The Cold Case Files (27 page)

Another attack on a man who lived alone was the murder of 70-year-old Tommy Casey, who died after suffering an horrific beating at his home at Oranmore, Co. Galway, in January 1996. The bachelor
and retired farmer had been targeted for robbery by a four-person gang of travelling criminals made up of two men and two women. The women’s role was to distract the victim at the front of
his house while the men entered through the back. A mother and daughter from Co. Tipperary were later jailed after admitting burglary charges relating to the incident and one man, also from Co.
Tipperary, was given a six-year sentence after pleading guilty to the manslaughter of Tommy Casey. The court heard how Tommy had been found dead on the floor of his kitchen eight days after he had
been attacked. The four members of the gang had actually been arrested by Gardaí in Galway city some hours after the attack on Tommy Casey when officers found housebreaking implements, a
dagger and a balaclava in their car. However, Gardaí were unaware of the attack on Tommy Casey and none of the occupants of the car raised the alarm, and it was eight days later before
Tommy’s body was found. If the gang had owned up to what they had done, Tommy’s life might have been saved.

In terms of discussing crime statistics and whether a case is solved or unsolved, the Tommy Casey murder is an important one to consider. It’s believed that four people were involved in
the gang which targeted Tommy Casey. The two female members who never entered Tommy’s home were jailed for burglary, and one man was jailed for manslaughter. However, the other man left
Ireland and his whereabouts are not known. He is still wanted for questioning about the murder of Tommy Casey. So is the Tommy Casey murder solved or unsolved? Three out of four members of a gang
were brought to justice for their roles. To say it is totally unsolved is not doing justice to the good detective work that went into the case, but similarly to say it is totally solved ignores the
fact that a very dangerous individual skipped the country and could now pose a danger elsewhere in the world.

A similar situation exists in the murder of 68-year-old bachelor farmer Paud Skehan who lived alone and who was attacked by at least two people who broke into his home at O’Briensbridge in
Co. Clare in April 1998. Paud was dragged from his bed, and was punched in the face and kicked. He was then bound and gagged and doused in lighter fluid as his attackers screamed at him to tell
them where he kept his cash. Finally his attackers fled, leaving Paud lying on his concrete sitting room floor with a blood-soaked blindfold on his face, his hands bound, and his feet tied to the
bannisters. Paud suffered fatal brain damage, but his suffering was not over. For hours he lay shivering in sub-zero temperatures and he developed bronchial pneumonia.

For almost eight weeks Paud Skehan fought for his life. For those 54 days he was in a coma as his family kept a bedside vigil at the Mid Western Regional Hospital in Limerick, but Paud never
recovered. His only recognition of sounds or voices was on the day he was rushed to hospital, but that was it. Paud’s injuries were fatal, and in early June 1998 his life-support machine was
turned off.

One of Paud’s murderers is now serving a life sentence for the crime. Career criminal William Campion from Limerick specialised in ‘tie-up’ jobs where he and accomplices would
break into people’s homes and tie up the terror-stricken occupants while stealing their cash. He was caught and convicted for Paud Skehan’s murder because when arrested he was still
wearing the
FILA
runners he was wearing when he stepped in Paud’s blood while attacking him. The good work of Gardaí and the Forensic Science Laboratory led to
the identification of Campion’s runners as being the very pair which had been present at the murder. Campion was given a life sentence for murder and a concurrent nine-year sentence for
burglary at Paud’s home.

So is the murder of Paud Skehan solved? Certainly, the capture of one of Paud Skehan’s attackers was Garda work at its very finest. Utilising good detective work and capitalising on some
good luck, an extremely dangerous random attacker was put behind bars. But what about his accomplice, the one who got away? From an analysis of the crime scene, Gardaí believe there were two
people involved in the attack on Paud Skehan and that second person is still out there somewhere and has never been identified. To say the murder of Paud Skehan is unsolved does not do justice to
the successful prosecution of one of his killers, but to say it is solved ignores the fact that only one of his killers was taken off the streets. Like so many crimes, the murder of Paud Skehan
might be better described as both partially solved and partially unsolved.

A similar situation could be applied to the murder of publican Tom Nevin at his Co. Wicklow pub—Jack Whites—in March 1996. His wife Catherine is currently serving a life sentence for
Tom’s murder. The jury also found her guilty of asking three men on three separate occasions to murder her husband. But while Catherine Nevin was caught and convicted and jailed for life, she
did not pull the trigger. The hitman who murdered Tom Nevin and then tied up Catherine Nevin, so as to make the killing look like a robbery and attack on both husband and wife, has never been
identified and never been brought to justice. The conviction of Catherine Nevin represented policing at its finest, but even still, the gunman got away.

Throughout the 1990s there were a number of murders of women which would eventually become cold cases. In June 1992, headlines had been dominated by the discovery in the Dublin
Mountains of the body of Patricia Doherty. A native of Annascaul, Co. Kerry, Patricia Doherty was last seen alive on 23 December 1991. She lived with her family at Allenton Lawns in Tallaght, and
had travelled to The Square to get Santa hats for her children. Patricia’s disappearance was totally out of character and her family reported her missing, but it was only in June 1992 that a
man out cutting turf at Killakee in the Dublin Mountains found Patricia’s body. She had been strangled, and her body had been left in a bog drain. No-one has ever been arrested in connection
with this unsolved murder.

On 16 December 1993, mother-of-one Marie Kilmartin vanished from Port Laoise. It was from a phone box across the road from her flat that an as yet unidentified man made a call which led Marie to
her death. Gardaí have established that a two-and-a-half minute call was made at 4.25 p.m. to Marie from that phone box. She left her flat soon afterwards and was never seen alive again. For
176 days her body lay hidden beneath water in a bog drain on the Laois-Offaly border. A large concrete block was on top of her chest. She was fully clothed, dressed in her matching jacket and
skirt, double-breasted herringbone overcoat and lace-up boots. Whoever had killed her had used their bare hands to strangle her before throwing her body into the bog drain and putting debris on top
of Marie. In September 2008, detectives arrested a man and questioned him about the murder. Another man and a woman were questioned on suspicion of withholding information. The three were later
released.

The 1990s witnessed a number of baffling disappearances of women. In March 1993 American woman Annie McCarrick disappeared after going for a walk in the Dublin-Wicklow Mountains. In July of that
same year Eva Brennan disappeared in south Dublin. Imelda Keenan vanished in Waterford in January 1994. Jo Jo Dullard vanished in Co. Kildare in November 1995 and Fiona Pender, who was six months
pregnant, disappeared in Tullamore in October 1996. Seventeen-year-old Ciara Breen is missing from Dundalk since February 1997 and mother-of-one Fiona Sinnott was last seen in Co. Wexford in
February 1998. In July 1998, a teenage woman vanished from Droichead Nua in Co. Kildare. Despite significant Garda efforts to try and solve these cases, no trace of any of these missing women has
yet been found.

The Cold Case Unit utilises the Violent Crimes Linkage Analysis System (
V
i
CLAS
), a computer system operated by the Garda Behavioural Analysis
Unit. Information from every violent crime, including murders and sexual assaults, is loaded into its database. The system is continuously searching for possible links between crimes and is of
particular benefit in Operation Trace, which is investigating the spate of unsolved disappearances of women in Leinster in the 1990s.
V
i
CLAS
compiles
thousands of pieces of information on every single violent incident and highlights possible links between crimes. It might be something as seemingly innocuous as the same make of car seen at two
crime scenes, or something more definitive such as the same description of an attacker involved, the same modus operandi; everything from speech pattern, facial tics, clothing worn, weapons used,
is all input into
V
i
CLAS
. The system assesses all information about the time, date and location of crimes, allowing for any similarities to show up.
Such an analysis might red-flag a particular person who works in a particular location, or who lives in a particular place, or who drives a particular route at a particular time every day or week
or month.

One major attraction of the
V
i
CLAS
system is the very fact that, because all significant details of violent crimes are preserved forever more on
computer, it ensures that there is a ‘corporate memory’ within An Garda Síochána of historic unsolved crimes. The three-member team which operates the system has assisted
Gardaí right around the country, but their work was particularly beneficial to the Cold Case Unit and in late 2009 a decision was taken to amalgamate
V
i
CLAS
into the Unit. The three Gardaí who worked with the system all transferred into the Cold Case Unit. Detective Sergeant Noel Mooney had been part of the Serious Crime Squad
since 1985 and was also a psychologist. Detective Garda Mary Fallon and Detective Garda Tony Keane had also many decades of experience in investigating serious crimes. As the newest members of the
Cold Case Unit they helped to enhance Garda links with both the FBI and Canadian police, including profilers. “
V
i
CLAS
and behavioural analysis
are employed by many law enforcement agencies around the world,” says Detective Sergeant Noel Mooney.

In an article for the
Garda Review
magazine published in 2009, one of Noel Mooney’s colleagues in the Cold Case Unit, Detective Sergeant Alan Bailey, described the many different
areas considered by detectives during the course of a cold-case review. “A review examines and considers all facets of an investigation,” he wrote.

One unsolved case at the higher end of the weighting matrix is the murder in December 1992 of 56-year-old Grace Livingstone. Grace was shot dead in her home in Malahide in
north Co. Dublin (see Chapter 5) and among a number of areas which may be advanced in the case is the possibility that Grace’s killer left his
DNA
on the tape used to
bind and gag her. Grace’s was one of a number of murders of women who were attacked in their homes in the 1990s. In December 1996 French film-maker Sophie Toscan Du Plantier was beaten to
death during a sustained attack outside her holiday home at Schull in west Cork. In June 1997 28-year-old Mandy Fong was strangled to death in her home in Crumlin in south Dublin. Just three months
before that murder, two women were stabbed to death after someone broke into their sheltered accommodation at Grangegorman on Dublin’s northside. Fifty-nine-year-old Sylvia Shields and
61-year-old Mary Callinan suffered multiple injuries when they were attacked as they slept in their beds in early March 1997. Even before the setting up of the Cold Case Unit, this double-murder
has been the subject of a cold-case review in recent years.

The failure by Gardaí to solve the murders of Grace Livingstone and Sophie Toscan Du Plantier led to the families of both victims separately taking matters into their own hands.
Grace’s husband Jimmy and her children Tara and Conor brought a case to the High Court on the basis that Gardaí had failed in their ‘duty of care’ to the family. The case
was settled to the family’s satisfaction after four days, and Jimmy then contacted the Garda Cold Case Unit and asked them to fully re-investigate the case. A team led by a senior
investigating officer is currently working on the unsolved murder. Meanwhile in France, Sophie Toscan Du Plantier’s family and friends have been behind recent efforts by authorities there to
mount an investigation into her murder. Although the brutal killing took place in Ireland, French officials agreed to the family’s request that, in the absence of any current action by Irish
authorities, a French judge should investigate the case. As part of subsequent enquiries Sophie’s body was exhumed in 2008 and French investigators have met with senior Gardaí to study
the unsolved murder file.