The Irish Scissor Sisters (7 page)

‘It’s Da,’ Linda shouted, her face breaking into a smile for the first time in hours.

John Mulhall came into the flat but was in no mood for pleasantries.

‘What’s done is done. I can’t believe that you have got yourselves into this awful mess,’ he said sadly, the disappointment clear on his face.

He spoke to his daughters about what they planned to do. They told him the whole story, about Farah coming on to Linda and how he wouldn’t let her go and that they attacked him with the knife and hammer, killing him. John Mulhall was a decent human being and didn’t like the thoughts of anyone meeting such a bloody end, especially not at the hands of his two daughters. He hated what they had done but he felt it was his duty as a father to help them.

He went into the murder bedroom and removed the duvets and pillowcases from the bunk bed and also stripped the double bed down. He took some of Farah’s clothes and the bloody towels that had been used to mop up the blood in the kitchen. He also collected the kitchen knife with the black handle that had been used in the murder. When he was finished there were probably three half-packed black bags.

He then made two journeys out to his van and put the black bags in the back to dispose of them later. He wanted to make sure they were never found by the guards. He had wrestled with his conscience for the whole night and found himself back at Richmond Cottages under protest, but he felt there was nothing else to be done. He knew that by removing evidence from a murder scene he was directly implicating himself in the crime but his mind was made up. Two of his sons, James and John, were already in jail; he didn’t want his little girls to end up there as well. He hugged Linda and Charlotte and got into his City Glass work van and drove away.

At about 7 a.m. on 21 March 2005 the three Mulhalls left Richmond Cottages, with Linda and Charlotte each carrying a sports bag. But unlike many of the people out at that time of the morning they were not planning to get some exercise in the gym before going to work. Linda’s sports bag contained two arms, a vest and a pair of underwear belonging to Farah, while Charlotte held a bag over her shoulder with the heavier torso. Kathleen didn’t carry anything but still went with her daughters.

The Royal Canal is less than a three-minute walk from Richmond Cottages. The Mulhalls went out the door, down a laneway that led onto Summerhill Parade and turned left to Ballybough Bridge. There had been heavy rain during the night and they were immediately struck by the 50 km/h winds that blew from the south-east. It felt far chillier than 9° C. Summerhill Parade is one of the main arteries into the city and it would have been bumper-to-bumper at that time of the morning. It was full of commuters travelling into Dublin city centre from areas like Fairview and Beaumont on the north side of the city. The three women looked at each other in silence as they crossed Ballybough Bridge. They looked to the left where they could see the black, cold waters of the Royal Canal flowing slowly below. They trudged down the public walkway and looked up to see the imposing presence of Croke Park to their right. Kathleen started crying and stared at the ground, afraid to see the man she had spent three and a half years with being dumped in such a lonely way into a canal. Linda and Charlotte were cold though and just wanted to get the job done. They had been up the whole night carrying out the brutal and horrific dismemberment – they just wanted the nightmare to end.

Linda unzipped her bag and took out the arms that lay wrapped in the large black refuse sack. She opened the black bag and went over to the water’s edge. She gently emptied the two limbs into the water, which was probably about eight foot in depth. The sound of the arms hitting the canal made a pronounced splash but nobody saw the three women, even though dozens of people would have walked over the bridge while they were getting rid of the body.

Charlotte took her black bag out and held the bottom of it and swung the torso into the canal. It landed about three feet into the water and immediately sank. She took her mother by the arm and said: ‘Come on, Ma, that’s the worst part over now. Let’s go home and get the rest and that’ll be it.’

They walked side-by-side back to Richmond Cottages. It is not known how many trips they had to make that morning to dispose of Farah’s body. Linda later told gardaí they went back and forth six times and Charlotte estimated that it was three or four. It is probable that Kathleen only accompanied them once. CCTV cameras outside the Gala supermarket only observed Linda and Charlotte. Their mother wasn’t recorded. Traffic cameras did not pick up Kathleen either. A traffic camera captured the sisters on Ballybough Bridge at 7.23 a.m., just yards from the canal, with the bags on their backs. They went down to the water and when they returned minutes later the bags were empty. However many times they went to the canal that morning, by the time they had finished, Farah Swaleh Noor was lying in the canal in eight pieces, and nobody had seen what they’d done.

After they had finished dumping the body and had returned to Richmond Cottages, the women started to clean the flat again. They had left the cloths and towels steeping in hot water and bleach for a couple of hours and they went over the bathroom and bedroom again with the same amount of effort they had put in earlier. They had all seen programmes about cleaning crime scenes on television and knew that you had to be meticulous if you wanted to avoid detection. They spent the next three hours on their hands and knees, scrubbing the bathroom floor and walls, making sure that people would never think that anything untoward had occurred at the flat. They cleaned the flat with such professionalism that, after spending days combing over each part of Flat 1, a team of trained technical examiners was only able to find a handful of blood specks. Gardaí would later observe that the Mulhalls were so thorough that they could easily have started their own contract cleaning business.

The last area left to clean was the kitchen. They steeped the Stanley knife and murder hammer in bleach in the sink and wiped it clear of fingerprints. Kathleen put the weapons into a backpack and left them in the hallway.

When they were finally satisfied that they had done enough, they gathered all the towels and cloths and put them in a black bag in the yard alongside the carpet, for the bin men to take away.

While they were cleaning, the three women discussed what to do with Farah’s head, which was sitting in a black bag in the kitchen. Linda suggested that they should bury it far away from Ballybough so that if Farah’s body was found, the gardaí wouldn’t be able to use the head to identify him. Hundreds of Africans came into the country each year and promptly left without a trace. It would not be easy for them to identify the dead Somalian. Later on this strategy would make it doubly difficult for garda investigators to determine the identity of the torso in the canal. It was with this in mind that the women decided to get the bus to a park they knew in Tallaght and bury the head in the ground. They also planned to dispose of the knife and hammer they had used to carry out the murder.

The sports bags were damp from being ferried back and forth from the flat to the canal. Even though the black bags had stopped any fluid or blood damaging them they were still quite smelly. The women were afraid that if somebody sat down beside them in the enclosed space of a bus they might be alerted to the fact that something was wrong. Kathleen had no other bags in the flat but remembered that she had a camera bag that her husband had given to her as a present a few years earlier. She went into the bedroom and took the large black bag from the wardrobe. She removed the camera and Linda took the bag and put the battered head in it. They were now ready for a trip across town to Tallaght, where Farah’s head would be buried, hopefully never to be seen again.

The three Mulhalls left the house shortly after midday and, as they were walking out the door, Kathleen picked up the bag with the knives and hammer. They took the same route they had walked earlier that morning.

At 12.11 p.m. Linda and Charlotte were captured on CCTV camera entering the Gala supermarket on Summerhill Parade. Charlotte was dressed in a fitted denim jacket, with a pair of dark denim jeans and white runners. She was carrying a dark pink rucksack that looked to be quite bulky. She stayed in the shop for less than a minute before going outside, obviously looking for somebody.

She appeared on camera again thirty seconds later with her mother, and the three women went to the deli counter and queued in line to be served.

The camera footage shows the three Mulhalls in what appears to be an agitated state, as they shuffled their feet and looked nervous. Kathleen was wearing a cream jacket with fur on the collar, a grey polo neck jumper and denim jeans with dark shoes. She had a royal-blue bag over her shoulder and also carried a black handbag. She left the queue and picked up a bottle of water and bought it before exiting the supermarket at 12.15 p.m. Kathleen was a regular in the shop and had been filmed there five days earlier after she collected her social welfare money. She had gone to the household products aisle that day and had bought black refuse bags and bleach, as well as phone credit. It was that same bleach that had been used five days later to clean the Flat 1 crime scene, and Farah’s dismembered body parts had been placed in those same black refuse bags before being transported to the canal.

Linda reached the top of the deli queue and ordered a breakfast roll from the shop assistant. She asked for tomato ketchup to go with her sausages, bacon, eggs and hash browns. She was obviously feeling hungry after a hard night of murder and the subsequent clean-up. She also bought six packets of crisps and a packet of Superking cigarettes.

At 12.18 p.m. Linda buttoned her black leather jacket tightly against her purple polo neck and left the shop with her sister, before tucking into her brunch. She didn’t even like the polo neck and was only wearing it to please her mother. Her brother John had given it to Kathleen as a present two years before but Kathleen didn’t think much of it either and had passed it on to Linda as a gift when her daughter went to visit her in Cork the year before. Linda was carrying the dark camera bag, containing Farah’s head, on her shoulder. She put the bag on the ground outside the shop, as she enjoyed her breakfast roll.

Kathleen and Charlotte smoked cigarettes while Linda finished off her roll, and the group then walked towards town to get a bus. As they walked up O’Connell Street, Linda couldn’t help thinking about the previous day. If she’d just stayed at home with her children like she’d wanted to, instead of giving in to Charlotte, then everything would be fine now. Why did she even go back to her mam’s flat? She knew Kathleen was fighting with Farah and she should have just got a bus back to Tallaght like any decent mother would have done. She realised, however, that there was no point driving herself mad with ifs and buts now and she’d just have to make the best of things.

They crossed the Liffey and turned right down the quays and waited for a 77 bus to bring them to the Southside. One arrived after less than five minutes and they each paid their own €1.60 fare and went upstairs to sit down. It was 1 p.m. and the bus wasn’t that busy. Linda and Charlie sat together near the back, with their mother in front of them. The camera bag with the head in it rested under Linda’s feet for the journey. They rode along in silence because none of the three felt like talking, each was engrossed in their private thoughts. Little did the dozen or so fellow passengers upstairs realise that they were travelling with the head of a dead African man.

As the bus pulled into the Square Shopping Centre in Tallaght, they got off and walked through the doors, past McDonalds and the cinema complex. They took the escalator up to the second level, stopping briefly to check out the window of a clothes shop. After exiting the shopping centre the Mulhalls walked down the street until they could see Tymon Park North in the distance.

Tymon Park is officially known as Sean Walsh Park and is on the left-hand side of the Tallaght by-pass, in the foothills of the Dublin Mountains. It is a large public park where local people go to sit and read or play football and is described by South Dublin County Tourism as ‘the St Stephen’s Green of Tallaght’.

The three women crossed over the footbridge connecting the Old Bawn Road to the Square and into the main gate of the park. They started to walk around. The area was so big that it was hard to know where to start. They were looking for somewhere to bury the head and dispose of the murder weapons. Linda would suggest a spot close to trees, only for Charlotte to disagree and say that somebody would notice if the ground was dug up there. This went on for about four hours and they kept walking and walking around Tymon Park, but couldn’t agree on a suitable spot to bury Farah’s head. There was a bench at the back of the park, up a slight hill and they finally sat down for a much-needed rest. As they relaxed, they looked at the large lake in front of the bench. It would be a nice place to sit to pass a couple of hours but they weren’t in the mood for taking in the scenery.

Charlotte began to get frustrated saying they’d been here for hours and still hadn’t done anything. She jumped up and went about two feet behind the bench and started digging furiously at the clay with her hands. Linda didn’t think they should bury it a few feet from where people came to sit but Charlotte had started digging and wasn’t about to stop now.

Kathleen took the Stanley knife out of her bag and handed it to her daughter, who used it to help disturb the earth, but she was having difficulty. Charlie thought to herself that she should have come prepared and brought a shovel. She eventually stopped digging and stepped back to observe her work. The hole was not very deep but the ground was too hard underneath and it was the best she could do under the circumstances.

Linda started having flashbacks to the murder and panicked, shouting at her sister to take the bag off her back. Charlotte grabbed the camera bag and took Farah’s battered head out of the black plastic bag by his hair.

Kathleen and Linda couldn’t bear to look and covered their eyes while the birthday girl tossed the head in the shallow grave and started to kick the muck to cover it in. Linda couldn’t bring herself to help fill in the hole and sat on the bench sobbing.