The Irish Scissor Sisters (38 page)

John Mulhall steered the Berlingo van in the direction of the Phoenix Park. He was familiar with most areas of Dublin and had played there as a lad. He knew where he would be able to find a good spot to do what he was about to do. He drove through the park gate at St James’s Gate and went up to the first roundabout and turned left. He would have ended up at Garda Headquarters if he’d taken the right-hand turn. He got onto Wellington Road and could see the imposing presence of the Wellington Monument, through the van’s spotlights. He parked the van at the side of the road and turned off the ignition.

He got out and walked to the back of the small white van and opened up the rear door. After he left Kilclare Gardens, through the front door, John had climbed into the back garden and taken the rope from the washing line down. He rooted around among his tools and found the rope that he’d thrown in the back. The street lights did not do a great job at illuminating the area and John must have struggled to make anything out as he walked towards the forest, opposite the monument.

John Mulhall must have been wishing to God that things could have turned out differently. But he knew that he couldn’t turn back time. He might have wished that he had done something twenty years ago when the kids were smaller and possibly that he had treated Kathleen differently. Maybe he was thinking that he should have looked after her and made more of an effort to be around the house, staying away from other women and being a better person. The demons had taken over John Mulhall’s mind – the same demons that had made Linda’s life hell after she murdered Farah Noor. Once the mist descends it is difficult to raise it and John Mulhall was doomed.

The fifty-three-year-old father-of-six took the rope and threw it over the thickest branch of a nearby oak tree.

He then took out his wallet from his pocket and got a €50 note. Using a pen, he wrote a short suicide note, leaving all his possessions to Marie. He put the note back in his pocket. He then scaled the tree and skilfully tied a double-knot that would easily carry the weight of a man, even one as stocky as he was. He put the end of the rope around his neck. His family believe he would have blessed himself. Then he jumped. It was all over in seconds.

The following morning, just before 11 a.m., a thirty-six-year-old local woman was out enjoying a morning stroll when she saw what looked to be somebody lying asleep under a tree, just inside a wooded area beside the memorial to Wellington. She went over for a closer look and was horrified to see a middle-aged man with a rope around his neck. It looked like the rope had snapped and broken a branch above. She knew instantly that the poor unfortunate man was dead and dialled 999 on her mobile.

Garda James Buckley from Cabra Station arrived at the scene and an investigation was immediately launched. Senior officers from the station, Detective Inspector John Kelly and Sergeant Paul McCarville, took charge. Photographs were taken of the scene in case foul play was suspected but it was obvious that the victim had taken his own life. The deceased’s wallet was in his trouser pocket and he was identified as John Mulhall from Tallaght.

A doctor pronounced John Mulhall dead at 3.25 p.m. and his body was taken by Stafford’s Undertakers to the City Morgue.

John’s estranged wife, Kathleen, was due to celebrate her fiftieth birthday two days after his death.

At around 7 p.m. Detective Garda John Stack was knocking on the Mulhalls’ door, with the news that all gardaí dread giving families. It is never a pleasant experience informing anybody that their loved one has been prematurely taken away, but at least it is easier to understand if somebody has been killed in an accident or dies suddenly from a medical condition. That is fate. How can you explain that somebody has willingly taken their own life and left a loving and heartbroken family behind, looking for explanations and wondering if they could have done anything differently to prevent it? Garda John Stack broke the news to Eric, who had been dreading that something like this might have happened ever since John had failed to come home. He rang his brother Andy and sister, Eileen, telling them that John was dead.

To say that things were tense in the Mulhall house after John’s suicide was an understatement. John’s funeral in his native Tallaght was a big event, attended by his many friends and work colleagues. Members of the Clondalkin Motorbike Club, of which John was an old and dedicated member, formed a guard of honour in memory of his passing. Sergeant Liam Hickey and Detective Inspector Christy Mangan also attended and members of the extended Mulhall family came up to thank them for how they had treated John, Linda and Charlotte while they were in custody. Linda was very upset and cried when she saw the two officers and thanked them for coming. It was a very difficult time for his children who were obviously stuck in the blame game. If Linda hadn’t attacked him that night would their father have still taken his own life? Nobody will ever be able to answer that question but the tension between some of his children was clear. Marie and Andrew Mulhall took their father’s death especially hard. At the ages of twenty-one and seventeen, they now had to face a life effectively without any parents. His other four children also took the loss of their father badly. The Mulhalls were a dysfunctional family but they were close and loved each other, through thick and thin.

While there is no doubt that John Mulhall was the foundation on which the Mulhall family was built, his role in the murder of Farah Swaleh Noor has never been satisfactorily explained. Some detectives privately say that he played a far bigger part in events than has been acknowledged. Linda, Charlotte and Kathleen Mulhall have always refused to acknowledge that John Mulhall was at Richmond Cottages on the night of the murder, even though John himself volunteered that information.

During the trial of Linda and Charlotte it did not emerge that traffic cameras in Ballybough had captured a white Berlingo van heading for Ballybough Bridge at 6.14 a.m. on 21 March, the morning after the murder occurred. The registration plates were not captured but when John Mulhall was asked about this incident, he admitted to gardaí that this was his van, although he was confused about dates. He said that he had dropped his daughters to their mother’s flat on the morning of the murder, 20 March. None of the three women ever told gardaí this and John’s story does not make sense.

There are two possibilities about what could have occurred at Richmond Cottages. The first possibility is that John Mulhall got the call from Kathleen, as he later admitted, and went to her flat at 1 a.m. but went home in disgust after he found out about the murder. When he got back to Tallaght he couldn’t sleep and finally decided that he had to help his daughters and drove back to Ballybough at around 6 a.m. and picked up the bloody clothes and duvets so they could be dumped later on. John had always claimed that this never happened but forensics linked the items pulled from the River Liffey to Richmond Cottages, so he certainly did remove evidence at some stage that day. There is also evidence that he then rang Kathleen briefly, at 7.15 a.m., as he was driving home with the bags to Tallaght. Many gardaí believe that this is the most credible scenario.

Other officers, however, favour the second possibility, which is that it was John Mulhall, and not his daughters, who cut up Farah’s body. They think that when Kathleen rang him before midnight, she told him what Linda and Charlotte had done and asked him to come over to the flat to help them to dispose of the body. John Mulhall was a law abiding man but what father would not do anything to stop his little girls going to jail for life? The theory goes that when John got to the flat, Farah was lying in the bedroom, after being bludgeoned and stabbed to death. The women were in shock after carrying out the murder and it was John who dismembered the body and packed it in bags for them to dump in the canal. He then drove home and rang Kathleen at 7.15 a.m., asking if they’d put Farah in the water yet. A witness had told gardaí that John Mulhall had previously threatened to kill Farah and said he wouldn’t be identifiable. Was this a case of a jealous, spurned ex-husband taking the ultimate act of revenge on the man who had broken up his marriage?

At various times John, Kathleen, Linda and Charlotte have all told the police that John and Kathleen rarely, if ever, talked. They all agreed that since the collapse of their marriage the couple had a mutual dislike for each other and had spoken less than a handful of times in three and a half years. However mobile phone traffic between their two mobiles tells a very different story. John phoned Kathleen four times the day after the murder, at 7.15 a.m., 8.57 a.m., 10.19 a.m. and 4.35 p.m. from his mobile. During the investigation he couldn’t explain why he had suddenly become friendly with his ex. He said he mightn’t have got through and was probably ringing to see if the girls were OK and if they were coming home.

Kathleen was also busy on the day after the murder, making calls of her own. She rang John on six occasions from 11.11 p.m. until midnight.

John again claimed that she didn’t get through, but the duration times of three of the phone calls were one minute twenty-eight seconds, one minute twenty-nine seconds and two minutes eighteen seconds, disproving his claims. Two people who hated each other were hardly off the phone to each other the day after their daughters had committed murder, but the question is, why? Maybe they were fighting about how Kathleen had got their daughters into a situation where they had ended up as killers, or perhaps they were getting their stories straight.

Unless Linda and Charlotte volunteer more information it will never be known what was said in those phone calls. It is highly unlikely, however, that they will shed light on the unanswered questions surrounding their father’s involvement. They have both steadfastly denied that John Mulhall played any part at all in the murder of Farah Swaleh Noor. They have been consistent with this story since the day they were arrested. Both girls were extremely loyal to John, even though they had regular and often explosive rows with him.

When Charlotte admitted her role in the murder she told officers that she had never told her father about what had happened and that Linda never rang him after the murder had taken place, despite phone records proving the contrary. Charlotte played dumb about the frequent calls between her parents and said that the only reason John would ever ring Kathleen would be if he needed to contact her.

‘So if something were to happen, would it be unusual for your father to make phone calls to your mother?’ a detective asked.

‘Yeah, unless he was ringing looking for me,’ she replied.

‘Looking for you? So would he ring your mother looking for you? You’re pretty close to your father?’ Charlotte said she was and was asked, ‘Did you tell him about this?’

‘No,’ she claimed.

‘Kept it all from him, yeah?’

‘I didn’t tell him,’ she insisted to the incredulous officers.

She was shown the evidence of Linda’s phone call to John immediately after they had carried out the brutal murder. She claimed she didn’t have a clue about this but the detectives interviewing her had their own ideas and told her: ‘Well you know if she was ringing your father to tell him about this major crisis in the family, now all the family were involved in this horrific murder.’

The twenty-two-year-old prostitute told the gardaí that she didn’t know what her dad thought of Farah but the two of them had never had a row or an argument. She told them that her parents didn’t get on anymore and commented: ‘Me father doesn’t visit me mammy.’

She totally denied that her dad had driven over to Ballybough in his work van and collected evidence to dump: ‘Me da doesn’t be near me ma’s house. They don’t exactly get along.’

Linda denied that her father even knew about the murder and claimed she hadn’t told him anything about it whatsoever.

During her interview Kathleen also denied that John was involved in the murder, although she denied that it had taken place at Richmond Cottages at all. After she left him for Farah, the husband and wife didn’t speak for over three years but had had some brief conversations in the year or so before the murder. She admitted that she and John had several conversations after the murder but said: ‘If I rang him it was because there was a problem with one of his children. My son James was having a problem. I visited him in jail and he asked me if I could pass on a message to John. I passed it on. I don’t have a good relationship with John.’

Following John Mulhall’s tragic death his family, which he had worked so hard at trying to keep together, fell apart. It had a huge effect on Linda and Charlotte, who were both out on bail. They went totally wild and started drinking heavily and using hard drugs.

One garda detective who knew the glass fitter said: ‘John was the rock that the family was built on. He urged his two girls to do what was right and admit that they killed Farah Noor. A lot of credit has to go to him for that. He was a loving family man but obviously couldn’t cope with the horror of all that had happened. He was the one bit of stability that his kids had and it was inevitable that when he died the whole thing would crumble down. That’s exactly what happened. It’s a tragic story.’