The Cold Case Files (8 page)

Two months after the murder of Nancy Smyth, Co. Kilkenny was again the centre of national attention when a major security operation saw the arrest of Dessie O’Hare, who was wanted for the
kidnap and mutilation of Dublin dentist John O’Grady. O’Hare and other members of the newly formed Irish Republican Brigade had kidnapped Mr O’Grady in Dublin on 13 October. He
was held at hideouts in Dublin and Cork before being rescued by Gardaí in Dublin on 5 November. During his ordeal, the tops of John O’Grady’s two little fingers were chopped off
by his kidnap gang, which was led by Dessie O’Hare. A manhunt continued for O’Hare across Ireland for three weeks after John O’Grady’s rescue, before intelligence was
gathered which led to his capture in north Co. Kilkenny during a shootout on 27 November. Detectives from Kilkenny and Tipperary joined with members of the Army in mounting a roadblock, which led
to O’Hare’s arrest. Another gunman was shot dead during the operation that led to the capture of Ireland’s most wanted man. O’Hare was later given a 40-year prison sentence
but has since been released as part of the Good Friday Agreement. The work done by Gardaí from Kilkenny in helping to bring Dessie O’Hare to justice was admirable. Their sense of
satisfaction with being involved in such an arrest was tempererd somewhat by the ongoing investigation into the murder of Nancy Smyth, which had by now stalled with no sign of an early
breakthrough.

The murder of Nancy Smyth was not the first time a killer tried to hide his crime by setting fire to his victim’s home, and it wouldn’t be the last. Co. Kilkenny was again the scene
of a most horrific case in December 2008, when three innocent lives were taken by a killer and arsonist. In the early hours of Christmas morning of that year, 30-year-old Sharon Whelan was
strangled to death in her home in Windgap in the south of the county. Sharon had been renting a farmhouse where she lived with her two daughters Zsara and Nadia, who were just seven and two years
old. Sharon did not know her killer—a 23-year-old man, Brian Hennessy, who was a postal worker and lived in Windgap village. He went to Sharon’s isolated home and, after strangling her,
he spent a number of hours in the house before he then set at least two fires to try and cover his tracks. He then callously walked out the door as the two little girls slept in the house. Both
Zsara and Nadia died from smoke inhalation. Brian Hennessy is now serving one life sentence for the three murders. Hennessy was caught through
DNA
evidence. It was the quick
thinking of brave neighbours of Sharon’s who removed the three bodies from the burning farmhouse which later allowed pathologist Maurice Murphy to determine that Sharon was dead before the
fire was set, and a major criminal investigation led to the capture of a triple-killer.

Some of the detectives who investigated the murders of Sharon, Zsara and Nadia could remember the unsolved case of Nancy Smyth. Once Brian Hennessy was identified as the culprit for the murders
in Windgap, it was clear that there was no link whatsoever with Nancy’s case. The two cases showed that two separate killers had struck in the county just over twenty years apart and both had
used arson as a means to try and hide evidence of murder. If Sharon Whelan’s neighbours had not managed to remove the three bodies from the burning farmhouse before it was too late, the
evidence of murder might have been lost and the deaths might have been blamed on an accidental fire. Similarly, if the fire set in Nancy’s home in September 1987 had taken hold fully, it
might have been wrongly assumed that there was nothing suspicious about her death.

The one major difference between these two cases is that the murderer of Sharon and Zsara and Nadia was caught, and caught quickly. The people of Co. Kilkenny could breathe a sigh of relief that
a dangerous killer was off the streets. There was to be no such feeling in the aftermath of Nancy Smyth’s murder. Her killer would remain free to roam the streets.

The Cold Case Unit have continued to carry out a full review of Nancy Smyth’s case. There are hundreds of recommendations which the Unit have made about new angles to explore, old
witnesses to re-interview, original crime scene material to be located and examined.

Nancy Smyth is buried at St Kieran’s Cemetery in east Kilkenny, not too far from Nowlan Park
GAA
grounds. The use of the term ‘city’ to describe
Kilkenny comes from a medieval charter it received over 800 years ago. The city is dominated at the south end by Kilkenny Castle, while the western bank has become a hub for arts, crafts and design
which have all led to sizeable tourist numbers, even in the midst of a recession. The continued successes of Kilkenny’s hurlers also give a sense of excitement to the busy and compact
Kilkenny city.

The house where Nancy Smyth was murdered is still there on Wolfe Tone Street. Less than half a kilometre away Nancy is laid to rest with her husband Dick. Gardaí investigating the murder
of Nancy Smyth need evidence, they need people to talk. Nancy Smyth’s final resting place is in Kilkenny, and the chilling possibility is that her killer may still walk these streets.

E
ighteen-year-old Inga-Maria Hauser had hardly set foot on the island of Ireland when she was murdered and her body hidden in a forest in Co.
Antrim in April 1988. The teenager was on the trip of a lifetime to Britain and Ireland, having set off from her home in Germany at the end of March. A confident and self-sufficient young woman,
Inga-Maria had travelled alone, using an InterRail ticket to set off from Munich. From the south of Germany she travelled north, going to Holland where she got a ferry to England on 31 March. She
was due to meet up with a friend in Wales, but just before Inga-Maria had left Munich the friend told her she now couldn’t meet until 9 April. Inga-Maria wasn’t deterred from her plans
and decided to do a week of sightseeing on her own before meeting her friend in Cardiff. When she arrived in England she stayed in London for two days and then travelled by train to Bath, Oxford,
Cambridge, Liverpool and then to Scotland. She went from Inverness to Glasgow and then to Stranraer. Inga-Maria still had four days before she was due to meet her friend in Wales so she decided to
get the ferry from Scotland to Northern Ireland, travel by train from Belfast to Dublin and then get the ferry back to Wales in four days’ time. It was a whistle-stop tour for a young woman
who had developed a great love of British and Irish people and their cultures. Inga-Maria arrived in Northern Ireland on the late evening of 6 April 1988 but she never made it to Belfast. Instead,
she was taken by her killer or killers to Ballypatrick Forest in north-east Co. Antrim where she was sexually assaulted and beaten. During the attack her neck was broken and her body was left face
down in a remote part of the forest, just off a dirt-track.

Cold-case detectives have a massive clue which they are actively pursuing as part of ongoing efforts to solve this most brutal murder. Police now have a full
DNA
profile
from a person they describe as a ‘crime scene donor’—it is male
DNA
found where Inga-Maria’s body was recovered, and advances in forensic science in
recent years mean that the
DNA
profile is a full profile. Back in 1988 the sample could only give a match of ‘one in 2,000’, meaning one in every 2,000 men would
have similar
DNA
to the ‘crime scene donor’. But now, advances in science have moved the mathematical certainties so far on that the
DNA
found at the crime scene can provide a one in a billion match. All the Police Service of Northern Ireland have to do now, and what they have been trying to do in recent years, is find that mystery
person. “Inga-Maria’s case is one that we carry with us all the time,” says the current senior investigating officer Detective Superintendent Raymond Murray.

It was Raymond Murray’s colleague, Detective Inspector Tom McClure, who made the breakthrough in 2005 that has given this murder investigation an amazing impetus. The detective carried out
a review of the case, looking in particular at possible forensic opportunities. He knew that
DNA
had been found at the scene in Ballypatrick Forest in 1988, but back then
forensic science was nowhere near as advanced as it is today. One of the frustrating aspects of
DNA
sampling is that when you raise a
DNA
profile you
can effectively destroy the sample, so the sample raised in 1988, which could only give a one in 2,000 match, was quite possibly not going to be any use in trying to raise a new, more exact
profile. Tom McClure looked over the full crime scene and the list of all the materials, which had been kept safe over the previous seventeen years. He suggested that certain items should be
re-examined to see if further
DNA
could be sourced. The scientists later came back to inform him he had been right, they had now found a new
DNA
sample which could be analysed with the latest technologies. The new
DNA
profile was raised under a process known as Second Generation Matrix Plus (
SGM
+), the standard that experts currently work to in Britain. The sample matched the original
DNA
found in 1988, which had been raised under the Single Locus
Point process, but the newly raised sample also now allowed for a one in a billion match with whoever had left their
DNA
where Inga-Maria’s body was found. “The
first thing we did in 2005 was race down the road and run the sample through our own
DNA
database, but there was no match,” Raymond Murray tells me. “At that
time the Northern Ireland and the
UK
databases were not one unified database, so we then ran it through their computers, but again there was no match. Everybody was
disappointed. We’ve also gone to Interpol and a number of countries with databases have checked it out but still there was no match.”

At her home in eastern Munich, I meet Inga-Maria’s mother Almut. Now in her early seventies, she has been kept up to date by the
PSNI
with the recent and ongoing
developments in her daughter’s case. Detectives have written to Almut in German, outlining the work which has been going on. With the assistance of a translator, Nele Obermueller, Almut tells
me she is heartened to know that her daughter’s unsolved murder is being pursued. “It is good that police have this lead which they are working on. I cannot get my hopes up too much.
The crime was so long ago. It was and still is unbelievable.”

Almut showed me around her apartment, pointing out all the paintings on the walls which Inga-Maria had done. She was a very talented artist, both with paint and pencil sketches. One painting is
of a girl walking through long grass on a summer’s day, she’s wearing a straw hat with a pretty bow. Another image is entirely different, it’s a black and white sketch which she
did in school depicting the subject of war. There are headstones in the centre of the image, with a dark sky above and distraught relatives in the foreground. “Inga-Maria was in her second
last year at Oskar Von Miller high school here in Munich,” says Almut. “She was in 12th grade when she decided to travel to Britain and Ireland. Inga-Maria was a kind, sociable,
conscientious young woman. When her friend said she couldn’t meet up as soon as they had originally planned, Inga-Maria decided to travel on anyway and do sightseeing. She wanted to see
Ireland, she had spoken about wanting to explore Ireland. She rang home every day at the start of her trip, and then the phone calls stopped.”

As well as phoning home during her time in England and Scotland, Inga-Maria was a prolific writer and sent numerous postcards to her friends during her trip in early April 1988. Having grown up
in a large city, she was also streetwise. In one of her postcards sent from England a few days before her murder in Northern Ireland she wrote:
‘You probably cannot imagine how much
England pleases me. The people here are so lovely that you don’t need to worry. I cannot imagine anything bad happening to me.’
On another postcard which she later sent from
Scotland she drew a small sketch of the Loch Ness monster.
‘I have just arrived in Inverness at Loch Ness where the monster lives but I have certainly not seen it yet,’
she
wrote.
‘My journey has run without a hitch so far. And it really is indescribably beautiful here. Unfortunately my money is slowly running out.’
As well as sending postcards
Inga-Maria kept a diary of her travels.