The Torso in the Canal (3 page)

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.