IN EARLY SUMMER last year, Noel Long received a telephone call.
Detective Inspector Eamonn Brady identified himself, and explained that the investigation into the 1981 murder of Nora Sheehan, now the longest running murder case in Irish history, remained live.
There was also, he explained, new evidence.
Detective Inspector Brady advised Long to contact his lawyers, as Gardaí wished to put this new material to him. As they had no power to arrest or detain him, they asked that he meet them at Bandon Garda Station on a voluntary basis.
However, Long said he would not be meeting with any Gardaí. He told the Detective Inspector that he didn’t want anything to do with the case, and wanted to stay “a million miles from it”.
He explained that he didn’t want to know about the new evidence, as it had nothing to do with him. Under those circumstances, there was no point in his talking to a solicitor either.
He claimed that he had kept his head down for 40 years, and just wanted to get on with his life.
On a hot summer’s day in 1981, Garda John B O’Sullivan used his hurley to make a pathway down a steep slope in the Shippool Woods towards the River Bandon.
Peering through the briars, he could see an area where the grass and overgrowth had previously been flattened. He circled around, careful to avoid disturbing any potential evidence.
The body that the two forestry workers had told him about was not visible from the road. However he could see a navy coat 20 yards away, near the riverbank.
The garment was lying in briars that had grown to waist height.
As he approached, a stench rose up, and he could blue bottles circling in the heavy air. He was just about able to make out the bruised and battered form of a semi-naked woman lying partially on her back.
Her navy pinafore dress was unzipped, and had been violently pulled over her head.
The remains of a pair of nylon tights clung to her left foot, and a single shoe, its buckle catching his eye, lay nearby.
Garda O’Sullivan had been on duty on Friday 12 June, 1981, when two forestry workers called to the public office around 3pm.
They had been searching the rural woodland for dumped rubbish when they found what they initially thought was a dead pig. However, they soon realised that they had discovered the body of a woman.
They were both visibly upset and told him that “it didn’t look good at all”.
As O’Sullivan was the only Garda on duty at the time, and as they were not equipped with personal radios, he deputised his wife to accompany him to the scene.
After driving his wife and the two workers along a twisting section of road for two-and-a-half miles, they pulled in to an area know as The Viewing Point.
Nora Sheehan, a 54 year old mother of three, lived in Ballyphehane on the south side of Cork city with her husband James.
James was somewhat older than Nora, and passed away in 1985, never seeing her killer brought to trial.
They had three sons, James Jr, Jeremiah, and Hugh. All three are alive today, and two were present for the opening of the trial.
Nora had previously worked in a nearby hospital, but had suffered a fall there. She experienced some ill health “whether arising from that [the fall] or otherwise” said Brendan Grehan, prosecution counsel, to the jury.
Grehan said that Nora was a familiar sight on the roads near her home, and would often wave down cars and talk to people about the goings-on at the hospital.
Neighbours would hear her shout “open the boots and let out the bodies”.
James Jr told the Central Criminal Court that his mother had a habit of waving at traffic, something he put down to her rural upbringing where “everyone used to pick everyone up”.
He described her as “a bit eccentric” and as someone who would freely speak her mind.
On Saturday 6 June, two dogs had gotten into a fight near Nora’s home. She was bitten on the arm when she tried to separate the animals.
She walked to the casualty department at South Infirmary Victoria University Hospital for treatment.
Agnes Rice, a nurse at the hospital, treated her wound around 9.45om that night. Nora didn’t want the area sutured, so she was given a tetanus injection, after which an antibiotic spray was applied and the wound dressed.
Nora was “very thankful” to the staff and wanted to leave money in the donation box.
Rice, now retired, recalled that Nora was formally dressed in a blue coat and a dress, and was carrying a bag. She said Nora wore a hat with a ribbon which she kept taking on and off “in an agitated fashion”.
She struck Rice as being a “vulnerable person”.
Maurice Murphy, who was 16 years old at the time, recalled being in the hospital’s casualty department that night after hurting his foot.
There were five others in the waiting room, and he remembered Nora being in “quite an agitated state; maybe excited”.
He heard her refuse to get the bite stitched, and recalled her “rummaging around in her bag and talking to everyone”.
Joan Holland was sitting in her boyfriend’s car near the hospital that same night when she saw Nora, who she knew, standing at a junction waving at cars.
She remarked that something would happen to her sometime “with the way she was going on”. She thought that Nora was far from home, as she was used to seeing her nearer Ballyphehane.
Patricia Sullivan was also in a car that night around 9:45pm when she passed a woman holding a handbag and dressed in a coat to her knees. She thought it was odd that the woman was waving at cars and smiling for no reason.
They didn’t know each other, and she didn’t get the impressions the woman was trying to flag her down.
Martin Sullivan’s eye was also drawn to the same woman while he sat in his car with his sister. He said she was dressed formally, in the way he would have expected his grandmother to dress going to mass.
Around 1.30am later that night, John Murray was driving home from work when he saw Nora standing at the junction of Vicar’s Road and the Togher Road in Cork city. He said she was waving at cars as they passed, a “thing she did”, which he described as “eccentric”.
The last sighting of Nora Sheehan was at 4.05am on 7 June. Brian Colman left his girlfriend’s house and saw a woman in a long overcoat on Vicar’s Street, waving at cars.
Three days later, on 9 June, her son James, then 23 years old, was contacted at work by a man who owned the corner shop near his home.
The shop owner told him that he needed to get home quickly, as his father needed to speak to him.
His father was distressed when he arrived home, and said his mother had been missing for three days.
Both father and son went to Togher Garda station and reported Nora Sheehan missing.
By happenstance, forensic scientist Dr Timothy Creedon was in Cork on June 12, 1981. Nora’s body was recovered by Gardaí just a few kilometres from where he was holidaying in Inishannon. He attended the scene in an observational capacity.
When Creedon returned from his trip, he became further involved with the case, and was tasked with examining swabs taken from Mrs Sheehan.
He preserved the semen that was retrieved from the victim and preserved this evidence on a microscopic slide. This was later archived in the Forensic Science Laboratory.
The preservation of this key piece of evidence was to prove to be of great significance in the decision to return Noel Long for trial 42 years later.
On the morning of Tuesday, 16 June, 1981, Superintendent Matthew Thorne stopped the then 32 year old Noel Long as he drove his blue Opel Kadett in Bishopstown.
Sitting in the passenger seat, Thorne directed Long to drive to Bridewell Garda Station, where the vehicle was parked in the station yard.
The vehicle underwent a forensic examination. Now retired forensic scientist Dr Maureen Smith told the trial that she examined sellotape lifts taken from inside the Kadett’s boot, to determine if there were any links between them and Nora Sheehan’s clothing.
Dr. Smith removed nine black viscose fibres from the victim’s coat, which matched carpet fibres taken from the victim’s navy overcoat which matched black carpet fibres taken from the interior of the Kadett.
She also found four black viscose fibres on Mrs Sheehan’s navy pinafore type dress, 20 black viscose fibres on the deceased’s brown tights and two black viscose fibres on nail scrapings taken from the victim’s right hand, all of which matched the fibres taken from the carpet inside the car.
Dr Smith also found fragments of blue metallic paint on the sellotape lifts taken from Mrs Sheehan’s coat, dress and shoe, which matched the car’s metallic paint. There were 26 fragments of green paint on the tights, which matched green paint fragments recovered in debris from the Kadett.
She also found two fragments of light blue paint on the tights, which matched fragments of blue and white paint taken from debris in the motor vehicle.
Finally, she removed a number of red foam fragments from the dress and tights, which matched numerous items of red foam found in the Kadett.
Forensic scientist Dr Sheila Willis said the fragments of blue paint found on Mrs Sheehan’s shoe consisted of three layers – metallic blue, grey and dark grey – which matched the control paint from the car in both colour and composition.
The deceased’s tights contained numerous prills and small circular pieces of metal and she said that similar prills and metal were “plentiful” in the metal of the motorcar.
After examining the findings, forensic scientist Amanda Lennon said there was “very strong support” for the view that Mrs Sheehan had been in Long’s car.
COLD CASE CONTROVERSIES
In 2008, a serious crime review team in An Garda Síochána was tasked with reexamining the murder of Nora Sheehan. As part of the review, the microscopic slide containing semen retrieved from her body was taken out of storage and reassessed “with an eye to modern scientific developments” and the science of DNA in particular.
The slide was sent to the UK in 2008 to generate a DNA profile as Ireland lacked the techniques to interpret low amounts of DNA at the time.
Scientist and DNA specialist Dr Jonathan Whitaker, of Forensic Science Services (FSS) in Birmingham, used a DNA profiling technique called Low Copy Number (LCN) to generate a profile. A male partial profile or incomplete profile was developed from the seminal part of the sample in the microscope slide.
Dr Whitaker said LCN was the most appropriate method available as it maximised the chance of getting a DNA profile from the sample, which he noted was quite old and had been taken from the decomposed body of the victim.
The witness, who has specialised in DNA profiling for over 30 years, said that LCN was developed by FSS around 1999 and has been applied to forensic cases since 2002.
The trial heard however, that the technique was not without its controversies.
Dr Whitaker told the trial that the biggest challenge mounted to LCN came in 2007 at the trial of Sean Hoey in relation to the Omagh bombing, when the judge had an issue with the validation of the technique and there was a temporary suspension of the test in the UK and Wales and a review of the methodology.
In December 2007, then 38-year-old Sean Hoey, from Jonesborough, south Armagh, was found not guilty of the murder of 29 people in the 1998 Omagh bombing by Mr Justice Weir at Belfast Crown Court. Mr Hoey had maintained his innocence throughout the trial.
A review undertaken at the time by Professor Brian Caddy examined the validity and reliability of the test. The Caddy review concluded in a report in April 2008 that there was no reason to believe there was any unreliability in LCN DNA testing but recommended that a quantification step be introduced into LCN methodology.
The LCN method stopped being used in 2012 after it was superseded by further developments in DNA profile testing.
The trial heard that the male partial profile or incomplete profile was later matched to DNA recovered from a beanie hat taken from Long in 2021, when a search warrant was executed on his home in Passage West. Dr Whitaker said the probability of the recovered DNA profile originating from someone unrelated “to the man in the beanie hat” would be one in 23,000.
Dr Dorothy Ramsbottom said that based on a database of the Irish population, it was at least 20,000 times more likely that the recovered DNA was a match to that found on the beanie hat rather than an unrelated person.
In his closing speech to the jury, Long’s defence counsel Michael Delaney SC said that LCN had a limited life cycle before becoming obsolete in 2012. He said its use in the UK lab which developed the technique was very limited and only three labs outside the UK had adopted the method.
“Dr Whitaker didn’t agree with that proposition but you can form your own view,” he said.
Mr Delaney said the method was controversial during the Omagh bombing ruling and that numbers were appearing in the results that didn’t belong to the DNA profiles. “These stochastic effects are more likely to be seen when an amount of DNA is below a certain level,” he said.
“Dr Whitaker couldn’t say whether the amount of DNA tested in this case from the vaginal swab was above or below that threshold and he couldn’t say that because the amount of DNA wasn’t quantified before it was tested,” Mr Delaney reminded the jury.
Counsel said forensic scientist Kristen O’Connor, who ran the DNA profiling on the beanie hat, gave evidence that quantification is now part of an automated process in Forensic Science Ireland and that it had been done for the last ten years.
“The purpose of that quantification is to optimise the amount of DNA, if you put in too little DNA it can lead to these stochastic effects,” said counsel. He said it was not just the failure to quantify but the absence of any proper validation of the method at all on an international basis that should give the jury some degree of concern in relation to the reliability of the test.
Mr Delaney said that the prosecution had overstated the significance of the match generated from the partial DNA profile and the profile found on the accused’s beanie hat.
NO CAUSE OF DEATH
Former State Pathologist Dr Marie Cassidy, who was called by the defence, gave evidence that Nora Sheehan’s cause of death was unascertained. There was no evidence she was strangled. She agreed with prosecution lawyers that death from asphyxia by one of two methods could not be proved or disproved.
Dr Cassidy said it also could not be excluded that the victim had suffered a heart attack due to cardiac arrhythmia during an assault or that she could have been suffocated by her head being pressed into a bed or pillow. She said that as the deceased was found completely unclothed and with an injury to her vagina, it was possible she had been sexually assaulted.
Dr Cassidy said there was no petechial haemorrhage on the lining or whites of the eyes. She said that these “tiny little red dots” are quite obvious in cases where a person has been asphyxiated or strangled.
The witness said a diagnosis of asphyxia could not be specifically made out and that the cause of death could not be definitely established.
Under cross-examination by the prosecution, Dr Cassidy said that if asphyxia was very rapid, then often signs of it are not seen and that death from asphyxia by one of two methods could not be proved or disproved in this case.
CLOSING SPEECHES
Closing the prosecution case earlier this week, senior counsel Brendan Grehan said the evidence all pointed to the “inescapable conclusion” that Nora Sheehan met her death 42 years ago at the hands of Noel Long. He said the prosecution’s case was built on two main planks; the forensic evidence obtained by scientists and DNA profiling.
Mr Grehan told the jurors they were being asked to infer that after Mrs Sheehan was last seen alive she came to be in a car, was badly assaulted and sexually assaulted and was ultimately killed in the course of a vicious assault or to cover up her murderer’s “misdeeds”.
In his closing address, defence counsel Michael Delaney SC said the case was wholly dependent on forensic science and there was nothing else to connect Mr Long to the deceased. He said the prosecution couldn’t precisely say how Mrs Sheehan met her death and reminded the jury that former State Pathologist Dr Cassidy said Mrs Sheehan’s cause of death was unascertained and had put forward possibilities, one of which was asphyxia.
“Just a possibility, very far from beyond a reasonable doubt,’ he said.
Counsel said the prosecution had failed to prove the intent required for murder and in those circumstances the most a jury could consider is a verdict of manslaughter.
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