The shocking case of the chopped-up canal body
WHEN Linda and Charlotte Mulhall killed their mother’s boyfriend, Farah Swaleh Noor, they set in motion a chain of events that was to horrify the nation and destroy their family.
The pair fatally attacked Noor – a 38-year-old Kenyan immigrant – at their mother’s house at Richmond Cottages off Dublin’s North Strand on March 20, 2005.
Evidence at their trial suggested they were on a vodka and ecstasy binge with Noor and their mother, Kathleen, when Noor made an aggressive pass at Linda.
When he ignored warnings to leave her alone, Charlotte picked up a Stanley blade and cut his throat. Noor, who had a wife and two children in Kenya, staggered into a downstairs bedroom.
Charlotte stabbed him up to 20 times with a kitchen knife while Linda admitted hitting him ‘a good few times’ in the head with a claw hammer. Both then spent hours cutting up his body in the bathroom and packing most of the parts into black plastic bags.
They then dumped his limbs and torso in the nearby Royal Canal before taking his head on the bus to Tallaght, where it was hidden in a park, before being disposed of in another location. The horrific crime earned them the nickname the ‘Scissor Sisters’.
Noor’s arms and legs were spotted floating in the Royal Canal ten days after his brutal murder.
In 2006 Charlotte was jailed for life upon conviction of murder. Linda got 15 years for manslaughter. Their mother Kathleen Mulhall, a then 53-year-old mother-of-six, was jailed for five years for cleaning up the scene of the killing. She was released in 2011.
Linda is due to be released from prison in the coming weeks.