The Irish Scissor Sisters (4 page)

He pulled her towards him and whispered that she was the image of her mother.

Angry, Linda tried to push Farah away, but he was far stronger than his small 5 ft 6" frame implied and she couldn’t get away from him. He pulled her close again and whispered into her ear, ‘We are two creatures of the night,’ or something like that. Linda was scared at this stage and shouted to her mam, who had come into the room.

‘What’s he saying about creatures of the night, Ma?’ she asked, her voice breaking with fright.

Kathleen told her Farah always said things like that but when she saw that he had his arm around Linda and wouldn’t let her go, she roared: ‘What do you mean by what you’re saying to Linda? What do you mean that we are two creatures of the night?’

Farah seemed to be in a different world at this stage and still had a hold of Linda.

Charlotte had always been very protective of her sister even though she was eight years younger than Linda. She shouted: ‘What the fuck are you saying to Linda, Farah? What do you mean about Linda? Let her go.’

Linda tried to get up off the couch again and get away from the demented African but he stood up with her. Farah wouldn’t release her from his tight grip. He started chanting ‘Linda, Linda ...’

Kathleen was roaring: ‘What the fuck are you doing, Farah? What the fuck are you doing? Get your hands off her.’

Linda was on her feet at this stage and had managed to stagger down towards the kitchen sink, but Farah still had a hold of her. She tried to shout at him but no words would come out. He put his hands down to her waist and Linda felt like he couldn’t even see Charlie and Kathleen. Farah was acting like he thought she was the only one in the room. She used all her strength to try to prise his hands from her waist but Farah was just too strong. She started crying and said to her mother: ‘He would sleep with your daughter just as soon as he would look at you.’

Sean Paul was still playing in the background as Charlotte got up off the settee and ran down to the kitchen.

Noor started whispering: ‘You are so like your mammy. You are so like your mammy.’

Charlotte lunged at Noor and told him, ‘Get your fucking hands off her now.’ Charlie was stronger and more street-smart than Linda. She worked as a prostitute, so she wasn’t to be messed with. She started pushing and pulling at him but his grip would not loosen.

Eventually he let Linda go and with a demented look in his eyes, walked towards Kathleen and grabbed her. Farah pushed her down towards the bedroom and made slitting signs with his hand, as if he was going to cut her throat and kill her.

Kathleen started begging her daughters to ‘please kill him for me’ or she would be dead herself by the end of the year.

Charlotte was furious and frightened and all she could hear was her mother repeatedly asking them to murder Farah, pleading: ‘Just please kill him for me; kill him for me.’

Both Linda and Charlotte thought that Farah was capable of anything with the way he was acting, and the younger Mulhall went over to the kitchen counter. There was a Stanley knife on top of it and she grabbed it. She pushed the button to make the sharp blade go up. Noor was still pushing Kathleen at this point and Charlotte went up behind him and grabbed the back of his head. She cut his throat with the blade, as hard as she could. She cut a four-inch gash and the injured man let out a gasp. He staggered forward with a look of disbelief on his face.

Kathleen was screaming, ‘Get him away from me. Get him away from me,’ as Farah stumbled into the bedroom. He got to about a foot short of the bunk beds, and fell hard, smacking his head off the wood.

Farah managed to get up and cried, ‘Katie, Katie,’ but Charlotte ran in after him and cut him on the throat again. He was still alive and clutching his throat, as blood oozed from his open wounds onto the blue carpet.

Linda went over to the kitchen drawer and took a hammer from it and followed her sister into the bedroom. Farah tried to get to his feet again. He attempted to pull himself up from the floor but saw the shadow of the hammer Linda was holding in her right hand. He let out a scream before the thirty-year-old used all her strength to bring the tool down on the top of his head.

Linda hit him repeatedly with the hammer and Charlotte stabbed him in the chest with the blade but they still weren’t convinced he was dead.

‘He’s alive, Linda, he’s still alive,’ Charlotte cried.

Linda was in shock and thought that the dying man was going to get her. She picked up the hammer and started pounding him on the head while Charlotte went out of control with the knife. She stabbed at every bit of Noor she could see through his Ireland jersey, which was left with gaping holes in it.

Charlotte finally stopped stabbing Farah and looked at his lifeless body. Farah was lying flat on the floor, with his head under the bunk bed, in a massive pool of blood. She didn’t need to check his pulse to see if Noor was breathing. The condition of the body said it all.

She turned to Linda and gently said: ‘Oh my God. He’s dead.’

The two women quickly realised the implications of what they’d done – they were now murderers. They hugged each other and cried, trying to console each other and convince themselves that everything would be all right. But they knew that things would never be the same again and that they were facing life behind bars.

After about fifteen minutes they calmed down and remembered that Kathleen was sitting in the front room. She had not come near the bedroom while the murder took place, although she undoubtedly knew what was happening to her lover while she sat in the other room.

The sisters slowly got up, held hands and walked into the sitting room. Both of them were covered in blood and their jeans had turned a dark red colour from kneeling in the pools of Farah’s blood. Charlotte was shaking her head as she told her mother that her boyfriend was dead.

Kathleen started screaming and her two daughters joined in. Within seconds all three were crying uncontrollably, as the effects of the alcohol and E tablets began to wear off.

Kathleen finally stopped crying and said: ‘Get him out! Get him out.’

They had a discussion about how to get rid of Farah’s body. Linda would later tell gardaí that her mother asked, ‘How are we going to get him out?’ and that Charlotte said they should cut him up and dump his body in the nearby canal. Charlotte tells a different story and later said, ‘Me mammy said just cut him up.’

The sisters went into the kitchen and poured themselves a large vodka and coke. They knocked it back, trying to get the courage to carry out an act so unimaginable that it would make anybody physically sick. They had a couple more drinks and then looked at each other before heading into the bedroom where Farah’s body lay.

The pools of blood had started to congeal at this stage and the blood on the carpet where Farah’s chest rested had spread to a five-foot radius. Charlotte left a large shoe print with her runner as she climbed to the left-hand side of the body and pulled him out from under the bed. She took his left leg and Linda grabbed a hold of his right foot and they dragged him out into the hall and down to the bathroom, about six feet away. A trail of blood marked the route where Farah’s body was pulled from the murder scene in the bedroom to the bathroom where his limp body would be chopped up.

The bathroom in Flat 1 was filthy with dirt and grime and the tiles on the floor were thick with months of dust and scum. It was too small for a bath. A toilet sat at the back of the bathroom and a small shower area was to the right of this, about a foot and a half away. The walls were tiled and they hadn’t seen a cleaning brush in years.

It took all the women’s strength to drag Farah in and to dump him in the shower, which was barely covered by a curtain. The base of the shower was far too small for the whole body to fit and his legs stuck out the side, lying against the floor tiles.

The girls went into the kitchen and searched the drawers for something sharp to cut the body up with. Kathleen wasn’t one for home cooking so they had to make do with a nine-inch bread knife. The brand of knife was Kitchen Devil and both the hammer and knife had been in the flat when Kathleen moved in, nearly four months before.

Kathleen didn’t want to see her boyfriend being dismembered so she went and sat in the front room. She hadn’t moved during the murder and wasn’t going to get involved now.

Linda and Charlotte walked slowly into the bathroom and just stared at the body for a few minutes. Charlotte sat on the toilet and put her head in her hands, before getting up and walking over to Farah. She took the dead man’s trousers off and left them on the floor. His two legs were fully exposed now and he was only wearing white underpants.

She picked up the knife and took Farah’s right leg in her left hand. She then started to use the knife as a saw and cut through the dead man’s right leg above his knee. She didn’t think the knife would be sharp enough but was surprised by how quickly the flesh cut, but the bones were more of a problem.

The sound of the knife grinding through bone and cartilage at the top of the knee was too much for Linda. She cried and cried and would not stop.

Charlie was focused on the task at hand and managed to hack through most of the leg after a few of minutes of intense effort. She couldn’t completely separate Farah’s kneecap from his thigh so she got Linda’s hammer and started hitting the middle of the knee for extra force. Blood splattered all over the bathroom and specks dotted her face. She alternated between the Stanley blade and the bread knife until the top of the kneecap eventually separated from the body. She picked the limb up and tossed it into the shower area, not bothering to remove Farah’s white sock. She then started sawing the left leg below the thigh and easily cut through the fatty part but again had problems with the muscle.

Linda had calmed down by then and used her hammer on Farah’s left leg. She beat at it furiously until she could hear the weight of the metal hammer crack through the victim’s shin bone, shattering it. She must have hit him around thirty times before her arm got tired and she sat back on the toilet seat for a rest.

Charlotte continued to work on the leg as Linda went into the linen press and took out clean white towels. She put a towel over the limb to stop the flow of blood that was seeping out of an artery. The blood was still warm.

As Linda breathed heavily, trying to regain her breath, her sister continued to saw at the left leg until it separated from the rest of the corpse. She was getting better at it now but there was blood everywhere. It was seeping out the side of the shower onto the floor tiles, leaving a horrible mess. Linda used the white towels to soak up the blood from the bathroom floor and they soon turned a cross between dark red and black, as the blood mixed with the filthy floor.

The sisters had to repeatedly rinse out the towels using cold water from the shower. The plughole was blocked with blood and bone, so Linda had to put her hand down to clear a path for the water to escape. After she did this, she finished wringing out the towel and threw it across towards the sink on the other side of the bathroom. The wet towel hit the tiled wall and stuck to it, before slowly sliding to the floor. It left a two-foot long bloodstain.

It was clear that they needed to get rid of the bits of flesh and bone fragments that were blocking the shower and causing a mini-flood on the floor. Charlotte lifted up the toilet lid and they each scooped up flesh and bone, throwing it down the toilet and flushing the chain. Later, tenants remarked that there was always a problem with the sewerage in the flat.

With both Farah’s legs dismembered, he could now fit neatly into the shower. It was far too uncomfortable, however, trying to lean in and cut the corpse while trying to avoid the limbs that had already been severed. They would have been there all night if they had to do that. So they pulled the body out of the shower by the arms and laid it on the floor and cut it up there. Linda knelt on the floor for most of the grim butcher’s job while Charlotte sat on the toilet. They tossed each body part into the shower as they cut them off and this system seemed to work quite well.

Over the next few hours, Charlotte became tired from cutting and said her right arm was sore. Every forty-five minutes or so she would sit on the toilet seat and rest for a few minutes while Linda took over the cutting. Both women alternated between using the knife to cut the victim’s flesh and the hammer to break his bones, by repeatedly chipping at them.

During the rest periods, whichever sister was not disposing of Farah’s body would spend their time using the bath towels to clean the excess blood from the floor. There were two large holes in the floor, which had been caused by the hammer slipping when they were beating Farah’s leg earlier in the night.

While her children were cutting up the body, Kathleen remained in the living room, leaving her daughters to get on with the grim deed. Charlotte and Linda next cut off both Farah’s arms, halfway between the elbow and shoulder blade. This took longer than you would imagine because the dead man was so lean and muscular; there was no fat on him at all. The Stanley knife was used for this and although it was small, its blade was very sharp and was perfect for getting past the difficult muscle. After the arms and legs were removed, they severed Noor’s two thighs from below the hipbone.

Thirty-nine-year-old Farah Swaleh Noor had been alive and well only a few hours before but now all that remained of him was the upper part of his body, from his hips to his head. But the sisters were far from finished. They used the knife to cut off his midriff and opened up the stomach in the process. Farah’s stomach was already riddled with massive gaping wounds from where Charlotte had repeatedly plunged the knife into his chest. When the stomach was exposed it was almost too much for Linda to bear. She was especially disgusted by what they were doing and regularly used her top to cover her face to shield herself from the stink of the remains. The deep, foul smell of the gut and entrails in an open stomach would be enough to make even the most experienced medical technician retch. She nearly got physically sick. They left the Ireland jersey on the body in a vain attempt to contain some of the smell. In the days and weeks following the murder, Linda could not sleep. She was kept awake at night with the memory of the lingering scent of human flesh being opened up. Somehow they kept to the task at hand and cut the midriff through the spine until it separated, leaving only the upper part of the body from the ribs to the head remaining.