The Irish Scissor Sisters (27 page)

Linda’s relationship with her youngest sister, Marie, was very fraught after her arrest and the two hardly spoke. She was far closer to her eldest brother, James, and regularly travelled to Wheatfield Prison to see him. After Kathleen told her son about the murder, Linda confessed to her role in it but it is hard to know whether she would have admitted it but for this. The killing was playing heavily on her mind and she asked James to look after her four children if she was jailed. He subsequently kept his promise and the youngsters are being cared for by him and his partner, Tanya.

Linda did start to get her life back on track after she confessed to killing Farah. She made sure she was in the house every day to bring the kids to school and made them dinner every afternoon when they came home. She even started to do some volunteer work at a local school. Life, however, was still difficult for Linda. She struggled with drug and alcohol addiction and was a single mother with four children. They all had to survive on the €226 in social welfare payments she collected each Thursday at Kevin Street post office. Social welfare records reveal that Linda has never worked a day in her life and has never paid tax. As her trial approached, however, she fell off the wagon and started to use drugs again and was drinking heavily. She has a history of depression and of inflicting self-harm and spent ten days in a psychiatric hospital in the days leading up to the trial. Her four children were being taken care of by relatives and were all continuing to attend school while their mother was gone.

When she was released, just before the trial was due to begin, Linda disappeared. She failed to turn up in court for the first day. She had been gone for two days and gardaí were desperately trying to contact her. They tried to ring her mobile but it was permanently turned off. At this stage Linda had moved to the Swiftbrook estate, in Tallaght, with her children and detectives feared that she had committed suicide. They went to the house and forced their way in, expecting to find her body. They nervously checked all the rooms but there was no sign of her. Meanwhile DI Christy Mangan was sending texts to her phone and was receiving delivery reports. He was sure that she was alive and getting the texts but was choosing not to respond. He sent a further text asking her to hand herself in.

After being missing for four days, Linda finally rang DI Mangan and agreed to meet him and Sgt Hickey outside her house. The detectives went to the house in Tallaght. They were waiting a few minutes when a battered taxi came up the road and pulled in. Linda was in the car, along with her two sons. She was inconsolable and had her belongings in the back of the car. She took out a sports bag, with some personal possessions and three cuddly toys. Amid floods of tears, she hugged her two boys and went with the two officers.

As the trio were about to leave, Linda’s eldest son, who was aged just thirteen, went up to Detective Inspector Christy Mangan and shook his hand. He asked the garda to take good care of his mammy.

Linda was finally prepared to face her fate.

of Farah Swaleh Noor, Charlotte hit the bottle in a bad way. She would start drinking as soon as she woke up each morning. When she’d had a particularly bad time, however, three or four days after it happened, and told Marie what she’d done, Charlotte knew she had to get her act together. She realised that if she didn’t compose herself the guards would find her. She would then be arrested and the whole story would come out. She made a pact with herself after that that she wouldn’t talk to anyone in her family about what had happened. She never mentioned her confession to Marie again and stayed away from Kilclare Gardens for the most part, only visiting the odd time.

In the weeks after the murder Charlotte spent most nights at the scene of the crime, in the flat in Ballybough. The twenty-two-year-old later said that she did go through days of feeling extreme guilt over what she had done but she still sold Farah’s rings and other jewellery to some junkies she knew from the street. She also didn’t seem to find it strange when her mother gave her Farah’s ATM card so that she could withdraw money from the dead man’s account.

After the family were taken in for questioning on 3 August 2005, Charlie’s father, John, started ringing her, pleading with her to admit what she’d done. The twenty-two-year-old was having none of this. She wasn’t about to sentence herself to life in prison when the police had no real evidence. After they were released, she met Linda a good few times, as she knew that her older sister was struggling to keep the secret to herself. Charlotte told her not to be stupid and tell the guards anything, because they were in the clear. She warned Linda that it would only take one word from her for the whole thing to come crumbling down and they’d then be sharing a cell together. Even though Charlotte regularly cautioned Linda not to say anything, the two of them never discussed the murder in any great detail. It had changed both of them and neither of them wanted what had happened to be dragged up again.

Sgt Liam Hickey had arrested Charlotte on 3 August and in the days following the swoop Hickey had built up a good relationship with John Mulhall. This had proved to be a very valuable link as it had led to Linda admitting to her role in the murder, effectively cracking the case for the gardaí. After he had secured Linda’s admission Sgt Hickey turned his attention to Charlotte. He rang John Mulhall on 23 August and asked him if his younger daughter would be willing to talk to him about Noor. John said he would speak to Charlotte and get her to contact him.

When the Sergeant did not hear from her, he tried again the following day. John Mulhall said that Linda had spoken to Charlotte to try to convince her to talk but she still didn’t ring the guard. Despite making three other attempts to contact Charlotte, Sgt Hickey heard nothing.

On 1 September he found out that Charlotte was living with with her Russian boyfriend, Dilmurat Amirov, in Artane, North Dublin. Sgt Hickey went to the house with Det Sgt Gerry McDonnell and told Charlotte that Linda had come clean about murdering Farah. He said that she had also implicated Charlie in the killing. The twenty-two-year-old knew that at this stage it was just Linda’s word against hers and that the gardaí could not arrest her for questioning a second time without a warrant from a judge. As they did not have one with them when they called to see her, she presumed the evidence against her was patchy.

Charlotte said she would call them after speaking to her mother. She made an appointment to see the men at the Mountjoy Station the following day but she didn’t turn up.

The detectives went back to her house in Artane but nobody was home. Sgt Hickey rang the number Charlotte had left him and it was answered by her boyfriend. He asked Dilmurat to get Charlotte to ring him but she never did.

Charlotte subsequently left the house in Artane but did not return to Kilclare Gardens. She had decided to disappear because she didn’t want to talk to the gardaí about Linda’s admissions.

On 5 September Charlotte rang Sergeant Liam Hickey’s mobile and apologised for missing their meeting. She said: ‘What Linda told you were complete lies. I will tell you all that happened tomorrow.’ She agreed to meet Liam Hickey in Mountjoy the next day at 1 p.m. but again she never went to the station.

Linda was charged with Farah Noor’s murder on 13 September and the courts issued an arrest warrant for Charlotte Mulhall on the same day. John Mulhall told Sgt Hickey that he’d contact him if he saw Charlie.

One month later, on Sunday 13 October, Sgt Hickey’s phone rang. It was John Mulhall and he lost no time in passing the phone over to Charlotte. She agreed to see Sgt Hickey the following Thursday, at the family home in Tallaght. Charlotte had split from her boyfriend Dilmurat at this stage and was single again.

Sgt Hickey and Detective Gardaí Kevin Keys and Adrian Murray went to the house at 11 a.m. on 17 October. The door was opened by one of Linda’s children who said that Charlotte was in the ‘gym’ in the extension at the back of the house. Linda had been out on bail for three weeks at this stage and was still living with her dad. She came into the main house and said she was in bed with the flu. When Charlotte came in the gardaí arrested her on suspicion of murder. She did not show any emotion and asked if she could use the toilet. Then she said she wanted to see her sister. Sgt Hickey went to the extension with the two women and they hugged each other before Charlotte was taken away to Mountjoy Garda Station.

Her first interview that day took place at 12.56 p.m. with Detective Gardaí Kevin Keys and Adrian Murray asking the questions. She refused repeated offers to have a solicitor present.

Charlotte told the detectives that she and Linda had met Farah and Kathleen at 1 p.m. on the afternoon of 20 March. She said they were on the Liffey Boardwalk, drinking and taking E tablets and had then headed to Summerhill. When they were at Richmond Cottages, Kathleen started arguing with Farah, so the two girls had left the flat at about 7 or 8 p.m. She told them that they had gone back into town and stayed out drinking until five or six in the morning. She said they then went back to the flat and there was ‘blood all over the bathroom and bedroom’.

Charlotte claimed: ‘Me and Linda thought Farah was after hitting her [Kathleen] and they were fighting as usual. She was like, she was screaming and crying like a mental case in the flat when we went back and we said, “Mam, what’s after happening?” She said she was after killing him.’

‘She was screaming and crying like mental; is that what you said?’ Detective Murray asked.

‘Yeah. We didn’t believe her and finally when we got her to sit down she said she was after killing him with a hammer and cutting his throat. We kept asking her where he was and she wouldn’t tell us. She kept saying if she got locked up she was going to kill herself. Then she told us she was after putting the body in the river.’

‘She said if she got locked up she’d kill herself?’ Det Gda Murray queried. Charlotte’s version of events was very different from what Linda had told them.

‘Yeah,’ Charlotte answered. ‘She said if she didn’t kill him he would have killed her. Then she asked us would we help. Would me and Linda help her clean up the flat. And we were cleaning up the flat, and me and Linda said that she wouldn’t go to prison; we’d say we did it. We told her that we’d say that we killed him so she wouldn’t go to prison. I didn’t think Linda would really say it, really say that she done it, because when it came to it, I didn’t.’

‘But when you left the flat … where did you go, yourself and Linda?’ asked Det Gda Kevin Keys.

‘All around town, drinking,’ Charlie said.

‘Where?’ asked Keys.

‘O’Connell Street, the Boardwalk,’ she answered.

‘About what time was this?’ the detective added.

‘About ten o’clock,’ claimed the twenty-two-year-old.

The two detectives were totally sceptical of Charlotte’s story and knew she was lying. Det Gda Keys then asked, ‘Are you suggesting that your mother, all on her own, killed him, cut him up into little pieces, all on her own, and brought him down to the canal, all on her own?’

‘The only thing me and Linda done was clean up the flat,’ she stated.