The Cold Case Files (2 page)

John Maunsell never forgot the case. While the murder hadn’t happened in his district, he was the Garda who had first received the crucial information, he was the person Veronica McGrath
had trusted enough to come forward and make a statement to. Maunsell had been greatly frustrated when no charges had later been brought, and he often thought about Veronica and her late father, who
had been denied justice. When he heard about the formation of the Garda Cold Case Unit he quickly picked up the phone and rang one of his former colleagues, Maurice Downey, who was one of the
members of the newly formed cold case squad. Maunsell and Downey had known each other from their days in the Central Detective Unit, and Downey listened carefully as Maunsell outlined the history
of the unsolved murder which was on his mind.

John Maunsell was convinced that with the right amount of time and resources this was a case which could still be cracked. Soon after speaking with the retired detective, Maurice Downey went and
got the full murder file from the Garda archives in Santry. He studied it thoroughly and spoke with his colleagues, including the head of the Cold Case Unit, Detective Superintendent Christy
Mangan. They all agreed with John Maunsell’s belief that this was a case that was indeed ‘solvable’. There were prime suspects, there was a crucial witness, a body had been
recovered, and advances in forensics might now prove the unlocking of the mystery. The unsolved murder of Brian McGrath became one of the top priorities for the Cold Case Unit. First and foremost
they would have to see that the body in Whitehall Cemetery was formally identified.

As plans were made for the exhumation, members of the Cold Case Unit met with Brian McGrath’s three sons, Brian Jnr, Andrew and Edward. In January 2008 the three men permitted
Gardaí to take swabs known as buccal swabs from the inside of their mouths. Those swabs gave full
DNA
profiles of all three men and would allow for a direct
comparison with the body at Whitehall Cemetery. It was only the
DNA
of Brian Snr’s children which would be able to be compared to the as yet unidentified body. Brian
had been brought up in State care after being abandoned as a newborn baby in Monaghan in 1944. He never knew his birth parents or whether he had any brothers or sisters.

Now Brian’s own three sons were to provide the
DNA
which would help to identify their father. The three men had been young children when their father had
mysteriously vanished in 1987. In early 2008 they were told that their father’s disappearance and suspected murder was being looked at anew and a major re-investigation was underway.

Detectives knew that once the exhumation began on 19 May the media would soon find out and the whole country would know about the cold-case review. Sometimes Gardaí choose to publicise
cases they are re-investigating and other times they like to work away quietly. In Brian McGrath’s case, Gardaí were working behind the scenes on the case for a number of months before
it hit the headlines on 19 May.

On 8 May 2008 Inspector Brendan Burke and Sergeant Michael Buckley of the Cold Case Unit met Forensic Anthropologist Laureen Buckley and State Pathologist Marie Cassidy to discuss the plans for
the exhumation at the cemetery in Westmeath, and also for a major fresh search of the McGrath family home at Coole nearby. Arrangements were made for a company called Earthsound Associates to carry
out a geophysical survey of the field beside the McGrath home to detect any evidence of soil disturbance. The following day Detective Inspector Martin Cadden from Athlone requested an order for the
exhumation of the bones of a man from Whitehall Cemetery which had been discovered at Coole in 1993. The request was granted and preparations were made for the operation to begin at first light on
Monday 19 May. Within two hours of the exhumation taking place, news of the operation broke on the 8 a.m.
RTÉ
radio news. Gardaí issued a lengthy press release
confirming that detectives were indeed re-investigating the disappearance of Brian McGrath, who was last seen alive in early 1987.

Dr Stephen Clifford of the Forensic Science Laboratory and Dr Marie Cassidy provided crucial work in what would be the first major success for the Garda Cold Case Unit. It was Dr Clifford who
positively identified the exhumed bones as being those of Brian McGrath. In order to make a positive match he had first ground down some bone material from the remains to allow
DNA
to be extracted and captured with a special
DNA
kit. He had then compared the profile he generated with the samples from the three sons of Brian McGrath. His
result was as clear as could be—the probability of the bones being those of Brian McGrath was greater than 99.5%. It was a phenomenal success—
DNA
technology had
advanced to such a degree that bones which had been burned and buried in a field for six years before being buried in a coffin for fifteen years had still been successfully analysed to give a clear
match. Forensic science was unveiling the truth about this cold case. Brian McGrath’s wife had consistently claimed he had gone off and abandoned the family and was living in another country.
And all that time he was actually lying buried in the field beside his home.

Dr Marie Cassidy studied Brian McGrath’s lower jaw, or mandible. Despite the extensive degradation which Brian’s body had suffered at the hands of his killers, the lower jaw was
still almost complete. Dr Cassidy found evidence of a fracture between two right teeth, which separated the bone into two parts. The right half of the jaw bone was unburned and it was clear to the
State Pathologist that the fracture to the jaw had happened before the body had been put on a fire by the killers. Marie Cassidy said such significant blunt force to the jaw was consistent with a
blow from a blunt object. Such violent trauma could cause death from blood inhalation as a result of a mouth injury, or bleeding into the skull cavity, or a brain injury. Ultimately it would prove
impossible to establish what exact form of death Brian McGrath had suffered, but the exhumation allowed not only for his identity to be established, but also for the post-mortem examination to be
carried out, which found clear evidence of violence. It all tied in with the account given by his daughter Veronica, who said she had seen her father being beaten to death in a sustained attack.
This was no longer an investigation into the discovery of an unidentified male body. This was now very much an investigation into the murder of Brian McGrath.

As they had stood at Whitehall Cemetery, and watched Brian McGrath’s coffin being taken from the ground, detectives knew they had the elements to potentially solve this cold case. They had
the forensic and pathology experts who in time would give evidence of identity and cause of death. But they also had that most important element—a witness to the murder, a witness who was
prepared to stand up in court and give evidence. Veronica McGrath had first come forward in 1993, seven years after she had witnessed her father’s murder. It would take another sixteen years
before she saw her mother jailed for life for murder, and her own former husband jailed for nine years for manslaughter. But Veronica was a determined woman, determined to get justice for her
father, determined to see his killers brought to justice.

The other important factor in the Brian McGrath case was that the suspects were still alive. Cold-case detectives knew well that sometimes time catches up with a suspect before Gardaí had
a chance to knock on their door. While the Brian McGrath case was the first successful prosecution for the Cold Case Unit, another case might have got in ahead of it if circumstances had been
different.

Soon after being set up in late 2007 the Unit began working on the unsolved murder of a woman who was strangled to death with a man’s necktie in the 1980s. The woman’s body lay
undiscovered in her home for over two and a half months. A man quickly emerged as the prime suspect—he had fled the country and gone to the United States. It was believed he had later gone to
Mexico, Portugal and then to England but had never returned to Ireland. On 7 November 2007 the Cold Case Unit under Detective Superintendent Christy Mangan was commissioned by an Assistant
Commissioner to review this case and they began an international search for the man. Detective Garda David O’Brien was appointed the Family Liaison Officer, and Detective Garda Padraig Hanly
was appointed Exhibits Officer for the fresh review of this unsolved murder. Within a short time the Cold Case Unit had found their man; they learned he had been living in England under his real
name for many years. Now that they had an address for the man they began making plans to travel and speak with him, and they liaised with the local English constabulary. However, the initial
excitement at finding the suspect’s address was short-lived when it was confirmed by English authorities that the man had actually died of natural causes on 16 September 2007, shortly before
the Cold Case Unit was set up.

By July 2010, when a jury found Vera McGrath guilty of murder and Colin Pinder guilty of manslaughter, there was much public interest in the work of the Garda Cold Case Unit. The murder trial
had put the spotlight on the work of a dozen detectives based at Harcourt Square. While their work involved close co-operation with regional detectives, it was the cold-case team which was catching
the public’s imagination, the idea that a group of Gardaí spent their entire working day trying to solve murders going back as far as the 1980s. The Unit welcomed some publicity,
seeing the media as a means to publicise their work, and to make appeals for people with information about unsolved murders to come forward and ease their consciences. The cold-case investigation
into the murder of Brian McGrath put the Cold Case Unit firmly on the map. It led to the successful prosecution of two killers and it brought some solace to Brian’s grieving daughter and his
three sons. There was huge potential for solving historic murders if the right elements were in place.

When the Cold Case Unit was launched in October 2007, many observers remembered the successful cold-case investigation in the late 1990s which had led to the capture of John Crerar, who had
abducted and murdered a young woman, Phyllis Murphy, in Co. Kildare in December 1979. Phyllis vanished in Droichead Nua as she walked towards a bus-stop; her body was later found hidden in the
Wicklow Gap. For 23 years John Crerar had evaded justice, and it was only when Detective Inspector Brendan McArdle of the Garda Technical Bureau organised for blood samples that had been taken back
at the time of the murder to be re-analysed that a full
DNA
profile of Crerar was matched to the semen found on Phyllis’s body. Two Gardaí, Christy Sheridan and
Finbarr McPaul, had safely maintained the blood samples in their lockers from 1979 until Detective McArdle began his work in 1998. When a jury later found John Crerar guilty of murder in November
2002, this successfully solved ‘cold case’ became a perfect example of how advances in forensic science could unmask the identity of a killer many decades after the crime. It had also
shown that when confronted by Gardaí in 1999, the man who had given Crerar a false alibi twenty years previously had immediately told the truth. The man had never suspected he had given a
false alibi for a murderer, he had merely thought he had been covering for a work colleague by telling a ‘white lie’ to say the man had arrived at work on time on an evening in 1979.
The detail of the Phyllis Murphy case was clear evidence that people carry secrets, and sometimes don’t even realise the significance of those secrets. By the time the Garda Cold Case Unit
was established five years after John Crerar was convicted, detectives had long known that when the dynamics were right, historic murders were very solvable.

As they prepared to begin examining over 200 unsolved murders which had occurred since 1980, the Garda Serious Crime Review Team met with cold-case detectives from other jurisdictions. They
studied the workings of American police forces, and cold-case police officers from Scotland, England and Wales, among others. They also began to liaise closely with the Police Service of Northern
Ireland. Authorities in the North had been to the fore in proactively re-investigating unsolved murders from the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s. Central to the work of rebuilding Northern Ireland in more
peaceful times has been the Historical Inquiries Team, which is tasked with investigating 3,269 deaths attributable to ‘the Troubles’ between 1968 and 1998. A number of retired police
officers from other jurisdictions are involved in this work too. The
PNSI
is also actively re-investigating cold-case murders which are not linked to the Troubles. In more
peaceful times and with cross-community confidence in the police service, detectives have made significant breakthroughs in a number of unsolved murders in Northern Ireland, and hope to have more
successes. One of the most troubling unsolved murders was that of 18-year-old German backpacker Inga-Maria Hauser, who was murdered in Co. Antrim shortly after she got off a ferry from Scotland in
1988. The case had stalled and eventually hit a brick wall, and then in 2005 a full
DNA
profile from the crime scene was established and the search is now very much on for
that man.

In the Republic, among the many cases the Garda Cold Case Unit would eventually take on were the murder of 56-year-old Grace Livingstone, who was shot dead in her home in Malahide in north Co.
Dublin in 1992; the sinister disappearance of Englishman Brooke Pickard in Co. Kerry in 1991; the murder of Nancy Smyth, whose killer tried to hide his crime by setting a fire in Nancy’s home
in Kilkenny in 1987; and the shooting dead of Lorcan O’Byrne, who was celebrating his engagement when armed robbers burst into his family home in Dublin in 1981.

The Garda Cold Case Unit established a liaison with Dr Martina McBride at the State’s Forensic Science Laboratory in the Phoenix Park. Much of the work of the Unit would be the tracing of
original crime scene materials for forensic re-examination. They also arranged to avail of various profilers and crime scene interpreters who might study original crime photographs or visit a crime
scene and give insights into what might have been going through a killer’s mind. Poring over the original case files would be crucial to establishing which witnesses might still be alive and
available. A number of families of murder victims were by now actively seeking out the Cold Case Unit. Some people were calling directly to their offices at Harcourt Square in Dublin. Gardaí
knew they had to manage the expectations of people; there were certainly some cases which they might be able to progress, but there would be many that despite their best efforts would probably
remain unsolved.