The Cold Case Files Page 4
In the first few nights after Lorcan was murdered, Niall O’Byrne was brought out by two Gardaí to try and spot the car used by the raiders. The officers trawled around different areas of Dublin with Niall in the back seat of the patrol car but they didn’t spot the Hillman Hunter. However, soon it was found burnt out in a field in Monasterevin.
Lar O’Byrne died in 1990, aged 74. He had spent his whole working life in the pub trade and had a huge circle of friends who were barmen or publicans. He and his wife also knew many Gardaí. From the early 60s right through to the early 80s, generations of young Gardaí assigned to Dublin stations had socialised at The Anglers Rest.
Sometime after Lorcan’s murder Lar O’Byrne got a gild painter to make a gold sign which read ‘Lorcan’s Lounge’ and he placed it on the wall of the pub. But Lar never spoke to his family or to anyone else about what they all had witnessed that awful night. He simply couldn’t. When the family left ‘The Anglers’ in 1984 Lar would still go back to the new owner and make suggestions about what they should do to keep customers or attract new ones. Lar and Bernie had built up a vibrant music scene at the pub, both Irish traditional music and cabaret. By October 1981 business was thriving. And then their eldest son was murdered in front of their eyes.
In 2009, Bernie O’Byrne passed away, aged 85. By the time of her death she knew that the Garda Cold Case Unit was re-investigating her son’s murder. She took comfort from that fact. Niall tells me that his Mam welcomed the new publicity being given to the case. “Mam’s whole attitude was that at the end of the day, if the armed raider was sitting in a pub somewhere watching the news and had beads of sweat running down his face looking up at a picture of Lorcan, that would be something. At the very least to feel uncomfortable and for him to be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life, for the Gardaí to come knocking. She’d be happy with that. There would be some satisfaction to see him worry for the rest of his life. If he went to jail it would be like winning the lottery.”
When I visited The Anglers Rest with Niall and Ger thirty years after their brother’s murder, we went upstairs. Where once there were 14 rooms in what was the O’Byrne family home, now there is one large function room which runs the length of the building. ‘The Anglers’ is no longer a home as well as a pub, it is now purely a licensed premises. The current owners have done a good job on transforming the upstairs to cater for large gatherings, and they have recognised that good food as well as drink is a key to success. Thirty years ago, the O’Byrnes had spotted the trend of the time that good music as well as drink was the order of the day—different times and different business plans to ensure ‘The Anglers’ keeps on top of the game. Niall and Ger point to one particular corner and then another. The sitting room where Lorcan was fatally shot is gone, as is the hallway where Niall was standing with his two friends when the two attackers burst in that Sunday night in October 1981. What was once the front door to the O’Byrne home is now a fire escape.
Some years ago John Meredith was interviewed on radio. He was talking about a group he had helped to set up in Ballyfermot for ex-prisoners. It was mentioned during the interview that Meredith had served a sentence for ‘a shooting in the Strawberry Beds’. It wasn’t specified that Meredith was one of the two-man gang which had caused the death of a young man celebrating his engagement.
As well as Lorcan’s family witnessing the murder, friends and work colleagues were also in the room when the gunman entered. Each of those people would keep harrowing memories of that night with them. Mick Byrne was a barman at ‘The Anglers’ and he and his wife Breda were among those helping Lorcan and Olive celebrate their engagement that night. “I remember Lorcan standing up and the next thing he took the full blast of the shotgun,” says Mick. “When the gun was fired it blew Lorcan backwards. My brother Paddy was also in the room and he was hit on the face with the gun during the attack. I remember people grappling with the gunman trying to get the gun and then he was gone.” Breda tells me how she was eight months pregnant at the time. “I remember people trying to calm me down, I was in shock, we were all in shock. Lorcan was a very nice young man. Myself and Mick were very fond of him, of all the O’Byrnes.” The month after Lorcan was shot dead, Breda gave birth to a baby boy. Herself and Mick decided to call the baby Lorcan.
Niall O’Byrne’s friend Eamonn Balmer was one of the first to see the gunman that night. He was standing in the hallway near the front door along with Niall and another friend Roger. Eamonn was only 17 years old at the time, and thirty years on his memory of that night is vivid.
Niall and I had done our Leaving Cert that year. We had got to know each other at school at Moyle Park in Clondalkin and I did a bit of work in ‘The Anglers’ too. That night we were just inside the front door as we were waiting for my parents to call and collect me. I remember the door was open and suddenly a masked man appeared in the doorway. I remember the mask more than the weapon but I knew he had a weapon of some sort. He was a big guy, stocky build. He said nothing, there was absolute silence, but the sense of terror was immediate. We all turned in different directions. I ran to raise the alarm. I remember being pushed to the ground in the sitting room. I think I was pushed by the raider. I heard the shot. As I got up, I saw Lorcan on the ground and could see the seriousness of his injury.
The lead detective involved in the original investigation into Lorcan’s murder was Detective Inspector Noel Conroy, who later became Garda Commissioner. He retired from the force in November 2007, shortly after he oversaw the establishment of the Garda Cold Case Unit, which is now re-investigating Lorcan’s murder. “A substantial team of investigators worked on the original case”, Noel tells me. “We received good descriptions of the culprits and their mode of transport. Information gleaned from Lorcan’s family under the most trying and harrowing of circumstances was of great benefit in establishing the make, model and description of the getaway car which in turn led us to suspects. I am conscious one person was convicted before the courts but the other person to commit this crime was not prosecuted. It would bring a lot of peace to the family of Lorcan O’Byrne if the person responsible for this shooting was finally brought to justice.”
Throughout the 1980s and into the 90s the murder of Lorcan was rarely spoken about in the O’Byrne home. They spoke about Lorcan and their happy memories of him, but they couldn’t speak about the night he was murdered. Each member of the family had memories of that night, memories that never faded. As Lorcan’s brothers and sisters grew older they began to ask questions about the failure to bring the killer to justice. They found it galling that such a person could still be walking the streets, having never owned up to what they had done. And what other harm might that kind of person have caused to others down the years? The kind of person who carries a loaded shotgun and is prepared to fire it indiscriminately, what else had they done since they killed Lorcan O’Byrne in 1981? The O’Byrne family began asking the Garda Commissioner to help them. The family heard about the setting up of the Garda Cold Case Unit. “I contacted senior Gardaí and asked if Lorcan’s case could be included, could be reviewed,” Niall O’Byrne tells me. “I met with Christy Mangan from the Cold Case Unit and after I went through the whole case with him he agreed to take a look at it. Two weeks later Christy told me there was enough to fully re-open the case.”
Before the Cold Case Unit ever got to visit John Meredith he took his own life. It was a pure coincidence that within weeks of the Unit being set up in late 2007 John Meredith shot himself. He was 55 years old and was terminally ill at the time. In previous years he had tried to contact Lorcan O’Byrne’s family, he wrote to them seeking forgiveness. A Garda told him to stop trying to make contact, the O’Byrnes wanted nothing to do with him.
John Meredith may have been genuinely remorseful for what happened to Lorcan O’Byrne. On the surface, it would appear that his later work in developing a group for ex-prisoners in Dublin was evidence of a changed character. The real test perhaps would have been if the
Cold Case Unit had ever got the chance to speak with him. Meredith had the full story of what had happened on the night of Sunday 11 October 1981. The fact that he wasn’t armed himself and simply used his hands and feet to terrorise and assault Lorcan’s brother Niall might indicate that he was the lesser of the two criminals. The gunman may have been the leader, the thinker, the boss. Meredith may have been in fear of the other man after Lorcan was killed. While Meredith readily confessed his own role when he was arrested within two weeks of the crime, you have to wonder if he was alive today what his stance would be about the gunman, the cold-blooded killer who got away with it.
Despite John Meredith’s death, the Cold Case Unit have a wealth of material to re-examine as part of their review of Lorcan’s murder. Gardaí have also built up a significant amount of information from people in the criminal world. With the passage of time, allegiances change, people fall out, people talk.
The murder of Lorcan O’Byrne is one of the oldest cases that the Serious Crime Review Team are re-investigating. Because you have to start somewhere, the Cold Case team took 1980 as a start date to review every unsolved homicide. The detectives also look at cases from the 1970s if they are asked, but most of their earliest cases are from the start of the 80s. While Lorcan’s case is one of the oldest, there is another case that precedes it which is also being actively pursued at present.
Four months before Lorcan was shot dead at The Anglers Rest, a 54-year-old mother of three, Nora Sheehan, was abducted and murdered in Co. Cork. Nora was last seen outside the South Infirmary Hospital in Cork city on Monday 6 June 1981. Her body was found on 12 June by two forestry workers at Shippool Wood at Innishannon, 17 miles from Cork city. Nora had been suffocated during the course of a sustained assault and the killer was never brought to justice.
Similar to the murder of Lorcan O’Byrne cold-case detectives believe there is potential for achieving a breakthrough in the case of Nora Sheehan. A number of items recovered by Gardaí during their initial enquiries in Cork in June 1981 are being re-examined at the Forensic Science Laboratory. It’s hoped that microscopic material which the killer may have left at the scene of the crime or elsewhere might now be positively identified.
And north of the border, a recent cold-case investigation by the PSNI has led to the solving of another murder case which is now more than thirty years old. Jennifer Cardy was nine years old when she was abducted and murdered while cycling near her home in the village of Ballinderry, Co. Antrim, on 11 August 1981. Her bike was found hidden behind a hedge but Jennifer had vanished. Six days later her body was found ten miles away in McKee’s Dam at Hillsborough, Co. Down. This shocking murder was actively re-investigated by the PSNI’s Serious Crime Branch in recent years, and a man in his sixties was arrested and questioned about the crime in 2005. In October 2011, this man—Robert Black—was convicted of Jennifer’s murder. The court heard he was already serving three life sentences for murdering three girls in Britain in the 1980s.
When I obtained a copy of Lorcan’s inquest file from the National Archives, I found official documentation which rightly records the cause of Lorcan’s death and his address and age and occupation. But the documentation only allows for a Coroner’s Certificate to specify if a deceased person was married, widowed or single. Never has official documentation been so inadequate to properly reflect a tragedy. There is no section to acknowledge that Lorcan was engaged, that he wanted to be married, that he was in love with his fiancée Olive, that only that night he was celebrating his engagement, that they had their whole lives ahead of them. The documentation in Lorcan’s inquest file merely records that he was ‘single’.
The Cold Case Unit are actively working to bring Lorcan’s killer to justice. Based on descriptions given by witnesses, Garda intelligence in the case, and looking at the circumstances of his accomplice John Meredith, it is quite likely that the killer who escaped justice is now in his sixties and from Dublin. As we chat about their memories of Lorcan, both Niall and Ger O’Byrne tell me of how their brother’s murder has affected how they have reacted to other violent incidents. On one occasion an armed man hijacked Ger’s car, but not before Ger started screaming at him. While other people might be frozen with fear, Ger found he was consumed with anger. Likewise, Niall once witnessed a high-speed car chase with Gardaí in pursuit of a group of people. The ‘getaway car’ came to a halt near Niall, and he offered his assistance to the Gardaí in keeping the suspects on the ground until Garda reinforcements arrived. It was an instinctive reaction by someone who has previously come face to face with the worst type of people in our society. I ask them their thoughts on John Meredith’s apparent remorse for what happened to Lorcan. They don’t know if it was genuine or not, but Ger sums it up well. “Meredith may have been remorseful,” he says. “But the other man never had any remorse. He never said sorry. Committing a murder didn’t faze this man, he has no value on life.”
“This case is not solved at all,” adds Niall. “Although Meredith was caught, the other guy, the one who shot Lorcan, is still walking around, and has been for the last thirty years.”
After strangling 79-year-old Nancy Smyth to death, her killer set a fire in Nancy’s bungalow in an attempt to make her death look like an accident. It was the early hours of Friday 11 September 1987 at Wolfe Tone Street in Kilkenny city. The killer had most likely entered Nancy’s home through the front door. Nancy lived alone with just her small pet dog; Nancy’s husband Dick had passed away the previous year. After getting into the house, the murderer had either punched or kicked Nancy in the head before strangling her to death in the living room of her home. The attacker then apparently set fire to the sofa which was beside Nancy’s body. And then the killer fled the scene, while Nancy’s small dog fretted over its owner’s body. As thick smoke filled the living room and then other rooms in the house, Nancy’s dog died beside her from smoke inhalation.
It is most likely that the killer was not a visitor to the city, but was actually a Kilkenny man. A credible theory is that after he murdered Nancy, the killer would have walked home to his own house in another part of Kilkenny, perhaps further out of the city. Based on all the witness statements which were taken in the original investigation, all the indications are that the murderer of Nancy Smyth knew her in some way, or had known her late husband. It would appear that a young man specifically targeted Nancy because he knew she lived alone, and he knew that, at 4’9” in height and aged 79, she would have been defenceless to an attack. After strangling Nancy and setting fire to her home it is likely the murderer slipped away to walk the streets of Kilkenny to his own home. Over the years he may have come to believe he got away with murder. However, approaching a quarter of a century after Nancy’s murder, the Garda Cold Case Unit recently completed a full review of the case and made 200 recommendations, including that all significant witnesses be re-interviewed and all items found or seized during the original investigation be forensically tested once again.
As he walked away from Nancy’s home shortly after setting the fire, the killer obviously hoped the bungalow would be engulfed in flames. Certainly the sofa where the fire had started was practically burnt out, but while this had caused thick plumes of smoke to spread throughout the bungalow, the fire was burning itself out in the living room by the time the emergency services were alerted. Although one bedroom window was slightly ajar when the fire service arrived, with heavy black smoke filtering out through it, it seemed that because the bedroom door was tightly shut, the fire in the living room had died out due to a lack of oxygen. So because Nancy’s body did not suffer extensive fire damage, the State Pathologist was later able to determine that not only was she dead before the fire was started, but that she had been strangled.
Nancy Smyth was seen arguing with a man at the front of her home just a few hours before she was murdered. A young witness was walking home after a night out with his girlfriend when he saw an altercation between Nancy and a man. The witness who saw this argument was able
to provide a significant amount of detail about what he had seen. The witness had earlier left his girlfriend’s house in the north of the city at around 12.30 a.m. and arrived at Wolfe Tone Street sometime between 12.45 a.m. and 1 a.m. The witness was heading towards nearby John’s Green to get a lift home. He had only begun walking down the top of Wolfe Tone Street when he looked across the road and saw a man knocking on the window of a bungalow. The bungalow was itself distinctive—it was set in off the road with a small garden to the front, whereas other more recently built houses on either side of the bungalow were fronted directly onto the footpath. But it was the commotion at the front of the bungalow that immediately caught the witness’s attention.
A man was banging on Nancy Smyth’s porch window which was to the left of the front door. The man was shouting something but the witness could not make out what it was. The witness slowed down as the man at the front of Nancy’s house continued to bang and shout. Just then the man saw the witness and walked out of the front gate onto the footpath and called over to the witness, asking him if he had a light. The witness crossed the road and would later tell Gardaí that he had been expecting an explanation from the man as to why he was banging on the window of the bungalow. However, the man did not offer any explanation to the witness, who gave the man a light for his cigarette. The man said something to the witness to the effect that he would offer him a cigarette but didn’t have a spare one, and the witness said it was okay, that he didn’t want one. The witness then walked back across the street and continued walking down Wolfe Tone Street, but looked back towards the house. He didn’t know who lived there. As he looked back he saw a woman inside the porch of the bungalow opening the front door.