It was April Fool’s Day in 1926 when The Times reported that gardener Henry McCabe was reported to have been passing an old country house called La Mancha when he saw that it was on fire. The report was that, ‘he ran into the grounds, to find that the doors were locked, and having failed to arouse the inhabitants, he rushed to the Malahide Police Station, where he gave the alarm’. He was certainly trying to fool somebody, and for a while he did so. A mystery emerged from that situation – a case of multiple deaths and a blaze in a beautiful old house. Six dead bodies were found inside when the Dublin Fire Brigade arrived and managed to get inside through a basement window.
The firemen struggled to find a way in, because the doors were all barred and bolted. But as they fought their way through all the rooms, they found first of all James Clarke dead on the kitchen floor. He was a servant of the family who owned the property, the McDonnells. As the search went on, the men next came across Peter McDonnell, and he was naked on the sitting-room floor; then upstairs his two sisters, Annie and Alice, were found dead, along with their servant, Mary Magowan. The women’s bodies had been badly burned. Finally, the other brother, Joseph, was found dead also. What was discovered and told to the press early on was that there had been a violent attack and that the first two bodies found had been killed before the fire was started.
It was soon ascertained that the fire was actually started by someone; an empty tin of petrol was found, and it was noticed that fires had been started in three rooms downstairs. The top floor had also been burnt and totally ruined. It took several hours to put out the flames and after that more information came to light which gave the police the beginnings of a narrative of those events that they would have to put together – that was the discovery of a bloodstained poker.