For 17 years, sisters Eroline O'Keeffe and Noeleen Slattery fought to get justice for Eroline's son Trevor, murdered by French serial killer Pierre Chanal. But their battle with the French legal system is not over. Noeleen reveals to Lara Marlowe in Paris the horrible coincidence of her own daughter's death in France five years ago. The sisters say they will not give up until they find out what happened to her
Does fate take a malignant pleasure in torturing good people? Did some evil genie decide that two Irish sisters should suffer the parallel devastation of losing a child, 13 years apart, in similar circumstances, in France?
The Trevor O'Keeffe murder case is well known. In August 1987, the 19-year-old was hitch-hiking home when he was picked up by Warrant Officer Pierre Chanal, a sexual pervert and serial killer who is believed to have kidnapped and killed eight young men before committing suicide when his trial finally started in 2003.
For 17 and a half years, Trevor's mother, Eroline O'Keeffe, has travelled to France to seek justice for her dead son, accompanied by her older sister, Noeleen Slattery. The two women achieved a small victory this week, when a Paris court found the French state guilty of "serious misconduct" in its slow, inefficient pursuit of Chanal. Though Eroline was the driving force behind the lawsuit, she received only €25,000 of the €900,000 paid to the families of Chanal's victims.
But as Eroline and Noeleen contemplated their achievement, they knew their struggle with the French justice system was not over. Until now, Noeleen has felt too fragile to reveal her tragedy, and there are aspects she will not discuss. By a terrible irony, her own daughter, Caroline Lee, a jockey, was found dead in suspicious circumstances in her home in Coye-La-Forêt, near Chantilly, in November 2000.
"I just hope I'll have the courage to do it again," Noeleen said of her attempts to push forward the stalled investigation into Caroline's death. "It better not go on so long [as Trevor's case], or I won't be alive."
Eroline O'Keeffe felt certain that Pierre Chanal had killed her son from the moment she learned of his arrest and trial for the kidnapping and rape of a Hungarian student.
Noeleen Slattery recalls how a gendarme and his wife befriended Caroline 10 years before her death. We'll call the gendarme and his wife Mr and Mrs X. They met Caroline as a result of Trevor's case, when she was helping her mother and aunt by acting as an interpreter and by lending them her car and even her bed.
"She was incredibly generous," says Eroline. "You couldn't look at anything and say, 'I really like that', because when you got to the airport she'd hand it to you, all wrapped up."
Noeleen always admired Caroline's strength and determination to become a professional jockey. Caroline began riding at the age of 12. At 15, she left school and went to work with horse trainer Liam Browne at the Curragh. She qualified as a jockey, but couldn't find work in Ireland because she was a woman. At 18, Caroline moved to France, where she lived until her death at the age of 37.
Caroline embarked on a brilliant racing career. A May 1986 article in the Sunday Times reported that after 26 wins in 1985, "Cyclone Caroline" had just won the Tiercé race at Saint-Cloud. In the French racing community, she was known as "la petite merveille irlandaise".
Prize money was abundant, and though Caroline lavished gifts on family and friends, she accumulated significant savings.
A few months after Caroline met Mr and Mrs X, she stopped racing. Her friends worried about the strange influence the couple exerted over her.
"She was over there on her own," Noeleen says. "She worked extremely hard, and I think she needed some kind of family."
When Caroline died, Mr and Mrs X made a statement that they had adopted her and that she had no family, though they had travelled to Ireland with Caroline and even stayed in Noeleen's home.
In the two years before her death, Caroline invested in a brasserie with Mr and Mrs X. Noeleen doesn't know what happened to her daughter's money. On the day she died, witnesses saw Mr and Mrs X remove seven or eight large black plastic bags from Caroline's house. All of her financial records for the year 2000 went missing.
To Noeleen's consternation, the investigation into Caroline's death was assigned to Mr X's colleagues in the gendarmerie. A justice official said standard procedure was followed. Noeleen has obtained copies of depositions from the few people they interviewed. A shopkeeper whom Caroline had befriended met her in the street on the day of her death.
"You must help me. Something dreadful is happening to me," Caroline said, begging her to come over.
Neighbours told police that they saw Mr and Mrs X leave Caroline's house an hour before she was found dead - by Mr and Mrs X.
In background briefings, the justice official told The Irish Times that Caroline led an unstable lifestyle and that there was inadequate evidence to pursue the case.
EROLINE AND NOELEEN reacted differently to the deaths of their children. When she speaks of Trevor now, Eroline still has an affectionate light in her eyes, a honeyed warmth in her voice.
"He was impish and cheeky and he loved anything to do with football. He was a handsome little fella with dark hair and a dimple in his chin, spoiled rotten by his older sisters," she says.
Eroline says the worst moment of her life was when she learned of Trevor's death. "I would pretend it wasn't true. I kept telling myself it wasn't Trevor."
Though she never saw his body - only the plastic sack containing his decomposing remains - she identified him through the series of photographs the police took as they dug him out of the shallow grave where Chanal had left him; first a hand, then Trevor's dirt-covered face . . .
"I recognised his teeth," Eroline shivers.
Though Caroline's death was much more recent, Noeleen has only vague memories of finding out about it. Eroline has to remind her that she was on holiday in Tunisia.
"I kept blanking in and out," she says. "There was a corridor, a travel agent . . . getting to France, I think it was Toulouse. I met my eldest son, Paddy, in Paris."
When Noeleen and Paddy arrived in Coye-La-Forêt, Mr and Mrs X told them that Caroline wished to be cremated, that she did not want to be buried in Ireland.
"I asked about an autopsy, and they said there was no need for an autopsy," Noeleen says. "They said it was suicide, that she'd taken poison. I kept thinking this couldn't be Caroline." She believed the death was suspicious and vowed not to go home without her daughter.
Through an Irish undertaker, Noeleen managed to have Caroline's body shipped to Dublin. She asked Dr Marie Cassidy, now the State Pathologist, to conduct an autopsy. Caroline's body had been found hanging from a door jamb, but with her feet touching the ground. The autopsy found no poison, but catalogued 48 bruises from the top of her head to her feet.
"Dr Marie Cassidy advised me to get a lawyer in France," Noeleen recalls. "She said: 'If this was my daughter, that's what I'd do.' "
In the summer of 2001, Noeleen and her French lawyer, Micheline Le Bochet, spent three hours with an investigating magistrate in a courthouse in Senlis, north of Paris.
"He said: 'A homicide investigation has been opened.' Then there was nothing," Noeleen recalls.
More than four years after Caroline's death, three successive magistrates have been appointed, but little progress has been made. A search through the bank accounts of Mr and Mrs X found nothing.
"If I wanted to hide money, I certainly wouldn't put it in a bank account!" Noeleen says.
The magistrate ordered that a wire-tap be placed on Mr and Mrs X's telephone about two years after Caroline died. In recorded conversation, they alluded to Noeleen's civil suit and said she was "going to do a witch hunt, like Eroline". They also expressed concern that a local doctor, a friend of theirs who signed the death certificate in Caroline's home, could encounter problems because of the investigation.
About a year after Caroline died, Mr and Mrs X seemed to try to hide the death of their own son by burying him in another town. Through her lawyer, Noeleen learned this month that an investigation into the son's death had been started and mysteriously stopped.
"I just keep telling Micheline: all I want is to know the truth," Noeleen says. "Nothing can fix it, but I do know something sinister happened to Caroline. I will never give up until I get an answer, or somebody says there is no more I can do."
EVERY NOVEMBER 29TH, Noeleen and Eroline travel to Coye-La-Forêt to place flowers in the church and burn candles for Caroline. The sisters say they will continue to do so for the rest of their lives.
After 17 and a half years, Eroline says she is sometimes able to block out thoughts of Trevor's death for a day or two. But ultimately, "time doesn't count. When you start talking about it, it's as if it was yesterday. You think you're better and then somebody says something and you're off bawling again".
In the intervening years, Eroline has watched Trevor's friends marry and settle down.
"He'd be 37 today," she says. "A friend of his named Mark used to live nearby and called regularly. He has two babies now."
Eroline owns a driving school in Naas, and a student recently told her he'd been a pal of Trevor's.
"I would have preferred he said nothing," she says.
Not an hour goes by without Noeleen thinking of Caroline's death.
"A year after Caroline died, it was like I fell out of a high-storey building. I hit the ground and my body splattered completely, but it was all internal," she explains slowly, bravely, suppressing sobs. "Externally, I was intact. Can you make sense of that? In counselling, they always say the worst that can happen is to lose a child. It is.
"My first husband died when Caroline was one and a half years old. I was left with six children. My first marriage was wonderful; it's been worth living for, just to have had that marriage. But my husband's death was nothing compared to Caroline's. It's like a part of your body is gone, like something has gone out of your insides." She remarried and had a seventh child.
Until Trevor died, Eroline and Noeleen were ordinary sisters in a family of 11 children, seeing each other only at family events.
"I asked her for help, because she had connections in France, through Caroline," Eroline explains. "She was my crutch."
The sisters are seven years apart and have different personalities. Noeleen is wise and reflective, Eroline mischievous and impulsive, yet their shared ordeals have melded them together. They speak on the telephone every day, often finish each other's sentences, travel to France several times a year.
When Eroline considered buying a gun and doing target practice, with Pierre Chanal in mind, Noeleen talked her out of it. "I said: 'You can't do this to your children. It would not serve any purpose.' "
As if they had not suffered enough, Noeleen has had health problems since undergoing a hip replacement a year ago and has had to abandon her practice in Chinese medicine. The operation is to be repeated in March.
"Physical pain is not as bad as grief," she says. "If I stay lying down, I can manage the pain with morphine and painkillers. But the other pain [of Caroline's death], you cannot."
Noeleen and Eroline's brother Val and sister Daphne both died of cancer in the same week in March 2004.
"Val's funeral was on the day that Daphne died," Noeleen recalls.
"We were there to tell Daphne," Eroline says. "So she didn't have to learn it from strangers. She was in a hospice and she couldn't speak, but she wrote down: 'All his pain is gone.' "
Noeleen feels she has reached a point beyond which "you couldn't really hurt any more". If anything happened to her six surviving children, she says, "I wouldn't want to live".
Mercifully, Eroline and Noeleen have never lost their sense of humour, which is often at the expense of the media. Eroline recalls how, shortly after Trevor's death, a journalist rang her front doorbell, demanding to see Mrs O'Keeffe.
"I told him I was the cleaning lady, that she wasn't there," she says with a hoot. "Then I went into the living room and bawled on the sofa."
The "Disappeared of Mourmelon" - the eight men believed to have been murdered by Trevor's killer, Pierre Chanal - received huge media coverage in France. At one hearing in the 1990s, outside the courthouse in Amiens, Eroline and Noeleen were frightened when a phalanx of television cameramen charged towards them. They ran inside, into the toilet, and tried to climb out of the window - "but there were bars on it," Eroline says, laughing.
The story they most enjoy telling is of a walk through Pigalle, where they purchased gaudy satin duvets in large carrying cases.
"They looked super in the shop," Eroline recalls. "But when we got them home to Ireland, they were dreadful."
As they walked down the boulevard carrying their bundles, men leaned out of the sex shops whispering "madam, madam", trying to entice them indoors.
Eroline and Noeleen brush off compliments about their courage and tenacity. It may look that way on the outside, they say; inside, it feels different. They keep at it for their dead children, and their grief is without self-pity. Do they ever wonder why so much sorrow has been heaped on them?
"We might be getting a bit more than some people," Noeleen says philosophically. "But everybody gets it."