The Irish Scissor Sisters (31 page)

‘Yeah, a few people around town,’ she said.

‘What did they ask?’ Det Gda Smyth wanted to know.

‘Just what all this was about,’ she replied.

‘Is it hard to keep this type of thing secret?’ Detective Sergeant Mc Donnell wondered.

‘Yeah,’ Charlie agreed.

The two officers were trying to understand how somebody could keep such a secret and wanted to know how it had affected Charlotte and her family.

‘Is it? What way will it affect the family? Will it eat into the family?’ DS McDonnell asked.

‘I’ve hardly seen them, my family,’ Charlotte confessed to the detectives.

‘You’ve obviously discussed it with your sister Linda?’ Gerry McDonnell enquired.

‘Yeah,’ she answered..

‘And your father?’

‘After we were all … after we were all arrested, yeah,’ Charlotte confirmed.

‘What are you expecting now, Charlotte?’ Mike Smyth asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘What do you think will happen?’

‘I’ll be locked up for a long time, I suppose,’ the twenty-two-year-old said sadly.

‘Do you want to ask us any questions, Charlotte?’ Det Sgt Gerry McDonnell asked.

‘What’s going to happen?’ she wondered.

‘Well basically I suppose the Director of Public Prosecutions will be contacted and it’s going to be for him to decide what charge will be laid. He will be contacted tonight. If he gives a decision you could be charged tonight. Does that upset you?’ the Detective Sergeant asked.

‘Yeah,’ she told him, staring at the floor.

The interview then ended.

Charlotte had been interviewed for a total of five hours and thirty-one minutes during her ten hours and thirty-five minutes in garda custody. She was asked on nine separate occasions if she wanted a solicitor present but declined each time. Linda had received legal representation but Charlotte was confident that the guards wouldn’t realise that she was not telling the truth and didn’t feel like she needed a solicitor.

At 9.40 p.m. on 17 October 2005 Charlotte Mulhall was charged with the murder of Farah Swaleh Noor, after Detective Inspector Christy Mangan had consulted with Pat Godfrey, a professional officer at the DPP’s office. She was formally charged by Sergeant Declan Healy, the member in charge of Mountjoy Station. She replied ‘nothing to say’ when the charge was read out to her.

Charlotte Mulhall appeared before Dublin District Court the following morning at 10.15 a.m. Judge O’Donnell remanded her in custody for one week, to allow for the book of evidence to be served. Charlotte did not apply for bail until the next court sitting.

shocked when they were all taken in for questioning about Farah Noor’s murder, on 3 August. She had stressed to Linda and Charlotte that there was no evidence against them and they’d be fine if they sat tight and said nothing. She went to Kilclare Gardens the day after the arrests and Linda told her that Charlotte was in Mountjoy over outstanding warrants. When they spoke about the previous day, Kathleen shook her head sadly and said: ‘It was James; it was James. There were things being said that were only said to James.’ She could not believe that her first-born child had betrayed her.

Two days after she was released, she went into Fitzgibbon Street Garda Station and asked to speak with Garda Sheelagh Sheehan. She wanted her passport and social welfare card returned and was carrying a photograph of Farah. She started crying and said that the photo was all she had left of her boyfriend. Kathleen claimed she slept with it under her pillow at night. She said she’d been involved in a brief relationship with a Russian man named Alex but he’d left her when she told him that her ex-boyfriend had been murdered.

Over the next few weeks Kathleen cut-off all contact with her family and moved to Carlow without telling anybody. She had no friends or family there but it obviously felt far enough away from Dublin. She lost contact with her two daughters during this time and didn’t return any of Charlotte’s many phone calls. Charlotte only heard that Kathleen was in Carlow from somebody she knew who had seen her mother down there.

On 2 September Kathleen was back in Dublin, collecting her dole money at North King Street Social Welfare Office. She had just left when she saw DS Gerry McDonnell coming towards her. She warmly greeted the sergeant and asked him was there any chance she could get a lift with him to the post office in Dorset Street. The detective sergeant agreed to take her and during the short journey he told her that Linda had confessed to them. He said that Linda had told them that Kathleen had asked her two daughters to murder Farah Noor in her flat at Richmond Cottages on 20 March. The Detective said that Linda had made an official statement and that Kathleen would have to respond to the allegations in some way. She agreed to ring DS McDonnell after she’d had a chance to speak to her two girls. She got out of the car, saying she would talk to him later.

Kathleen Mulhall never made any contact, however, and the guards spent a week trying to get in touch with her, without any success.

Kathleen had a lot of time for Garda Sheelagh Sheehan who had interviewed her a couple of times on 3 August. On 13 September Gda Sheehan found out that Kathleen had secretly moved to Carlow. Detective Superintendent John McKeown travelled down to Carlow District Court that afternoon and made an application for the re-arrest of Kathleen Mulhall for the murder of Farah Swaleh Noor. The application for a warrant was granted.

The following morning Det Sgt Gerry McDonnell, Det Gda Pat Keegan and Gda Cliona O’Brien drove to Carlow, arriving at 84A St Mary’s Park at 12.35 p.m. When Kathleen opened the front door she was officially arrested and taken to Mountjoy Garda Station for questioning. Kathleen said she needed cigarettes and they stopped at a garage just outside Carlow. She tried to talk to DS Gerry McDonnell about the case during the car journey but he said they couldn’t discuss it until they got to the station.

They arrived at Mountjoy Garda Station at 2.05 p.m. and the forty-nine-year-old was processed and told that Linda had been charged with Farah’s murder. Kathleen said she wanted to talk to her solicitor. Daragh Robinson spoke to her by telephone at 3.07 p.m. and made plans to go to the station to see his client.

Kathleen was then interviewed from 4 p.m. to 6.26 p.m. by NBCI Detectives Malachy Dunne and Pat Flood. Detective Superintendent John McKeown granted a six-hour extension to her detention period after this.

Det Sgt Gerry McDonnell and Det Gda Pat Keegan went into the interview room at 6.50 p.m. and asked her to tell them the truth about what had happened in her flat at 17 Richmond Cottages on 20 March. Kathleen agreed to tell the men exactly what had occurred and she had just started to open up when there was a knock at the door. The detectives were informed that Peter Mullen, a colleague of Daragh Robinson’s from Garret Sheehan’s office, had arrived at the station and wanted to speak to their client. Kathleen initially indicated that she didn’t want to see the solicitor but then changed her mind and said she’d see him for five minutes.

The interview was suspended at 7.04 p.m. and before Peter Mullen went off to a private room to advise Kathleen, DS Gerry McDonnell told him that she was just about to tell them what had happened when he arrived. During her session with the solicitor, Kathleen also consulted with Daragh Robinson. She spoke to him two more times by phone, at 7.05 p.m. and 7.25 p.m. respectively.

The interview resumed at 7.38 p.m. and, between that time and her eventual release at 12.15 a.m., Kathleen stuck to the story she had told the gardaí when she was detained on 3 August. She denied any knowledge of her boyfriend’s murder. She also claimed she didn’t know anything about Linda admitting to carrying out the killing and pointing the finger of blame at her. She was asked how she felt about Farah Noor’s death and replied: ‘If you loved someone and they were found chopped to bits, how would you feel?’ She wouldn’t concede that Farah had been murdered in her flat and denied that he lived with her because he ‘never spent a full week there’.

Det Sgt McDonnell and Det Gda Keegan asked her if she spent every night at the flat.

Kathleen replied, ‘Actually, no, I didn’t. The nights I didn’t stay there I was out selling myself for money.’ She told the detectives that she had turned to prostitution to earn money to send back home to Farah’s family in Kenya. She claimed: ‘I started going up to Baggot Street to get money for Farah to send to his family, but he didn’t know I was going up there.’ She said that she had only started working the streets around the south city in the weeks before the murder because she was worried that Farah was claiming social welfare cheques he wasn’t eligible for as he was working.

When questioned, she couldn’t remember how many nights she had worked in and around St Patrick’s Day because she was drinking a lot, but thought it was probably ‘a good few’. She claimed that it was Charlotte who had introduced her to prostitution when she was short of cash. She said her daughter had brought her to an area called Lad Lane, just off Baggot Street, and showed her what to do to sell herself for sex, for fifty or sixty euro a go. Kathleen hadn’t even known that the notorious red-light area had existed until her daughter brought her down. After that she regularly worked the streets for extra cash. She was never arrested by the guards and said she used to spend nights in clients’ houses, before getting a taxi home the next morning.

She claimed that on the day of her boyfriend’s murder she spent the early afternoon drinking with him and her two daughters and stopped at an off-licence on the way home for some cans and vodka. After buying the drink she said: ‘I went off on my own, maybe down the street. I didn’t go home that night. Farah said he was going to see an ex-girlfriend. I was going my own way.’

She denied seeing Mohammed Ali Abubakaar on O’Connell Street when she was with the group, commenting, ‘That man did not even know my daughters.’

She also denied that Farah and she had an argument and even lied about them having a relationship: ‘No, me and Farah weren’t a couple. We didn’t have a relationship. He was my friend.’

The detectives could not believe what they were hearing. They knew for certain that Kathleen was involved in a relationship with Farah Noor but she was openly telling them lies – lies that she would obviously not be able to get away with.

Kathleen claimed that when Farah left her on O’Connell Street he promised to phone, but she never heard anything from him again. She said she walked down O’Connell Street, across the quays in the direction of Baggot Street, where she spent the night on the game. She drank the vodka as she went, to give her the courage to put herself in the potentially dangerous situation of selling herself for sex in a dark alleyway. After finishing her stint on the streets, Kathleen said she got a taxi home. It had started to get bright and there was nobody in the flat when she arrived. Something had happened though, because when she got into the flat, Kathleen stated: ‘All my clothes were pulled out of the dressers, pulled out everywhere. I went to the toilet and then I slept on the couch. I got up and started to fix my stuff. I noticed Farah’s clothes were gone except for a white jacket and a couple of T-shirts. All his other stuff was gone.’