The Irish Scissor Sisters (17 page)

Linda said she didn’t know what to make of the evidence. She was asked if she wished to make any alterations to the notes that gardaí had made of the interview and replied, ‘About the shop, where I said I wasn’t in the shop, I must have been in the shop.’ She was then released without charge after twelve hours in custody and went home to Tallaght.

Sergeant Liam Hickey had arrested Charlotte around Kilclare Gardens, just fifteen minutes before Linda was picked up from their family home. Charlotte was taken to Mountjoy Garda Station. Gardaí had difficulty in getting a doctor to the station to take hair, blood and saliva samples from her and there was a short delay while one was found. During her twelve-hour detention, she was interviewed on five occasions by Gardaí Niamh Coates, Ian Brunton, Nichola Gleeson, Fergal O’Flaherty and Detective Garda Tom Feighery.

The twenty-two-year-old insisted that she knew nothing about Farah Swaleh Noor’s murder. She said that she had no involvement and neither did her mother or sister. She denied carrying out the killing and dumping the body in the canal. She told them that her dad didn’t get rid of the evidence in his van. She said that her brother was telling lies when he said that they were involved and he ‘must be fucked in the head’.

Gardaí knew immediately that Charlotte was a hard nut and wouldn’t crack easily. They decided to ask her a series of difficult questions, to try to get her emotional so that she would be more inclined to tell the truth.

They asked her about cutting off Farah’s penis, enquiring if ‘it [was] a sexual thing, or was it pure spite on your part?’ Charlie didn’t bat an eyelid and they continued with: ‘Your mother, Kathleen, she was the one being badly treated by Farah. Did she get enjoyment when his penis was cut off? Was that the ultimate revenge? To clean up – I’d say that was great fun. When you were hungover after your birthday, was it a treat for you to clean up the mess?’

Charlotte was well used to dealing with the police and she had no respect for them. Questions such as, ‘Did ye enjoy cutting him up?’ or ‘If you say you didn’t cut him up, did you enjoy watching others cut him up?’ or ‘When you cut off his head did you talk to it? Do you find that funny?’ didn’t bother her in the slightest.

She said that the last time she’d seen Farah was in Eamon Doran’s pub in Temple Bar when she met him and Kathleen for a drink around mid-February. She claimed they had three or four drinks and then she got a taxi back to Jobstown. She said she never saw him around St Patrick’s Day and that she was very drunk at that time. Her mam had told her that Farah went off with a Chinese girl around mid- April and she didn’t ask many questions because it wasn’t her business. She said she wasn’t interested who her mam was seeing but she had known that Farah had had a child with the Chinese girl.

She told gardaí that she thought ‘not a lot’ when she heard on the news that the remains had been discovered in the canal. When gardaí put it to her that the crime was very gruesome, she said, ‘God, yeah.’

The detectives said they had CCTV footage of Kathleen and Farah on O’Connell Street taken on St Patrick’s Day. He was wearing the Ireland-away jersey but Charlotte said she’d only ever seen him in a Manchester United shirt. She told them she was drinking on 20 March because it was the day before her birthday but she couldn’t remember if she was with Farah and her mam and couldn’t remember if she saw a friend of Farah’s on O’Connell Street.

She claimed: ‘I can’t remember any of my birthday this year because all I done was drank.’

‘Surely you must have woken up at some stage, sober?’ she was asked.

‘Not if ya drank as much as I do,’ she responded.

‘Did you always drink a lot?’

‘Yeah,’ she said and claimed that she regularly suffered from memory loss because of drinking but denied that she was an alcoholic. She admitted, ‘I don’t really do much but drinking so there’s not much to remember.’

She said she couldn’t even remember where she woke up on the morning of her birthday, but it was in either Tallaght or Summerhill. She thought she’d spent the previous day drinking in a pub and her mam might have been with her, but she couldn’t be certain. Charlotte maintained she could remember absolutely nothing of March 2005, except for the fact that she met her boyfriend at the end of the month, on the thirty-first.

Gardaí said that they thought it was ‘very strange that you remember 31 March 2005 and no other days in your life.’ They asked her: ‘You don’t remember your birthday but know the day you met your boyfriend. Did you feel guilty on your birthday?’

‘I’d nothing to feel guilty about,’ she coldly replied.

Charlotte said she never took drugs, except for the odd E tablet and had never taken them with Farah and didn’t think that he was a drug user either. She couldn’t explain how a work colleague of her father’s had come into possession of Farah’s phone. She denied taking the phone after he was killed. She said she never changed the voicemail greeting on it and didn’t know who did.

The prostitute didn’t recognise Farah’s Ireland jersey or a pair of socks or a number of bags and other evidence exhibits that were shown to her. She identified Farah and Kathleen from CCTV stills taken in the Parnell Mooney pub on St Patrick’s Day and recognised pictures of the beds and dresser from her mam’s flat. She said she didn’t know why the wallpaper was removed from beside the bunk beds and said that the carpet was probably taken out because it was infested with cockroaches. She knew there had been a problem with cockroaches since Kathleen moved into the flat in December 2004.

Charlotte also claimed that she never saw blood in the flat in Richmond Cottages. She told the guards that she loved her mam and sister but wasn’t protecting them. She was certain that Kathleen never asked her to murder Farah because as she put it: ‘Well, I think you’d remember something like that, wouldn’t ya?’

The interviewing gardaí spent a lot of time asking Charlotte about the violence that her mother had suffered at the hands of Farah Swaleh Noor. She told them that she had seen Farah push her mam once and knew that he probably hit her but she didn’t have any details and didn’t ask. She then recalled one conversation with Kathleen where her mam had claimed that a scar on her leg had been caused in 2003, by Farah beating her up. They asked her if she was concerned that the man who was supposed to be her mother’s boyfriend was beating her up. Charlotte answered, ‘Obviously it concerns me; everyone has arguments though.’ She added that she wasn’t concerned about her mam’s safety. Just because he pushed her once ‘that doesn’t really mean how the general relationship was, does it?’ Although she had heard and suspected that Farah was violent towards Kathleen, she didn’t have a clue about how he treated her because: ‘I wasn’t there twenty-four hours, was I?’

Charlotte was asked if she had discussed worries about how her mother was being treated by Farah Noor with Linda at any time throughout the month of March. She answered that she hadn’t mentioned anything to her sister: ‘Why would we speak about me mother? Ya don’t speak about your mother, do ya?’

The twenty-two-year-old admitted that she had gone to see her brothers in Wheatfield during April and they had asked her how Kathleen was getting on. She didn’t tell them that their mother had split up with Farah and didn’t mention the small fact that he was beating her up because ‘it didn’t come up in conversation’. She didn’t like to talk about ‘other people’s problems’ on the visits because she didn’t want to upset John and James and there was nothing they could do about it anyway.

The fact that her two older brothers had contacted the guards and ratted on their whole family was also a topic of conversation during the interviews. Charlotte acted like she didn’t know what they were talking about and claimed not to know anything about Kathleen confessing about the murder to her sons. She said that she usually went to visit her brothers with her mother but there were times when Kathleen went on her own and she could have, in theory, told the two boys, but she did not think this was the case.

‘Well, how, apart from your brothers being psychic, which I take it they’re not, how on earth would they have known about all this?’ she was asked, but couldn’t offer an answer.

‘Your brothers rang us and told us that they’ve been told, so you see we’ve a serious problem here. Why did your brothers ring us up from prison to tell us what had happened? Why do you think that happened? Did they fall out with your mother or the rest of the family? Something happened, didn’t it, to change your brothers’ minds?’

Charlotte played dumb and insisted that she knew nothing about any murder.

Despite not revealing anything about the murder during her twelve hours of questioning, detectives were sure that she was lying. They were convinced that she was probably the main instigator of the murder. The guards felt that they would have a difficult job in getting her to come clean, however, and had to release her without charge – for the moment. When Charlie walked out of Mountjoy Garda Station she was nearly two months pregnant.

On 3 August forty-nine-year-old Kathleen Mulhall was staying at Ardfert House on Nelson Street in Dublin 7. At 10.15 a.m. she was arrested at Summerhill Parade by Detective Sergeant Gerry McDonnell, along with Detective Gardaí Terence McHugh, Pat Keegan and Garda Sheelagh Sheehan. She had been waiting outside the post office to collect her social welfare payment. She told the gardaí that there was no need to arrest her because she was on the way up to see them at the station anyway and she wasn’t going anywhere. She was taken to Mountjoy Garda Station for questioning. Detective Superintendent John Fitzpatrick of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation gave permission for her to be photographed and finger and palm printed. Officers also took samples of her blood and hair.

The four officers who had arrested Kathleen, along with Garda Sean Earley, interviewed her on six occasions during the twelve hours that she was held in custody. She contacted her solicitor, Daragh Robinson from Garret Sheehan’s office, and spoke to him by phone and in person during the course of the day.

When gardaí asked if she was involved in her partner’s murder, she completely denied having any hand in Farah’s death, saying: ‘That my kids may die I did not hurt a hair on his head.’ She added, ‘Do you think if I did anything I would still be in the country? Why would I stay here? I have a passport. I could have left.’

When asked if she was upset that he was dead she replied: ‘Yes. I was waiting for him to come back to me. Three years of my life I gave to him.’ She said to the gardaí: ‘I can’t understand that you’d think I’d hurt him. Farah was harmed enough times and what did anyone do? Irish lads beat him and they [the gardaí] did nothing. He has enemies: his so-called friends who gave him drugs.’

Kathleen said that Farah was often violent towards her but she never contacted the police. She thought that he would be capable of murdering somebody and had made her life hell at times while they were together. She denied that she murdered him for revenge and said he didn’t deserve to die ‘with no head and his body cut up’.

She stated that she had no idea how he ended up mutilated in the canal and insisted: ‘I didn’t do nothing; I don’t know how he ended up there. I never murdered Farah; no one touched Farah, no one in my family. You’re looking in the wrong place.’

Kathleen claimed that she was seeing somebody else and didn’t even know that Farah was dead until the guards told her on the day of her arrest. She said their relationship was over when he died and she saw him ‘like a friend, a companion’. Kathleen claimed that Noor was staying with her for two nights a week over the two months before he died but she didn’t know where he was when he wasn’t at Richmond Cottages. She spoke with gardaí about Noor’s history of cruelty to women but she totally denied that he had ever raped her, saying: ‘He did get sex. He never forced me. He never raped me.’

She said that Noor was a heavy drinker who used to polish off two large bottles of vodka a day, and always went out drinking, even though Kathleen always pleaded with him to stay in. He would fall into deep comas when he drank heavily and wouldn’t be able to defend himself if anybody attacked him. The mother-of-six also alleged that Farah took drugs but did not sell them.