The next day, 14 July, Det Sgt Fox got a text from the same mobile number, even though the use of mobile phones is forbidden behind bars. He rang John Mulhall back and had another conversation with him on 15 July. The brothers were asking for a move to medium-security Castlerea Prison in Co. Roscommon. If they could not go to Castlerea together, then they wanted to move to Shelton Abbey open prison in Co. Wicklow. Det Sgt Fox told them that he did not have the authority to promise them any transfer but said the possibility was being looked at. The brothers said they were going to talk to a solicitor.
John Mulhall rang the Detective Sergeant again the following day, confused about why they hadn’t been moved yet. He then said he’d changed his mind and now wanted to stay in Wheatfield because it would be obvious that they had touted to the gardaí about what their family had done if they were both suddenly transferred. The pair did not want any other prisoners knowing that they had spoken to the police. John said they had extra information on the killing but would not tell gardaí and would not make official statements. They did not want their family to know that they had talked to the gardaí. Nevertheless they continued to keep in contact with Det Sgt Colm Fox.
On the same day Dr Dorothy Ramsbottom of the Forensic Science Laboratory confirmed to a 99.9 per cent certainty that the canal remains were those of Farah Swaleh Noor. The DNA tests taken from his son six weeks previously were positive. Dr Ramsbottom also told gardaí that the blood swabs extracted from the flat at Richmond Cottages on 26 May matched Noor.
Gardaí were convinced that Flat 1 at 17 Richmond Cottages was the murder scene. They arranged for a more indepth forensic examination of the flat. This took place over the last two weeks of July and arrangements were made with the landlord, John Tobin, that the two tenants from Flat 1 would be housed elsewhere. Detective Sergeant Mick Macken and Detective Garda John Higgins were in charge of the search, which involved members of the Garda Technical Bureau and the Forensic Science Laboratory. During the search a chemical called luminol, designed to show up the presence of minute levels of blood, was used for one of the first times in Ireland. The luminol examination revealed splatters of arterial blood throughout the bedroom. The bloodstaining was consistent with a serious assault having taken place. There was evidence of blood present in the grooves of the pine planks of a wardrobe in the bedroom but not on the surface of the planks. This meant that the area had probably been well cleaned. Gardaí now knew, with scientific certainty, that the man found in the canal was Farah Swaleh Noor and that he had been murdered at Flat 1, 17 Richmond Cottages, the home of his partner, Kathleen Mulhall. All the pieces of the jigsaw were starting to fit nicely into place. In the days after the double breakthrough Detective Sergeant Colm Fox and prisoner John Mulhall had a number of further conversations. Then, on Tuesday 19 July, James Mulhall rang. He told the detective that he wanted a transfer to Shelton Abbey and that his brother knew about it and didn’t mind. He said he didn’t feel safe in Wheatfield and was worried he would be attacked. Det Sgt Fox told him that he’d have to check with the authorities and ring him back but the brothers suddenly stopped co-operating with the investigation.
In the end the brothers completely refused to co-operate with gardaí and would not give statements implicating any of their family in the murder. They were never transferred out of Wheatfield. Their informal statements against their parents and sisters, however, were more than enough. The brothers’ crisis of conscience had resulted in detectives making massive progress in the case.
Gardaí had now built up a reasonably strong case against the Mulhalls. The DNA linking Farah Swaleh Noor’s death to 17 Richmond Cottages was significant, as was the witness statement placing the three Mulhall women with Farah Noor on O’Connell Street on the night he died. Combined with the fact that Farah’s phone had ended up in the hands of John Mulhall Senior and the new information from John and James Mulhall, detailing the alleged roles their mother and two sisters had played in the crime, detectives now had enough evidence to arrest Linda, Charlotte, John and Kathleen Mulhall.
Detectives had a case conference on the afternoon of 2 August 2005 and it was decided that Linda, Charlotte, Kathleen and John Mulhall would all be arrested for questioning the following day. It was agreed that four teams of detectives would swoop simultaneously and that the Mulhalls would be questioned in two separate city-centre garda stations. Some members of the media had been tipped off in advance about the imminent arrests and the Evening Herald had planned to run the story about the breakthrough in the case on its front page on the morning of 3 August. A senior garda involved in the case requested that they pull the story in case one of the suspects was not at their address when the gardaí called looking for them. The Evening Herald subsequently led with the story in its later editions, and the arrests, which took place at around 10 a.m., were the main story on RTÉ’s News at One.
At 10.40 a.m. Detective Sergeant Walter O’Connell from Store Street drove to 31 Kilclare Gardens with Detective Gardaí Kevin Keys, Adrian Murray and Garda Muireann O’Leary. They arrested Linda Mulhall under Section 4 of the Criminal Justice Act, on suspicion of murder.
The mother-of-four was taken to Store Street Garda Station for questioning and was processed at 11.25 a.m. by Garda Paul Caffrey, supervised by Sergeant Karl Mackle. She was fingerprinted, photographed and also provided a sample of blood and saliva to a doctor. She declined to have a solicitor present but said she wanted her father informed. Linda didn’t know that at this stage John Mulhall, as well as Charlotte and Kathleen, were all being detained and that her father was also in Store Street.
Over the course of the next twelve hours, Linda Mulhall was interviewed on four separate occasions by two teams – Detective Gardaí Kevin Keys and Adrian Murray and Detective Gardaí Larry Duggan and Mark Jordan. Linda told her interviewers that she was not in Ballybough on the day that Farah Noor was murdered. She insisted that this was the truth, even though she was told that two witnesses had put her with Noor, her mother and sister on O’Connell Street on 20 March. She was shown CCTV footage from the Gala supermarket taken the day after the murder. Linda admitted that it was her captured on the film but said she couldn’t remember being in the shop or being out drinking on the day of the killing. The detectives put it to her that she had denied being in O’Connell Street with her mam and sister on the day of the murder to conceal her role in the crime.
She told them: ‘It’s not that I tried to distance myself; I honestly can’t remember being there. Unless I must have been drinking. I’m not supposed to drink when I take these tablets.’ At the time Linda was on medication for her blood pressure.
She was shown Farah’s Ireland-away jersey and told: ‘Now I just want to point out the numbers one to ten. Now these are all holes we believe were caused by a knife when Farah was stabbed. Do you see them? What do you have to say about that?’
She said she didn’t know anything about Farah’s jersey and didn’t even know he had been murdered until today. She couldn’t offer any information about his death.
She conceded that she had been in her mother’s flat in Ballybough on two occasions and was given pictures of the bunk bed, which had bloodstains on it. ‘God, I don’t know anything about that,’ she replied.
She started to lose her composure when gardaí produced photos of the scene at Ballybough Bridge where the body was found. They asked if she recognised anyone there.
‘No, no, no, no, no, no,’ she shouted.
The detectives then asked: ‘You do know that Farah was cut up into eight pieces?’
‘I knew there was a body found but I didn’t know the way it was cut up. Was it really Farah? I would like a solicitor because I just can’t believe any of this.’
Linda asked for a solicitor at 8.31 p.m. and she spoke to Kevin Tunny, who is based in Tallaght, by phone. He then came to the station and spoke to her in person.
When the interview resumed, gardaí played Linda the tape of her brothers making the 999 call from Whea
tfield Prison telling the police about their family’s involvement.
After hearing it she said, ‘That doesn’t sound like my brothers.’
The tape was played again for her but she insisted: ‘That’s not my brothers; that’s not my brothers. That sounded like a junkie to me. My brothers don’t sound like that.’
The detectives told her that they were hardly making it up and that John and James Mulhall had rung them because they wanted to get what they knew off their chests. ‘Do you not believe that your brothers would tell about the murder?’ she was asked.
‘They don’t know anything to tell about murders. I don’t know anything. I don’t believe what you’re saying to me, I don’t believe any of that,’ she replied.
The mother-of-four also denied ever seeing the Sagem V55 mobile phone that belonged to Farah, which her father had said one of his daughters had given to him. She claimed, ‘I’ve never seen that phone before in my life,’ and also said she knew nothing about money that had been withdrawn from Farah’s account after he died.
Garda Paul Caffrey, who was based at Store Street Station, went into the interview on two occasions. He wanted to check that everything was all right with the prisoner. During one of these visits Linda asked the detectives if her father was in the same station. Apart from this, she did not ask about her family.
Before she was released from custody that night, after the twelve-hour interrogation, Linda was asked if she wanted to reconsider anything she had said during the day. Gardaí first summed up the evidence against her: ‘So your two brothers call the gardaí and tell us that you and your mother and Charlotte killed Farah at Flat 1, 17 Richmond Cottages. We go to that address and search the same. This is where your mother lived and we find splatters of blood everywhere and the indication we have is that there was a violent struggle or assault there. Farah’s body is found in the canal very close to the flat. You are the last people seen with Farah. He is found wearing the jersey he had on when last seen with you. You were in the Ballybough area after he was last seen and your father states that you or Charlotte gave him Farah’s phone and Charlotte takes money out of his account after he goes missing. We can prove all these allegations very well indeed. What do you say to that?’
Linda said she didn’t know what to make of the evidence. She was asked if she wished to make any alterations to the notes that gardaí had made of the interview and replied, ‘About the shop, where I said I wasn’t in the shop, I must have been in the shop.’ She was then released without charge after twelve hours in custody and went home to Tallaght.
Sergeant Liam Hickey had arrested Charlotte around Kilclare Gardens, just fifteen minutes before Linda was picked up from their family home. Charlotte was taken to Mountjoy Garda Station. Gardaí had difficulty in getting a doctor to the station to take hair, blood and saliva samples from her and there was a short delay while one was found. During her twelve-hour detention, she was interviewed on five occasions by Gardaí Niamh Coates, Ian Brunton, Nichola Gleeson, Fergal O’Flaherty and Detective Garda Tom Feighery.
The twenty-two-year-old insisted that she knew nothing about Farah Swaleh Noor’s murder. She said that she had no involvement and neither did her mother or sister. She denied carrying out the killing and dumping the body in the canal. She told them that her dad didn’t get rid of the evidence in his van. She said that her brother was telling lies when he said that they were involved and he ‘must be fucked in the head’.
Gardaí knew immediately that Charlotte was a hard nut and wouldn’t crack easily. They decided to ask her a series of difficult questions, to try to get her emotional so that she would be more inclined to tell the truth.
They asked her about cutting off Farah’s penis, enquiring if ‘it [was] a sexual thing, or was it pure spite on your part?’ Charlie didn’t bat an eyelid and they continued with: ‘Your mother, Kathleen, she was the one being badly treated by Farah. Did she get enjoyment when his penis was cut off? Was that the ultimate revenge? To clean up – I’d say that was great fun. When you were hungover after your birthday, was it a treat for you to clean up the mess?’
Charlotte was well used to dealing with the police and she had no respect for them. Questions such as, ‘Did ye enjoy cutting him up?’ or ‘If you say you didn’t cut him up, did you enjoy watching others cut him up?’ or ‘When you cut off his head did you talk to it? Do you find that funny?’ didn’t bother her in the slightest.
She said that the last time she’d seen Farah was in Eamon Doran’s pub in Temple Bar when she met him and Kathleen for a drink around mid-February. She claimed they had three or four drinks and then she got a taxi back to Jobstown. She said she never saw him around St Patrick’s Day and that she was very drunk at that time. Her mam had told her that Farah went off with a Chinese girl around mid- April and she didn’t ask many questions because it wasn’t her business. She said she wasn’t interested who her mam was seeing but she had known that Farah had had a child with the Chinese girl.
She told gardaí that she thought ‘not a lot’ when she heard on the news that the remains had been discovered in the canal. When gardaí put it to her that the crime was very gruesome, she said, ‘God, yeah.’
The detectives said they had CCTV footage of Kathleen and Farah on O’Connell Street taken on St Patrick’s Day. He was wearing the Ireland-away jersey but Charlotte said she’d only ever seen him in a Manchester United shirt. She told them she was drinking on 20 March because it was the day before her birthday but she couldn’t remember if she was with Farah and her mam and couldn’t remember if she saw a friend of Farah’s on O’Connell Street.
She claimed: ‘I can’t remember any of my birthday this year because all I done was drank.’
‘Surely you must have woken up at some stage, sober?’ she was asked.
‘Not if ya drank as much as I do,’ she responded.
‘Did you always drink a lot?’
‘Yeah,’ she said and claimed that she regularly suffered from memory loss because of drinking but denied that she was an alcoholic. She admitted, ‘I don’t really do much but drinking so there’s not much to remember.’
She said she couldn’t even remember where she woke up on the morning of her birthday, but it was in either Tallaght or Summerhill. She thought she’d spent the previous day drinking in a pub and her mam might have been with her, but she couldn’t be certain. Charlotte maintained she could remember absolutely nothing of March 2005, except for the fact that she met her boyfriend at the end of the month, on the thirty-first.
Gardaí said that they thought it was ‘very strange that you remember 31 March 2005 and no other days in your life.’ They asked her: ‘You don’t remember your birthday but know the day you met your boyfriend. Did you feel guilty on your birthday?’
‘I’d nothing to feel guilty about,’ she coldly replied.
Charlotte said she never took drugs, except for the odd E tablet and had never taken them with Farah and didn’t think that he was a drug user either. She couldn’t explain how a work colleague of her father’s had come into possession of Farah’s phone. She denied taking the phone after he was killed. She said she never changed the voicemail greeting on it and didn’t know who did.
The prostitute didn’t recognise Farah’s Ireland jersey or a pair of socks or a number of bags and other evidence exhibits that were shown to her. She identified Farah and Kathleen from CCTV stills taken in the Parnell Mooney pub on St Patrick’s Day and recognised pictures of the beds and dresser from her mam’s flat. She said she didn’t know why the wallpaper was removed from beside the bunk beds and said that the carpet was probably taken out because it was infested with cockroaches. She knew there had been a problem with cockroaches since Kathleen moved into the flat in December 2004.
Charlotte also claimed that she never saw blood in the flat in Richmond Cottages. She told the guards that she loved her mam and sister but wasn’t protecting them. She was certain that Kathleen never asked her to murder Farah because as
she put it: ‘Well, I think you’d remember something like that, wouldn’t ya?’
The interviewing gardaí spent a lot of time asking Charlotte about the violence that her mother had suffered at the hands of Farah Swaleh Noor. She told them that she had seen Farah push her mam once and knew that he probably hit her but she didn’t have any details and didn’t ask. She then recalled one conversation with Kathleen where her mam had claimed that a scar on her leg had been caused in 2003, by Farah beating her up. They asked her if she was concerned that the man who was supposed to be her mother’s boyfriend was beating her up. Charlotte answered, ‘Obviously it concerns me; everyone has arguments though.’ She added that she wasn’t concerned about her mam’s safety. Just because he pushed her once ‘that doesn’t really mean how the general relationship was, does it?’ Although she had heard and suspected that Farah was violent towards Kathleen, she didn’t have a clue about how he treated her because: ‘I wasn’t there twenty-four hours, was I?’
Charlotte was asked if she had discussed worries about how her mother was being treated by Farah Noor with Linda at any time throughout the month of March. She answered that she hadn’t mentioned anything to her sister: ‘Why would we speak about me mother? Ya don’t speak about your mother, do ya?’
The Irish Scissor Sisters Page 11
