Retired detective Gerry O’Carroll rejects claims of murderer Noel Long

Retired detective inspector Gerry O’Carroll has dismissed allegations by convicted killer Noel Long that he was beaten during Garda questioning and his head forced into a large jar he was told contained body parts.

Long (74), Maulbawn, Passage West, Co Cork, was on Friday convicted of murdering Nora Sheehan (54) between June 6th and June 12th, 1981. Her body was found by forestry workers at the Viewing Point, Shippool Woods in Cork six days after she went missing. The 42-year period between the killing and conviction is the longest in the history of the State in a murder case and for any Garda cold case review.

Mr O’Carroll told a hearing which took place in the weeks before a jury was empanelled for Long’s trial that the claims being made about his alleged conduct as a murder squad detective working on the case in 1981 were “extraordinary”, “nonsense” and “beyond comprehension”.

“I can say this to my Lord: we don’t have body parts lying around in Garda stations,” he said during the pretrial hearing when the allegations related to body parts was raised.

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Speaking to The Irish Times on Friday, after the guilty verdict was returned, Mr O’Carroll also dismissed Long’s claims he was beaten and otherwise mistreated while being questioned.

“I was only a wet day in the murder squad at the time, I’d only just been transferred there... And that was before there was any allegations, I mean afterwards there was allegations of the heavy gang. But Noel Long wasn’t even arrested at the time, he was free to go. I couldn’t have put my hand on him, for God’s sake. He was there [being questioned] voluntarily. If he had decided ‘look boys, I want out of here’... He could have just got up and walked out of the door. But he said ‘yeah, I want to clear my name’ and all this sort of stuff.”

O’Carroll pointed out when Long was questioned in 1981 gardaí did not have the power to arrest a murder suspect, who had to be invited to respond to questions voluntarily and were under no obligation to continue to be questioned. He added at the time gardaí would instead coax suspects to agree to be questioned by telling them they had “nothing to fear” if they were innocent and could clear their name by agreeing to answer questions.

Long’s defence counsel, Michael Delaney, put it to Mr O’Carroll in court that he had given an interview in the recent past about the existence of a “so-called heavy gang within the murder squad”, which was in operation at the time. Mr O’Carroll asked the lawyer to “rephrase that”, as he took “umbrage at that comment” and had gone to the High Court, where he had received considerable damages on two occasions. He told the court that even now he would certainly take legal action against anybody who used that expression “outside the confines of this court and privilege”.

Mr O’Carroll told The Irish Times Ms Sheehan had just come out of hospital when she was murdered, she was a vulnerable woman and even dressed in the style of a person who lived perhaps six decades earlier. Her vulnerability, and the manner she was murdered and her body dumped, had left Mr O’Carroll “particularly upset”.