Shan Mohangi did not want the fire brigade on his Harcourt Street premises in August 1963, in spite of the fact that there was smoke pouring out of the place and he had already had to open the door to a young couple passing by who knocked and aroused him to ask if help was needed. He even told the fire chief that there was nothing to worry about and wanted the engines to go away. But they had shot there at high speed from Tara Street and Captain Michael Grey knew that there was a serious fire there where Mohangi stood, apparently complacent. It was to be the beginning of what has become known as the ‘Green Tureen Case’.
Mohangi took Grey down to a basement to show him the cause of all the black smoke: there were some rags of cloth on a grill, and Grey quite rightly wanted to speak to someone in authority. But the manager of the restaurant was not there. Firemen were taking no chances and were about to put some water into the back area of the cellar when Mohangi stood in their way, saying that there was only a storeroom through there. We have to feel for poor Captain Grey, who finally had to be content with a warning and a rather low-key exit from what had clearly looked like a severely dangerous situation. The young Indian Mohangi, who said he was a medical student, had been behaving most peculiarly.
That evening there was to be a dinner there in Harcourt Street at the restaurant, and a man called Desmond Mullen from Shankill, was to be there, with his young sister Hazel. He arrived that afternoon after all the drama and listened again to Mohangi’s explanation for the smell of burning, as another man had done also, a student who came. Mohangi said that Hazel would not be coming to join them.
Mohangi and the Mullens had become friendly about a year before these events; Mohangi was twenty-three and Hazel just fifteen when they began walking out together. Mohangi was Indian, and from Natal. In 1961 he came to Dublin to study medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons, and in the old tradition of students everywhere, he was working to pay fees and subsistence costs. The young peoples’ relationship deepened and Mohangi had asked Hazel to marry him, but Mrs Mullen sensibly advised caution and there was a postponement.
On the fateful day when Hazel did not arrive for the dinner, Mullen and his girlfriend ate dinner and then went out for the night, expecting Hazel to turn up, but she did not. Mrs Mullen was understandably very worried and Mohangi tried to stall her with excuses and fantasies. He spun a yarn, saying that the girl had rung him from the Bank of Ireland, cancelling their day together. But there had been no word from her at home. Mrs Mullen said she was distraught. Mullen and Mohangi went to the Mullen home and the medical student started to project his performance of ‘worried boyfriend’ to the world.
The police had to be told, as she was now unaccountably missing. Constable Donaghue was on the case and he took details of her supposed last statements and movements, as far as these were known. Later, at trial, Mohangi said, ‘She had no other boyfriends… We were in love and planned to be married. She must have been kidnapped from the streets and she is being held prisoner somewhere. You must find her before something terrible happens.’ After that, as more time passed and the level of concern increased, Mohangi accelerated the act of worried and tense lover, going out to search all the places he thought she might be found –places he of course would know from their time together. By the Sunday, the matter was urgent and a Detective Inspector was on the case – Matthew Kennedy. The detective, knowing that nothing had been found and that there had been no sighting of the girl, did the obvious thing – just as had been done in the case of Dr Crippen many years before – he suggested that they search the flat in Harcourt Street. Mohangi naturally protested, and that was a mistake.
The turning-point came after that first fruitless search, because Kennedy found out about the fire alarm, and more importantly, he found out about Mohangi being seen by a neighbour walking up the stairs with ‘an Irish girl’. Someone said that the girl had left alone at about midnight. There was a stepping-up of enquiries about Hazel then; officers questioned people who knew her and there were plans for a more thorough search of the rooms in Harcourt Street. An odd thing then happened, something that directed attention away from the immediate area; a family friend of the Mullens said he was sure that Hazel was walking around the Crumlin area, somehow out of touch and mentally troubled. When this came to nothing, after a long period of walking around with Hazel’s picture, the family were understandably in despair.
But the Harcourt Street premises were to become the focus of intense police activity after a cook turned up for work and was subject to a noxious smell; she found some bones wrapped in newspaper and took them out to the bin, but still there was a stink. Suspicions were aroused, and people began to feel that it was strange that the young student would not go to the police regarding the fire and now the smell and the bones down in the cellars. By Wednesday, the police were in Harcourt Street again and there they found Mohangi lying in bed with a gas heater blasting gas at him, and a bottle of tablets by his bed. There was a suicide note saying, ‘Everything belonging to me goes to Maureen Kelly.’ He was taken to hospital, and the search of the premises began in earnest.
Superintendents McShane and McLoughlin had the unpleasant task of searching for materials in the midst of an overpowering smell. When they came across what was almost certainly a human thigh bone, the net was definitely closing in on Shan Mohangi, who was recovering consciousness in hospital. Altogether, the hunt in the cellar resulted in seventeen body parts being found; it was now a job for a pathologist and Dr Maurice Hickey came, to confirm that what they had there was a case of the dismemberment of a young girl – done with a meat cleaver and by someone with the medical knowledge needed to do that task effectively. The scenario became as gruesome as anything from Rillington Place; bits of flesh were found behind a heater; bloodstained garments turned up, and then personal belongings, all adding up to the fact that Hazel Mullen had been murdered there, and then a most horrific act of butchering had taken place.
It was all up for Mohangi; discharged from hospital, he was escorted to gaol and the two detectives who had experienced the foul effects of the man’s murderous handiwork talked to him there. The student said that the crisis came when Hazel had told him she had kissed another man. This led to his account of how, among his own people at home, chastity was paramount when wedding was discussed, and that as he had learned that Hazel was a virgin, he was more determined than ever to marry her and that she should be chaste. When she said that she had kissed another, Mohangi told the officers that he did not know what had happened to him. ‘I had always loved and worshipped her for that one thing. I was in a rage at the time. I caught hold of her and put my arms around her neck…’
He said he had panicked and that the death was accidental. But of course he had known what to do to try to hide her body: he said he had been burning body parts and dissecting the girl when the firemen had come. He had had to leave the horrible work unfinished while he played the part of worried lover and then actually gone back to the cutting and burning on the Monday. It was then that the suicide was discussed and it was ascertained that the Maureen Kelly he had written about was his first friend in the city; she was found and questioned and it was soon explained that they had been close friends. She was a nurse, young and pretty, and they had always been close and that she had been at the flat just a day before Hazel had been killed.
There was no body part to be available so that doctors could either confirm or deny the supposed fact that Mohangi had cut Hazel’s throat, but there was clearly a case of murder – intended, premeditated and ruthless. The trial began in February 1964. It was a case of there being a large medical presence in court: expert witnesses were needed to clarify the probable cause of death because if Hazel had been strangled purposefully and then cut and burned, that was a very different thing from an accidental death which might have happened in a situation of intimacy. One doctor said that a sudden and even unintentional pressure on the throat could cause a stoppage of the heart.
The crux of the matter was the attitude of Mohangi to Hazel. He had written a letter to her just a day before her death, passionate and loving, saying, ‘There never will be a heart so true/ for I am devoted to you, my love/ and forever will be true/I love you my Hazel.’ But of course, with all the revolting detail of the dismemberment and blood, with the odour of burning body-parts filling Harcourt Street, it was hard for anyone to allow thoughts of the accused being anything but a savage. If, however, the death had been caused by what one lawyer called ‘playful inhibition’ then it was a matter of manslaughter, in spite of all the gore and revulsion involved. But after three hours, the verdict was that Mohangi was guilty of murder and he had nothing to say to the court before the death sentence was passed on him.
But the scaffold did not wait for him; there was an appeal and on that occasion, he was found to be guilty of aggravated manslaughter. This would be therefore ‘involuntary’ – that is to say, committed while the person was doing a dangerous or reckless act. He was given a sentence of seven years’ penal servitude.