Of all the horrific murders carried out in recent times, the killing committed by Charlotte Mulhall – one of the notorious Scissor Sisters – stands out for its sheer gruesomeness and brutality.
That two young women could stab and beat to death their mother’s boyfriend and then dismember his body shocked and appalled the nation.
Charlotte and Linda Mulhall sank to extreme levels of depravity when they cut off Farah Swaleh Noor’s head and penis and then dumped his chopped-up body in Dublin’s Royal Canal.
To add to the horror, they were caught on CCTV eating breakfast rolls shortly after the murder – with the victim’s head still in a bag on Linda’s shoulder.
The head was never found.
Charlotte Mulhall, 37, would be sentenced to life in prison for the grisly murder, while her older sister was handed a 15-year term for manslaughter.
Linda was released in 2018 having served 12 years of her sentence.
Charlotte did not set out to murder their mother’s lover but one of the most notorious murders in the
annals of Irish crime began with a drink and drug-taking session on March 20, 2005.
Linda, 44, and Charlotte, along with their mother Kathleen and her Kenyan partner Farah Swaleh Noor, headed into Dublin city centre and spent the day drinking and consuming ecstasy.
Later on they returned to Kathleen’s flat in Summerhill, Dublin, where they continued taking drugs and drinking.
The fuse that led to an explosion of extreme violence when Linda was sitting on a couch and Noor, 38, started touching her in a sexual way and refusing to let her go.
When he made advances and whispered how they were both "creatures of the night” she became hysterical and her mother begged the girls to “kill him”.
Charlotte slashed Mr Noor across the throat with a Stanley knife before Linda picked up a hammer and hit him on the head a number of times as he lay on the ground.
In the midst of the bloodbath, they continued to stab the victim up to 20 times before dragging his lifeless body into the bathroom and dismembering his remains with a kitchen knife and hammer – including his head, limbs and penis.
A forensic psychologist would later claim the sisters decapitated Noor to “remove torment” and cut off his penis as a “signal of power”. When the dismemberment was complete, the body parts were placed in black plastic bags and a sports bag, before being dumped in the canal.
In a statement to gardai, Linda told how they butchered Mr Noor in their mother’s home in Richmond Road and described how they spent hours chopping up the body before dumping the parts.
The sisters would later board a bus and sit among other passengers with the victim’s head in a shoulder bag and head to Tymon North Park in Tallaght, South Dublin.
The idea was to dispose of the head in a separate location to prevent identification.
Some days later, Linda allegedly returned to the park and dug up the head to move it to a field in the Killinarden Estate in Tallaght.
She told gardai she said a prayer over the spot and told him: “I’m sorry, you shouldn’t have died, it should have been me ma.”
The head has never been found and is still thought to be somewhere in Tymon Park or was eaten by animals, but if that is the case the skull still could be there.
Ten days later, Mr Noor’s leg, with a sock on the end, was seen floating in the canal a few hundred yards from GAA headquarters at Croke Park in the north of the city.
The Mulhall sisters and their parents were arrested and subsequently denied any knowledge of the killing but a number of weeks later Linda confessed to the killing in what was a massive breakthrough in the case.
Sentencing the evil sisters, the late eminent judge Paul Carney described the murder as “the most grotesque killing that has occurred in my professional lifetime”.
Charlotte received the mandatory life sentence and Linda was given a 15-year sentence for manslaughter, with both being sent to Dublin’s Mountjoy Women’s prison.
Detective Garda Daniel Kenna, who investigated the murder, said the case was one of the worst killings he had ever encountered.
He added shortly after the sisters were jailed: “I have worked on a lot of murders and murder is murder but in this circumstance, the fact that the body was mutilated in the way it was after the killing and the fact that it was done by women made it particularly gruesome.”
Later commenting on the murder to a Scannal documentary on RTE, forensic psychologist Ciara Staunton described the Mulhalls as a family living on the edge.
She said: “Here is a family on the fringes of a normal society. Drugs and alcohol play a large part. Farah is known to be a violent sexual predator.
“So it’s an explosive set of interpersonal relations.”
To add to the tragedy after Charlotte and Linda were charged with murder in December 2005, their father John Mulhall went
to Dublin’s Phoenix Park and hanged himself.
Their mother fled to Britain but was later brought back and sentenced to three years for aiding and abetting her daughters in
the killing.
While serving her life sentence, Charlotte has been anything but a model prisoner and has not left her troubled past behind.
Last September she filed a challenge in the High Court to a decision to transfer her from the Dochas Centre in the Mountjoy complex in Dublin to Limerick Prison, saying, “I am lonely and sad” due to “the lack of visits from my family”.
She denied having lesbian romps in jail, including an alleged fling with a warder and disputed claims she had been “found in a very
compromising position” with the prison officer.
In November 2017 a male member of prison staff was found hiding behind a shower curtain in Mulhall’s en-suite bathroom and prison CCTV recorded the man entering her cell 10 minutes earlier.
Shortly after her incarceration, Charlotte was also disciplined after photos emerged of her posing for the camera, jokingly holding a knife to the throat of a male inmate in the jail’s kitchen.
Although she is 14 years into her life sentence, there is little chance of her being released any time in the near future.
Apart from the sheer horror of the crime she committed, there is no evidence to show she would fit back into normal society.
