Cool and calculating, he preyed on victim

Dan Buckley looks at the events leading up to the killing of Melissa Mahon.

SLIGHT and frail and looking younger than her 14 years, Melissa Mahon was a troubled girl. One of a family of 10 children of Freddie and Mary Mahon, she had disappeared numerous times from her home at Rathbraughan Park in Sligo during the summer of 2006.

The Mahons had returned home from London in 2005 to bring up their large family in what they felt would be the safer environment of the West of Ireland. But Melissa, having spent most of her young life in a big city, found it hard to settle and her relationship with her family became fraught.

She left her family home having made allegations of abuse against her parents and began to spend all her time with Ronnie Dunbar and his two daughters. She had come to regard the Dunbar’s family as her own.

After she went missing, it was assumed she had run away and would come back. She had run away a number of times the previous June and again in August but had returned and had come to the attention of social services. At the time of her disappearance in September 2006, she was living in Lis na nÓg residential care home in Sligo.

For the past few months her parents had become increasingly concerned about her friendship with 44-year-old Ronnie Dunbar, also known as Ronald McManus. They weren’t the only ones.

The HSE had applied to the District Court for an order under section 47 of the Child Care Act preventing Dunbar from having access to Melissa. But during the second week of Melissa’s placement at Lis na nÓg, at the beginning of September 2006, social worker Catherine Farrelly found a picture of Ronnie Dunbar under the girl’s pillow as she was making her bed. That was the morning of September 14, 2006, the day Melissa vanished for good.

As her disappearance hit the papers, there were possible sightings of Melissa around Athlone and other parts of the Midlands and there were rumours that she had run away with a boy of about her own age. Sightings were also reported in her old London neighbourhood. All proved groundless and gardaí were soon convinced that she had come to serious harm.

Yet it took almost another year and a half before the full, horror began to emerge — and it came from her killer’s own child. In February of 2008, Dunbar’s eldest daughter Samantha contacted gardaí in Sligo and told them they would find Melissa’s body in Lough Gill wrapped in a sleeping bag. She claimed her father had killed Melissa and dumped the body in the lake. Samantha also told gardaí that he had sexually abused and raped both her and her younger sister.

Garda divers spent days trawling the muddy reaches of Lough Gill. Locals who regularly use the waterway felt there was little chance of finding a body in such a large lake because the currents could have swept the body far away from where it entered the water and into the centre where it is 120 feet deep.

But the gardaí persevered. Samantha had told them they would find the body close to the shoreline. After halting due to bad weather, the divers set off from the quayside near Parkes Castle and crossed the lake to the spot where they were told they would find the body. A short time later, skeletal remains were plucked from the muddy waters. Garda Stephen Foley took part in the search and discovered bone fragments and teeth found in shallow water close together. DNA evidence was to prove they were Melissa’s.

Then, as a murder investigation began to take shape, events took a bizarre turn. Dunbar — describing himself as the prime suspect in the case — gave an interview to the Sligo Weekender newspaper following a report published in the Sunday World alleging that an “incest beast” was responsible for the death.

In his interview with the Sligo paper, Dunbar denied he was a registered sex offender in Britain and he claimed that he had helped Melissa in the weeks before she disappeared. He said: “I certainly did not murder and dump this young girl’s body in the lake. It was her safety I was concerned with at all times.”

He claimed he received a phone call from a man in Co Leitrim in the early hours of September 14 and said Melissa came on the phone and begged him to take her home and later turned up on his doorstep “all cut and bleeding”.

Questioned about his daughter’s allegation of rape against him, he said: “I have a history but I am not a pervert and I did not rape my daughters.”

Evidence at the murder trial revealed that Dunbar was a cool, calculating killer.

Shortly after murdering Melissa and dumping her body in the lake, he calmly brought his daughters to his regular Thursday evening football practice.

John Banks, the manager of the Teeling Sports Centre where Dunbar played football, told the trial jury that there were two or sometimes three girls with him at the Thursday evening practices. He said he later recognised the third girl as Melissa Mahon.

Mr Banks said it would have been unusual to see young girls with a group of footballers.

He said the girls wore “prominent eye make-up” and often squabbled. He described them as “pleasantly noisy”.

Dunbar’s daughters were always in his company. Garda Jonathan Sweeney who attended the Thursday nights practice session with Dunbar, said: “They were always with Ronnie, it’s like they were attached to his hips.”

The jury also heard Melissa took a pregnancy test, which was positive, before she went missing.

Two teenage girls said that they were with Melissa Mahon in the toilets of a McDonalds restaurant when she took the test. Both girls told the court that it was positive. One said that Melissa bought a pregnancy test in Tesco and took the test in the toilets of the fast food restaurant. The witness said she saw the stick and it was positive.

The girl said Melissa was “kind of happy, kind of delighted in a way”.

The most chilling evidence in the trial came via videolink from Dunbar’s youngest daughter, who was the same age as Melissa at the time of her murder.

She said that on September 21, 2006, she saw her father lying on top of Melissa Mahon on his bed. When she asked what he was doing, her father replied “keeping her sweet” and Melissa had laughed.

She left the room but returned with her sister some time later and saw her father lying on his side behind Melissa.

She said he had his forearm around Melissa’s neck and was strangling her. She said her father told them that Melissa was going to go to the gardaí about him and that Melissa had tried to kill him.

She told a hushed jury how her father had asked her to hold a tie around Melissa’s neck while he went to the bathroom and that he returned and placed a pillow over the schoolgirl’s face. His daughter said she thought at first it was a joke and did not believe that her father was really killing Melissa.

“I thought they were faking it, that it wasn’t real, that he wasn’t really killing her. Melissa joked, so I thought she was going to wake up any minute and laugh at me.”

When she and her sister went with their father to dispose of the body, he warned them that they were accessories to murder.

She and her sister did not talk about what had happened that evening but she wrote text messages to her sister. In one text, she begged that her dad would not kill her if she was bad.