A look at tales of the sinister in new book

ENNIS author Anthony Galvin’s new book The Cruellest Cut – Irish Women Who Kill has hit the shelves.

ENNIS author Anthony Galvin’s new book The Cruellest Cut – Irish Women Who Kill has hit the shelves.
The book features 15 tales of female killers, including the Mulhall ‘scissors sisters’, Limerick pair Deborah Hannon and Suzanne Reddan and psychiatrist Dr Lynn Gibbs, who drowned her teenage daughter.
It’s an interesting and unsettling read, gripping at times, with harrowing descriptions of lethal, female violence.
The author told The Clare Champion that he had fairly specific terms of reference for the women he wanted to include.
“I decided to concentrate on violent women killers. There are a lot of women killers who might hire a hit man, like Catherine Nevin, or that might use poison. This is all about violent women, who did it themselves and got their hands dirty.”
There’s a big market in Ireland for true crime books these days and Anthony tapped into it a few years ago with a book on the feuding gangs of Limerick, something that was informed by the years he spent working as a crime reporter in the city.
For the new book, he wanted something a little more left field. “I think I was looking for something that hadn’t been done to death. Now a couple of the cases had been covered a lot, like the scissors sisters, you couldn’t avoid putting them in because what they did was fairly horrific. A lot of the recent crime books have concentrated on sensational domestic crimes like Joe O’Reilly or on gangland events like Paul Williams’ book or my earlier one. I wanted to do something that wasn’t as much to the fore.”
What the women have done isn’t as interesting as why they did it, Anthony believes, and he wanted to know what drove them.
“There’s no psychology involved in deciphering why a drug dealer shoots a rival drug dealer. With violent women, you’d be curious as to why women are violent, what drives them to it, is every woman capable of it or are there triggers for it? It was things like that that interested me. I actually interviewed a criminal psychologist and got his insights into it. I tried to get into their heads a bit.”
Some parts of the book would hardly make for soothing bedtime reading and Anthony says the writing and research were also disturbing at times.
“There were some bits I did find very uncomfortable, particularly the cases of women who kill children. You couldn’t just switch off the computer at the end of the day and forget it, it stays with you. There was a case in the South East of a woman who killed her 10-year-old son. I found that absolutely horrific. Then there was a psychiatrist who drowned her 15-year old daughter. That case disturbed me.”
He believes that in relation to homicide, the judicial system generally doesn’t go as hard on women as it does men, with some females receiving lighter sentences than he feels their deeds merit.
Anthony also believes that given the wrong combination of events, women can resort to extreme violence in the same way that men can. “The thing that struck me is that women have the same capacity for violence as men do and they’re not seen to have. There was one case, and no-one was killed in it, where a woman in Donegal beat an elderly neighbour half to death after she had embezzled money off him. That’s a very male crime, to attack an elderly farmer and steal his money. Cases like that brought it home to me that women are as capable as men of violence in the wrong circumstances.”
While some of the violence described in the book is horrendous, he found himself looking relatively benignly on a few of the killers.
“I found myself having tremendous sympathy for some of them. There was one girl, Kelly Noble, who was in her late teens and was accosted outside a shop by a town bully. Now there was a history between the two of them and Kelly Noble had her own troubles. She was from a very troubled background, had been abusing drugs and she was no angel herself. Anyway, she was accosted and assaulted inside in a shop, she phoned a friend and asked for a knife to be brought for her protection. She was accosted again outside the shop, stabbed her attacker once and killed her. Kelly Noble didn’t set out that day to do anyone any harm.”
He says that he wanted to “breathe a bit of life” into the stories and to avoid dry recounts of years’ old court cases. However, he found he had to limit himself a little and, as is often the case with crime writing and reporting, he couldn’t include all the information he was aware of. “In an awful lot of cases, there’s information you know that can’t go anywhere near the book, and you can’t even hint at,” he said.