The Irish Scissor Sisters (13 page)

Twenty-four-year-old Paul Kearney, a local man, was cycling along the canal from Jones Road towards Ballybough at around midday on Good Friday, 25 March. As he approached the bridge, he saw what he thought was a right arm in the canal. When he stopped to take a closer look, he saw other body parts, including a leg. The arm was sticking out of the top of the water and he could see fingers and nails on the clenched fist, but it was the same whitish colour all over so he thought it was a dummy. He rang his dad, Paul Snr, who was sitting at home, and said: ‘Da, you’re not going to believe me. I was walking along the canal when I saw part of a body.’ He told his dad he was worried, but his father thought he was joking and started laughing, telling him to ‘go away out of that’. Paul hung up the phone but a few times over the next week thought about his find. He contacted Fitzgibbon Street when the body was eventually discovered.

On the day that the remains were finally uncovered, fourteen-year-old Christopher Leech was fishing in the canal with his pal Sean Tighe. The teenagers were on their Easter holidays and were sitting on the bank of the canal beside Ballybough Bridge. At about 2.30 p.m. Christopher saw a black bag with see-through Sellotape around it, floating down from the Croke Park side of the canal. The closed bag wasn’t moving very quickly and was being carried back and forth around a small area by the current. Christopher later told detectives that half the bag was under the water, with the other half floating on top, near the bank. He was looking in the water for pike but didn’t see any fish and didn’t notice any body parts either. The boys thought nothing more of what they’d seen and continued fishing for another hour or so. Then they went back to Christopher’s house, which was across from Ballybough Bridge. When they looked out his window later in the evening they saw a large crowd at the bridge, with police cars and fire engines.

At about 4 p.m. that same afternoon Ballybough man David O’Connor was out for a walk on the canal with his two daughters. His girls were looking at a football that three or four kids had just kicked into the water. David was on the Williams Street side of the canal and saw a bag lying on the bottom of the water, under Ballybough Bridge. It was white and medium-sized like a plastic shopping bag, with something in it that looked round. He didn’t pay much attention to it and his daughters never saw it at all. They continued on home and David only thought about the incident when a garda called to his home later.

At the same time Linda Staunton from Ballybough was returning from dropping old clothes to a recycling centre near Westwood Gym in Clontarf. She sat down on the bench nearest Ballybough Bridge to have a cigarette. She stayed there for about five minutes with her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Jade, who was asleep in her buggy. She saw Christopher Leech and Sean Tighe fishing and also saw three other youngsters throwing rubbish into the water. She noticed a black plastic bag floating on the canal at the bridge and assumed that the children had thrown it in. She paid no more attention to it.

Linda also told gardaí that on or around St Patrick’s Day she had seen a group of young people in their early twenties around the canal. She described how they ‘looked like college students – they were respectable’. There were two males and two females in the group and one of the girls was trying to remove a big plastic bag that looked ‘packed out’ from the middle of the water. Linda went home without seeing anymore but the incident stuck in her mind because ‘you don’t normally see college students along the canal but they had an interest in the bag’.

At 8 a.m. the following morning, Det Gda Geraldine Doherty arrived back to Ballybough Bridge to carry out a technical examination of the scene. Before she met the dive team that was en route from Athlone, she collected a number of samples and packaged and numbered them. As gardaí did not have any idea of the victim’s identity she was very thorough in collecting and bagging anything that might potentially be of evidential value. She took samples of paper that lay beside faeces under the bridge, three swabs from the faeces, as well as collecting cigarette butts and chewing gum. These would all be tested for DNA to hopefully identify the victim.

The garda sub-aqua team arrived at around 8.30 a.m. to carry out the unenviable task of removing the limbs from the canal waters. Sergeant John Bruton from Athlone Garda Station headed the team of four. Sergeant Bruton was acting as the dive supervisor while Garda Eamon Bracken, who was also stationed in Athlone, set up and tested the equipment that would be used to film the dive. The two gardaí whose job it was to recover the limbs – Gardaí Eoin Ferriter and Brian Breathnach – were both from Santry Garda Station and were experienced divers.

Sergeant Bruton was briefed by Detective Sergeant Mick Macken from the Technical Bureau, who was acting as the crime scene manager. Superintendent John Leahy also talked the dive expert through what had happened the previous day, so he could prepare his two divers for the job ahead.

Gardaí Ferriter and Breathnach put on their diving gear while Garda Eamon Bracken was finishing setting up the Colourwatch, a state-of-the-art underwater video system. Before they even got started, the two divers, Ferriter and Breathnach, removed the torso that was floating in water close to a wooden jetty, 150 feet past the bridge in the direction of Croke Park. Garda Brian Breathnach lifted up the torso and scooped it into a body bag held open by his colleague. Both men could clearly see that the victim had suffered multiple stab wounds to the chest area. The head and both arms had been removed and the torso hacked off across the midriff. They got the torso out of the water using a stretcher and placed it on the wooden jetty, where it was handed over to Detective Garda Geraldine Doherty.

The dive then got under way at 9.55 a.m. when both divers entered the freezing water. Garda Breathnach held the Colourwatch camera, which relayed video images that were recorded and watched on the surface by Garda Bracken. This underwater video survey took about forty-five minutes and seven body parts were located, at a depth of about 1.8 metres, under the bridge, close to the canal wall.

A part of a lower leg was the first limb recovered, followed by a thigh, a full leg, an arm and the midriff, followed by a second arm and finally, another section of thigh. Each limb was placed in a separate plastic evidence bag under the water before being handed over on the surface to Sergeant Bruton, who passed each bag on to the Technical Bureau. The video footage clearly showed that the pelvis was wrapped in a green and white Umbro football jersey.

Senior gardaí supervised this important dive and Sgt John Bruton offered instructions from time to time, making sure that the video footage would be of sufficient quality to be used in any later court case. The underwater search team continued to scour the canal in search of other body parts, from the lock gates under Ballybough Bridge up as far as Croke Park, a few hundred feet away. It soon became clear that the victim’s limbs had all been dumped in the one spot and that the torso was the only body part that had floated away from where it had been dumped.

At 11.10 a.m. both gardaí were called out of the water and got dried off before going back to their stations. Garda Bracken labelled the videotapes of the morning’s work and handed them over to Det Sgt Colm Fox. Over the next few days other searches of the canal took place, including one from Crossguns Bridge back to Ballybough, but nothing more was found.

After the divers had left the scene, the work of the Garda Technical Bureau was only just starting. Members of this elite section, based at Garda Headquarters in the Phoenix Park, are trained to work methodically and routinely spend hours trawling crime scenes. As well as gathering chewing gum and old cigarette butts from under the bridge, Detective Garda Doherty also took samples of canal water and drained water from the recently recovered torso. She took swabs from bloodstains found close to where the body parts were recovered under the bridge. Items of clothing removed by the divers, including a pair of jeans and a tracksuit top, also had to be bagged up and sent to the lab for testing.

Stafford’s Funeral Directors, who are based at nearby North Strand Road, were contacted by the City Coroner’s office and agreed to remove the victim’s body to the City Mortuary in Marino. Nevin Stafford arrived at Ballybough around midday and was directed to the two body bags that contained the remains. He loaded them onto a stretcher and placed them in an ambulance. He was accompanied to Marino by Garda Cliona Beirne. Karl Lyons, the Mortuary Technician, met him and took delivery of the body bags.

Later that afternoon, Malachy Fallon from Stafford’s picked up the body bags and brought them to Beaumont Hospital. The limbs were X-rayed before being brought back to the morgue for the post-mortem.

Dr Michael Curtis, the Deputy State Pathologist, carried out a post-mortem examination at around 7 p.m. that evening. He had been at the scene at 9 a.m. that morning when his preliminary examination revealed that the victim had most likely died from stab wounds.

Dr Curtis determined that the body parts found in the canal were probably those of a healthy black male, aged between twenty and thirty years old. It had originally been thought that the remains were those of a white man because they’d been in the water so long that most of the skin had separated from the limbs. The body had been contaminated with silt and fresh-water prawns and he thought that it had probably been in the water for in excess of a week. When he looked beneath the white underpants it was clear that the man’s penis had been amputated, along with the anterior part of the skin of the scrotum. The testicles were still present, as was the victim’s pubic hair.

When the body parts were laid out on the mortuary table their combined length measured 5 ft 4", which meant that allowing for the head, the body would have probably been in the region of 6 ft. The victim appeared to be of an athletic and muscular build.

According to the post-mortem, ‘There was considerable water-logging of the skin of the wrists, hands and fingers, producing a so-called washerwoman appearance.’ The hand was found in a clenched position with the fingernails short and ragged. There were no defensive wounds to the hands or fingers and the way the bones of the body were fragmented indicated that they had probably been cut by a sharp instrument. Some of the fracturing was not very clean though, which suggested that a blunter instrument had also been used.

The victim had been stabbed a total of twenty-two times, with eighteen of these wounds being made to the middle of the chest, between the nipples and neck. Many of these wounds measured 3.5 cm, such was the ferocity of the assault. There were two injuries to the lower chest. The stomach had suffered four wounds to its front and was empty when examined. There was also trauma to the large intestine and colon. There was a 22 cm wound on the victim’s back which had penetrated deep into the flesh, while another wound to the shoulder blades was also detected, as was a stab wound to the lower left-side of the back.

The liver appeared pale and there was a superficial V-shaped wound on it, as well as a 2 cm long cut to its posterior. The left kidney bore a small amount of surface damage, which had most likely been caused during the dismemberment. The bladder had been pierced a number of times and was empty. There was significant damage to three ribs, caused by the knife cutting through the stomach. The victim’s stomach contained traces of blood and blood clot. Two attempts had also been made to penetrate the heart but these stab wounds only caused damage to the heart muscle, the organ itself was not penetrated. The dead man’s lungs had been penetrated five times. All of the victim’s vital organs were healthy and Dr Curtis believed that the dead man had a history of good health and had not been in any way sick.

Alcohol was detected in the blood but the level could not be quantified. Drugs were not initially detected.

Dr Curtis’s report concluded: ‘This man’s body had been dismembered. Dismemberment would have occurred after he had succumbed to multiple penetrating wounds. In the course of the dismemberment, the soft tissues had been cut relatively cleanly with a sharp knife or similar implement, while the bones had been severed relatively clumsily by repeated chopping actions from an instrument or instruments such as an axe or a cleaver. The head and neck had not been recovered at the time of post-mortem examination. The penis had been amputated and was not recovered.’

He determined that the victim had died as a result of ‘penetrating wounds to the trunk’.

Detective Garda Geraldine Doherty was present while the examination took place and was in charge of handling samples taken from the remains. Samples of the victim’s pubic hair, nail swabs and anal swabs were taken. Bone marrow, muscle tissue samples, as well as blood and toxicology samples, were also gathered and handed over to Dr Hillary Clarke of the Forensic Science Laboratory in Dublin. Dr Clarke was also responsible for testing the soccer jersey, vest, underpants, socks and tea towel that were found with the remains.

Mr Neil O’Brien, a biochemist at the Toxicology Department in Beaumont Hospital, took delivery of the toxicology samples. Detective Garda Glenn Ryan of the Bureau’s fingerprint section took a set of palm and fingerprints from the body. They would be checked against the National and Asylum Fingerprint Databases to see if the victim had applied for asylum as a refugee. Europol, Interpol and international immigration authorities’ records would also be checked.