The Irish Scissor Sisters (11 page)

Three weeks after Kathleen had moved upstairs she invited her neighbour Donna up to her flat for a drink. When Donna arrived at Flat 4 Charlotte was there, along with the two women’s boyfriends, Dilmurat and Alex. Donna had one glass of vodka before her taxi arrived, as she was going out for the evening.

Donna later stated that she was on decent enough terms with Charlotte and Linda and that Charlotte had called into her for a chat a couple of times. Donna also spoke to Linda once or twice while she was around Richmond Cottages. She said she got the impression that Linda was not very close to her mother and had taken her father’s side when the couple had separated. She was a shy person who kept herself to herself and didn’t mix with other people like her mother and sister. Linda suggested that they should go out drinking together. Donna agreed that it would be a good idea but never had any intention of spending a night out with any of the Mulhalls. It never struck Donna that Kathleen acted as if she had been involved in Farah’s murder. She seemed very normal to her friend and neighbour.

Neither Charlotte nor Kathleen ever mentioned Farah or the horrible events that had taken place in the downstairs flat. Alex and Kathleen’s relationship soon fizzled out and Charlotte’s relationship with Dilmurat didn’t last long either. Dilmurat and his three friends were thrown out of Flat 3 and then moved into Kathleen’s flat. They lived there for a while but were caught and were thrown out of Richmond Cottages altogether.

As the weeks passed, Linda was still having terrible trouble sleeping and Charlotte thought it would be wise for her to spend time around Richmond Cottages so she could keep an eye on her older sister. Around Easter time, Linda moved in for a few nights with her four children. The group would arrive back to the flat with cans and neighbours would hear them up drinking all night. The three women spoke about the murder a few times but didn’t dwell on it. They did discuss what to do if the police began asking questions. The Mulhalls decided they would say that they knew nothing about what had happened to Farah and stick to their story. Charlotte told her sister that they should ‘keep their mouths shut’ – no matter what happened.

Towards the end of March 2005, Robert McGovern and Brian Molloy, two park rangers were working at Sean Walsh Park in Tallaght when they saw a strange object sticking out of the ground. The rangers are responsible for patrolling the park and picking up rubbish. They were on foot patrol, emptying a bin beside a park bench in front of the lake, when they noticed what looked like a dead animal buried behind the bench. The men stopped to have a smoke and examine the object. The ‘animal’ had short black hair and was sticking out a few inches from the ground. Brian Molloy walked behind the ‘animal’ and started kicking at the ground with his foot. Bits of grass and chipping came away and when he saw the black hair Molloy thought that it looked like a human head. It was round in shape and appeared to have a wound in the middle of it. He called Robert McGovern and for a couple of minutes the two men had a conversation about what it might be. Eventually they decided that it was a dog’s belly. They also considered whether to dig it up or to just ignore it. In the end they agreed to cover it with a bit of clay and forget about it. They were both convinced that the object was an animal and nothing more.

McGovern thought nothing more about what had gone on and would only remember the strange ‘animal’ when the gardaí eventually cordoned off the area.

Brian Molloy noticed that the object was there for about a week or ten days after he first saw it. He had decided not to dig the remains up because he assumed that they would just rot in the ground, but then one day they had just disappeared. A few people also contacted him to report that something was in the ground, including a man who he knew as Lar. Molloy knew Lar because he spent a lot of time in the park drinking.

‘Lar’ is Laurence Keegan, a retired army private from Tallaght who goes to Sean Walsh Park with a book every day and has a drink and a smoke. He sits at the same bench and enjoys a few quiet hours keeping his own company. A few days after the remains were recovered from the Royal Canal Laurence looked up from his book and saw something black on the ground beside the bench. He thought it was a dead bird. He got up and started kicking it with his boots but it didn’t move. Then he realised that it wasn’t lying on the ground and was in fact buried in a hole. He saw that there was hair sticking out the top of whatever was buried. Laurence then realised that it could be the top of a head, with short dark hair. He had steel toecaps on his boots and tried to dig up the ground around the thing to move it. He thought he’d dig it up so he could see exactly what it was. It was lodged solid though and wouldn’t budge at all. He had read about the headless corpse taken from the canal and it immediately struck him that the ‘head’ he was digging up could be the same head for which gardaí were desperately searching the city. He went and reported the find to park ranger Brian Molloy and asked him to get rid of it. Molloy told him it was only a dog buried there but Laurence insisted that the object was human. He said it was the head of the body that had been found in the canal near Ballybough. Keegan thought that the park ranger didn’t believe him and wasn’t taking him seriously because he drinks in the park.

Laurence Keegan returned home and met his daughter Carol Kelly. He told her he’d seen what looked like a buried head in the park. He said it could be ‘the black fella’ found in the canal. He asked her if she would go back and help him to dig it up but she refused. He went back to Sean Walsh Park as usual the following day and it was there in the same position. Keegan became convinced that the head was human because of the crown sticking out of the ground. He could clearly see that it had black hair but couldn’t see enough of the face to make out the skin colour.

It was the same for the next three days as well. The second last time he saw the head, he noticed that blue bottles had started eating into it.

Two days later it was gone, and Keegan assumed that one of the park rangers had dug it up. All that remained of it was a large hole. He saw Brian Molloy and asked him if he had dug the object up but Molloy said he had taken nothing from there. Once the head was gone, Laurence didn’t think much more about it and thought that it was none of his business anyway.

It later emerged that Linda had dug up the head. After the body had actually been discovered she had started to get worse. Farah would not leave her mind, even when she was awake. She was in a constant state of drunkenness and was teetering on the edge of insanity. Her dreams started to get darker and the demons were telling her to dig up the head.

Some time in early April she was in the house drinking when she had got the urge to go to see the head. It was after 10 p.m. but she walked down to Tymon Park and sat on the bench, just feet from where they had left Farah, a few weeks earlier.

She was suffering from hallucinations and Farah started to talk to her, thanking her for coming to see him. She thought he had shaved his hair off since he’d been in the ground. She dug up the clay with her hands and picked up the head and put it in a black bag. It was badly decomposed and there was a good chance that rats and other wildlife had feasted on it while it lay exposed.

Linda picked up the bag and left Tymon Park. She walked to Killinarden Park in Tallaght, which was just a short distance away. She hid the bag in some thick bushes where she was sure it wouldn’t be discovered and went home to Jobstown. She spent the rest of the night drinking vodka and only went to bed for a couple of hours.

She got up early and went back to Killinarden Park and took the bag from the bushes, after making sure that nobody was around. She took the black bag and put it in a carrier bag she had brought from the house. It was her son’s schoolbag and she had taken his pencils and sharpeners out of it that morning – school copy books had now been replaced by a human head. As the mother-of-four walked home, she was determined to get rid of Farah’s head permanently.

When she reached the house, she rang Kathleen. She told her that she had Farah’s head with her and was going to bury it in a safer place. Her mother didn’t want to know about Linda’s plans. The thirty-year-old went to the extension in the back garden of the empty house. She took a hammer out of the toolbox and put it in the schoolbag, beside the head. She was about to walk back out the door when she remembered there was a litre bottle of vodka in the kitchen press. She took this too and also put it in the bag.

She walked in the direction of an area in Tallaght known as Killinarden Hill. It was about forty minutes’ walk from Kilclare Gardens and Linda knew the area well because she used to live close by. When she got to Killinarden Hill, she climbed over a locked gate into a large field with burnt-out cars dotted around it. She turned right and walked for about 300 feet to the back of the field, before sitting down on the grass close to a ditch.

She took the bag off her shoulder and kissed it.

‘I’m sorry, Farah; I’m sorry,’ she said and sat for over an hour, thinking about just where her life had gone so badly wrong.

She took out the bottle of vodka and drank it straight. It was empty before long. Linda was drunk and highly emotional by now and she started hitting the bag with the hammer. She smacked it dozens of times and could hear the skull shatter as the heavy tool repeatedly connected with the bones.

She fell asleep for a few hours and woke up shivering. It was getting dark and she decided to re-bury what remained of the head. She walked towards the ditch and found an area of the field that was soggy and dug a small hole with her hands. She took the black plastic bag out of the schoolbag and tipped the fragments of the head and skull into the hole and covered it with the wet soil.

‘I’m sorry Farah. It should be me ma in there and not you,’ she whispered, as the last bit of muck filled the hole. She took a lighter out of her pocket and set fire to the plastic bag. It was soon consumed with flames and she put it on top of her child’s schoolbag and that went on fire as well.

Linda waited until all that remained of the bag was ashes, and she threw them into the ditch. She got the hammer and threw it into the ditch and left the empty vodka bottle in the field. With that she ran across the field, jumped over the gate and ran all the way home to Kilclare Gardens, not stopping once. She thought she’d never get to her house and just wanted to be as far away as she could get from Farah Noor and his talking head.

When she got home she didn’t say a word to anybody and went straight to bed. Farah didn’t come to see her in her dreams that night. She eventually went to the Heatons department store in the Square and bought two school bags for €20. Charlotte had already taken her other son’s bag and the two children had to go to school with their books in plastic bags for a few weeks.

Linda’s mental health had not been helped by the fact that she’d had a pregnancy scare. She had met a man a few weeks before the murder and had been involved in a casual relationship with him. In early April she’d informed her mother and sister that she was pregnant and intended to go to England to have an abortion. The three of them met in Richmond Cottages and decided that they should all go to the UK for a while, to try to get over what they had done to Farah. They decided to get the ferry over four days later, after social welfare day. While they were waiting Linda went to see doctors in the Coombe Hospital and was told that her pregnancy scare was a false alarm. As she was no longer expecting a child, she decided not to go.

Charlotte and Kathleen, however, were determined to go anyway and booked the ferry. They got the boat over to Holyhead, carrying changes of clothes in two schoolbags. They went on the Irish Ferries crossing and the weather was so bad they couldn’t go onto the top deck. When they got to Holyhead they stayed in a homeless hostel, which was a ninety-minute walk from the train station, for a night. They ended up sleeping rough in a park for two or three nights before going back to the hostel. They had enough money for the train fare to Manchester and when they arrived in the city, they went drinking.

Charlotte met an Englishman named George Gray in a pub and they ended up staying in his room at the Grattan Arms hotel. She later said it was ‘not a proper relationship, just going for a few drinks, staying for a few days’. At the time she was going out with Dilmurat, her Russian boyfriend, but she never contacted him while she was away. Instead, Charlotte was happy to sleep with another man and let him pay for drinks for herself and her mother.

After they’d been there for about a week, Linda agreed to go to England to meet up with them but she then changed her mind. She was supposed to bring them over money, as after their ten-day holiday the two Mulhalls had decided they’d had enough of England. They wanted to go home, but without Linda they had no cash. They contacted the social welfare who arranged tickets for the two of them to travel back to Ireland. When they returned, Kathleen told Donna Fitzsimons that she had been staying down the country with a friend.