Teenage mother died after consuming drugs

A TEENAGE mother-of-one whose naked body was discovered at a derelict house in Co Kildare, died after consuming drugs, an inquest heard yesterday.

The badly decomposed body of Lynette McKeown, aged 19, from Dublin’s Tallaght, was found in Eadestown on August 21, 2004, eight days after her family reported her missing.

Dr Declan Gilsenan, assistant state pathologist, said that, as he arrived at the scene, he saw “the body of a young woman naked apart from a plastic bag around the lower parts of her leg.”

A report from Dr Gilsenan read out to the inquest at Naas courthouse found the mother-of-one died from an aspiration of vomit due to morphine toxicity.

Lynette’s mother, Carol, reported the 19-year-old missing on August 13, 2004, after she went into Dublin to have her fortune told by a tarot card reader.

However, the mother-of-one, who was living in a council house in Springfield in Tallaght, never turned up to meet her friend. Her mother and her partner, Michael Murphy, issued heartfelt pleas for information as her then two-year-old daughter, Kelly, missed her. There were reports that Lynette was last seen in Dublin’s red light district, around Arbour Hill and Benburb Street.

The family have strenuously denied she was working as a prostitute and said she was in a drug treatment programme at the time.

Inspector Pat Mangan of Naas Garda station said the investigation into Lynette’s death was still ongoing. He applied for an adjournment of the inquest under section 25 (1) of the Coroners Act.

The inquest heard there were severe difficulties in identifying the body due to the level of decomposition.

The pathologist’s report detected morphine and methadone in Lynette’s body.