The Irish Scissor Sisters (46 page)

Gibney was serving a five-year sentence for the possession of 9,000 E tablets worth €135,000. The drugs were in a shopping bag in his car when he was stopped by gardaí for a routine search. He pleaded guilty to possession and said he was moving the drugs for someone else. He was regarded as a responsible prisoner and was given a trustee job in the kitchen of the female jail. This was obviously a highly sought after position because of the number of females around, which naturally appealed to men spending long periods of time locked up. He was released from Mountjoy shortly after the photo was taken and when he was tracked down to his home in Crumlin, the forty-year-old told reporters, ‘I’ve taken a lot of crap over this photo; I really don’t need this shit. I won’t be giving any information about that photo. If I want to talk, I’ll call you and let you know.’

Perhaps the most bizarre story to emerge about the Scissor Sisters appeared in the
Star Sunday
newspaper, also in August 2008. The reporter claimed that Linda Mulhall had become pregnant behind bars by one of the inmates from the Mountjoy men’s prison, who worked with her in the kitchen. She allegedly told family members that a scan had confirmed that she was expecting her fifth child. A Prison Service spokesman immediately came out and dismissed the report as inaccurate and nine months passed without the baby ever appearing.

In February 2009 Charlotte Mulhall broke her years of silence to give a telephone interview to the
Sunday World
newspaper from her plush room at the Dóchas Centre. In the same week that her mother, Kathleen, pleaded guilty to the part she played in the brutal death of Farah Noor, Charlotte described how she would never tell gardaí where Noor’s head was and how she was still haunted by the murder and often cried about it.

When asked by reporter Niamh O’Connor what Noor was like, she said, ‘He was an evil bastard … He broke my ma’s ribs with a hurley, her hand with a hammer … The things he done.’ Describing the day of the murder in March 2005 she said, ‘We were very high ... I think I was that out of my head, really, I didn’t really realise what I was after doing until the next day. I still can’t believe it, that it’s true. He was trying to strangle me ma … dragging out of Linda and pulling out of her and saying mad shit to her. He was a weirdo … The most I remember about it is that Linda and my ma panicked and were afraid. They were just screaming, basically, what are we going to do with this [the body]?’

Charlotte then described cutting up Noor’s body and how she felt she had to be strong for Linda. ‘The two of them were just really losing it altogether. I dunno; it was just a spur of the moment, like, and me ma said we’re going to have to cut him, cut him up, like.’ She then started to cry and said, ‘I dunno; I think it was just panic trying to get rid of it and cut him up, basically. I don’t sleep. You always see it in front of you, just like flashbacks all the time. It is really hard to deal with. I try to tell myself that it’s not real, kind of, but it’s very hard, though, really.’

Charlotte also said that she felt that she and Linda had been wrongly convicted of Farah’s killing and that she was unhappy that evidence about Noor’s abuse was not heard. ‘We were convicted before the trial even started. The jury didn’t hear his two ex-partners give evidence. They were sent out for that. The jury were sent out for that in case they, what was the word, prejudiced the jurors. I mean that girl told of how he was molesting his own child and everything. He broke her arm, raping her for years when she was only sixteen. The judge said that would prejudice the jury. He couldn’t listen to it, basically.’

Charlotte said she had no hard feelings about her mother fleeing to London, where she spent her time bedding sex offenders. ‘Me ma was a great ma. So was me da; that’s one thing I will say to them. In later years that [her parents’ break-up] was between them, but it never affected any of us in any way.’

She also described the trauma that her mother had gone through after Noor’s tragic death, but maintained that Kathleen did not still love the dead African. ‘She does not [still claim to love him]. She doesn’t even talk about it. It’s too hard for her. Even if I try and mention something to her about it, she’ll just break down in tears. She is taking it very bad now. I don’t think she can really cope with it. She’s been drinking and all. She’s lost an awful lot of weight. She used to be very happy-go-lucky.’

Even though Kathleen Mulhall admitted to detectives that she sold her body as a prostitute and that Charlotte had coached her, Charlotte denied that this was the case. ‘That’s a lie. I was out working, me mother never did … I only actually started going out working on the streets after all that hassle [her parents’ break-up over Farah Noor]. That’s when I started on heroin and heavy drugs, and it was just to pay for my habit really.’

Despite being jailed for life because she’d carried out the murder on her mother’s say-so, Charlotte had a remarkable lack of bitterness towards Kathleen. When asked if she blamed her at all for her predicament, she said, ‘I don’t know if she actually knew what she was saying, because she was, we were all really out of our heads … To me, me ma, she’s an older woman and she didn’t even actually see anything that we done that night.’

Charlotte even defended her deadbeat mother when talking about the way Kathleen kicked John Mulhall out of his home so that Noor could take his place. ‘Me da was having an affair with someone she knew, so there was always trouble in the family … But to me that was a long time ago,’ she said.

Charlotte still wasn’t prepared to come clean and confess to what really happened to Farah’s head. A lot of detectives had major doubts about Linda’s version of events, in which she claimed to have smashed the skull with a hammer, in a field in Tallaght. ‘I don’t think it would actually make a difference at this stage, not after being sentenced,’ was Charlotte’s answer when she was asked why she wouldn’t come clean about the where the head was. ‘They won’t even let me appeal against it [the sentence], so I really don’t think it would make a difference. I think it’s just gone too far. It’d only just start another whole load of publicity again. I think it’s just best to leave it be really.’ When asked if a full and frank confession would show that she feels remorse for what happened on the night of the Noor murder she replied, ‘I don’t know. I just can’t really say. I swore I wouldn’t.’ She said she made this promise to her mother and Linda and that, ‘I’m the kind of person, if I give someone my word, I just can’t go back on it.’ she concluded, before hanging up the phone.

In May 2009 Kathleen Mulhall appeared before the Central Criminal Court to answer for her role in Farah Noor’s death. Coincidentally it was Mr Justice Paul Carney who presided over the case. Carney had been the judge in Kathleen’s daughters’ trial and had famously said of it: ‘It was the most grotesque case of killing that has occurred in my professional lifetime.’

Kathleen admitted to cleaning up the murder scene at her flat in Ballybough and was facing a possible ten-year sentence for the cover-up. The strain was clearly evident on her face as she broke down in court and wept as details of Farah Noor’s killing were read into the record. Her senior counsel, Hugh Hartnett SC, said Mulhall had been abused by her parents, her husband and later by Mr Noor, but she had never been in trouble with the law and had no previous criminal convictions. He pleaded to Mr Justice Carney that, ‘Not to take it [the abuse] into account would be an outrage against justice.’ He said that Mulhall had suffered bouts of depression and had turned to religion in the Dóchas Centre. ‘She was abused as a child by her father and, indeed, her mother. Despite that, she never got into trouble and got married at a very, very young age.’

Evidence was heard that Mulhall had initially denied any knowledge of the murder but had eventually admitted that she had stayed silent to protect her children. She also offered to take the blame for the killing to protect her daughters, it was heard. Hugh Hartnett said his client had tried to do her ‘level best’ for her family.

Mr Justice Carney adjourned the sentencing hearing for a number of days and requested a transcript of the short hearing.

When the case went back before the court, Mulhall was more composed, and, dressed in a brown pinstriped jacket and pink shirt, stared ahead and showed little emotion or fear of what she was facing. Mr Justice Carney said he would take into account the fact that Mulhall had returned from the UK voluntarily. He also noted that she was trying to protect her children and had suffered abuse and violence at the hands of Noor, her late husband and other members of her family. The judge imposed a sentence of just five years and backdated it to February 2008, when she first came back to the country and was remanded in custody. This meant that she would be freed at the end of 2011. It was a very good result for Mulhall, who many detectives believe had got off very lightly indeed.

There was some controversy over whether life in the Dóchas Centre was too easy, when the long-serving governor Kathleen McMahon controversially retired early, in May 2010. After she resigned she gave media interviews in which she severely criticised the Irish Prison Service, saying that the Dóchas Centre had become severely overcrowded and that the progressive, non-judgemental regime that she encouraged during her time as governor was being ‘cannibalised’. She also claimed that the overcrowding was leading to a major increase in lesbianism among the women.

In response, the director general of the Irish Prison Service, Brian Purcell, highlighted the fact that the prison service was obliged to take every inmate that the courts decided to jail and could not put a ‘full up’ sign in the jail. He said that overcrowding was undesirable but inevitable and that the new jail planned for Thornton Hall would ease the overcrowding situation. He told the
Sunday Tribune
: ‘The Dóchas Centre is our flagship model. The new facility will continue with that regime and improve on it. We will have a lot more space. The bunk-bed situation is not ideal. The regime we have for women at the Dóchas Centre works very well. It wouldn’t necessarily work the same for male prisoners. Men and women are different. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus.’