Sickening Incest Inquest Ends

By Paddy Clancy

JUSTICE Minister Michael McDowell has been urged to order a prompt investigation into Garda (police) handling of inquiries into the murder of a newborn infant 34 years ago.

The call came from Cynthia Owen, who gave birth to the child at the age of 11 in the family home in south County Dublin.

The place became known as “the house of horrors” as sickening details of incest and child sex abuse unfolded before a jury at a four-day inquest last week into the death of the infant.

The child had no name until the coroner, Kieran Geraghty, asked at the end of the inquest if Owen had ever given the youngster a name. She replied with one word, “Noeleen.”

The jury found unanimously that Owen was the mother of the child and that Noeleen died at the family home in Dalkey from blood hemorrhage due to stab wounds.

Although the jury didn’t specify who killed the child, Owen in her evidence told the inquest that the infant had been stabbed to death with a knitting needle by her own mother, and that the body was dumped in a nearby laneway.

The child was conceived as a result of sexual abuse in the family home.

During the hearing Owen gave evidence of being raped repeatedly from the age of seven or eight into her teenage years by four different people, one of them her brother Peter Murphy Junior, whom the media was able to name because he waived his right to anonymity.

The inquest heard that five out of six females brought up together alleged sex abuse in the family home.

After the inquest Owen called for the probe into police handling of the case. She said that when she eventually disclosed after more than 20 years the abuse that had gone on in the house and that her baby had been killed detectives were severely handicapped because of a bungled investigation when the body was discovered in 1973.

“The 1973 investigation was compromised. Con-temporaneous direct evidence mysteriously went missing,” Owen said.

“This calls for a satisfactory investigation and I would ask the minister for justice to act promptly and have it investigated.”

For more than three decades the murder of the baby found dumped in the alleyway was shrouded in mystery.

Members of the Murphy family were questioned several times but nobody was ever charged. Owen’s maiden name was Murphy before changing her surname to match that of her partner Simon Owen.

The unidentified child was buried in the Holy Angels plot, along with more than a dozen other babies, in Glasnevin, Co. Dublin.

Four years later Cynthia gave birth to another baby, a still-born boy. She said the pregnancy was caused by a rape. The child was buried in the family’s back garden.

In 1994, Owen finally walked into a police station to tell for the first time of the cruel abuse that went on during her childhood.

In 1995, a brother hanged himself after telling one of his other sisters that he had been sodomized in the family home.

Another brother vanished in 2002 when he was suffering depression and drinking heavily. Suicide was suspected when his body was discovered in undergrowth three years later.

Three weeks after the discovery of that body, a 33-year-old female member of the family, a daughter of one of the older Murphy girls although she believed they were sisters, committed suicide and left a 37-page note detailing appalling abuse.

A statement from the legal representative of Owen’s 79-year-old father, Peter Murphy Senior, and three of her four remaining sisters who refused to believe she gave birth, said they were “shocked and distressed” by the outcome of the inquest.