I cried all the way back to the police station.
Neither of my parents had confessed to a single crime. It was 5 p.m., and the police had until 9 p.m. to charge or release them. I had to confront them and was shown into an interview room.
I recoiled in shock when I saw Mammy sitting at a round table, surrounded by five officers. I hadn’t seen her for nine years, but time rolled back and I felt instantly scared in her presence.
‘Hi, Mammy,’ I said quietly, as a detective pointed to my place across the table.
Her face was hard and cold, and she looked as brazen as if she was sitting at her own kitchen table.
‘Well, you said you would get us,’ she replied.
‘What do you mean?’ an officer interjected.
‘I mean she has always hated me and she is doing this to spite me,’ she spat.
My body was shaking and my emotions were screaming out in confusion.
For a second I wanted to run and throw my arms around her. I wanted her to tell me she loved me and that she was sorry, but when I looked at her again she was giving me a cold, evil stare, one that shot me straight back to my childhood.
She was trying to unhinge me. She was trying to get through to that little girl inside me, the one who was so scared of her that, even when she was holding my murdered baby in her arms, I obeyed her command to get back in the house, and slipped inside the sitting room, just because my mammy told me to.
I’ve often wondered how different my life and so many other lives, would have been had I had the courage to run away that night.
I wasn’t a little girl any more, and I looked her in the eye.
‘Would you please tell them about my baby and what you did to her?’ I demanded.
‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’
My blood boiled, and I pointed my trembling finger at her.
‘You killed my baby. You stabbed her with a knitting needle in front of me.’
Her mouth fell open, and she threw her nicotine-stained hands up to her face in horror.
‘May God forgive you!’ she wailed dramatically.
I exploded with frustration. ‘Will you come with me to the lane where we dumped her tiny body, and tell me then you did not kill my daughter?’
‘I would be too embarrassed,’ she said pathetically. ‘People would be looking. I’d collapse!’
‘Well, I had to do it!’ I bellowed. ‘I had to face it. Why shouldn’t you?’
She shook her head defiantly.
‘Come to the grave then,’ I goaded.
‘No.’
‘Why not? If you are so innocent, why can’t you come to her grave with me? Why did you kill my baby? Why?’
‘You never liked me, and you always said you would get me,’ she replied.
‘Is that all you can say? Why did you feed me raw eggs and liver? Why did you send me to my father’s bed on Christmas Day?’
She continued to glare at me in a mocking, intimidating way, and I began to feel frightened.
An officer put his arm around me and told her to stop staring at me.
Her denials went on. She denied ever knowing I was sexually abused. ‘I’d have helped her if I’d known,’ she lied through her yellow teeth.
‘What about that man?’ I asked. ‘The one you made me sing “Scarlet Ribbons” to, and then forced me into bed with?’
‘That was all very innocent,’ she replied, seemingly unrattled.
‘Cynthia is a liar,’ she went on. ‘She used to steal chips off her younger brothers’ and sisters’ plates. She was a terrible child to raise.’
I laughed cynically. ‘Is that all you have on me?’
An officer reminded her they were not here to talk about me. My mother was the one being questioned about murdering a baby.
‘She tells lies,’ she repeated over and over again, regardless of what we threw at her. ‘She makes things up. She’s mad. If there was a baby, then she must have murdered it herself in the lane.’
I left the interview room exhausted and defeated at 8.10 p.m., after more than three hours with my mother.
She was nearly sixty-two-years-old. She had been arrested, locked in a cell and then grilled for twelve hours, but she never once showed the slightest sign she might give up any one of her sordid secrets.
She was pure evil, and I was heartbroken.
I was immediately beckoned to another room. I walked up to the door and glanced through the glass.
My father was sitting inside, and I gasped in shock and stood nailed to the spot for several minutes, trying to give myself the strength to go in.
He looked shaken. His body was jangling from head to toe, like he had lost all control of himself.
I said hello as I opened the door, and he looked up at me and said, ‘What’s that?’
‘That’s your daughter,’ the detective told him.
‘I don’t know her. Get her out of here,’ my father scoffed.
‘You should know me,’ I said sternly. ‘Because you are the one who raped me.’
He pointed to the statement on the desk in front of him and jabbed his finger at it.
He stank of stale cigarette smoke, and his fingernails were black as coal. I winced.
‘I’ve said what I’ve got to say,’ he said.
‘Please tell the truth,’ I begged desperately. I knew the clock was ticking. I had to get him to talk.
‘I’m sick of her lies,’ was all he could say.
I made one last, desperate attempt to find his conscience.
‘Daddy, will you not just admit I was pregnant as a child? Please?’
‘She’s mad!’ he screamed. ‘Get her out! I want judge and jury on this. I want to put her to shame.’
‘I’ve got the shame of what you did to me for the rest of my life,’ I shouted. ‘Please tell them the truth!’
But his eyes were dead and his mouth was set in stone.
I walked out and felt as if I was falling apart. I had expected my mother to be a cold, evil bitch, but I had hoped my father might find it in himself to tell the truth.
How wrong I was. I looked back at his trembling body and felt nothing but contempt. He was a cold, evil monster too.
At 9 p.m. they were both released without charge, but all was not lost.
There were other avenues to explore in my quest for justice, and I agreed to everything the police asked of me to keep the investigation going.
I underwent nine hours of interviews with a psychologist and a psychiatrist, who both verified my sanity and the consistency of my story.
I also had to identify Noleen from two photographs.
I could sense I was plunging deeper into hell, but I told myself to be strong. I was doing it for her.
I already knew my baby had been stabbed forty times. She weighed 5lbs 5oz and was 18.5 inches long.
The wound that killed her was in her neck, but my mother had gone on stabbing her repeatedly, even after she had died.
I opened the blue photograph folder very slowly, with shaking hands, and the second my eyes fell on my daughter’s body I had to look away in horror - but it was too late.
I saw Noleen’s beautiful fair hair and how perfect she had been, but I also saw how she was laid on a mortuary slab, her tiny body covered in stab marks.
One was on her chin. I remembered my mother stabbing her there, because I remember thinking she had a dimple like my father.
I slammed the folder shut and jumped out of my seat to get away from it.
‘Can you identify that child as your daughter?’ the policeman asked.
‘Yes, that is my daughter,’ I said. ‘That is my daughter, Noleen.’
I had never named her before that day, but I’d recently asked my good friend Diane to help me choose one.
Diane had been my long-suffering friend for seven years and had been a rock. Noleen was her middle name, and when she suggested it I thought it was perfect.
As incredible as it may seem, it took twelve long years from that point on for Noleen’s name to be formally recognized, and for the cause of her death to be publicly recorded at her inquest.
The police didn’t exhume Noleen’s body, because of the passage of time and the fact she was in a communal grave, so there was no chance of linking me to her though DNA evidence. My parents were never prosecuted, because of lack of evidence, and when I eventually plucked up the courage to report the abuse I’d suffered at the hands of all those other men at the building, they were never prosecuted either. Lack of evidence was cited in each case.
With each setback, I refused to give up hope of finding justice for Noleen. Simon supported me every step of the way, telling me I had to follow my heart.
We held a memorial service for Noleen in April 1996, and Theresa stood with me as I laid a bunch of pink and white carnations on the grave. I placed a card there, which said:
‘To Noleen, cry no more. Sleep in peace. Two broken hearts have been mended.’
I hadn’t seen Theresa for several years. Our shared memories of abuse had been too much to bear, and it became too painful to spend time together, but I was comforted to see how well she looked that day.
She was stunningly beautiful, with her glossy dark hair and pale skin. Somehow, she had found the strength to push forward with her life, and she had a good job, travelling the world as a nanny to a famous pop star. I was delighted for her.
I was suffering from crippling depression as my legal battle dragged on and on.
In time, the Minister for Justice said she could not help me, and the European Court of Human Rights turned me down flat.
I was struggling to sleep at night. I had frightening flashbacks of my father grabbing at me in bed, and I often woke up screaming.
Sometimes I couldn’t bear to let Simon touch me. That hurt me so much. I loved my husband dearly, and it felt like my parents even had the power to damage my marriage, which infuriated me and fuelled my fight.
My luck finally changed in 2000, when I was introduced to Gerry Dunne, a Dublin solicitor who knew of my case and wanted to help. He had a top barrister, Kieron Wood, on board too, as well as Michael Forde, a senior member of counsel.
They were a godsend. It was Gerry who first suggested we could ask for Noleen’s inquest to be re-opened. It had been opened and adjourned on 27 April 1973, but to formally identify Noleen could only improve my chances of prosecuting my parents. For the first time ever, I wasn’t feeling my way through the legal system on my own. It would take time, but I could see light at the end of the tunnel.
I was doing the housework one morning in June 2002 when I got a text message from an old friend in Ireland:
‘Did you know Michael has gone missing? I read it in the paper.’
I grabbed the phone, instantly in a panic, and called Dalkey police station for confirmation.
‘Yes, Mrs Owen, he has been missing for nine days now.’
I was paralysed with shock. Was he lying dead somewhere?
I sat in bed shaking, and didn’t eat, sleep or even wash for four whole days.
I lived for the phone to ring with good news, but it never did. I felt laden with guilt. I had practically raised Michael single-handed as a baby. I hadn’t seen him for a while. Had I neglected him, too caught up with fighting for Noleen?
My parents were both in their seventies by this time, and living comfortably in a retirement bungalow in Sallynoggin, not far from Dalkey. It sickened me to think of them pottering happily around while Martin lay dead and Michael was missing.
My desire to punish them for their crimes was so strong it spurred me on, despite the terrible trauma Michael’s disappearance brought me.
It was nearly three years before he was found. In my heart I had known my little brother had to be dead. His decomposed body was finally found at Killiney Station on 1 February 2005.
A few weeks later I spoke to Theresa for the first time in ages, and I was shocked when I heard her voice. The strong and confident woman I’d been so proud of at Noleen’s memorial service sounded like a scared little girl again.
‘I can’t get over Michael,’ she said in the thinnest of whispers. ‘I heard you’re still fighting. You’re stronger than me, but you’ll never win against those bastards.’
Her voice frightened me. ‘Theresa, I am coming to Ireland tomorrow to see you,’ I said.
When we met, she cried in my arms like a baby for three harrowing hours.
She told me Michael’s death had triggered horrific memories of the pair of them being raped by my father, and she couldn’t get them out of her head.
‘I keep having flashbacks of Mammy ripping at her own arms with needles and putting her head in the gas oven, telling us she’s going to kill herself,’ Theresa sobbed.