Court was reminded of the harrowing details of Farah Swaleh Noor's killing before the sentences were delivered, writes Kathy Sheridan
Linda's weeping was audible from behind the long blonde hair. As prison officers led them from the courtroom for the last time, there was none of the embraces and whispers for their legal team and investigating gardaí that there had been after the verdict. They were going down for a long time, their children would be without a mother, and their own mother was nowhere to be seen.
Linda and Charlotte Mulhall had seemed relaxed and cheerful to begin with, when they were escorted into Court 2 for sentencing at around 12.25pm yesterday.
Mr Justice Paul Carney had had a busy morning in a clammy court packed with would-be jurors, onlookers, media and passing lawyers. It had included empanelling a jury for the retrial of Mayo farmer, Pádraig Nally.
Attempts by the prosecution and defence to have the sisters' sentencing deferred for psychiatric reports, and to fly the victim's mother from Kenya were roundly rejected by the judge on the grounds that the sides had been given "ample time" to prepare.
This posed a problem for Linda Mulhall's senior counsel, Brendan Grehan, also representing Pádraig Nally, whose new trial by now was up and running in another court across the hall.
The junior, pronounced Judge Carney, "has been provided by the taxpayer to cover Mr Grehan in his absences". Pause. "Well, we will just have to wait until one of them appears," he declared.
And so, for 10 tense, silent minutes, the packed courtroom waited. When Mr Grehan hurried in, offering apologies, the judge again asked for the whereabouts of his junior, who, he repeated, "has been provided by the taxpayer". "I'm not specifically aware of where he is at the moment," said Mr Grehan.
After further futile requests for an adjournment, the hearing finally proceeded. The court heard the same harrowing details of the killing and dismemberment, the reminders of the Mulhall family's brutal, troubled background and fraught relationships, the child abuse by a partner, the alcohol and drug abuse, the self-harm, the fact that the victim's torso bore 27 stab wounds and that his head was still missing . . .
The sisters' counsels pleaded for mitigation, noting that they had co-operated with the Garda, that they were very remorseful, that Charlotte has a baby and Linda has four young children - "and is a good mother to those children", in the words of Brendan Grehan.
At which point Judge Carney intervened to say that there had been evidence that Linda "wanted to make a trifle for the children rather than go out with gardaí to the locations [ where searches were being conducted]". He could not "quite accept that someone who put herself in this situation is a good mother".
Their father, John, the hard-working glazier who hanged himself in the Phoenix Park last December, was mentioned as having helped to keep Charlotte in contact with gardaí.
Their mother, Kathleen - thought to be in England and about whom the Garda are still "carrying out inquiries" - was summoned up in evidence by Linda, said Brendan Grehan, when Linda had sat up with a bottle of vodka and the victim's head, she had commented that "it should have been her mother [ who was killed] and not the deceased".
During the trial, it was alleged that Kathleen Mulhall had instructed her daughters to "please, just kill him for me". It was never established what she was doing during the hours that her two daughters hammered and sawed at Farah Swaleh Noor's body. While the sentencing of Charlotte - a mandatory life sentence for murder - was a foregone conclusion and was met with her expressionless response, Judge Carney went into considerable detail to explain his decision in Linda's case.
In one review of 50 cases of manslaughter, which had been originally tried as murder cases, 14 years had been the longest term imposed. There would be no mitigation for Linda on the grounds of her dysfunctional family or background.
The judge accused her of trying to stop or postpone the trial from the beginning by threatening to go "cold turkey" during it. He noted, however, that she had been "highly" co-operative with the investigation, was very frank in her admissions and on the final occasion when the gardaí had come for her, recalled that she had said that "she had had her bags packed from the very first day". That allowed him to give her 15 years rather than 18. But he repeated that if she was "a good mother", as had been claimed, "she would not have been getting herself into a situation of this kind".