The Cold Case Files Page 6
Nineteen-eighty-seven was also the year that father-of-four Brian McGrath vanished from his home at Coole in Co. Westmeath. The 43-year-old’s body would not be found until November 1993, when Gardaí excavated a field next to Brian’s house, after his daughter bravely came forward to give details of the murder she had witnessed six years before. However, it would be 2008 before advances in forensic science would confirm that the body was indeed missing man Brian McGrath. His wife Vera was later convicted of murder and is now serving a life sentence. A man was convicted of manslaughter and jailed for nine years. The Brian McGrath case was the first major success for the Garda Cold Case Unit, and gave hope that other historic unsolved murders might see similar advances. In Nancy Smyth’s case, there was a similar hope of a breakthrough. The circumstances of every case were different, but in Nancy’s case, just like the Brian McGrath case, the feeling has always been that the person responsible is still alive and might still be brought to justice.
On Tuesday 15 September 1987, four days after Nancy’s body was discovered at her home in Kilkenny, Gardaí arrested a man in his mid-twenties. The arrest was made in Kilkenny and the man was held at the local Garda station and questioned by teams of detectives. The man was questioned throughout Tuesday afternoon and into the late evening, and again the following day. With an arrest having taken place so soon after the murder, people naturally wondered if there might be substantial progress in the case. However, after being held for two days the man was released. His was the only arrest to be ever carried out in the murder enquiry.
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.
Eighteen-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 is wonderful to now have a full DNA profile from the crime scene, but it is also frustrating at the same time, because we have not yet matched that profile to any individual. It is forensic science which is currently leading us in particular directions, and as more and more people are eliminated as the possible crime scene donor, the pool shrinks and you wonder how close you might be getting. We feel we are very close to an answer, I believe we are all around this, but these cases are marathons and you have to dig in for the long haul.
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.
One entry records ‘the day after tomorrow I’m going on to Ireland. I’m looking forward to that the best.’ Inga-Maria’s last diary entries are on 6 April 1988 and record her travel up to and including being on the ferry: ‘Going to Glasgow now. Snowy mountains, wild landscape ... Went from Glasgow to Ayr and then to Stranraer to get over to Ireland. Saw the sea, beautiful and mysterious. Wonder where I stay tonight, need more money.’
Inga-Maria arrived in Northern Ireland at 9.40 p.m. on 6 April 1988 when the ferry, MV Galloway Princess, docked at Larne, having left the Scottish port of Stranraer just over two hours previously. Inga-Maria was dressed as a typical backpacker. She carried a large blue rucksack on her back and also had a distinctive canvas bag on top of the rucksack. The canvas bag was green but had a lot of prominent red, blue and yellow colouring with stars and circles motifs and the letters ‘USAF’. She also carried a green shoulder bag and had a pair of white runners hanging by the laces from her rucksack.
A total of 422 people are believed to have travelled on the ferry from Stranraer to Larne that evening. Many of those people were located back in 1988 or have been identified since then, but there are still a number of passengers who were on the same ferry as Inga-Maria who have never made themselves known. There were around 100 vehicles on the ferry, both cars and lorries. Some of those vehicles and their drivers have never been positively identified. Inga-Maria boarded the ferry in Scotland as a foot passenger and one assumption is that she similarly walked off the vessel when it docked in Larne. This is the logical conclusion, given the fact that the train station was just a short distance away within the port. This is where Inga-Maria would have planned to get a train to Belfast. Despite the late hour she might have planned to stay in a hostel in Belfast and maybe travel to Dublin the next day, or perhaps the day after that. But something happened to stop Inga-Maria even making it to the train station in Larne. She was either abducted or accepted a lift from someone, perhaps someone who told her they would drop her in Belfast. If she accepted a lift it’s possible she sat into a vehicle as the ferry docked. While there are reported sightings of Inga-Maria during the two-hour ferry crossing, it’s still not clear whether she left the docked vessel by foot or in a car or lorry.
While it’s logical to assume that Inga-Maria’s plan was to travel to Belfast and then to Dublin, perhaps she changed her mind and willingly accepted a lift from someone she knew was driving further north from Larne. Inga-Maria had
seen some stunning scenery in Scotland and perhaps she made a decision to find a hostel in north-east Antrim and then do some sightseeing the following morning. Maybe Inga-Maria had heard about the Carrick-a-rede Rope Bridge or Rathlin Island or the many other scenic spots on Ireland’s most north-east edge, where you can see across to Scotland’s Mull of Kintyre. Perhaps Inga-Maria fell into conversation with someone on the ferry who told her of all the tourist spots she could visit in this corner of the island of Ireland, and maybe they offered to drive her to a hostel.
Inga-Maria either willingly took a lift or she was abducted. If she was abducted, it would appear that it happened in Larne at the same time as other passengers were leaving the port for their onward journeys. If Inga-Maria willingly took a lift, the person or persons into whose vehicle she entered may have either told her they were taking her further north, or they may have lied to Inga-Maria and told her they were bringing her to Belfast, but instead of heading south from Larne, they turned north. It was now dark outside, and Inga-Maria may not have even known which way she was being brought, and may not have suspected anything until it was too late.
Inga-Maria was not a hitch-hiker, she was self-sufficient and confident, but she used public transport to get around. From the ferry terminal exit, it was less than a minute walk to Larne train station. She had an InterRail Pass and she loved travelling that way. Detectives have long considered what might have happened to divert Inga-Maria from her intention to get the train. Is it possible that Inga-Maria was abducted either before the ferry had docked, or as she disembarked, or as she walked towards the train station? There are so many possibilities which police have considered. Is it possible that Inga-Maria felt ill and had to sit down and accidentally missed her train before a predator killer struck?