PROLOGUE

The exhumation began at first light. Members of the Garda Cold Case Unit and local detectives from Westmeath stood silently as Brian McGrath’s body was removed from Whitehall Cemetery. It was just after 6 a.m. on Monday 19 May 2008. A small digger began the task of removing topsoil from the plot, which was sited close to a wall. When the digger finished its work, Gardaí completed the task of removing the coffin from the ground. The exhumation was done in dignified silence; it was a momentous moment in terms of a fresh murder investigation, but it was also a time for reflection on what Brian McGrath had suffered all those years before. Those present knew that it couldn’t yet be said beyond all mathematical certainty that the body was indeed the father of four last seen alive 21 years ago. That was the whole point of the exhumation—to establish once and for all the identity of the man whose bones had been found hidden beneath the soil near Brian McGrath’s home at Coole in 1993. People might have long believed the body was Brian’s, but now as part of a cold-case investigation it had to be proven beyond all doubt that the body was Brian’s. The evidence had to stand up in court.

By the time they came to stand at the graveside in Whitehall that morning, cold-case detectives had worked for months re-investigating the suspected murder of 42-year-old Brian McGrath. They had built up a picture of how it was believed Brian had been beaten to death, secretly buried, dug up and burned, and then secretly buried again. It was a most distressing crime, but one which seemed very solvable to the newly established Garda Serious Crime Review Team, or Cold Case Unit as it would become known.

When Gardaí had initially found Brian’s remains near his home in 1993 the body had been secretly resting there since 1987. Forensic science in the early 1990s was nowhere near as advanced as it is today, and the bones recovered in 1993 could not be identified as Brian’s to a mathematical certainty. Gardaí in 1993 had a great deal of information to go on, in what was a major murder enquiry. They only found the body because they were specifically looking for Brian and believed he had been murdered and buried on his land. They had arrested the two suspects, but in the absence of an absolute identification of the human remains, the DDP would not permit charges to be brought. The suspects were released and the body was later buried in 1993 without being formally identified. It was a most complicated, bizarre and violent murder which seemed destined to remain unsolved. Over time the case began to gather dust. And then in late 2007 the Garda Cold Case Unit was formed.

It was a retired detective who alerted cold-case detectives to the unsolved murder of Brian McGrath. John Maunsell had been a detective in the Dublin suburb of Tallaght, and in 1993 had received crucial information about the murder in Westmeath. Maunsell had been involved in a separate successful investigation into the murder of a woman in Dublin, and it was through publicity surrounding his role in that case which led someone to contact him about the murder of Brian McGrath. John Maunsell agreed to meet the person in a pub in Dublin, and they outlined how Brian McGrath had been missing from Westmeath since 1987, and that Brian’s daughter Veronica was very distressed and wanted to tell what she knew.

Veronica met with John Maunsell and his colleague Kevin Tunney and outlined how she had seen her then fiancé Colin Pinder and her own mother beat her father to death. She had seen her mother Vera goad her future son-in-law into attacking Brian without warning sometime in March or April 1987. Veronica had seen her father being beaten with various implements and had seen him being struck by both Colin Pinder and Vera McGrath. Veronica had witnessed the subsequent secret burial of her father in the back garden, she had also seen the body being subsequently placed on a large fire after it had been dug up, and she knew her father’s body had been reburied on land just beside the family home. Detectives Maunsell and Tunney spoke with Gardaí in Westmeath, who carried out a search of the McGrath land and they soon found a body where Veronica said it would be. Colin Pinder had by now returned to his native Liverpool while Veronica’s mother Vera still lived at the family home in Westmeath. Both were interviewed by detectives and a file was sent to the DPP, but word eventually came back that it was impossible to positively identify the body and in those circumstances the DPP was unwilling to press charges.

John Maunsell never forgot the case. While the murder hadn’t happened in his district, he was the Garda who had first received the crucial information, he was the person Veronica McGrath had trusted enough to come forward and make a statement to. Maunsell had been greatly frustrated when no charges had later been brought, and he often thought about Veronica and her late father, who had been denied justice. When he heard about the formation of the Garda Cold Case Unit he quickly picked up the phone and rang one of his former colleagues, Maurice Downey, who was one of the members of the newly formed cold case squad. Maunsell and Downey had known each other from their days in the Central Detective Unit, and Downey listened carefully as Maunsell outlined the history of the unsolved murder which was on his mind.

John Maunsell was convinced that with the right amount of time and resources this was a case which could still be cracked. Soon after speaking with the retired detective, Maurice Downey went and got the full murder file from the Garda archives in Santry. He studied it thoroughly and spoke with his colleagues, including the head of the Cold Case Unit, Detective Superintendent Christy Mangan. They all agreed with John Maunsell’s belief that this was a case that was indeed ‘solvable’. There were prime suspects, there was a crucial witness, a body had been recovered, and advances in forensics might now prove the unlocking of the mystery. The unsolved murder of Brian McGrath became one of the top priorities for the Cold Case Unit. First and foremost they would have to see that the body in Whitehall Cemetery was formally identified.

As plans were made for the exhumation, members of the Cold Case Unit met with Brian McGrath’s three sons, Brian Jnr, Andrew and Edward. In January 2008 the three men permitted Gardaí to take swabs known as buccal swabs from the inside of their mouths. Those swabs gave full DNA profiles of all three men and would allow for a direct comparison with the body at Whitehall Cemetery. It was only the DNA of Brian Snr’s children which would be able to be compared to the as yet unidentified body. Brian had been brought up in State care after being abandoned as a newborn baby in Monaghan in 1944. He never knew his birth parents or whether he had any brothers or sisters.

Now Brian’s own three sons were to provide the DNA which would help to identify their father. The three men had been young children when their father had mysteriously vanished in 1987. In early 2008 they were told that their father’s disappearance and suspected murder was being looked at anew and a major re-investigation was underway.

Detectives knew that once the exhumation began on 19 May the media would soon find out and the whole country would know about the cold-case review. Sometimes Gardaí choose to publicise cases they are re-investigating and other times they like to work away quietly. In Brian McGrath’s case, Gardaí were working behind the scenes on the case for a number of months before it hit the headlines on 19 May.

On 8 May 2008 Inspector Brendan Burke and Sergeant Michael Buckley of the Cold Case Unit met Forensic Anthropologist Laureen Buckley and State Pathologist Marie Cassidy to discuss the plans for the exhumation at the cemetery in Westmeath, and also for a major fresh search of the McGrath family home at Coole nearby. Arrangements were made for a company called Earthsound Associates to carry out a geophysical survey of the field beside the McGrath home to detect any evidence of soil disturbance. The following day Detective Inspector Martin Cadden from Athlone requested an order for the exhumation of the bones of a man from Whitehall Cemetery which had been discovered at Coole in 1993. The request was granted and preparations were made for the operation to begin at first light on Monday 19 May. Within two hours of the exhumation taking place, news of the operation broke on the 8 a.m. RTÉ radio news. Gardaí issued a lengthy press release confirming that detectives were indeed re-investigating the disappearance of Brian McGrath, who was last seen alive in early 1987.

Dr Stephen Clifford of the Forensic Science Laboratory and Dr Marie Cassidy provided crucial work in what would be the first major success for the Garda Cold Case Unit. It was Dr Clifford who positively identified the exhumed bones as being those of Brian McGrath. In order to make a positive match he had first ground down some bone material from the remains to allow DNA to be extracted and captured with a special DNA kit. He had then compared the profile he generated with the samples from the three sons of Brian McGrath. His result was as clear as could be—the probability of the bones being those of Brian McGrath was greater than 99.5%. It was a phenomenal success—DNA technology had advanced to such a degree that bones which had been burned and buried in a field for six years before being buried in a coffin for fifteen years had still been successfully analysed to give a clear match. Forensic science was unveiling the truth about this cold case. Brian McGrath’s wife had consistently claimed he had gone off and abandoned the family and was living in another country. And all that time he was actually lying buried in the field beside his home.

Dr Marie Cassidy studied Brian McGrath’s lower jaw, or mandible. Despite the extensive degradation which Brian’s body had suffered at the hands of his killers, the lower jaw was still almost complete. Dr Cassidy found evidence of a fracture between two right teeth, which separated the bone into two parts. The right half of the jaw bone was unburned and it was clear to the State Pathologist that the fracture to the jaw had happened before the body had been put on a fire by the killers. Marie Cassidy said such significant blunt force to the jaw was consistent with a blow from a blunt object. Such violent trauma could cause death from blood inhalation as a result of a mouth injury, or bleeding into the skull cavity, or a brain injury. Ultimately it would prove impossible to establish what exact form of death Brian McGrath had suffered, but the exhumation allowed not only for his identity to be established, but also for the post-mortem examination to be carried out, which found clear evidence of violence. It all tied in with the account given by his daughter Veronica, who said she had seen her father being beaten to death in a sustained attack. This was no longer an investigation into the discovery of an unidentified male body. This was now very much an investigation into the murder of Brian McGrath.

As they had stood at Whitehall Cemetery, and watched Brian McGrath’s coffin being taken from the ground, detectives knew they had the elements to potentially solve this cold case. They had the forensic and pathology experts who in time would give evidence of identity and cause of death. But they also had that most important element—a witness to the murder, a witness who was prepared to stand up in court and give evidence. Veronica McGrath had first come forward in 1993, seven years after she had witnessed her father’s murder. It would take another sixteen years before she saw her mother jailed for life for murder, and her own former husband jailed for nine years for manslaughter. But Veronica was a determined woman, determined to get justice for her father, determined to see his killers brought to justice.

The other important factor in the Brian McGrath case was that the suspects were still alive. Cold-case detectives knew well that sometimes time catches up with a suspect before Gardaí had a chance to knock on their door. While the Brian McGrath case was the first successful prosecution for the Cold Case Unit, another case might have got in ahead of it if circumstances had been different.

Soon after being set up in late 2007 the Unit began working on the unsolved murder of a woman who was strangled to death with a man’s necktie in the 1980s. The woman’s body lay undiscovered in her home for over two and a half months. A man quickly emerged as the prime suspect—he had fled the country and gone to the United States. It was believed he had later gone to Mexico, Portugal and then to England but had never returned to Ireland. On 7 November 2007 the Cold Case Unit under Detective Superintendent Christy Mangan was commissioned by an Assistant Commissioner to review this case and they began an international search for the man. Detective Garda David O’Brien was appointed the Family Liaison Officer, and Detective Garda Padraig Hanly was appointed Exhibits Officer for the fresh review of this unsolved murder. Within a short time the Cold Case Unit had found their man; they learned he had been living in England under his real name for many years. Now that they had an address for the man they began making plans to travel and speak with him, and they liaised with the local English constabulary. However, the initial excitement at finding the suspect’s address was short-lived when it was confirmed by English authorities that the man had actually died of natural causes on 16 September 2007, shortly before the Cold Case Unit was set up.

By July 2010, when a jury found Vera McGrath guilty of murder and Colin Pinder guilty of manslaughter, there was much public interest in the work of the Garda Cold Case Unit. The murder trial had put the spotlight on the work of a dozen detectives based at Harcourt Square. While their work involved close co-operation with regional detectives, it was the cold-case team which was catching the public’s imagination, the idea that a group of Gardaí spent their entire working day trying to solve murders going back as far as the 1980s. The Unit welcomed some publicity, seeing the media as a means to publicise their work, and to make appeals for people with information about unsolved murders to come forward and ease their consciences. The cold-case investigation into the murder of Brian McGrath put the Cold Case Unit firmly on the map. It led to the successful prosecution of two killers and it brought some solace to Brian’s grieving daughter and his three sons. There was huge potential for solving historic murders if the right elements were in place.

When the Cold Case Unit was launched in October 2007, many observers remembered the successful cold-case investigation in the late 1990s which had led to the capture of John Crerar, who had abducted and murdered a young woman, Phyllis Murphy, in Co. Kildare in December 1979. Phyllis vanished in Droichead Nua as she walked towards a bus-stop; her body was later found hidden in the Wicklow Gap. For 23 years John Crerar had evaded justice, and it was only when Detective Inspector Brendan McArdle of the Garda Technical Bureau organised for blood samples that had been taken back at the time of the murder to be re-analysed that a full DNA profile of Crerar was matched to the semen found on Phyllis’s body. Two Gardaí, Christy Sheridan and Finbarr McPaul, had safely maintained the blood samples in their lockers from 1979 until Detective McArdle began his work in 1998. When a jury later found John Crerar guilty of murder in November 2002, this successfully solved ‘cold case’ became a perfect example of how advances in forensic science could unmask the identity of a killer many decades after the crime. It had also shown that when confronted by Gardaí in 1999, the man who had given Crerar a false alibi twenty years previously had immediately told the truth. The man had never suspected he had given a false alibi for a murderer, he had merely thought he had been covering for a work colleague by telling a ‘white lie’ to say the man had arrived at work on time on an evening in 1979. The detail of the Phyllis Murphy case was clear evidence that people carry secrets, and sometimes don’t even realise the significance of those secrets. By the time the Garda Cold Case Unit was established five years after John Crerar was convicted, detectives had long known that when the dynamics were right, historic murders were very solvable.

As they prepared to begin examining over 200 unsolved murders which had occurred since 1980, the Garda Serious Crime Review Team met with cold-case detectives from other jurisdictions. They studied the workings of American police forces, and cold-case police officers from Scotland, England and Wales, among others. They also began to liaise closely with the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Authorities in the North had been to the fore in proactively re-investigating unsolved murders from the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s. Central to the work of rebuilding Northern Ireland in more peaceful times has been the Historical Inquiries Team, which is tasked with investigating 3,269 deaths attributable to ‘the Troubles’ between 1968 and 1998. A number of retired police officers from other jurisdictions are involved in this work too. The PNSI is also actively re-investigating cold-case murders which are not linked to the Troubles. In more peaceful times and with cross-community confidence in the police service, detectives have made significant breakthroughs in a number of unsolved murders in Northern Ireland, and hope to have more successes. One of the most troubling unsolved murders was that of 18-year-old German backpacker Inga-Maria Hauser, who was murdered in Co. Antrim shortly after she got off a ferry from Scotland in 1988. The case had stalled and eventually hit a brick wall, and then in 2005 a full DNA profile from the crime scene was established and the search is now very much on for that man.

In the Republic, among the many cases the Garda Cold Case Unit would eventually take on were the murder of 56-year-old Grace Livingstone, who was shot dead in her home in Malahide in north Co. Dublin in 1992; the sinister disappearance of Englishman Brooke Pickard in Co. Kerry in 1991; the murder of Nancy Smyth, whose killer tried to hide his crime by setting a fire in Nancy’s home in Kilkenny in 1987; and the shooting dead of Lorcan O’Byrne, who was celebrating his engagement when armed robbers burst into his family home in Dublin in 1981.

The Garda Cold Case Unit established a liaison with Dr Martina McBride at the State’s Forensic Science Laboratory in the Phoenix Park. Much of the work of the Unit would be the tracing of original crime scene materials for forensic re-examination. They also arranged to avail of various profilers and crime scene interpreters who might study original crime photographs or visit a crime scene and give insights into what might have been going through a killer’s mind. Poring over the original case files would be crucial to establishing which witnesses might still be alive and available. A number of families of murder victims were by now actively seeking out the Cold Case Unit. Some people were calling directly to their offices at Harcourt Square in Dublin. Gardaí knew they had to manage the expectations of people; there were certainly some cases which they might be able to progress, but there would be many that despite their best efforts would probably remain unsolved.

When it was launched in October 2007, the Cold Case Unit said it was initially going to examine 207 unsolved murders which had occurred since 1980. The year 1980 was chosen simply because they had to start somewhere. The Brian McGrath case was the first success for the Cold Case Unit, so it might have been thought this would reduce the number of unsolved murders to 206. But such figures are only ever a guide to a situation which is impossible to accurately quantify. For example, what about the cases of missing people where it was quite possible the person had been murdered and their body hidden? What about murders which had never been recognised as such—unexplained deaths where no crime was ever detected but where one couldn’t be ruled out? What about more recent murders which have occurred since 2007 and which have not been solved, and which in time will come under the remit of the Cold Case Unit? The only certainty is that there are hundreds of unsolved murders, hundreds of families seeking justice, hundreds of killers who have quite literally got away with murder. Every killer has a family, has friends, has a social network, perhaps has work colleagues. The more you look at the scale of Irish cold cases, the more you realise there are potentially thousands of people on this island who have direct information or strong suspicions about the identity of killers who have evaded justice for far too long.