The Irish Scissor Sisters

by Mick McCaffrey

  ‘Who’s the closest person to you? Charlotte who’s the closest person to you alive?’ the Detective Sergeant continued.

  ‘Linda,’ she responded.

  ‘You’ve a lot of time for Linda, haven’t you?’ he stated.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I would go as far as to say you love your sister,’ McDonnell said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Charlotte nodded, saying she did love Linda.

  ‘But telling lies is neither going to help you or Linda. Do you understand that? Do you understand that?’ asked McDonnell. ‘But the truth is what you came here to tell us and you haven’t told us the truth. Charlotte, we will listen to the truth, we don’t want to be giving you a hard time or upsetting you. Are you all right?’ he asked.

  Charlotte nodded that she was all right but she was starting to lose her composure. The twenty-two-year-old had spent the day being grilled by four skilled investigators and it was catching up on her. They were beginning to wear her down. ‘Do you want anything?’ Det Gda Smyth asked her, ‘A glass of water or something?’

  She shook her head and Det Sgt Gerry McDonnell pleaded with her, ‘Will you tell us the truth, Charlotte?’

  She nodded her head.

  ‘OK, you’re OK,’ he said reassuringly. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said.

  ‘OK Charlotte, what happened?’ DS McDonnell asked, gently trying to push her over the line to an admission.

  ‘Everything that Linda said,’ Charlotte finally whispered and started crying, the relief of finally getting the murder off her conscience now clearly on show.

  ‘We will have to go through it in stages. We don’t mean to be painful with you or anything like that. What do you want to say about what you told us earlier?’ McDonnell asked.

  ‘Sorry,’ Charlotte sobbed.

  ‘Were you doing it to try to protect Linda, were you?’ he asked.

  Charlotte started crying again and nodded that she was. She then talked the two detectives through what happened, starting with Kathleen Mulhall spiking Farah Noor’s drink with ecstasy: ‘She said he would be on the same buzz as us. He was drinking for ages and everything was grand and the two of them started arguing as usual, and Farah started saying shit to Linda and he wouldn’t let her arm go.’

  ‘Yeah? Do you remember anything, when you say shit? Was there any phrase?’ queried DS McDonnell.

  ‘Yeah, something like “we’re two creatures”, something similar,’ Charlotte elaborated. ‘Everyone was just arguing. Me mam kept saying to me and Linda, “Just please kill him for me. Kill him for me.”’

  ‘She kept saying that, your ma? OK,’ McDonnell nodded.

  ‘Then she got the hammer and the knife she gave to me and Linda, but he wouldn’t let Linda go, and I cut him,’ she admitted.

  ‘You cut him. Where did you cut him?’

  ‘On the neck,’ she said, pointing to the side of her neck. She didn’t remember what kind of knife it was but after she stabbed Farah, she said Linda hit him with a hammer in the bedroom. ‘I don’t remember how he died in the bedroom. Then we didn’t know what to do with him.’

  ‘When he was dead, yeah?’ asked the DS McDonnell.

  ‘Yeah. Me Mammy said just cut him up,’ Charlotte claimed.

  ‘How did you cut him up?’

  ‘With the knife and hammer,’ she said.

  The detective sergeant asked, ‘What’s your recollection of cutting him up?’

  ‘I just remember cutting. I cut him up with the knife,’ she told the guards.

  ‘Right. Did you use anything else?’

  ‘Yeah, the hammer.’

  ‘You cut his skin with the knife … and then what would you do with the hammer?’ DS McDonnell asked.

  ‘Linda used the hammer. I don’t know,’ she claimed.

  ‘Do you strip him naked though, while you’re cutting him up?’

  The detectives were trying to get a clear picture of exactly what happened on the night of the murder.

  Charlotte agreed that they did and said: ‘We just cut him up and brought him down to the river.’

  ‘The river – you mean the canal?’ Det Gda Mike Smyth asked.

  ‘Yeah. We cleaned up. We went back and just started cleaning up, just cleaning up for hours.’

  ‘Are you OK? Do you want time to compose yourself?’ asked McDonnell.

  Charlotte was still upset at this stage. She had bottled the secret up for so long that it was a relief to finally get it off her chest, but it still distressed her.

  ‘No. We had everything in the flat cleaned up. Then we went up to the Watergate Park and buried the head. After we done that we went back and started cleaning the flat again,’ Charlotte told them.

  Gerry McDonnell asked: ‘Who decided to cut his head off?’

  ‘I can’t remember,’ she claimed.

  ‘What about his penis?’

  ‘I can’t remember who cut it,’ she replied.

  ‘And what happened the head?’

  ‘Linda put it somewhere. At first the three of us went to the park and put it there but Linda moved it,’ Charlie explained.

  At 5.53 p.m., one hour and thirty-two minutes after the second interview commenced, the detectives decided to take a break to allow Charlotte to compose herself. She had confessed to the murder but they still needed her to fill in the blanks about who decided to dismember Farah Noor’s body and who actually took part in the process of chopping him up into eight pieces.

  At 7.57 p.m. Det Sgt Gerry McDonnell and Det Gda Mike Smyth interviewed Charlotte again. Gda Karl Murray was also present for a time. They showed the twenty-two-year-old exhibits that gardaí had recovered. Detective Superintendent John McKeown had granted a six-hour extension to her detention period at 5.10 p.m. During her rest period Charlotte was fed and had a lie down in her cell. She did not contact anybody or ask for a solicitor.

  Garda Murray showed her the knife that had been recovered from the lake at Sean Walsh Park. Charlotte said she didn’t recognise it and that it didn’t look like the one she had used to murder Farah. She was also shown the hammer but again said she didn’t recognise it because she said that she hadn’t used it.

  The detectives then showed her a series of photographs from the flat at 17 Richmond Cottages. She said that the bedroom looked different because the bunk beds were now in a different place and there was different wallpaper and carpets in the bedroom.

  She was shown a photo of the bunk bed and Det Gda Mike Smyth asked, ‘Did he bleed on the bunk bed?’

  ‘I don’t know if he did,’ she answered.

  ‘Did he put up any struggle?’ queried DS McDonnell

  ‘I really can’t remember any,’ Charlie said.

  The Detective Sergeant queried her about Farah’s consciousness after he was stabbed and hit with the hammer in the bedroom: ‘How did you know he was dead and he wasn’t just seriously injured?’

  ‘He wasn’t breathing,’ she explained.

  ‘Why? Did somebody check on him?’

  ‘Don’t know; might have been scared to,’ Charlotte told him.

  The detectives then moved on to the bathroom where the dismemberment had taken place and showed Charlotte pictures of the shower. Detective Smyth said to her, ‘I’ve been in that. That’s a very small shower. You didn’t do all the cutting up in the shower?’

  ‘It wasn’t in the shower, it was on the floor,’ Charlotte answered.

  ‘On the floor. And how, when you were doing the cutting up, how was he, how did you position him?’ Smyth asked.

  ‘Just on the ground,’ she said vaguely.

  DS Gerry McDonnell then moved on to the issue about the number of wounds that Farah Noor received, saying, ‘Now the pathologist, his report I think indicates that he [Farah Noor] was stabbed over twenty times. Would you accept that?’

  ‘I really … I really can’t remember.’

  Charlotte seemed shocked at hearing about the extent of Farah’s injuries. Linda was also
surprised when she was told of Farah’s shocking injuries. The women did not realise just how far they had gone when they attacked Noor.

  ‘I’m just saying that’s what the pathologist has said. Would you accept that you had stabbed him?’

  ‘No,’ Charlie answered.

  ‘How many times did you stab him?’ Detective Sergeant McDonnell queried again.

  ‘I don’t know, a couple. It was nothing like that.’

  ‘Is there any situation there where your mother would have stabbed him or anything like that?’ McDonnell continued.

  ‘No,’ she said, emphatically.

  ‘When he was dead, then what happened? Were you panicked? What did you do after that?’ the detective wondered.

  ‘I don’t know. Me ma said the only way it’s going to get rid of this is you’re gonna have to cut it up now,’ she claimed.

  ‘What’s your view on what happened that night, Charlotte? Are you annoyed with your mother over it?’ asked DS McDonnell.

  ‘I can’t be annoyed with her. We’re the stupid ones that done it,’ Charlotte said.

  Detective Garda Mike Smyth wanted to understand what had driven two seemingly ordinary women to carry out such an extraordinary act. He asked Charlotte: ‘Would you say there was a point in the night that made you go from just arguing to killing him? What made you?’

  ‘The way she kept going on, just telling us, “He’s going to kill me; he’s going to kill me. Youse have to kill him.”’

  ‘Right, but what specific thing happened? Was it him grabbing Linda?’ Det Gda Smyth pushed.

  ‘Yeah, I think so,’ she said.

  ‘That turned youse?’ he wondered.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Are you saying the decision to kill him really came from your mother?’ DS Gerry McDonnell asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ Charlie answered.

  ‘She made the decision in relation to that?’ asked the detective sergeant.

  ‘Yeah,’ was her response.

  ‘What are your thoughts on all of it now? I mean how do you feel? Do you feel sorry for him? How would you describe how you feel?’ asked Mike Smyth.

  ‘I feel sick,’ Charlotte responded.

  ‘When the decision came to cut him up, are you saying that decision again was made by your mother?’ DS McDonnell wondered.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Did she make it there and then or did she have to consult with somebody?’ he continued.

  ‘I don’t know. She just kept telling us she’d think of something, she would think of something to do,’ Charlotte claimed.

  ‘And whose decision was it to drag him into the shower room or bathroom?’ McDonnell queried.

  ‘She told us to bring him in,’ she responded

  ‘Whose decision was it to cut off his head?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Charlie again answered.

  Now that Charlotte had confessed, the detectives needed to get a clear picture in their own heads about the exact events of the night of the murder and deliberately revisited earlier questions.

  ‘You don’t know? Or [whose decision it was] to cut his penis off?’ DS McDonnell queried.

  Charlotte shook her head, to say she didn’t know.

  ‘Was that done for any reason?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she insisted.

  ‘Or was his head cut for any reason?’

  She shook her head again.

  ‘Was there any reason why he was chopped up?’

  ‘We didn’t know what else to do,’ Charlie claimed.

  ‘Yeah, but was it to make it look like something else?’ asked Gerry McDonnell. Det Gda Mike Smyth intervened and told Charlotte: ‘It was just when this happened – I am sure you read all the newspapers – most people thought it was something else altogether.’

  ‘You’ve heard of ritual killings, have ya?’ Det Sgt Gerry McDonnell queried.

  ‘No,’ Charlie stated.

  The two detectives had got Charlotte to admit that she had murdered Farah Noor. She had been questioned for over five hours and they decided there was no point in pushing her in the circumstances.

  They were almost finished with Charlotte, when Gerry McDonnell asked her, ‘How do you feel now, after you told us?’

  ‘Better,’ she muttered.

  ‘Sorry?’ Gerry McDonnell couldn’t hear the mumble.

  ‘A lot better,’ Charlie stated.

  ‘You feel better. Why do you? What way do you feel better after you told us? Do you feel like it’s a load off your chest, do you? Do you?’ he asked.

  She nodded in agreement.

  Mike Smyth asked her, ‘Did people ever ask you about it, after Linda was arrested?’

  ‘Yeah, a few people around town,’ she said.

  ‘What did they ask?’ Det Gda Smyth wanted to know.

  ‘Just what all this was about,’ she replied.

  ‘Is it hard to keep this type of thing secret?’ Detective Sergeant Mc Donnell wondered.

  ‘Yeah,’ Charlie agreed.

  The two officers were trying to understand how somebody could keep such a secret and wanted to know how it had affected Charlotte and her family.

  ‘Is it? What way will it affect the family? Will it eat into the family?’ DS McDonnell asked.

  ‘I’ve hardly seen them, my family,’ Charlotte confessed to the detectives.

  ‘You’ve obviously discussed it with your sister Linda?’ Gerry McDonnell enquired.

  ‘Yeah,’ she answered..

  ‘And your father?’

  ‘After we were all … after we were all arrested, yeah,’ Charlotte confirmed.

  ‘What are you expecting now, Charlotte?’ Mike Smyth asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘What do you think will happen?’

  ‘I’ll be locked up for a long time, I suppose,’ the twenty-two-year-old said sadly.

  ‘Do you want to ask us any questions, Charlotte?’ Det Sgt Gerry McDonnell asked.

  ‘What’s going to happen?’ she wondered.

  ‘Well basically I suppose the Director of Public Prosecutions will be contacted and it’s going to be for him to decide what charge will be laid. He will be contacted tonight. If he gives a decision you could be charged tonight. Does that upset you?’ the Detective Sergeant asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ she told him, staring at the floor.

  The interview then ended.

  Charlotte had been interviewed for a total of five hours and thirty-one minutes during her ten hours and thirty-five minutes in garda custody. She was asked on nine separate occasions if she wanted a solicitor present but declined each time. Linda had received legal representation but Charlotte was confident that the guards wouldn’t realise that she was not telling the truth and didn’t feel like she needed a solicitor.

  At 9.40 p.m. on 17 October 2005 Charlotte Mulhall was charged with the murder of Farah Swaleh Noor, after Detective Inspector Christy Mangan had consulted with Pat Godfrey, a professional officer at the DPP’s office. She was formally charged by Sergeant Declan Healy, the member in charge of Mountjoy Station. She replied ‘nothing to say’ when the charge was read out to her.

  Charlotte Mulhall appeared before Dublin District Court the following morning at 10.15 a.m. Judge O’Donnell remanded her in custody for one week, to allow for the book of evidence to be served. Charlotte did not apply for bail until the next court sitting.

  shocked when they were all taken in for questioning about Farah Noor’s murder, on 3 August. She had stressed to Linda and Charlotte that there was no evidence against them and they’d be fine if they sat tight and said nothing. She went to Kilclare Gardens the day after the arrests and Linda told her that Charlotte was in Mountjoy over outstanding warrants. When they spoke about the previous day, Kathleen shook her head sadly and said: ‘It was James; it was James. There were things being said that were only said to James.’ She could not believe that her first-born child had betrayed her.

  Two days after she was released,
she went into Fitzgibbon Street Garda Station and asked to speak with Garda Sheelagh Sheehan. She wanted her passport and social welfare card returned and was carrying a photograph of Farah. She started crying and said that the photo was all she had left of her boyfriend. Kathleen claimed she slept with it under her pillow at night. She said she’d been involved in a brief relationship with a Russian man named Alex but he’d left her when she told him that her ex-boyfriend had been murdered.

  Over the next few weeks Kathleen cut-off all contact with her family and moved to Carlow without telling anybody. She had no friends or family there but it obviously felt far enough away from Dublin. She lost contact with her two daughters during this time and didn’t return any of Charlotte’s many phone calls. Charlotte only heard that Kathleen was in Carlow from somebody she knew who had seen her mother down there.

  On 2 September Kathleen was back in Dublin, collecting her dole money at North King Street Social Welfare Office. She had just left when she saw DS Gerry McDonnell coming towards her. She warmly greeted the sergeant and asked him was there any chance she could get a lift with him to the post office in Dorset Street. The detective sergeant agreed to take her and during the short journey he told her that Linda had confessed to them. He said that Linda had told them that Kathleen had asked her two daughters to murder Farah Noor in her flat at Richmond Cottages on 20 March. The Detective said that Linda had made an official statement and that Kathleen would have to respond to the allegations in some way. She agreed to ring DS McDonnell after she’d had a chance to speak to her two girls. She got out of the car, saying she would talk to him later.

  Kathleen Mulhall never made any contact, however, and the guards spent a week trying to get in touch with her, without any success.

  Kathleen had a lot of time for Garda Sheelagh Sheehan who had interviewed her a couple of times on 3 August. On 13 September Gda Sheehan found out that Kathleen had secretly moved to Carlow. Detective Superintendent John McKeown travelled down to Carlow District Court that afternoon and made an application for the re-arrest of Kathleen Mulhall for the murder of Farah Swaleh Noor. The application for a warrant was granted.

  The following morning Det Sgt Gerry McDonnell, Det Gda Pat Keegan and Gda Cliona O’Brien drove to Carlow, arriving at 84A St Mary’s Park at 12.35 p.m. When Kathleen opened the front door she was officially arrested and taken to Mountjoy Garda Station for questioning. Kathleen said she needed cigarettes and they stopped at a garage just outside Carlow. She tried to talk to DS Gerry McDonnell about the case during the car journey but he said they couldn’t discuss it until they got to the station.