Shankill, a small village in 1936, close to the sea and to Bray, has had few murders in its chronicles, but the killing of Vera Ball in February of that year was a very rare event in murder – it was a case of matricide. It all started when a man delivering newspapers saw an Austin car stuck in a street in a place where vehicles would not normally be found. When When he went to inspect he had a terrible shock – the interior was covered in blood and on the back seat there was a towel soaked in blood.
The man went to the police and when the Garda came to investigate they found blood below the car as well, and on a tyre. They soon found whose car this was, because of the papers inside. That led them to the home of Mrs Vera Ball in St Helen’s Road, Booterstown. What happened then was to be the beginning of a very straightforward track to the solution of the mystery, because a maid in the house said that Edward, one of Vera’s two sons, had recently come to live with them from Dublin, as he was hard up. But more importantly, she said quite plainly that mother and son did not get on well at all; in fact Edward was a drifter, a man who dreamed of an acting career but was basically unsound and very difficult.
When the detectives returned they found Edward Ball at home; he had assembled a scenario in his head and the thespian in him started to fabricate a tale, saying that he had seen his mother drive away in her car the day before. He was twenty, and his mother had not been very happy about having him back to live with her, but he told police that she had done so out of a sense of duty – after all, he was not twenty-one yet. He mentioned only a very minor incident (the smashing of a cup) when asked if he had fought with his mother recently. He was very cool at this meeting, dealing with a question about the blood-soaked towel calmly, saying only that maybe there had been some kind of accident and a window had had to be forced open.