After 34 years of official indifference, Cynthia Owen had the short life and violent death of her baby daughter Noleen finally acknowledged yesterday. Kathy Sheridanwas in Dublin County Coroner's Court to hear the verdict
In the end, neither her father nor her brother were there to see her vindicated. Although present all week at the inquest, they were absent for the verdict. Her mother died last year. The people who were most prominent in her early life and memories were not there to hear that the savagely killed newborn of 34 years ago had an identity and a name, that the baby was indeed hers, nor to watch the coroner invite her gently to the stand and ask her to confirm "that you have given your baby a first name?".
Hardly able to walk or speak through her sobs, Cynthia Owen nodded and said "Noleen", almost in a wail. With a voice that sounded suspiciously hoarse and almost in a kind of blessing, Kieran Geraghty, the Dublin County Coroner, whose persistence in reopening the inquest had finally borne fruit, said : "I hope that that baby will finally rest in peace."
It was not a trial, but the inquest of a baby, Dr Geraghty said repeatedly this week. For many of those present, however, the stakes were just as high. The presence of a jury and three legal teams, including one for the Garda Síochána, was a testament to that.
The events surrounding the case were more than 35 years old, but the allegations of heinous abuse, incestuous rape and sodomy in a two-room house in Dalkey, stories of barely pubescent girls being hired out as sexual playthings to men known only by alphabet numbers, tales of casually dismissed miscarriages and attempted murder, retained the power to foul the air of a pedestrian conference room in a Tallaght hotel.
This week, a desperately divided family, split three ways, assembled at last in the only official forum made available to a 45-year-old woman in her decades-long search for truth and justice, with the nature of memory at its core.
At the heart of this week's hearings, though almost obscured in the seething conflict within one of Ireland's traditional large families, was an unidentified, 5½lb, newborn baby girl, stabbed to death in April 1973, dumped in a Dún Laoghaire laneway and - despite the fact that the case remained open and the inquest merely adjourned - buried beyond retrieval in a communal plot with 100 others. Evidential material capable of establishing the baby's identity also went missing from police custody.
"No system is perfect," said the coroner soothingly on Thursday, fearful of the inquest running away down yet another avenue.
"The investigation that was supposed to have been carried out in 1973 was compromised, if not an entire sham," said Cynthia Owen in her statement yesterday evening.
The coroner's job, however, was not to apportion blame, he said, but simply to establish the identity of the baby and where and when she died.
The baby, claimed Cynthia Owen, née Murphy, was her daughter Noleen, conceived when Cynthia was just 11, and stabbed to death with a knitting needle in the family home.
THE CLEAR SPLIT between Cynthia Owen and most of her family was evident in the court. All week, until yesterday - the day of the verdict - her sole surviving brother, Peter Murphy jnr, was present with his feeble 79-year-old father, Peter. They were seated on the left side of the courtroom, with Peter junior's siblings,
Margaret, Esther and Catherine, aligning themselves alongside.
On the right of the court sat their estranged sister, Cynthia, with her second husband and a few friends. Although Cynthia stated that at least four people bore witness to the birth of her baby at home in 1973 (three of whom were named as abusers, to varying degrees, during the case), none confirmed it or said they believed it. Her sister Frances, who told the inquest that she was raped on two occasions in the family home by a man referred to as "C", when she was aged about nine, said she believed that Cynthia had given birth, though she herself was not a witness to the fact. Despite Frances's support, there was evidence that her relationship with Cynthia had suffered too as a result of repeated calls from Cynthia to Frances's daughter, asking if she too had been abused.
Amid all the claims and counter-claims this week, one clear fact emerged. Of the six girls reared by Peter and Josephine Murphy, five alleged sexual abuse in the family home. One of the five, Theresa, who was Margaret's daughter but who was reared as her sibling, committed suicide, leaving a horrifying 37-page report of abuse, both of herself and of her brother Michael, in their home. Of the three Murphy sons, two are dead, Michael's bones found beside Killiney train station in 2005 and Martin committing suicide a decade earlier.
Until Thursday morning, the last of the brothers, Peter, now aged 47, had appeared to be a man of few words, the de facto head of the family. Then, surprisingly, he chose to take the stand to deny that he was the perpetrator of alleged sexual abuse against some family members. In doing so, he waived anonymity.
"You are C, aren't you?" demanded Cynthia Owen's barrister, Michael Forde SC.
Peter Murphy hardly blinked, though now publicly identified as the alleged rapist of two of his sisters. The day before, Frances, palpably angry and defiant, had testified to having been left sore and bleeding after being raped by him on two occasions. Cynthia wept throughout her sister's testimony, her second husband's comforting arm around her.
The tough line of questioning adopted by counsel for Peter Murphy snr and three of Cynthia's sisters, Catherine, Esther and Margaret, suggested that no prisoners would be taken here.
"How do you feel about your sister pimping you out?" asked barrister Caroline Kelly of Frances, when Frances gave evidence of a young Cynthia encouraging her to believe Peter's inducements of a doll and pram.
Frances had told her mother of the abuse, she said, but her mother had done nothing but apply a little cream and talc. It emerged later that Frances has been on anti-depressants and attending rape crisis counselling for many years. Frances also gave evidence that her brother Martin had told her that he had been raped in the family home by a man referred to as "A". Now here was her brother, formerly known as C, relentlessly, unstoppably, talking about their poor but happy childhood in the 1970s. This was on a different planet, apparently, from the one remembered by others, where Peter snr spent his nights in the pub and their mother sent her children up for deliveries of cheap port. Peter jnr blithely dismissed any suggestion of abuse within this happy idyll.
"All lies," he said.
So his view of their childhood was rosier than that of his sisters, asked the coroner?
"That's their memories. Or their made-up memories, if I might be permitted to say," he said with a tight smile.
But evidence from a former childhood friend of Peter Murphy jnr painted a different picture. Ciaran Hutton said his friend had told him that he had "had sex with his sister. I was only 11 or 12. I stopped hanging around with him then".
AN ENDURING IMAGE from the inquest was of Margaret Stokes, the only one of the Murphy girls to deny seeing any evidence of sexual abuse in the family home. Her daughter Theresa, who committed suicide at the age of 33, alleged in a 1995 statement to gardaí that her grandmother (who died last year) had forced herself and Michael to take turns sleeping in bed with a male member of the family.
"She hung herself," said Margaret Stokes, expressionless. And no, she said, she did not believe the allegations made by her daughter. But as with several of the others, she also told a tragic personal story which revealed something about values within the Murphy household. After becoming pregnant by her boyfriend as a teenager, she miscarried the child.
"It was like a little pet mouse with no hair," she said. "My mother wrapped it in a towel and flushed it down the toilet." No doctor was called for the teenager; there would be no medical check-up.
Did no one notice what was happening to Cynthia Murphy, pregnant at 11, in fifth class of a convent school? The principal of the national school was alleged to have said: "When the Murphy girls go into a toilet, they come out with a pram." There was an allegation that the same nun had called Cynthia into her office to ask if she was pregnant. Evidence given by former classmates (including one who had had no close friendship or contact with Cynthia since primary school), attested to her swollen belly and maternity-type clothes. Several mentioned long absences from school around the time of the alleged birth.
This was strongly disputed by the opposing teams, including Cynthia's teacher at the time, Rosemary Warren, a woman who prided herself on being "visually observant", as she had lectured in the visual arts, she said. Could Cynthia have been pregnant, she was asked?
"Absolutely not," she replied. "You didn't get fat children that often in schools then . . . A child who was pregnant would have been very obvious."
She believed that there was a baby, and that there was abuse, she said; it was the "time element" she had a problem with. She just could not understand how Cynthia could have been pregnant, delivered a baby, been dragged around Dún Laoghaire, nearly drowned by her mother, and still make it into school a day or so later.
Cynthia's attendance record "wasn't marvellous", she said, "but maybe it was consistent", at about one day's absence a week. In fact, after various tortuous attempts by several parties to count the days, the consensus was that following the birth of her child on April 4th, she had attended school for just two days that month (including the Easter holidays).
Rosemary Warren's first statement in 1995 described Cynthia as "unkempt, withdrawn . . . introverted", although she admitted under questioning that she only remembered Cynthia when shown a picture of her. Then again, this was the Ireland of the 1970s. Her single class in Dalkey comprised 45 or so pupils; elsewhere, she had taught as many as 65 to a class.
When charging the jury, Kieran Geraghty had talked of the nature of memory and the tricks it can play. He told the jury that they did not have to believe everything Cynthia Owen said in evidence. New memories can be triggered by certain things; there can be gaps in memory and the brain "attempts to tidy up things and might fill in the gaps with things that are only partially correct".
What you do have to believe, he stressed, is the core of Cynthia Owen's evidence - that she was the mother of that child. And they did.