Chapter Two

‘To profane a dead body by cutting it to pieces has always seemed, at least to our Western eyes, an act of bestial brutality. It is one thing to do murder. It is quite another to destroy the murder victim’s identity, and this is the effect of dismemberment.’

 

- Dr William R. Maples, forensic anthropologist, in Dead Men Do Tell Tales

 

There are numerous ways of hiding a body and erasing proof of a murder. Those most frequently used are burial of the victim’s body at a secret location such as a remote wood, mountain, or a construction site. Sometimes killers burn the bodies of their victims using accelerants, until all traces of the crime have been erased and identification of the victim is almost impossible.

Other killers have been known to drop a weighted-down body in the open sea or in a lake in the hope that it will never be found. Dismemberment is, by far, the rarest method of body disposal. Few killers have the stomach or nerve to take an axe, or a saw, to a body and begin cutting it into small pieces.

Women are rarely accused of denigrating a victim’s body in such fashion. Of the handful of cases of those who do, dismemberment is almost always carried out immediately after the crime, usually in a blind panic.

Perhaps they went into shock when they realised the gravity of what they had done; in many ways this would have given them a very limited ability to understand their actions, while helping them to suspend reality while they went about their gruesome task. Neither of the two appear to have planned what took place; instead the events just unfolded. When they realised that no one could help them, they got on with the task of dismembering Noor’s body.

 

*****

 

The actual dismemberment took place in the bathroom of the flat. This was small and pokey. Therefore, when the sisters dragged Noor’s body into the bathroom, they found there was no room to move; certainly not enough to dismember a corpse.

At this point, Charlotte sat on the toilet seat while Linda positioned herself in the shower. This gave them some room to manoeuvre.

According to the statements given by both Charlotte and Linda, Kathleen did not participate in the dismemberment. Instead, she sat in the kitchen smoking continuously.

The tools they used to dissect the body were the same implements they had used to kill Noor—a Stanley knife and a hammer, and the bread knife that had perforated his vital organs.

Charlotte was the one who began the vile process of dismemberment when she attempted to saw through one of Noor’s arms with the bread knife.

Her statement read: ‘We got Farah into the bathroom. Myself and Charlie dragged him in by the legs, and me and Charlie cut him up. It was Charlie’s idea. Charlie started sawing on his arms, with the knife; the knife had a rugged edge on it.

‘She cut into his arms with the knife, she got tired. I then used the hammer and hit his legs a number of times. It took us a few hours to do it. Me and Charlie took turns cutting him and breaking the bones.’

The Stanley knife made an unsuitable tool for dismemberment. While the same knife had cut Noor’s flesh with relative ease, it was unable to divide the cartilage and bone without excessive effort. However, this resistance didn’t stop Charlotte, who had boundless energy from the ecstasy in her bloodstream. It should be remembered the two of them had taken more ecstasy tablets.

Although the sawing action was exhausting, Charlotte cut and cut at the body with the knife until she could cut no more. Linda sat beside her, helping and encouraging her. When they encountered resistance in the form of bone and cartilage, Charlotte didn’t give up. Instead she took hold of the hammer and began to strike Noor’s legs in a battering fashion. While this motion was aimed at dismembering his joints, it caused the body to haemorrhage excessive amounts of blood, which spilled from the body.

A man of Noor’s size and weight normally has about 5.6 litres of blood—Charlotte’s butchery caused much of this to depart from the body. This flowed on to the floor. In a desperate attempt to stem this, the two women placed towels around the severed wounds, but this had little effect. The blood continued to flow; there was nothing they could do to stop it.

The bathroom of the flat now resembled a slaughter house; a horrid smell engulfed the room and permeated everywhere. It was foul. Of the night in question, Linda would later say the ‘smell was ... it wouldn’t go away. I think about it every night.’

The act of dismemberment proved to be a highly physical process for the sisters. Charlotte continued to tear and hammer at the bones and sinews that somehow held Noor’s legs together.

Sweat poured from her body, and her arms were soon covered in blood and pieces of flesh. The scene was one from the bowels of hell; nothing had prepared them for this. They tried looking away from the body but it was no use. They also changed positions and swapped implements on several occasions but it didn’t make the butchering process any faster. When one got tired of hammering, they would rest by using a knife to cut at another section of the body.

One noticeable fact was that they used no coherent method to dismember Noor’s remains. High on drugs, confused and terrified, they just cut away and hammered at the victim’s flesh and bones, mutilating him, in no methodical way.

Perhaps the most gruesome part of the dismemberment was Linda’s decision to remove the victim’s penis. This was a brutal act of barbarism.

‘Me ma had told me already that he had raped her and I said, “He won’t rape me Ma again.” I cut his private parts off, the long piece, not the balls,’ she later said.

The mutilation of the genitalia was significant insofar as it had nothing to do with disposing of the body but everything to do with revenge. Noor had beaten and attacked women; by cutting off his penis, Linda believed she was avenging the violence he had dispensed on her mother.  

In total, the sisters spent five hours cutting Noor’s corpse into eight separate pieces of varying weights and sizes.

The largest body segment was the upper torso, which involved his disembowelment, revealing his intestines and internal organs.

Once this bloody act had been accomplished, his lower torso was left with the hip joints fully intact; it should be noted that they had earlier cut off his legs, but now they removed the femurs, leaving his lower legs intact with the feet attached.

His right and left upper limbs were also broken above the humerus using the claw hammer; this was difficult as a variety of muscles were attached. When he had been alive, these enabled movement at the elbow and at the shoulder. Now they held what remained of his body together. These particular muscles were hard to cut through as Noor had been strong and athletic in life.

The head was the final body part to be removed.

In their subsequent statements to gardaí, both sisters admitted that they took turns at cutting it from the torso.

However, removing the head was particularly traumatic for Linda, who later recalled that she wasn’t able to look at the face while she cut and hammered.

She was consumed by guilt, which she somehow managed to block from her mind. In many ways, she was unable to evaluate the situation she found herself in. Rather than even think about what she and Charlotte were doing, even for a second, she forged ahead with the cutting.

Of course, they knew the life had long since gone from Noor’s eyes, but they still haunted Linda. She could not help but look at the expression on his face while she engaged in the savagery.

The look of terror was too much. Eventually, she placed a towel over his face while she finished hammering his neck, in a final attempt to dislocate it from the shoulders. This made it easier for her to butcher the body and cut off the head.

It was a bloody operation, as the towels were completely ineffective at soaking up the blood that flowed from every wound. In fact there was so much blood that a crimson pool formed on the floor.

‘I had the towel over his head, over his face, and kept using the hammer. It would not come off. Both of us had to take turns with the hammer. I did not think about chopping it up but Charlotte said to do it,’ she said in a statement.

Linda and Charlotte were now completely panic-stricken and called their father. Linda rang John Mulhall Snr from her mobile at 11.41pm as Noor lay dead on the floor. They spoke for about two minutes and Linda told him what had happened. It is likely that he couldn’t understand his daughter or didn’t believe her, as he rang his estranged wife ten minutes later to verify if what Linda had said was true—if they had actually killed Farah Swaleh Noor. He also spoke to Kathleen for about two minutes, before speaking to her briefly one last time just before midnight. All three women had consumed drink and several ecstasy tablets, so perhaps it took him some time to comprehend what had happened.

 

*****

 

Now they had finished butchering him, it was time to dispose of the body. This would be the most important part of the killing. The dismemberment had already taken six to seven hours. It was now night and the streets around Richmond Cottages and the north inner city were largely empty apart from the odd vagrant wandering around.

Their father had initially thought that Linda and Charlotte were high on drugs when they called to say what they’d done. Though, when he thought about the conversation, he began to panic. While he wanted to believe his daughters were claiming to have killed Noor because they were high; something in their voices caused him to worry. Driven by fear, more than anything else, he drove from his home into the city. He arrived there at 1.30am.

He rang the flat’s doorbell and walked in. When he walked through the front door, he saw Linda, Charlotte and his estranged wife. The flat was clean, almost as if nothing had happened. Neither Linda nor Charlotte was soiled by blood stains. He momentarily relaxed. He had been estranged from his wife for years but very much cared about his daughters.

According to the statement he later gave to detectives, he asked where Noor was. Linda told him his body was in the bedroom. He looked in the room but could see nothing. He returned momentarily, and said he wasn’t there. He never suspected that the body had been dismembered.

Linda told him to look again, and then confessed as to what had happened—that they had dismembered his remains. He looked once again. This time he saw a black bin liner in the corner. It was full. He suddenly felt nauseous. He moved a little closer and momentarily glanced into the bag. What he saw made him run from the flat. He threw up on the steps. When he pulled himself together, he said he wanted to have nothing to do with them. He then left. He didn’t care what happened to them. As far as he was concerned, they were on their own.

The departure of their father from the scene sent the women into a blind panic that gripped them, according to statements they later made. Though it should be noted that they made sure not to mention his visit to the flat in any of their subsequent interviews. It is also noteworthy that Kathleen also never mentioned her estranged husband’s visit.

The effects of the alcohol and ecstasy were also beginning to wear off, making it more difficult for them to function as they were confronted by the reality of what they had done. However, their actions from this point onwards, suggest they still operated with some degree of clarity and forethought.

Realising they would have to act alone, they were careful not to try move the entire body at once. They had packed the separate body parts into black plastic bags; these were then placed into sports bags, Linda recalled:

‘Charlotte started pulling the heavy pieces into sports bags. Charlotte put the main parts of the body into the sports bag; she put it into a black plastic bag at first. I put the legs into the black plastic bags but I let the legs come out.’

They then lifted the battered and bruised head into a plastic bag, which they placed in a suitcase. Rather than dispose of the head with the rest of the torso, they left it in the back garden of No. 17 while they went about disposing of the remaining body parts, one by one.

Linda would later admit it was her idea to separate the head from the body.

‘I decided we were not throwing the head in. I said it to Charlotte so that it would not be identified.’

They all hoped the decision to hide the head elsewhere would ensure the gardaí would not identify the remains.

Perhaps their greatest mistake was to dump the body parts locally rather than at some remote location, away from the city. If the body parts had been hidden at several different locations, without leaving any clothing behind, it is likely the killing would have gone unnoticed, or certainly unsolved. But this was out of the question because neither Linda nor Charlotte drove a car. They couldn’t transport the body out of the city so, due to the circumstances, they had no choice but to dispose of it locally.

While they figured it was the safest thing to do—moving the body parts through the city during daylight hours being too risky—it was also the clumsiest.

They carried the body parts to the Royal Canal, which flowed through the north inner city. It was no more than a five minute walk from Richmond Cottages.

The place they chose to dump the body was Clarke’s Bridge, near Ballybough, just minutes away from the flat. In the dead of night, the two sisters carried the bags to the canal bank. Linda carried the light bits while Charlotte carried the heavier ones.

During the course of the trial, Linda’s statement was produced as evidence. It indicated that her mother accompanied Charlotte and her when they went to move the bags, saying: ‘Charlotte took the heavy bits, we walked down to the canal, me ma walked with us.’

As they made their way down the bank and under the bridge, they operated under the cover of darkness. When they stumbled down the bank, they opened a bag and threw a body part into the water.

They made the journey several times, all the time watching for passers-by or unwanted strangers. They could just about see what they were doing, it was so dark. After they had dumped the final body part; there was some panic about whether a scar on Noor’s arm would identify him. Suddenly the sisters were gripped by fear, but by this stage, it was too late.

The torso, femurs, legs and arms had all sunk in the water. There was nothing more they could do, even if they wanted to.

 

*****

 

When they returned to the flat, they found the bathroom and bedroom covered in blood and tiny pieces of flesh. The violent manner in which Noor had died had left tell tale marks everywhere. His blood had soaked into carpets, linoleum and the wooden skirting boards around the flat. The scene was one of horror, with all the tell tale signs of death there to see.

Linda would afterwards confirm to gardaí that the carpet close to the bunk bed was heavily soiled with blood: ‘There was more blood there than anywhere else.’

The towels they used to mop up the blood had also left crimson stains on the floor.

The sisters next set about washing these stains away using buckets, mops and clothes. The clean up lasted well into the night. Charlotte recalled that they stayed up all night.

‘We were just cleaning up for hours. We had everything in the flat cleaned up then we went up to the Watergate Park and buried the head,’ she later said.

As her statement indicates, the next stage of the cover up involved the disposal of Noor’s head. It was crucial that it would never be found. Others would not have been so brazen to attempt it, but the decision to dispose of the head at another location was made while they were still partly drunk and high on drugs. This explains their bizarre decision to place the head in a bag, take it through the city centre, then carry it on a public bus, and to a place where it could be disposed of safely. In many ways, the audacity of this would help ensure its success.

They stayed up all night long cleaning away all traces of blood before they left Richmond Cottages the next morning. The time was now 11am. They were suffering from a mixture of shock, exhaustion and guilt; they were also hungry.

But they knew that to conceal their act, they had to dispose of the head as quickly as possible.

Having placed the head in a bag the night before, they now took it with them as they walked into a supermarket on Summerhill Parade to buy salad rolls, which they ate on the street. They were actually filmed in the store by an internal CCTV camera.

When they finished eating, they made their way into the city centre and caught a bus to The Square Shopping Centre in Tallaght. They paid the correct fares and didn’t draw any unwanted attention to themselves.

With Noor’s head still safely in the bag, they walked around the shopping centre, looking in the windows of clothes shops. They were now nursing headaches, but their minds and senses were also in turmoil.

Linda began to have flashbacks; she could not stop thinking about Noor, the look on his face when he died, and how he’d called out her mother’s name after Charlotte had slashed his throat.

Inside, she felt she was trapped in a living nightmare. She possessed a magnified view of the death she could not escape from. The memory of the dismemberment made her sick. She had cut, torn, pulled and wrenched the body apart; removing his limbs and head. She had mutilated his body.

In truth, she was horrified by what she had done. She felt waves of nervousness, anxiety, hyperactivity and irritability. She couldn’t hide her agitation, no matter how hard she tried. She also looked terrible.

Charlotte’s mind was also in turmoil, though she managed to remain calm. She too was in the throes of a deep depression, terrified about what to do next. The reality of the situation the sisters found themselves in ignited a sense of paranoia. They now felt sick.

It is clear that they were in a state of denial. Admitting to themselves that they had killed Noor was hard enough, but admitting to dismemberment was something else. In many ways, strolling through the shopping centre was their means of normalising the situation.

When they left the Square, they walked to the Sean Walsh Memorial Park in Tallaght. It was here they planned to bury Noor’s head in the ground in the hope it would never be found.

The mentality shared by the two sisters was a confused one. In truth, they didn’t know what to do or how to handle the situation. They certainly weren’t thinking rationally; for a start they couldn’t decide exactly where to conceal the head. Linda later recalled:

‘Charlotte knows the park and we were saying “We will put it here and put it there.” We walked around for ages. We sat down on a rock. We were looking for different places, where the bench was. Charlie started digging holes with the knife. The hole was not very deep. I had the head on me back and I said to Charlie, “Get this off me.” Charlie took it out of the bag and put it in the hole. The head was still in the black bag. Charlie filled the hole. I could not do it.’

The hole she had dug lay a few feet away from a park bench. In a statement later produced in court, Linda said that their mother, who had accompanied them, ‘took the knives and hammer and flung them into one of the park’s lakes.’

‘We then went home. I burned the bag in a fire at home in the sitting room. Me da was in bed.’

Although they convinced themselves that they had gotten away with the killing, the death continued to haunt them in the hours that followed. Linda feared the body parts would be found in the canal. In fact, she was certain that someone would see something out of the ordinary, and find a body part. Her senses told her it was just a matter of time.

While Charlotte had the outward appearance of someone with not a care in the world, inside she too was beginning to break down. At one point, just days after the killing, she broke down and confessed to her sister Marie, who thought she was making up stories.

It was 6.30pm and Marie was just home from her job as an apprentice mechanic. She found Charlotte drunk when she walked into the house. She sat down beside her and comforted her, before Charlotte eventually said, ‘We’re after killing Farah Noor.’

Marie knew from previous experience that Charlotte was capable of telling wild stories, particularly when she was drunk. Marie kept quiet and just let Charlotte ramble on, thinking nothing more of the story. This time, Charlotte told a different version of the events that had taken place; she said that she had gone to the chipper with her mother, and when they returned, they found Noor trying to rape Linda.

Charlotte said she had first hit Noor, then Linda had hit him, causing him to fall. Marie would later make a statement which said: ‘She did not describe the items used to hit Farah, nor did I enquire. Charlotte told me that they then cut Farah Noor into two halves and buried him either side of the canal. She did not identify the canal, nor did I ask her. I honestly did not believe her. Charlotte was very upset at this stage and I was shocked to put it mildly, by the story she told me even though I did not believe her.’

Marie, who was a rock of sense, thought nothing more of the story. She did not believe her younger sister and didn’t press her for further details, as she thought that Charlotte was rambling.

Instead she went for a drive and when she returned, Charlotte had calmed down and was sitting on the couch, talking to their father. She appeared to be talking about normal matters, so Marie went to bed and didn’t think anything more of the story. She didn’t discuss it with anyone. However, it would later emerge that Marie played a significant role in getting her sister to speak to gardaí, once she realised there was truth in the story.

Perhaps, like Linda, Charlotte knew it was only a matter of time before the torso, or some other body part, was found in the water. As it would emerge, they were both right.

 

*****

 

Just hours after Charlotte and Linda had dumped the body parts into the canal, the torso began to float to the surface. It soon drew attention from passers-by who thought it looked like a body without a head. It floated because Noor’s lungs were full of air.

The location where they dumped the other body parts, including the arms and legs, almost guaranteed they would be found. The section of canal under the bridge was the clearest, allowing anyone who happened to walk by a full view of the submerged body parts, though the women had no way of knowing this as they had dumped the body in the dead of night.

Margaret Gannon was one of the many people who saw the mutilated torso drifting in the dark waters on 21 March, a Monday. In her statement, she said she saw a black plastic bag wrapped in brown tape floating in the water. She didn’t take much notice of it, but when she saw it again on Tuesday, she thought the bag looked like it contained a body with no head. She was struck by the sight but didn’t believe her eyes, and continued about her business.

Three days later, Paul Kearney was cycling along the canal from Jones Road to Ballybough. He saw an arm and other body parts submerged in the water under Clarke’s Bridge, known locally as Ballybough Bridge, but concluded that they were parts of a broken mannequin. He too didn’t think for a moment that the body parts could be real.

On the evening of 30 March, Peter Steinle was walking beside the canal from North Strand Road, when he saw a number of body parts—this time they were floating in the water. He noticed an arm and hand, a second arm floating separately, two lower legs and feet with socks.

He was horrified by what he saw and rang Crimestoppers when he reached home. He left a message on the answering machine, saying he thought he saw body parts floating in the water.

The second person to alert the emergency services to the remains that day was one James O’Connor. He often walked along the banks of the Royal Canal. Around 6.30pm, some hours after Steinle had phoned Crimestoppers, O’Connor noticed a number of youths standing around the water at Clarke’s Bridge. They told him without fear of contradiction there was a dummy in the water. Out of curiosity, he looked more closely; he thought he saw body parts but he wasn’t sure.

For some reason, O’Connor felt that something was wrong but he wasn’t sure what he was looking at. He could just about make out the shapes of the various body parts submerged in the water. Then, when he strained his eyes to look more closely, he began to see more body parts.

As his eyes wandered, he made out an arm, then a leg with a sock on the foot. As his eyes became accustomed to the dark water, he next saw what he thought was a torso and then a thigh. He immediately dialled 999 and asked for help.

His call was logged at 6.56pm at Tara Street Fire Station, a command and control centre in Dublin city. Fire officer Glen Mannelly took his call, which stated that there was a body in the Royal Canal.

The fire service presumed someone had fallen into the water, and dispatched two fire engines from the North Strand to retrieve the body. An emergency tender was sent at speed from Phibsboro while an ambulance rushed to the scene from Tara Street. Meanwhile, Garda Control was notified.

O’Connor waited on the canal bank for about five minutes when help arrived at 7.02pm. Derek Carroll was the district fire officer and the first to arrive at the scene. He spoke to O’Connor, who thanked him for coming and pointed in the direction where the body parts lay submerged in the water under the bridge.

Carroll looked into the water. He too could see a leg with a sock, the arm and other body parts. They looked real to him but like everyone else, there was a residual fear that this was an elaborate hoax. That’s why Carroll instructed one of his fire crew, Andrew Cullen, to examine the body parts more closely.

It should be noted that the body parts had turned a marbled white colour as they decomposed in the canal water. This caused them to look somewhat artificial. This, more than anything, ensured that no one was quite sure what to make of the discovery. There was only one thing they could do.

Cullen retrieved a drag from the fire tender and plunged it into the water. This was a fork-like object used for searching ponds and rivers. It immediately caught one of the arms that had been resting in about seven feet of water directly under the bridge.

Those present watched the drag emerge from the water wondering whether or not they might be the victims of a hoax. However, once the arm emerged from the water, all those present knew it was real.

The fire crew knew by looking at the marbling of the skin tissue, coupled with the odour of rotting flesh, that they had found a decomposing arm. In fact, the body had decomposed faster than normal because it had been dismembered—areas of a body which have sustained trauma decompose more rapidly than those that have not.

The decomposing flesh smelt putrid; it was rotting and began to fall apart. There was no mistaking its authenticity.

Cullen returned the arm to the water in order to preserve it. The fire crew then set about cordoning off the scene in accordance with established procedure. This was no longer their business; it was a murder scene.

Garda Alan Greally had been on duty that evening in Garda Command and Control. He had been notified by Dublin Fire Brigade just after 7pm that there might be a body in the water at Clarke’s Bridge in the north inner city. He entered the information gleaned from the emergency call into the Garda’s computer system, PULSE, as Incident No. 050890972.

The report was initially communicated to Fitzgibbon Street, the garda station nearest the scene. When they received the news, nine officers were sent to the canal within minutes, to seal off the area. The call also went out to the station’s Detective Unit to make their way to the scene.

They arrived as darkness descended but they learned enough to know they were dealing with a serious case. The scene was still not fully preserved, insofar as it had not been examined to any degree.

As the gardaí sealed off the area they began to find more body parts. For example, one officer noticed what he thought was a black plastic bag floating in the canal water some 20 yards away from the body parts under the bridge.

Given what had just been found, he looked more closely and disturbed the bag, causing the torso to float off. The bag was quickly retrieved and the area where it was found was marked with plastic markers.

It is standard procedure in cases where bodies are found in such circumstances to call a doctor. It may seem strange but the police at the scene were obliged to call a medic to pronounce death officially.

The doctor in question was Y.M. Fakih. He was met at the scene by Detective Sergeant Gerry McDonnell, one of the most experienced officers attached to the District Detective Unit at Fitzgibbon Street, who had arrived at the canal. He too saw what appeared to him to be mutilated limbs of a body submerged in the canal water. There was obviously nothing the doctor could do but confirm the remains were human.

The body parts could not be moved that evening so they were left in the water overnight to preserve them and any evidence that may have been left behind. Uniformed gardaí were left guarding the canal bank to keep the public from contaminating the scene. By this time, news of the gruesome discovery had broken on the news bulletins. Photographers and journalists descended on the north inner city while curious onlookers gathered on the canal bridge.

Rumours of the torso in the canal spread among the residents of the local flat complexes and housing estates. Teenagers and curious onlookers gathered to watch: among them were Charlotte and Linda.

They had been watching the evening news when their worst fears were realised. Inside the flat, Linda cried uncontrollably when a report on the body find was broadcast. She could barely comprehend what was happening.

‘We were all in the house crying. We then went down close to the bridge, close to where the guards had the tape. We walked on the side away from the Gala. We asked some people what was after happening. We went home and watched the news,’ she later recalled.

A sense of blind panic consumed the sisters. Linda was unable to stop crying; Charlotte was also overrun by emotion. They comforted each other, and drank as much alcohol as possible in a desperate attempt to come to terms with what they had done, but also to quell a sense of terror that had quickly enveloped them.

Linda feared jail more than anything else. She thought about being separated from her children.

Charlotte was also gripped by fear. In fact, neither of them could eat properly nor sleep; instead they spent their waking hours trying to imagine what would happen.

 

*****

 

Meanwhile the ten days that had passed since they had killed Noor now seemed like an eternity. Linda, perhaps, more than Charlotte, knew things would never be the same again. No matter what way she examined the situation, no matter how much she tried to deny she would be caught, she could not escape from the fact that sooner or later, she knew someone was going to come looking for her. Waiting for this event to happen, more than anything else, terrified her.

The next time her sister Marie gave Charlotte’s story more thought was when she heard that the body of a man had been found in the Royal Canal. She was sitting watching the news on TV3 with her father when she saw the report. The location of the body meant nothing to her as she wasn’t aware of where her mother lived, as she had dropped contact with her soon after Kathleen started going out with Noor. She had a brief conversation with her father about the news item, but did not discuss what Charlotte had drunkenly spoken about a few days previously. She would never have imagined that Charlotte could do such a thing. She would have called the gardaí if she had made the connection.

In any event, John Mulhall Snr appeared to Marie to know nothing about it, and they moved on to talking about more mundane matters. Marie would later make a statement which read:

‘I discussed the news story with my father, John. We just had a short conversation about it. He did not seem to know anything about the body at that stage.’