Was this Omagh man a serial killer ... and did he take his deadly secrets to the grave?
Patricia O’Brien is convinced Noel Knox murdered her sister Mairead McCallion and two other women but, she tells a fascinating Radio Ulster documentary due to be broadcast tomorrow, his sudden death a year ago this week robbed her of the chance of justice. Ivan Little reports
Is this the face of an Ulster serial killer? Patricia O’Brien certainly thinks so. She’s convinced that Noel Knox not only murdered her sister, but at least two other women as well.
And now a new BBC Radio Ulster documentary has set about investigating the claims that Knox, from Omagh, was an evil predator who targeted vulnerable women with drink problems and had a hand in the deaths of his former girlfriends, Diane Conway in 2002, Catriona Fulton in 2006 and Mairead McCallion in 2014.
Knox was also linked to the death of a fourth woman, but her family are sceptical.
Patricia O’Brien never had any doubt that Knox was to blame for the death of her sister, trainee accountant Mairead McCallion, who was an alcoholic, her mental problems exacerbated by the death of her best friend Julia Hughes in the Omagh bomb.
In the documentary, Patricia said of her sister: “She was using alcohol to try and dull the pain. But she would always be sending cards. She never forgot anyone’s birthday. She was very thoughtful and a very, very kind person.”
But Patricia said that as her sister’s drinking got worse her relationship with Knox deteriorated and the violence against her intensified. She added: “The abuse was quite horrific. At times it was of a sexual nature.”
Last year a coroner ruled that 36-year-old Mairead died from head injuries after Knox forced her out of his Omagh home on February 23, 2014.
The PSNI was criticised for taking the injured Mairead to a police station and not straight to hospital.
Knox was initially charged with Mairead’s murder, but the case was dropped after prosecutors raised concerns about inconclusive medical evidence.
The programme makers said the job of the prosecution services had been made more difficult by Mairead’s alcoholism which had led to her having a shrunken brain that made her more vulnerable.
Prosecutors said they couldn’t prove that Knox’s attack caused her fatal injury. Mairead’s family solicitor Pat Fahy told the documentary: “Whether or not there would have been a conviction there was more than sufficient evidence to mount a case and to have the jury decide on the evidence whether or not Knox was guilty either of murder or manslaughter”
At her inquest, coroner Paddy McGurgan heard that Knox had admitted putting two hands on Mairead to remove her from the house at Castleview Court, but denied any wrongdoing.
She had told police that Knox hit her head off a wall and refused to give her coat and shoes from inside the house. The coroner found that some of Mairead’s hair had been pulled out by the roots and that the cause of her death the next day was a bleed on the brain.
Noel Knox died just over a year ago, on November 22, 2017, and that robbed the McCallion family of the hope of seeing him back in court.
They had made a formal request to the Public Prosecution Service to consider charging him for a second time over Mairead’s death.
After Knox died Patricia O’Brien told Sunday Life that the world was a safer place without him in it.
She said she believed he had killed three other women from Omagh.
They were claims she repeated in the documentary: “I know there’s a story here. There’s a story that needs to be told because this is happening to other women and nobody is doing anything about it.”
Olive Wylie, the sister of Catriona Fulton, had also told Sunday Life that she believed Knox had played some part in Catriona’s death.
At Knox’s Requiem Mass in St Mary’s Church in Omagh, attended by just 40 mourners, a priest said he was “a gentleman, the life and soul of the party always up for banter”.
That’s not the way relatives of his former partners saw him, views they shared with the Radio Ulster documentary team who launched their inquiry after producer Elaine Dunseath heard a disturbing remark from Patricia O’Brien during a meeting with her about an unrelated issue.
Dunseath said: “Patricia told me that her sister had been killed by a serial killer called Noel Knox. That made me sit up and take notice.”
She set about finding out more about Knox, and reporter Declan Harvey came on board. And the pair investigated more alarming allegations about Knox’s relationships which had ended in tragedy. Harvey said: “We wanted to find out if the claims about him held any water.”
The BBC team met Omagh freelance journalist Anton McCabe, who told the programme: “I believe that Noel Knox was Omagh’s serial killer. I believe that he murdered four women, all four vulnerable women.”
He said there was a history of women who got involved with Knox ending up dead, adding: “People thought Knox had got away with too much for too long.”
One man who decided to take the law into his own hands was Mark McGlone, from Omagh.
He attacked Knox with a broken glass in a pub in August 2011, leaving him requiring 16 stitches to his throat and 14 to his face. McGlone pleaded guilty to a serious assault charge and it later emerged that his sister, Diane Conway, had been in a relationship with Knox when she died nine years earlier.
A barman recalled that as he tried to restrain McGlone he heard him saying: “That b ***** d killed my sister. I’d do it again.”
Diane Conway had also turned to drink, after the breakdown of her marriage, and died in Knox’s arms in 2002.
The rumour mill linked Knox to the death of a fourth woman but the programme-makers weren’t able to find anyone to substantiate the claims and decided not to name her.
Her body had been found by Knox at the bottom of concrete steps, but there was nothing to suggest that she had ever been in a relationship with him.
❝ They are all dead. Why bring this up ... there’s no point now, they’re all dead
The programme-makers also spoke by telephone to the woman’s eldest son who was shocked by their call. He said he knew nothing about a link to Noel Knox in his mother’s death.
He revealed that a post mortem was carried out on his mother whose circumstances were different from the other women associated with Knox, and coroner Joe McCrisken who studied the woman’s death certificate on behalf of the Radio Ulster team said it ‘categorically’ ruled out foul play.
But the questions about the other women’s deaths persisted.
Harvey and Dunseath found more material relating to Mairead McCallion’s fraught relationship with Knox in a solicitor’s office.
They unearthed a letter that Mairead had written to the PSNI five years before her death regarding an allegation of assault she made against Knox.
She said she’d made numerous claims of domestic violence but wanted to withdraw the latest one against Knox “because I cannot go through this again”.
“Did he put me up to this?” she asked. “Well, I think everybody knows the answer to that question.”
A woman believed to be a relative of Diane Conway was tracked down by the BBC team but said: “They’re all dead. Why are you bringing this up? There’s no point now, they’re all dead.”
Professor Peter Hepper, from Queen’s University’s psychology department, told the programme that it was common for serial killers to target powerless people, possibly with alcohol prob- lems, who were easier to control.
Olive Wylie, who told the documentary she was still trying to come to terms with the death of her sister Catriona Fulton, ad- mitted that she hated the “obnoxious” Knox.
Catriona was also an alcoholic whose marriage had fallen apart and she was part of a circle of heavy drinkers who gathered in empty flats in the Mullaghmore estate in Omagh.
Olive said that when Catriona was found in a semi-conscious state in her home, Noel Knox was in the bedroom but immediately walked out. Catriona was rushed to hospital where she died several days later.
The stories that Olive Wylie and Patricia O’Brien told the BBC about Knox and how he manipulated and controlled their sisters were almost identical as were their accounts of how both women had bruises and other visible signs of abuse.
They also said that Knox tried to lure Catriona and Mairead back into his life with the same tactics after their sisters had persuaded them to leave him.
Declan Harvey said Knox insisted to the women that he was the only person who really loved them and tried to isolate them from their families.
In the end the question of Knox’s culpability over the deaths is left open with Harvey and Dunseath saying it’s up to listeners to reach their own conclusions based on the evidence they’ve presented.
In their documentary, Did a Serial Killer Murder My Sister? the team have also given airtime to a sister of Knox who defended her brother and to another ex-partner who denied that he was a violent man.
Knox’s sister, who asked the documentary team not to use her name, did allow them to record her interview in which she rejected the claims about her brother whom she described as “easy-going, helpful and kind”.
She claimed he’d taken Mairead McCallion in off the street and cared for her. She said he wasn’t the kind of man who drank every day and added that he had spent years looking after his ill brother.
The woman said that she and her other sisters wanted to clear his name, adding that he wasn’t a serial killer, “not in a thousand million years”.
She dismissed the possibil- ity that there was another side to her brother that she didn’t know. “I knew all sides of Noel,” she said. “Okay, he might get a bit angry and a bit annoyed but he wouldn’t go and lift your head and bang it against a wall. He wouldn’t do that.”
Support for the sister’s picture of Knox came from a former girlfriend who had been with him for two years. She told Elaine Dunseath that she saw never saw any signs of violence and didn’t think what was being said about him was fair.
Knox took his secrets to the grave last November when he died from a blood clot.
Just two weeks earlier another man suspected of involvement in the deaths of two of his ex-girlfriends in Co Down also died.
The similarities between Knox and Leslie Ross are remarkable.
Ross, a stonemason from Dromore, was charged with killing two women, Margaret Weise and Michelle Bickerstaff
He was acquitted, however, and another charge of murdering a third former partner, Lily McKee, never went to full trial.
All three women, like Ross himself, had problems with alcohol and the defence case was that the deaths could have been caused by drink-related falls.
Harvey told the Belfast Telegraph: “The comparisons between Ross and Knox came up at every turn during our investigation. Knox used alcohol to target women. It was a perfect cover-up for him to create the circumstances in which they died.
“He may not have been a serial killer in the traditional sense but the families believe that he in no small way contributed to the deaths of their relatives and I think that is a fair perspective to have.”
Did a Serial Killer Murder My Sister? BBC Radio Ulster, tomorrow, 12.30pm.