A normal day turned out to be the last for house-mates

MARCH 6, 1997 was a normal day for the three middle-aged residents of 1 Orchard View, a sheltered health-board-run house in Dublin’s north inner city.

Ann Mernagh, now Ann Lynch since her marriage, spent the day shopping, buying cigarettes from a vendor in Moore Street, vacuuming the house, and enjoying tea and a chat with house-mates Sylvia Shields and Mary Callinan, before heading out for a night of bingo and returning home with a bag of chips.

After making a cup of tea, she headed upstairs to bed about 11.20pm, stopping off at Sylvia’s room to say goodnight and to ask for a call in the morning if her friend was awake first. That was the way it worked in the house, Ann said yesterday, whoever got up first woke the others. They were friends, she added.

Ann took valium and fell asleep listening to her walkman. She heard nothing during the night, but was the only one of the three women to survive the night in Grangegorman and be able to tell her tale at the Coroner’s Court.

She woke at 6am. “I got up and came down the stairs. My bag was at the end of the stairs and everything out of it. I went into the kitchen, the window was up an inch and the curtains blown back. The drawers were all open and cutlery on the floor. I knew there was something wrong.”

Ann ran up the stairs to Sylvia’s room. She saw her friend lying across the bed with blood around her neck. Ann went over to shake her. The body was “stone cold”.

She ran out of the house to Number 5, where nurses charged with looking after the highly-dependent, mentally-ill patients under the care of St Brendan’s, stayed.

She shouted at Nurse Mary Creavin: “There’s something wrong, Sylvia’s dead. She said: ‘You’re dreaming’.”

It was no dream, as the psychiatric nurse found out when she went to check and found the stabbed and beaten bodies of the two women.