A forensic scientist has recalled the horrific moment she found body parts floating in the Royal Canal during the notorious Scissor Sisters probe.
Dr Martina McBride has looked back on one of the most shocking and infamous crimes in Irish history for an episode of RTE show Scannal, which airs next week.
In 2005, Charlotte and Linda Mulhall killed their mother’s lover Farah Swaleh Noor in a drunken, drug-induced rage, chopped up his body and dumping it in the canal.
Dr McBride revealed: “At first I saw a hand and a foot in the water. There was a sock on the foot. Gardai said a lot of people had seen the body parts.
"They thought it was a mannequin.”
In a statement to gardai, Linda told how the butchered African, who was known to be violent, met his grisly end in their mother Kathleen’s flat in Richmond Road, Dublin.
After a day spent drinking vodka and taking ecstasy, Noor made advances to Linda whispering how they were both “creatures of the night”.
She became hysterical and her mother begged the girls to “kill him”.
Linda hit Noor with a hammer and Charlotte stabbed him repeatedly.
They spent hours chopping up the body before dumping the parts – minus the head and penis – in the canal.
CCTV showed them eating breakfast rolls shortly afterwards, with the victim’s head still in a bag on Linda’s shoulder.
Kathleen and her daughters took a bus to Tallaght and buried Noor’s head in Tymon Park. But Linda later dug it up and reburied it in another location.
She told gardai she said a prayer over the spot and told him: “I’m sorry, you shouldn’t have died, it should have been me ma.”
Forensic psychologist Ciara Staunton said: “Here is a family on the fringes of a normal society. Drugs and alcohol play a large part.
“Farah is known to be a violent sexual predator. So it’s an explosive set of inter-personal relations.”
Charlotte was jailed for life for murder and Linda was given 15 years for manslaughter.
Their mother, who fled to the UK, was brought back and sentenced to three years for aiding and abetting.
* Scannal airs on RTE One on Tuesday at 7pm.
