He didn’t know the exact date of the visit, but he thought it wasn’t long after he and his team had started on site. That would’ve made it early March 2001, around the time the O’Neills’ planning application had been approved. It had been late in the day, maybe five or six o’clock, and Johnnie was in the utility room on the ground floor, off the kitchen. He was using it as a make-shift office. That evening he was staying late to sort some paperwork and was the only person left on site. Linda and Conor were gone to Cork to collect some bathroom fixtures. When he heard a noise in the kitchen he thought it was them, back earlier than expected. But when he went to investigate, Johnnie found himself face-to-face with a uniformed guard.
Johnnie had lived in Fermoy all his life and was a regular face at committee meetings, on the sidelines at GAA games and holding fort in the local pubs. He knew the guards who worked out of Fermoy station just from seeing them around and running into them at these same places. But he didn’t recognise this guard and didn’t like the fact that he’d found the man inside the house. When he flashed his badge, Johnnie made a point of studying it and committing the name on the identification to memory: Garda Ronan Donoghue. He thought the ID looked a bit fishy but he’d never actually seen one up close and didn’t know what they were supposed to look like, and the badge sitting next to it in the guard’s little flip-up wallet seemed legit. Johnnie had had a bit of trouble with the guards when he was a teen, a time in his life he deeply regretted, and as an adult his default setting with them was deferential, obedient and polite.
‘What can I do for you?’ Johnnie had asked.
Donoghue said there’d been a burglary in the area. He was looking to speak with the owners about securing their property, especially while building work was going on and ‘all sorts of people’ would be coming and going. Case in point: he’d just been able to walk right into the house through the open front door. (Johnnie didn’t think he’d left the door open but he wasn’t sure, so he said nothing.) Donoghue asked about the owners – who they were, whether they were new to the area, if they had kids, whether or not they were living there while the work went on.
Johnnie felt like Donoghue was criticising him, that he was intimating that Johnnie and his team were doing a shoddy job of securing the site, and he didn’t like it – especially when the man was clearly new around town and Johnnie was a permanent fixture in it. The more Donoghue talked, the more annoyed Johnnie became. But he had to hold it in. He felt he couldn’t say anything antagonistic. By the time Donoghue left, steam was practically coming out of Johnnie’s ears. Who the hell did this prick think he was, eh? Who did he think he was speaking to? The fucking cheek of him.
Johnnie doesn’t think he ever mentioned this visit to Linda or Conor, but he did say it to Gerard Byrne, a friend of his who taught at the primary school. Byrne said he thought Johnnie was paranoid and totally overreacting. But he also said that as far as he knew – and he tended to be a man who knew such things – there was no Garda Donoghue working out of Fermoy station.
Johnnie did nothing with this information. He didn’t call the station to check. He didn’t report that someone was impersonating a member of An Garda Síochána. He didn’t mention the visit to anyone other than Gerard Byrne – even after Linda was attacked when, in my opinion, the visit could only have taken on a greater and worryingly sinister significance. Johnnie just forgot about it. He told us he didn’t think he’d ever even thought of it again until Ed called and asked him specifically if such a thing had happened.
I desperately wish I could rewind the clock and set off alarm bells at the point in this story, when someone claiming to be Garda Ronan Donoghue leaves the house in Fermoy while Johnnie Murphy stands in the doorway and watches him go. Forget alarm bells – let’s have air-raid sirens. Because that’s the moment. That’s the point at which two paths diverged in a wood and had we chased him down the other one, my family would still be alive.
But I am armed with the knowledge of what’s to come. I know that someone will enter the O’Neills’ house to move things, to interfere with things, and to take something – Linda’s diary – away. I know that Linda will suffer a heinous attack in her own home that will almost kill her. I know that in a few months’ time Ed will link that case to four others, including the murder of my own family members, and that nearly two decades after that, he and I will find another connection that involves a man pretending to be a guard.
But Johnnie didn’t know any of that. He had an annoying five-minute conversation one day and complained about it to a friend who mentioned that he didn’t think there was a guard by that name in the local station. So what? It was a minor detail in an unimportant event on an unremarkable day, and it soon fell straight out of Johnnie’s mind.
You open your door one evening to find a uniformed police officer standing outside. Nothing’s wrong, don’t worry. This is just a courtesy call. There’s been a burglary in the area and they’re just letting you know so your home isn’t next. Lock your doors and windows. Keep valuables out of view. Think about installing an alarm. You chat for a few minutes. You might mention the door at the back that doesn’t lock. Or that fact that you live here alone. Or that the couple who owns this construction site is living here while the work goes on – or, well, one of them is, because her husband is going back to San Francisco for a few weeks next week. Maybe you don’t reveal any information, but while you speak he’s still gathering it. The integrity of the front-door lock. The layout of the ground floor. Whether or not he likes the look of you. If he’d like to do to you what he’s already done to the others.
That’s how he was choosing them, we felt sure. Donning a Garda uniform and doing door-to-door calls in the aftermath of a real burglary. But was he really a guard?
Neither Tom nor Johnnie could remember seeing a Garda car, and we thought it would be relatively easy to convince a member of the public that you were wearing a Garda uniform when in actual fact you were wearing an approximation of one. He could’ve also easily got hold a real uniform – if he was prepared to murder innocent people, he was probably willing to steal items of clothing too. Moreover this behaviour would have been an incredible risk for a serving member to take, when one phone call to the local station would’ve been all it took to bring his little rogue scouting missions crashing down.
Ed never said this to me, but I felt he had another objection to the theory that our Ghost Garda was the real deal: he thought there was no way a Garda could do this. Would the kind of man who’d rape Linda O’Neill and then leave her for dead also want to work in the force that protected civilians from men like him? Ed couldn’t bring himself to believe the answer was yes.
I have to admit that I found it easier. A real guard would do a much better job of acting like one. He would have access to reports and operational details, so he’d know where there’d been a residential burglary and when his colleagues would be out officially knocking on doors. He’d also be familiar with investigative methods and know the importance of leaving no physical evidence behind him. And he’d already have a real uniform and badge.
We arranged for a sketch artist to meet with Johnnie Murphy so we could get some picture of ‘Garda’ Donoghue, but Johnnie’s memory of the man’s face wasn’t as detailed as his memory of their conversation. He did, however, remember a lot about the man’s uniform. He mentioned epaulettes with numbers sewn on and although he didn’t remember what they were, he could recall that one of them was askew, hanging – literally – by a thread.