesea Garda Station and interviewed under caution.

Noor seemed surprised to be quizzed about the killing and told the officers, ‘I have never killed anybody, either in Ireland or Somalia.’ He said that in September 1999 he was staying in the Rosepark Hotel in Dun Laoghaire. He said he remembered back that long because ‘that was when the girl Raonaid Murray was murdered. It was all over the papers on the news. I didn’t kill Raonaid Murray. I didn’t know her; I have never met her and I have never even seen her. I can’t really remember that well but I think that on the day that Raonaid was killed I was out at my girlfriend’s house. I think I got the bus to the Rosepark Hotel. It was the last bus leaving at 10.30 p.m. and it is about forty-five minutes on the bus. I went straight into my room in the hotel. I was on my own. I went direct to my room and didn’t speak to anybody. It was a long time ago so I am not fully sure but I think that’s what I did. I didn’t go back out until morning time.’