This made Ed think that even if the man wasn’t the real deal, the uniform was. Numbers coming loose was a common problem that Ed himself had suffered when he was in uniform, keeping a supply of paperclips on him just in case. (They were the best way to reattach them in a hurry.) Rank-and-file Gardaí have to report to superiors if any issued items go missing or get misplaced, but looking for such a thing nearly two decades later would be a fool’s errand. However, spit-balling about this scenario made Ed think of another kind of missing property report: the evidentiary kind.
It wasn’t common, but sometimes things went missing between crime scenes and the evidence room. Money and drugs, mostly. Corruption plagued the force just as it did every other area of society. If it was noticed, it took a brave and principled member to report it, but it did happen. Ed went to his Superintendent, Kevin Taylor – who had already helped us so much – and, through him, managed to get a look at such reports for Cork county for the twelve months before the Nothing Man’s first attack. Taylor wanted the same thing Ed and I did: to finally solve this case.
In October 1999, a handgun, one of thirteen weapons seized in a raid in Ringaskiddy, disappeared somewhere between the farmhouse in which it was found and the evidence room to which it should’ve been delivered. There was no way of knowing if that gun was the same one the Nothing Man had used, but the model didn’t clash with the description of the gun as provided by Linda O’Neill. Had the Nothing Man got a gun by stealing it from a crime scene? If he had, then we had our answer: he was a real guard. But investigating every member of An Garda Síochána who theoretically had access to that gun nearly two decades ago was a step too far for Ed, if not morally or logistically then certainly legally and procedurally, when we had no evidence that the missing gun and the gun used at the O’Neills’ house were one and the same.
And just like that, we found ourselves at another dead end.
What else could we do? Put a call out asking people if twenty years ago they’d had a five-minute visit from a uniformed guard? Even if anyone remembered that they had, we’d need a team of people not only to get the word out there, but also to effectively collect and deal with the responses.
I couldn’t quite believe it – I refused to, at first – but after the dust had settled on this heady rush of new information, Ed and I were stuck once again. We had run our Ghost Garda lead down and it had led us absolutely nowhere.
Burglary. After nearly twenty years, we thought we finally had the password that would unlock the entire Nothing Man case.
But we didn’t.
– 11 –
The Nothing Man
Dr Nell Weir is associate professor of forensic psychology at Trinity College Dublin. She is in her mid-forties and was born in Port Talbot, Wales. If you visit her profile page on the university website, you will not find the kind of professional headshot her colleagues have all opted for. Instead, Dr Weir has chosen what looks like a holiday snap, taken outside the Lizzie Borden House in Fall River, Massachusetts, where the bodies of Borden’s father and stepmother were found covered in axe wounds in 1892. Today it is both a macabre tourist attraction and a thriving bed and breakfast. It’s only a tiny glint of light in the photograph, but Dr Weir is wearing one of her favourite accessories on her coat’s lapel: a small pin in the shape of a pair of pursed, full lips that says, Let’s talk about serial killers. That’s what Dr Weir does on a freshman module called ‘Ordinary Monsters: Inside the Mind of the Serial Murderer’. The course is so popular that she teaches it twice a year to keep up with demand and, even then, enrolment has to be decided by a lottery of student numbers to keep things fair. ‘It is surely the only class on campus,’ Dr Weir told me via email, ‘where we have to station someone outside to stop students from sneaking in.’
On a Tuesday morning in January 2017, I sat in on the introductory lecture. It was held in a theatre that seated at least a hundred people, but by the time I arrived – early, I thought, a good ten minutes before Dr Weir was due to – it was already standing room only. I hovered by the doors until a gaggle of teenage girls took pity on me and squeezed up so I could fit on the end of their bench. The room was overheated and I felt slightly sick with nerves, although Dr Weir had assured me the next forty-five minutes would be free from gory details and that she wouldn’t be talking about the Nothing Man.
The girls beside me were trading the names of their favourite true-crime podcasts (‘That’s the one about the kids who went missing. It’s so good, oh my God, I was obsessed!’) when Dr Weir arrived and descended the central stairs to the front of the room. When she turned on the projection screen, we were treated to an extreme close-up of Anthony Hopkins in his most famous role, as the food and wine and human flesh connoisseur, Hannibal Lecter.
Dr Weir took her place behind the lectern and smiled at us. She didn’t have to wait for everyone to quieten down; that had happened automatically when she’d entered the room. The air buzzed with giddy anticipation.
Before she began the lecture proper, Dr Weir announced, she wanted to gauge our existing knowledge. She asked anyone who knew the name of a serial killer to raise their hand and keep it up until she called on them, or until someone else she’d called on said the same name first.
Almost everyone in the room put up a hand and Dr Weir started pointing at random.
Ireland’s own Will Hurley, aka the Canal Killer, was back in the news, so it was unsurprising that his was the first name said aloud. Then came all the usual American and British suspects. Ted Bundy. Jeffrey Dahmer. John Wayne Gacy. Ed Gein. Fred West. Peter Sutcliffe. Harold Shipman.
‘The Nothing Man,’ one student said, ‘but we don’t know who is he yet,’ and I silently thanked her for that yet.
After those names, barely half the raised hands were still up. Then came the ones whose nicknames were better known than their given ones. Gary Ridgway aka the Green River Killer. Richard Ramirez aka the Night Stalker. Dennis Rader aka BTK. Ted Kaczynski aka the Unabomber.
Now, only three hands remained. When Dr Weir called on them, she got Arthur Leigh Allen, suspected of being the Zodiac Killer; Andrew Cunanan, the man who shot and killed Gianni Versace; and Aileen Wuornos, executed in 2002 for the murders of six men and famously played by Charlize Theron in the movie Monster.
‘Well,’ Dr Weir said, ‘I’m very impressed. Give yourselves a round of applause.’ The students were happy to oblige. ‘Now let’s do the same thing again, but this time, I’m looking for names of their victims.’
Silence – and not a single hand.
‘Even just a first name,’ Dr Weir said.
The students shifted in their seats. Some of them turned to their neighbour to exchange nervous smiles. There were a few throat-clears and coughs.
‘Anyone?’
Dr Weir waited them out and, eventually, the student who’d named Andrew Cunanan tried to offer her Versace, but Dr Weir said that didn’t count because he’d already mentioned it and Versace was famous for other things. A girl in the front row put up her hand and said the name Caroline Ranch, uncertainly, phrasing it as more of a question. Caroline Ranch …? Dr Weir told her good try, but she was thinking of Carol DaRonch who had had a miraculous escape from Bundy’s car and later testified against him at trial. Another student thought the Canal Killer’s victims might have included a ‘Paula Something’ (they didn’t), while another, who had recently watched David Fincher’s Zodiac, said the name ‘Paul Avery’. That was the crime reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle played by Robert Downey Jnr in the movie and definitely not a victim of the Zodiac.