From top: Cynthia Owen; Journalist Michael Clifford; Frank and Ellen Mullen

Frank Mullen, alongside his wife Ellen, has given journalist Michael Clifford two interviews in the past fortnight – with the Irish Examiner and Newstalk radio – to “clear his name” in the so-called Dalkey House of Horrors case.

A complete transcript of the Newstalk interview is below this article and the couple’s interview in the Irish Examiner can be read here.

Broadsheet readers may be familiar with this case through the efforts of Cynthia Owen (formerly Sindy Murphy), whose story featured on our post ‘A Dalkey Archive’.

Mrs Owen was found by an inquest jury in 2007 to be the mother of an infant (subsequently named as Noleen Murphy) stabbed to death and left in a doorway in Lee’s Lane, Dun Laoghaire in April 1973. Cynthia Owen was 11 years old at the time.

Mrs Owen has stated that Noleen was born in her parents’ house at 4 White’s Villas, Dalkey and murdered by her mother Josie with a knitting needle prior to being disposed of in Lee’s Lane.

Mrs Owen and a number of her siblings have also made statements alleging sexual abuse by her father Peter Murphy – a former Corporation labourer and subsequently caretaker of the Town Hall, Dalkey – and other members of the Murphy household.

The Garda investigation into Noleen’s death, which took place over a six-week period in 1973, failed to identify Cynthia as the child’s mother.

At the 2007 inquest, evidence was given that key files were missing and that at least one Garda statement in the remaining files had been fabricated.

Items found with the body, which could have provided DNA to assist in identifying maternity and paternity, were also missing.

A request to have Noleen’s body exhumed from the plot in the Holy Angel’s Plot, Glasnevin, where she had been buried in 1973, was refused by the then Justice Minister Michael McDowell.

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