Interpol called in as Kerry Babies DNA trawl targets ‘illicit’ affairs
Baby John’s life was short but his death cannot be resolved without local will to discuss it, writes Wayne O’Connor
PEOPLE suspected of having extramarital affairs and “illicit relationships” during the 1980s will be selected for DNA testing by experts working to solve the Kerry Babies case.
Interpol is assisting gardai with the inquiry that will see increased DNA sampling carried out in Kerry and further afield.
People who left South Kerry in 1984, soon after Baby John was discovered murdered near Cahersiveen, will also be among those vetted as gardai follow a number of lines of inquiry. This will include people who eventually returned to the area or settled elsewhere.
No DNA samples were taken on Valentia last week as gardai went door to door with their inquiry for the first time in more than three decades. The number of people from whom officers have taken DNA is already in “double digits”. Forensic efforts will be stepped up in the coming weeks and are expected to continue for months. They will not be confined to Kerry.
“This is selective sampling and it will continue for as long as it needs to,” a source told the Sunday Independent.
“Discussions about illicit relationships are being followed up and cases where people went away.”
Baby John was just five days old when his body was found. He had been stabbed 28 times. Investigators have not ruled out that abuse, rape and incest may have been factors in his murder.
Supt Flor Murphy, the garda leading the inquiry, believes local knowledge will help the investigation. “We are convinced people were aware of this event — the pregnancy, the birth and the series of events after Baby John was born. We want those people to come forward,” he said.
THE people of Cahersiveen awoke last Monday to the sound of patrol cars travelling in a tight convoy through the town — the biggest influx of gardai in 34 years.
As the children filed into the secondary school on the outskirts of town, just a couple of weeks into the new term, they asked teachers, parents and each other: “What’s going on?”
They are too young to know that the answer to their question could be found across the road from their school in the cemetery where Baby John, the Kerry Baby, is buried. Baby John is rarely discussed in this tight-knit community.
“It’s the opposite of a Chinese whisper,” explained local councillor Norma Moriarty. “When something stops being spoken about, it just goes away.”
The gardai and detectives zipping through the Iveragh Peninsula last week were bound for Valentia armed with new leads and a new sense of purpose to solve a mystery more than three decades old.
DNA analysis means it is now possible to biologically match the murdered baby with a living relative.
This is a vital forensic thread to be unravelled by investigators. They have a parent to find and a killer to unmask.
This technology was not available when the case was investigated in the 1980s so gardai are working to track down Baby John’s genetic relatives by going door-to-door as part of an information-gathering exercise.
They are mapping Valentia island, getting a sense of what it was like in 1984 and building a picture of the cast of characters who lived on this Atlantic outpost during a crucial window before the body of Baby John was found.
Mostly, people are happy to help with the inquiry but they speak with trepidation.
Baby John’s case has always been deemed too tragic, too unfathomable to talk about. The botched Garda inquiry that followed the discovery of the body of the five-dayold infant boy in 1984 further stunted discussion and broke the traditional trust between the forces of law and the local people.
A new generation of committed investigators are endeavouring to make amends for that bungled investigation now but locals on the peninsula still fear talking about it.
Growing up in Kerry, it is easy to pick up the habit of answering a question with a question, to seek another person’s information before divulging your own. But that conversational tick does not apply to the Kerry Babies case.
One Valentia resident summed up this ‘Kerry way’ last week: “Any time you walk in and sit at a bar counter the first thing said is ‘Any news?’ Yet no one ever asked about the [Kerry Babies] case. It was never the done thing.”
Since 1984, Kerry people have been acutely cautious about even inadvertently arousing suspicion about a neighbour, about saying anything which might lead to another innocent person being wrongly accused of stabbing the infant 28 times before casting him to sea in the indecent shroud of a plastic fertiliser bag.
One woman, Joanne Hayes, 80km away at the other end of the county, already had her life ruined by the case.
The shameful treatment she received stymied local will to solve or even discuss the case.
“Because the State got it so badly wrong, they were not willing to suggest or speculate about anything,” said Ms Moriarty.
“No one would do anything without 100pc certainty and that just stopped discussion.
“People would never suggest they were suspicious of anyone for fear that it might wrongly bring the full glare crashing down upon them.
“There was never a name or a suggestion of a person being involved and I have been here all my life.
“There has never been gossip about this and that is unusual for the area because we will gossip about anything.”
Finally, the councillor made an appeal on behalf of Ms Hayes, wrongly accused and ultimately cleared of the most heinous crime.
“She has been through enough. She should be left alone.”
Joanne Hayes was charged with killing Baby John after it was reported she had gone through a pregnancy but had no child to show for it.
After gardai discovered the unmarried mother’s own son had died soon after birth and was buried on her family’s farm in North Kerry, they concocted a theory of “heteropaternal superfecundation” — that she had borne twins by different fathers — and disposed of both infants.
The charges were eventually dropped when blood tests showed Baby John was a different blood group to the woman, her lover and the North Kerry Baby.
Yet she was subjected to a horrific public tribunal over 82 days and forced to disclose personal and intimate details about her sex life, menstrual cycle and her use of contraception. She was cleared of any involvement.
A Dail committee labelled her ordeal “insensitive, harrowing, horrific and shameful” and the Garda Commissioner of the day believed gardai had been “grossly negligent” in their investigation.
Since those dark days, Baby John has seldom been spoken about since the Kerry Babies Tribunal finished in October 1984.
Just two occasions brought the case back to the broader public and the still intensely guarded local community.
In 1995 another baby was discovered in similar circumstances on a Kerry beach.
Nine years later, in 2004, Baby John’s small headstone, engraved with the words “I forgive” was smashed with a sledgehammer — a shocking act of desecration.
That destruction of the infant’s final resting place highlighted how the case is fraught with distress for an individual who was among the people of the Iveragh Peninsula at that time and added another layer to the veil of silence.
People are so aware of the sensitivities that his headstone was replaced without the message of forgiveness.
A year ago, with advances in technology, gardai were able to analyse a card that contained a sample of Baby John’s blood and thus established a DNA profile of the infant.
That information served to add a definitive and absolutely unarguable scientific proof to the exoneration of Ms Hayes.
She received an apology from the State and An Garda Siochana for the distress caused.
The State apology issued by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar coincided with a re-opening of the case.
The DNA had provided a crucial new lead for investigators.
The Sunday Independent has learned that gardai are working with Interpol and its international DNA experts as well as targeting individuals and requesting further DNA samples to see if they can be matched with Baby John’s profile.
Sources said the number of DNA samples taken since January is in “double digits” and follows a certain line of inquiry.
This newspaper has also established that the investigation has spread far beyond the borders of County Kerry.
Gardai are following up on people who left the area shortly after Baby John was discovered on White Strand, just outside Cahersiveen. This includes people who subsequently settled outside Kerry and people who returned to the area after a spell abroad or moved elsewhere in the country.
Individuals from the peninsula who were rumoured to have been involved in extra-marital affairs during a critical window before the discovery of Baby John’s body are having their DNA sampled, as are women who were in their teens during the 1980s.
Plans are in place to conduct further “selective sampling” of DNA in the coming weeks and months.
No DNA samples were taken in Valentia last week.
Superintendent Flor Murphy, the garda leading the investigation, told the Sunday Independent he believes Baby John’s mother is still alive.
“Investigating gardai appreciate and clearly understand she may be a victim in this sad and tragic event. My colleagues and I are conscious she may have endured a lot of pain and distress for the past 34 years.
“She needs to be treated with respect and compassion but we want to speak to her.
“We have specially trained gardai suitably qualified and with relevant experience of delicate matters in such situations.”
Recent developments in the case are unwelcome to some in the Valentia area. People are willing to answer the questions being put to them but discussion about the case has always met some resistance.
“Someone, somewhere, is hurting enough over this and has hurt for a long time now,” one resident said when the Sunday Independent visited the island last week.
“Maybe it was time they were left alone.”
The day after gardai came knocking on his door, another resident said: “They are 34 years too late to be investigating this. They should have done it properly in 1984. Then we would never have had to deal with this.”
Others feel Valentia is being unfairly targeted.
Gardai insist areas nearby will be canvassed later. They had to start somewhere.
It is easy to understand why Valentia was seen as a good starting point.
Baby John was found on the shore of White Strand, just outside Cahersiveen — an area known as ‘Across the Water’ — by a man out running on April 14, 1984.
Valentia is opposite the strand and sources said the team currently investigating the case sought expert advice on tides and currents in the area.
The island and other areas outside Cahersiveen were not canvassed by gardai during the 1984 investigation.
A school of thought they are happy to follow now is that Baby John could have been cast into the Atlantic from Valentia before being washed ashore on the mainland. Locals are not so sure. “Why have they come here now?” asked one local fisherman.
“It paints Valentia in a very negative light when the reality is that baby probably never came from here. All the attention is on the island when this is probably something that happened on the mainland.
“The tides are also wrong. The water here wouldn’t have carried it towards Cahersiveen. It would have been taken to the north or off to the south.”
Another fisherman agreed. “If a woman was pregnant on Valentia then we all would have known,” he said.
The whereabouts of Baby John’s mother is key and there is a sense locally that she may not have been a guilty party in his killing.
Gardai cannot rule out that the woman may have been a victim of sexual abuse, rape or incest.
There is also a hope the passing of time means relationships, friendships and links to religious or social influences may have changed.
Post-natal depression is also a concern.
“Whoever did this was not in a good place mentally,” said a source.
“Does a parent carry out an act like that? This could have been a mother, a father, a brother, an uncle...”
Supt Murphy is reluctant to delve in to the personal circumstances that led to Baby John being killed five days after being born, but he admits someone must know something.
“People don’t always pick up the phone to talk to us. Sometimes you need to go into the house, drink the tea and open up with people to give them an opportunity to talk. The canvass is being done to gain the trust of people and that unearthing of information will continue in our future canvasses.
“The public on the Iveragh Peninsula or even further afield have information relevant to this case. We are convinced people were aware of this event — the pregnancy, the birth and the series of events after Baby John was born. We want those people to come forward and talk to us.
“We are determined to get to get to the bottom of what happened here and more doors will be knocked on. We will approach everyone.”
A woman who lives on Valentia said she was in her teens when Baby John was found.
“It is awful sad and all this attention with the gardai brings it up again. That has an impact on people. The memories come back.”
She had already been canvassed by gardai who asked her to identify her home, how old her house is and what stood on the site in the 1980s.
“They did the same with my parents. They want to know about ruined houses, places that may not be here any more, old farm buildings and things like that.”
But if gardai ever want to uncover what happened to the Kerry Baby they will need locals to start talking about more than empty buildings when the canvass moves to the mainland.
‘If a woman was pregnant we all would have known’
‘Someone is hurting over this and has done for a long time now’
‘They wanted to know about ruined houses, places not here any more’