Jim needed something new. Something stronger.
– 10 –
Password
Burglary. After nearly twenty years, we thought we finally had the password that would unlock the entire Nothing Man case.
What we needed to do now was to try to confirm that Tommy and I were remembering these events correctly, and then to determine if the same thing had happened at the other three Nothing Man homes. If we could establish that we were and they had, our next step would be to verify the nature of those visits. Was that man really a guard? Had there really been burglaries? How was this the connection?
Ed quickly established that there had indeed been a burglary near Tommy’s family home on Bally’s Lane in September 1999. On the afternoon of 5 September, a property had been burgled during the funeral of its elderly owner. Numerous antiques worth thousands of pounds had been stolen, presumably in a van that had been spotted in the area at the time emblazoned with the name of a (fake) moving company. The theft had made the news, with the deceased man’s adult son growing tearful as he spoke live on air to a local radio host, pleading with the public to assist in the return of the items his late father had spent a lifetime collecting.
This was the kind of crime the Gardaí called theft-to-order. It hadn’t been your run-of-the-mill home burglary – whoever had done this had known what was in the house and how to offload the goods afterwards. The way to solve this type of crime was through the cooperation of antique dealers. Someone would try to sell them one or more of the items; they’d alert the Gardaí; the Gardaí would trace the item back, seller-to-seller, until they got to the person or persons who had stolen them in the first place. It made no sense that anyone involved in the same investigation would be calling to local houses to warn them about it. Unless they also had a house full of antiques and were going to leave them unattended while the whole family went to a funeral, there was zero danger of them suffering a similar fate – which was why the Gardaí hadn’t done that. There was no record of any members being sent anywhere to do house-to-house calls aside from the homes immediately neighbouring the target, whose occupants had provided witness statements in the hours after the theft.
There was no record of Christine Kiernan being visited by a guard in the weeks before her attack and after a delicate conversation with her parents, I determined she hadn’t mentioned such a thing to them either. But there had been talk at the time of installing gates at the entrance because of a recent burglary in the area. I’d already met with Maggie Barry, the neighbour who’d found the rope and knife, and I called her again to ask if she could remember anything about this or a visit from a guard. She said no. But Maggie was the current secretary of the Covent Court Residents’ Association and one of her duties was storing the association’s files, which included minutes from their AGMs and special meetings. She went through them and found this very issue raised at a special meeting at the beginning of June 2000, six weeks before Christine was attacked. The minutes referred to a ‘break-in on the Blackrock Road’. Whoever had recorded them had written this with the word ‘Florida’ in brackets afterwards.
When Ed went searching, he found a report about a burglary in a detached house on the Blackrock Road reported on 29 April 2000. A family had returned from a fortnight’s holiday at Walt Disney World in Orlando to discover their entire home ransacked and vandalised. What neither Ed nor I could find was any mention of this incident in the media. This meant one of three things: there had been media coverage and Ed just couldn’t find it; one or more of the residents of Covent Court personally knew the family involved or someone who knew them and had heard about it that way; or one or more residents of Covent Court had had a visit from the Gardaí warning them about it. It didn’t rule out anything and, as Ed liked to say, an absence of evidence was not evidence of absence. Our theory that this was somehow the connection between the victims could remain alive.
Ed found two candidates to support my vague memory about the visit to our house. There had been equipment stolen from a farm in Monkstown, and electronics and cash taken from a house on Monastery Road on the outskirts of Passage West itself. Both of these incidents had occurred within six weeks of my family’s murders. The records kept by the investigating Gardaí were incomplete but one of the detectives involved was still an active member, and he told Ed he had no recollection of any house calls in relation to these events except for the homes, again, actually neighbouring the targets. It wasn’t much, but we had to take what we could get. When I asked Ed if there could’ve been some home safety initiative where members of the Gardaí, separate to official investigations, called to houses in an effort to prevent them falling victim to property crime, he laughed at me. There was no scenario, at any time or in any place, where the Gardaí would have had the resources to do that.
We didn’t need to go searching for burglaries in Westpark or its surrounds, as Ed himself had investigated a spate of them, albeit before the residents arrived. He could find no reports of any subsequent incidents. We couldn’t, of course, ask Marie or Martin if they’d had any visits from a guard.
There were five Nothing Man targets in all. In two of them, we had visits prior to the attacks from a lone guard warning of a recent burglary in the area – but one of these was based on my own very vague memory of a man at the door who made my mother call my father and grandmother by their first names. In four of them, we could confirm that burglaries had taken place nearby, prior to the attacks – but burglary was a fairly common crime and if we picked five Cork homes at random at any date in time, we would probably find similar incidents to connect to them.
If this really was the connection between the Nothing Man’s victims, if this was the key that would unlock the mystery of why us, it was still just a blurry shape in the distance.
But we still had Linda O’Neill in Fermoy to check out.
We had only recently made contact with Linda O’Neill after months of unanswered calls, emails and even a handwritten letter sent to her place of work. Shortly before Ed and I met Tommy at Dublin Airport, I had given up on her and resigned myself to completing the chapter about her attack with the materials I had, namely Garda reports and media interviews she’d given at the time. Then Ed tried in an official capacity and finally got her on the phone, but she only stayed on it long enough to tell him – and me – that she had no interest in being involved in this book. It wouldn’t be fair to contact her again, now, to ask if she’d ever had a visit from a guard at the house in Fermoy, and honestly even if that didn’t present a moral problem for me, I just couldn’t stomach another six months of trying to track her down. Instead, Ed went to someone else who had spent a lot of time at the house in the weeks leading up to the attack and who was happy to talk to us: Johnnie Murphy, the foreman.
Johnnie was still in the construction business, although he was now the head of his own firm and was, as he so poetically put it, no longer freezing his balls off on building sites but burning them on space heaters in Portakabins. And as soon as Ed asked, ‘Do you remember any Garda calling to the O’Neills’ house before the attack?’ Johnnie said, ‘Yeah, I do – that little prick.’