The public seating in Room 25 of the Circuit Criminal Court complex in Dublin is not designed for comfort. The half-dozen rows of benches are wooden and narrow, with barely enough room for your knees. I spent the better part of October trying not to fidget in those pews, sitting, as I was, just a few paces away from the defendant, who was under strict orders from her lawyer not to fidget at all.
In this court the defendant sat apart and alone, on a separate bench, directly opposite the jury, while the lawyers for both sides shared a large wooden table. For nearly a month this defendant followed her orders well; while I squirmed, she stared purposefully ahead, rarely looking directly at anyone, though once in a while I accidentally caught her eye.
Her name was Noreen Mulholland. She was a nurse. She was in this courtroom charged with assaulting two patients in her care. In the Irish tabloid headlines she was "the Naas Nurse," after the town where the supposed crimes were to have occurred.
She had also been my children's baby sitter.
I met Noreen in 1994 when she answered an ad I placed in our suburban New York newspaper seeking help on Saturday nights. My son Alex was a newborn then, and Evan had just turned 3. The occasional weekend night became every week — and also whenever our au pair was sick, or I had to travel for work, or we needed an extra pair of hands. At one point, when Noreen was between apartments, she lived in our spare room. At another point, so she could make extra money, I hired her to clean the house. My friends grabbed the rest of her time, and after school every day she cared for a little boy who was Alex's best preschool friend. My world and Noreen's were loosely, but definitely, entwined.
One day, when Alex was about 5, he said he didn't want Noreen to come anymore. "Noreen scares me," he said, but could not, or would not, explain further. By then I'd known her long enough and — I thought — well enough that I owed her the benefit of the doubt. I told her what Alex had said. I hoped she would answer as I like to think I would if I learned that a child was afraid of me — with concern, or at least an explanation, maybe an apology, an offer to help make things right. Instead she said, "You know, Lisa, kids lie."
James Joyce, whose spirit is everywhere in Dublin, once said, "In the particular is contained the universal." This is about child care only in its particulars. It is not a tale of evil nannies lurking around every corner, or a declaration that children are not safe with anyone other than their mothers. More universally, it is about trust, and the harsh reality that as well as you ever know anyone, you can know only what he or she allows you to see.
We know this, and yet we trust. We trust strangers not to poison our food in their restaurants, not to drive drunk when we board their buses. We trust loved ones, even though each year brings news stories of husbands leading double lives, wives whose hidden demons cause them to kill. We hire office workers after a few hours of interviews, at best, and trust them not to steal or destroy all that we have built. We go to a doctor based only on the fact that our neighbor seems to like him. We hand employers our Social Security numbers, and valets our car keys, and bank tellers our balances, and nannies our children.
When I learned that Noreen was in trouble, in May 2004, my first question was "What has she done?" I knew she had gotten her nursing degree and moved to Ireland after we'd parted ways, but I had no idea how to reach her. The news reports I could find online were sketchy, alluding to possible exhumations, a planned review of the cases of any patients she might have cared for and a hot line relatives could call if they thought their loved one had been harmed by the Naas Nurse. "Did She Poison Them?" screamed a headline in The Irish Daily Mirror, next to a prominent photo of the woman who used to give baths to my boys. But what none of these stories told me was what exactly she was accused of. Was she a serial killer? An "angel of mercy"? A screw-up? An innocent victim of a false accusation? Or some combination of the above?
My second wave of questions, following milliseconds behind the first, began with, "What had I done?" As a reporter, it is part of my job to size people up quickly — to know (or at least wonder) if they are lying or sublimating or telling a story that isn't linear and complete. I had sized up Noreen and welcomed her into my family. Along the way there were hints that everything was not perfect. But no human being is perfect, and to have a relationship, any relationship, means to decide which imperfections we choose to accept. I accepted, even embraced, Noreen's. Until Alex said that she scared him.
I became all but obsessed with getting answers to these questions, which is how I found myself two years later in a Dublin courtroom, trying not to stare too blatantly at Noreen while she tried not to glance my way. By then I had learned that she was not a serial killer, in fact she was not a killer at all, and despite the flurry of headlines and hysteria, she would, in the end, be charged in just two cases, and in both instances she was accused of assault and giving an unprescribed drug. But that was about all I could learn from afar. I needed to hear the evidence from the mouths of those who accused and defended her and decide the facts of the case firsthand. I needed to know if I was right to have trusted this woman long ago. Even more, I needed to know if I could continue to trust myself.
Many details of my years with Noreen Mulholland are fuzzy, but others are crisp, and among the clearest are those of the first time we met. I was a sleep-deprived mother of an infant and a toddler 12 years ago, looking for a way to go to dinner and a movie on Saturday nights. I couldn't believe my luck when this Irish burst of energy all but blew into my house for an interview.
She was 23, curvy in a comforting way, with auburn hair, a warm smile and the habit of calling everyone "Love." Until that moment I didn't know that I carried an image of the nurturing Irish nanny, but she filled it completely. Then, as always, her hair was perfectly cut, her makeup smoothly applied. She took pride in looking good and, I would later see, in doing things right. "It's O.K., Love," she might have said to Alex as she offered to take him from me and then rocked him on her knees while we talked. She had the sure moves of someone who had done this before.
One of the first things she told me was that she was determined to become a nurse. Her mother had been a nurse, and it was all Noreen ever wanted. She was a teenager when her mother died, from a brain aneurysm, at 41. I'm not sure if she mentioned her mother during that first interview, but I am positive she talked about her own nursing goals, because it was a large part of the reason I hired her. Nursing is shorthand for caring and competence. It says, "I don't shirk from the messy" and "I have smarts and ambition beyond being just your baby sitter." What more could a mother want?
Well, glowing references from a former employer, for starters. And Noreen didn't have those. She described her depth of baby-sitting experience — much of it back home, then several years with a family here in the States. As I recall, she then said she preferred that I not contact that family. Things ended badly, she told me. She loved the kids but felt friction with the mother, who, by Noreen's description, was jealous that the nanny was better with the children.
I didn't hire her entirely without references, though. As it happened, she was dating the son of a woman who worked in the local school district, and that woman described Noreen as kind and hardworking and lovely. I also went ahead and called the family Noreen had asked me not to speak to. The mother wasn't home, so I spoke to the father, who basically said that his wife felt it was time for a change. Anyone who has ever checked references knows that is code for volumes more.
And yet I hired her. I remember wondering whether this young woman might be the type who always insisted she was right, and if one day I would be the one she complained about to the next prospective employer. On the other hand, she would be coming only on Saturday nights, which the children spent mostly asleep. I gambled because I trusted the warmth she showed while holding Alex. I was relieved to have found someone who spoke fluent English and was more mature than a neighborhood teenager. The delightful brogue, I confess, didn't hurt.
As it turned out, she was wonderful with the boys. Alex loved when she baby-sat, and even more when she came to clean, because she would wave the vacuum wand over his Dutch-boy haircut and make his hair stand out straight from his head. She seemed to love him back. One afternoon when she wasn't working, she was at a neighborhood pool with a friend and an announcement came over the loudspeakers that a child named Alex was missing. The next day she told me how frantic she felt for the moment when she wondered if it might be "our Alex."
We would chat in my kitchen while she took a break from cleaning and I took a break from writing. I have two sons, and while she was too old to be like a daughter, she certainly added some welcome girl talk to my life. I don't remember much of what I told her, mostly stories about the boys, I think. She, in turn, told me stories of her family back home — of her father, whom she didn't speak to; of land her mother had left her that some relatives tried to steal; of an argument over her mother's headstone.
I heard a lot about her love life too — a series of relationships that seemed particularly tumultuous. In the last, and most serious, of these, she lived for more than three years with a man who, to her dismay, would not propose.
I wondered along the way, as I had the day we'd met — what was it about this woman that she was always being wronged? I kept those thoughts to myself, though, and instead I tried to help, offering advice, lending an ear. She had no health insurance, so I sent her to my doctor for flu shots and chicken pox vaccines and paid the bill. I proofread her application for nursing school and wrote a letter of recommendation. When she was wait-listed, I called the dean and told her they would never have an applicant who was more determined to become a nurse. She was accepted.
Going to school full time while still working nearly full time took its toll over the coming months. She became tired and snappish. Which is why when Alex said, "Noreen scares me," I was not as alarmed as I might have been. She was burned out, and she screamed at him. That's what I believed then. I still believe that now. Lord knows, I had been known to do the same. I knew she had a temper — although I had never heard her raise her voice to a child, I had witnessed her displays of anger at those she felt had wronged her over the years, and I'd heard her describe it herself when telling me how she'd thrown her boyfriend's clothes out of the apartment during an argument and screamed at his mother over the phone that he didn't appreciate her. I could imagine that she'd snapped and turned that temper on my boys. Not acceptable, but not a crime.
Unacceptable, though, was her answer when I'd asked about it. "You know, Lisa, kids lie." Once again she was the victim. Once again she was in the right and the other guy (my kindergartner) was in the wrong. This time it was too close to home, and it was the last conversation we would have for several years. I simply stopped calling her with work.
I heard through friends that she finished nursing school, with honors, and returned home. She would have preferred to have stayed in the States, but her arguments with that boyfriend over marriage had reached the point at which she'd threatened to go back home if there was no wedding, and in the end he called her bluff. "I would have married the girl," he told me one recent morning, when he appeared at my door after learning I had been at the trial. "But not because she was telling me to. If only I'd have married her, none of this would have happened."
When I next saw Noreen, it was in a jam-packed Irish courtroom, nearly five years after her work for me ended. She all but collapsed in my arms. We had talked on the phone a few times, but she hadn't received the e-mail message that said I'd be coming. When she saw me, her knees buckled and I had to grab her arms to keep her from hitting the ground. It took but a few moments for her to compose herself, though. "I'm not allowed to cry, no emotion, I can't let them see me cry," she kept saying, as she put her game face back on. By "they" she meant the cameramen outside and the print reporters inside.
This courtroom, in November 2004, was in Naas, about an hour outside Dublin. Noreen was there for a hearing to ask for a change of venue, which was granted. As we left the courthouse, it became clear why her lawyers did not want her to be tried in Naas. Cameramen yelled her name as they followed her down the block and around the corner toward her car.
She was out on bail and was required to check in with her local police station every Monday and Friday. She had been planning to drive directly back home after the hearing, but I talked her into letting me buy her lunch. She chose a restaurant that didn't have a TV in the bar so that she wouldn't have to see herself on the midday news while she ate. The dining room of the restaurant was decorated like a living room, and we sat side by side on a cozy couch with a low table in front of us.
She asked me why I had come. I told her, honestly, that I wasn't sure. Part of me, I think, wanted to save her. She was in over her head, and I wanted to help. Part of me, though, wanted to shake her and demand to know what she had done. Had she lost her temper? Had she lost her mind? And then there was the part of me that knew I might be writing this article. I wasn't certain I would, but I told her that day that I might, and I took notes while we talked. My pad on the table was my way of reminding us both that while our roles and emotions were muddled, I was very much a reporter.
I asked how she was doing. "My life's on hold," she said. She'd had to sell her house near Naas and move to Northern Ireland, where she qualified for welfare. Once there she spent her days reading the growing file on her case, calling it "my homework," and exercising like a demon at a nearby gym. She'd lost weight and viewed herself as training for a fight.
Gradually we inched toward the subject of the case itself. What, exactly, had she done? She had been charged with harming John Gethings and Seamus Doherty, both elderly men in very poor health, when they were admitted to Naas General Hospital in 2003. Noreen was accused of giving each man an injection with the drug haloperidol, known by the brand name Serenace in Ireland (and as Haldol in the U.S.). An antipsychotic, it is also used as a sedative for agitated patients. Gethings died. Doherty was, at the time, still living but in a nursing home. (He would die, of unrelated causes, in March 2006. An autopsy later showed that Gethings's death was not caused by Serenace.)
Noreen told me in an earlier phone conversation that she had learned of the charges one afternoon when a supervisor called "out of the blue" and said that all her shifts were canceled. She had been working at Naas General for about six months when she got that call in July 2003 and thought she had formed good friendships with other nurses there. When she went down to meet with the administrator, she described being stunned to see "my best friend's handwriting" on a complaint report.
From these sketchy descriptions, I gathered that she was accused of giving each man an injection with an unnecessarily large needle in a way that caused pain. She also told me she was accused of throwing a glass of water at one patient and saying, "If you don't shut up, you'll get another" injection. But she had done none of those things, she said. Whatever other facts were out there would be kept sealed under the Irish system until the actual trial, so for now all I had was Noreen's assurance that this was all a mistake, a vendetta by co-workers who turned out not to be her friends.
She suspected that they were jealous, she said, since she had trained in the States and was better at nursing than they were. "My colleagues just hadn't a clue," she said. "Their technology was decades behind." Periodically, she said, she would ask herself: " 'Where the hell am I?' They're doing backward nursing here. I'd tell myself, 'Just blend in, do the best you can.' " And yet, she said, she made sure everyone knew she graduated with honors from nursing school, and she often wore her gold honors' society pin on her white nursing blouse and was proud that the others had nicknamed her the Professor.
As the hours passed at lunch that day, Noreen talked more about her past. She described a childhood spent watching her father regularly beat her mother. Noreen wanted to be a nurse not for the reason I'd thought — to follow in the footsteps of a beloved mother — but because she was determined to avoid her mother's fate. "I wasn't going that route," she said. "I wasn't going to be pregnant and dependent, with a bruised face."
In a way her ambition was a different kind of homage to her mother. "I knew I could nurse because I had been my mother's nurse," she said. "I knew really young to get the wet cold cloths. I knew which were the old towels and to use those to clean up the blood."
Sometime during her childhood her father was sent to prison for bludgeoning a man in a bar fight. She was glad when he went away, she said, because he couldn't hit her mother when he was in jail. Her mother made plans to go back to school and continue the work that had been interrupted when she'd had children, but before she could finish, she died. With nothing left for her back home, Noreen left for the U.S. and did not return until the fight with her boyfriend in 2001. Her father died in February 2004, a few months after Noreen saw him for the first time in more than 16 years.
My mind was reeling. I was scanning through mental snapshots of what I had known of her life and seeing them through this new lens. Her choice of problematic men — a re-creation of her relationship with her father? Her inability to see herself as in the wrong — a response to a lifetime of being told that she was? Her determination not to ask for help — a belief that she was completely on her own?
I might well have hugged her then and told her everything would be O.K., when she went one thought too far. In the dimming late afternoon light, she turned to me and said, "One Christmas you wrote me a note saying that I must have come from a loving family to show such love."
She took a deep breath and looked me straight in the eye. "Wow, did I put one over on you."
Her voice was steel. Icy. Scary. She seemed pleased with the pain her words could cause.
I know we stayed longer and talked more, but I have no record of what was said because I all but stopped writing after those words exploded between us. I felt blindsided, deceived, ill. Somehow the conversation came around to the question I had gone all that way to ask, a question that seemed trivial against the enormity of what I now knew.
What had happened to frighten Alex?
Her answer is the last thing written on my pad from lunch that day: "I was burned out. I was a cleaner. I was taking care of four walls, not the people within them. If your kids got me before a certain time, they got singing and playing and fun. After a certain time, I held back. I wanted my own children someday, and when they would do certain things I knew I would say, 'That's just like Alex, or Evan, or Eli.' I didn't want that. I needed to save something for my own children."
The relationship between a mother and the woman she hires to care for her children is filled with unspoken truths. The mother does not say out loud that she expects the nanny to have more patience, more time, more energy than she has for herself. The nanny does not say, in turn, that this is just a job, and that you cannot love a stranger's children as your own. The mother wants the nanny to give love, and the children to return that love — but not too much. The nanny has opinions, based on experience, but she knows enough to keep most of them to herself.
I know mothers who do all they can to make it a business relationship, with charts and lists and performance evaluations — the better to be able to end things if the situation starts to sour. I know others who embrace their nanny as a friend — as if knowing her every thought, the wheres and whos of every Saturday night, will keep the children safe. The first group always seems to feel that their relationship is cold, and the second that things are too fraught.
I spent a lot of time in the months after I returned from Ireland replaying Noreen's words — "Wow, did I put one over on you"— and trying to decide why they hit me with such force. I couldn't get over the feeling that she had lied — if not by commission then by omission. Why had she not told me about her tortured childhood?
I fully understood why she didn't walk in the door and tell so deep and personal a secret at our first interview. It's not something you would share with a stranger. Besides, had I somehow known everything from the start, she would have been right to fear that I might not have hired her. I know the scientific literature. Abusers have often been abused themselves or witnessed abuse. Of course I also know that the reverse is not true — a history of abuse does not make you an abuser. But while I would have been — and still am — impressed by Noreen's determination to escape her mother's fate, I might not have taken a chance when the job was caring for my children.
If she had a right to her secrets, though, then why did they feel like lies? What rattled me, I came to see, was that Noreen had kept up a facade for five years. On the spectrum of business relationship to friendship, ours tipped well toward the friendship end. I listened. I gave advice. I cared. In exchange, she knew what went on in my house and saw me in those private, unguarded moments we all try to keep to ourselves.
So was I angry because I'd treated Noreen as a friend, and friends are expected to share? That was my conclusion — at first. But as I examined my anger, I had to confront the uncomfortable fact that I was too often only going through the motions of friendship with Noreen. I asked about her life more often than I told her about mine. I pried more than I shared. I wanted to keep her close and earn her trust because I cared about her, yes, but also because I needed regular reassurance that she was good for my children. Sincerity mixed with strategy.
"Wow, did I put one over on you." I believed that Noreen believed we'd had a friendship. With one sentence she made it clear that I had been fooling only myself.
For two years after that meeting in the fall of 2004, we kept in touch by e-mail and occasional phone calls, she on her side of the Atlantic, going to the gym and preparing to testify, me on mine, pondering the meaning of the truth. I recognized that I was wearing a mask of my own during that time. Even as I sent her birthday packages of Dunkin' Donuts coffee and cheerful notes telling her to hang in there, I had doubts about her innocence. Couldn't the woman who snapped at my children have snapped at a patient? Couldn't the woman who'd kept truths from me also keep them from the police? I didn't share my doubts, reasoning that I would not really know what I thought until I'd heard the evidence. I wasn't lying; I was keeping an open mind.
Yet I knew she expected that I was there to rescue her and support her. Her belief in me was made clear about a year before the trial, which began this October, when she asked if I would be a character witness. It was as awkward a conversation as I've ever had. On the heels of her question she started to tell me what I should be careful not to mention — particularly details of her romances (since she feared the prosecution would suggest that rocky relationships led her to seek revenge on helpless men in her care) and what I now knew about her father (for the same reason). In response, I hemmed and hawed and don't remember uttering a coherent sentence. What I most definitely did not say was this: "I can't be a character witness because I'm afraid what I have to say would hurt your case."
Noreen was not the only one to whom I was telling just a part of the truth. I had met a postal deliveryman named Thomas Gethings while I was at the change-of-venue hearing in Naas. His father was one of Noreen's supposed victims — the only patient whose body was actually exhumed as part of the investigation — and Tom and I, too, corresponded via e-mail over the next two years. He told me about his father, a truck driver and quiet, unassuming man. He told me how the exhumation had devastated the family, particularly his youngest sister, who insisted on staying by the graveside and watching as the coffin was lifted back out of the earth.
Everything I told him about myself was correct — that I was a reporter for this magazine, that I specialized in medical issues, that I would be writing an article about the case. But I didn't share the all of it. If I had, I reasoned, Tom would have questions, and I was not yet sure of the answers.
With every e-mail message, though, I debated what to do. Do I tell too soon — before I knew Tom enough to trust him not to betray a confidence? Or do I tell too late — after Tom trusted me and might well feel deceived? I couldn't help seeing, in my journalistic quandary, a parallel to Noreen. Had she wrestled with when or whether to tell me her secrets when we were talking like friends? Had she struggled with finding the right moment — and fearing that she might have let it pass?
In our short notes and phone calls over the months, Noreen mentioned her hesitancy to go out on dates. "What do I tell them about this mess," she said of the charges and the looming trial, " 'I'm a nurse, but I'm taking a break?' " Then, in passing, she mentioned a young man named Sean whom she met online. A short while later she called to say they were engaged. "I broke all the rules and told him everything on the first date," she said. "He had a flat mate, a male nurse, who had been falsely accused, so he understood me right away."
I almost didn't recognize Noreen when I saw her again this past October in Dublin as the trial got under way. All that exercise had left her fit and thin, and all the strain had left her drawn and pale. She had grown her hair longer than I was used to seeing it and dyed it black instead of the soft auburn I knew. I wanted to take her out for a haircut and highlights. She looked severe. "Like a wicked witch," Tom Gethings said during the first day of trial. I imagined that the jury would see her that way too.
That jury was sworn in after lunch on the first day — six men and six women. Judge Frank O'Donnell took the bench, and within a few witnesses, the prosecution's case, which I had wondered about for two years, was made clear. Both John Gethings and Seamus Doherty were "quite unwell," in the understatement of the prosecutor, Orla Crowe. The men were patients on the Curragh Ward — an acute-care ward — of Naas General Hospital. Noreen was the nurse responsible for each of the men on the two nights in question. Each man was described as calling out in the night, disturbing the other patients.
Two different nurses described two separate times when Noreen, agitated by the noise, jumped up from her seat at the nurses' station in the middle of the night, went into the room where the drugs were stored and locked and then headed toward the patient's room with a loaded syringe.
Sharon Baxter, the nurse who witnessed the injection of Gethings, testified first. In the predawn hours on March 1, 2003, she said, as Gethings was yelling, "I'm dying, I'm dying," Noreen "jumped out of her seat and ran into our treatment room across the hall where we keep our medications. She said something along the lines of, 'I need to shut him up, he's waking them all up, I need to give him something.' "
Baxter described Noreen as taking a vial of Serenace from the drug cabinet and drawing it into a syringe. "Is the drug prescribed?" Baxter recalled asking. Noreen said that it was but walked away with the syringe before Baxter could follow the protocol for any intramuscular injection — checking the dose, expiration date and method of administration against the chart.
"She had the medication drawn up very quickly into the syringe and she left the room," Baxter said. "I followed her out. She went straight to the patient's room." The curtain around Gethings's bed — Bed No. 2 — was pulled, Baxter said, and Noreen "had rolled him onto his side." Baxter stood by the man's head and reassured him, saying: "The nurse is going to give you a little injection, it will help you sleep, it will feel like a little prick. You're not dying, you're going to be all right."
Looking down the bed, Baxter described how Noreen "very roughly, very brutally, drew back her arm a lot more than required to give the injection, so she gave it with a lot of force." When asked to demonstrate by the prosecutor, Baxter raised her own fist over her shoulder, with her elbow bent so that it pointed straight ahead and her arm was parallel to the floor. Then she brought it down from that height into the imaginary patient beneath her in the bed. It looked as if it would hurt. "As she was withdrawing the needle from the patient, I looked to see what had happened," Baxter said. "It was a 16-gauge needle, a white needle, NEVER used for giving an injection.
"I asked her if she had meant to give it with that needle," Baxter said.
"What did Miss Mulholland say to you?" the prosecutor asked.
"She laughed."
Later, Sinead Noone-Norton, the nurse who witnessed the injection of Seamus Doherty, took the stand. The tale she told was different only in the details. Another night shift, this one on June 18, 2003. Another agitated patient, calling out and waking the others. Doherty, who was a sheep farmer, was not sure where he was and was ranting about tractors. "Noreen said she was going to give him something to calm him down," Noone-Norton said. "She went off into the treatment room to prepare her injection. I waited for her to call me in or bring me the injection to check out the vial." Instead, "she walked by me very quickly."
"I walked into the room," she said. "The curtains had been pulled" around Bed No. 9, Doherty's bed. "Behind them she was drawing the injection into a syringe using a white needle. She pushed Seamus over onto his left side. She launched the needle at him. It was done very roughly.
"Seamus yelped. He started yelling 'Help' again, and Noreen was saying, 'Shut up.' There was half a glass of water on the bedside. Noreen threw it in his face and told him to shut up.
"I stepped outside the curtains. I was in shock. I just took some deep breaths. I walked back in. Noreen was standing there. She had the white needle held up in her fist, up like this." Noone-Norton held up her hand as if grabbing a knife by the handle, blade down, ready to plunge. "She wasn't expecting to see me this second time. I said, 'What are you doing?' She said, 'Just threatening him.' "
Needles of different thicknesses are topped in different colors of plastic to easily tell them apart. The lower the gauge of a needle, the thicker it is. An orange needle, the thinnest under this system, is used for subcutaneous injections, meaning those that go into the layers of skin. A blue needle, in turn, is 23-gauge and used for intramuscular injections, or IMs; you'd probably get your flu vaccine with this. A green needle is 21-gauge and used less often, usually with drugs of a slightly more syrupy consistency. A white needle is 16-gauge and is intended to draw medication into a syringe; that needle is then unscrewed and a smaller needle or an IV mechanism is attached to the syringe.
After each nurse's testimony, the prosecutor asked that the jury be shown the white needle. Not the exact one used in these incidents, since those needles were disposed of long ago, but an example of a 16-gauge version. First it was given to the nurse, who held it up in the witness box. It was so thick that it could be seen across the room, where the jury sat. It looked like a dart. The tip of a ballpoint pen. A weapon. Then it was passed around the jury box, where it had the desired effect. A few of the jurors — and more than a few of the spectators — cringed.
Those two stories formed the basis of the assault charge. It is worth underlining here that Noreen was not accused of anything worse than assault. Gethings died at 11 on the morning of March 1; Doherty, according to his family, was never the same after the night of June 18. But the prosecutor and the state pathologist all made clear during the trial that the injection of Serenace did not cause death or long-term harm. The case the prosecution did make was that Noreen gave the injections brutally, tantamount to assault, and that because the Serenace was not prescribed it fell under the definition of poisoning, which was the second charge in each case. Again, Nurses Baxter and Noone-Norton told similar stories that differed in their details. Baxter testified that she had checked Gethings's chart soon after the incident and that it said Serenace had been prescribed P.O. (by mouth) once per night. Noreen had already given him that tablet earlier in her shift.
Baxter said she is absolutely certain that there was no prescription for an injection of Serenace. By the time the chart made its way to the police investigators, however, the notation IM was written in next to the P.O., an addition that would allow for an intramuscular injection. That addition was in black marker, in contrast to the black ink of the rest of the writing on the entry. The implication was that someone — Noreen? — had changed the chart.
On Doherty's chart, in contrast, there was no prescription for Serenace at all. Nor was there a prescription for any sort of injection. Here the defense made the case, in cross-examination of Noone-Norton, that Noreen had paged a doctor who had approved the prescription over the phone. But Noone-Norton said no mention was made that night of a doctor and that none had come to see Doherty.
Noreen's lawyer, Giollaiosa O'Lideadha, did his best. He grilled Baxter and Noone-Norton, as well as the corroborating staff members, about every moment of the nights in question — where they were standing, how quickly the incidents happened — in an attempt to cast doubt about whether they had actually been able to see what they said they had seen. Was it really a white needle in Noreen's hand, or did it go by too quickly? Did Noreen actually say, "Shut him up," or might she have said, "I'll give him something to keep him quiet"? Wasn't it true that record-keeping at Naas General Hospital was full of omissions, and hastily scribbled additions, and orders that were never written down? Why did Baxter wait four months and Noone-Norton nearly two weeks to come forward with their accusations? They talked to each other before they filed their complaints, and they talked again after Baxter testified in court but before Noone-Norton took the stand — was this not collusion?
Just when I started to think that collusion was going to be the crux of the case — after all, Noreen had described this all along as a vendetta — O'Lideadha went in another direction entirely. He asked Baxter (and, later, Noone-Norton) whether one's view of a situation is colored by the facts you know. If you see two men energetically fighting on the street, he said, you might call the police unless you knew that the men were brothers and that they often went at each other in good-natured tussles. Baxter warily agreed that this was true.
Then he asked if Noreen seemed "competent, assertive and confident." Well, yes, Baxter agreed. What if that impression, O'Lideadha continued, gathering steam, was based on an incomplete knowledge of the facts?
"Did anybody tell you that Miss Mulholland did not complete her year of nursing training at Blackrock?" (a well-respected clinic in Dublin) O'Lideadha asked. "That she only lasted there nine months? Were you told that Miss Mulholland's mentor at Blackrock, after a short period, asked that she mentor with someone else, basically because Miss Mulholland was 'not picking up what I am teaching her?' Would it be a surprise to you to know that she was dismissed from Blackrock because her clinical skills were not acceptable? Because senior staff there were unable to assign surgical or complex patients to her? Because she was unable to call for assistance? Because Noreen did not achieve the clinical level to do night-nursing duty?"
Behind me, John Gethings's daughter turned pale and his sons turned pink. I turned inward, remembering, again, the young woman who refused to admit that she was wrong. I had come to hear what happened, and now that I had, I wanted to flee. If there was a single moment in the monthlong trial when I became certain that the charges against Noreen were true, it was this one. Her lawyer's point was that Noreen was incompetent, that if she used the wrong needle it was ineptitude, not aggression. But to me the horror lay not with the white-topped needle but with her white-hot anger. O'Lideadha described a woman who could lash out and then lie about it rather than admit a mistake. I recognized that woman. I'd seen her before.
The new certainty made me angry. Why, I thought, could Noreen not have said, "I was wrong"? Or some version of those words, like, "I'm stressed out and snapped at Alex," or "I lost it with a patient, I need help"? If she had said that to me, we would never have parted ways. If she'd said it to the Naas supervisor, the case might have remained a disciplinary matter and never have made it to the police or to the jury. But she couldn't admit fault — even to herself. I was furious with her.
"The senior nurse at Blackrock will testify that Noreen did not accept her clinical limitations," O'Lideadha continued. "She considered herself an expert. She had a fear of being portrayed as needing help." Not only that, he added, Noreen also did not accept the criticisms in this line of defense. "She disagrees with this evaluation of her abilities," he said.
A fight on the street — two thugs going at it? Or two brothers horsing around?
A nurse botching an injection — a deliberate disregard for the patient? Or pathetic incompetence?
That nurse laughing about it afterward — callous cruelty? Or an attempt to seem strong while feeling weak?
A nanny being sharp with my children — a kind woman, simply burned out? Or a victim of abuse becoming the abuser?
"I now wish to suggest to this witness that if she had had this information at the time, this could have influenced her perception of Miss Mulholland," her lawyer said. "If you knew on the night what you know now, do you think that your take on what was happening would have been different?"
The testimony went on for weeks. Along the way, Noreen stopped speaking to me in the lobby in the morning. I assume this was because my growing belief that she was guilty was obvious from my body language and in the time I spent talking to the Dohertys and the Gethingses. Eventually I told the families everything. They had the questions I'd expected, and now I was ready to answer. Do you think she did this? Yes. Do you think she purposefully set out to hurt anyone? No.
I returned home before the verdict. I was sitting in the carpool line at Alex's middle school when I learned, in a cellphone call from Tom Gethings, that the jury convicted Noreen on both counts of assault and one count of "poisoning" (against Gethings).
In the weeks between that verdict and the sentencing hearing, I heard from Noreen one last time. She needed letters asking for leniency from the judge. Would I write one? I said I would and agonized over every word. I told the judge what I'd learned of her childhood and how I'd become convinced of her guilt. And I asked him for compassion, though not, I think, the kind that Noreen had in mind.
"What Noreen needs," I wrote, "is structured and intense help in absorbing and learning from her past, so she can begin to heal. She needs abuse-survivor counseling, to unravel the damage done to her by her father. She certainly needs anger-management training, to teach her to take a different path from the brutal road on which she was raised. But to send her to prison will merely add yet another victim to this awful tale."
I sent the letter directly to Noreen, not to the court. Her lawyer never presented my words to the judge. "After consulting with my legal representatives, the letter cannot be used," Noreen e-mailed me a few days before the sentencing hearing. "I am more than your next story," she continued. "I was the person who loved your boys, the person who cleaned your kitchen on a Saturday night so your mother-in-law wouldn't pass comment on her Sunday-morning arrival.
"I am now at a stage of my life," she concluded, "when I have had to question many things and many people. After reading your letter ... I have no choice but to ask you not to contact me in the future."
I have not spoken to Noreen since, and she declined to speak to a fact checker for this article. I was not in the courtroom when O'Lideadha, asking for a reduced sentence, told the court that his client had "flipped out and used excessive force" on Gethings and Doherty, that she had never deliberately tried to hurt anyone and that she was deeply sorry for the pain caused to patients and families.
Her lawyer went on to describe the horror of her childhood. It was only then that I learned that even all that she told me that afternoon in Naas was far from everything. She was sexually assaulted by a neighbor at age 9, her lawyer said. She was hospitalized after a suicide attempt at 15.
Judge O'Donnell said he took all that into account when, on Dec. 18, he sentenced Noreen to four years for each assault charge and two years for the single poisoning charge — and then suspended the sentence, giving her five years of probation instead. He acknowledged her harrowing childhood and said there would be "little point" in sending her to prison. The fact that she had surrendered her license, and would never work as a nurse again, he said, was punishment enough.
Reading all of this on the Web site of an Irish newspaper, I saw, with new and growing clarity, why Noreen had kept so much of her life a secret. Why there were some things she would not say out loud until she had no choice, until telling all was the only way to keep herself out of prison.
I had thought it was because of the shame of it. Now I think I understand something more. Just as I have been wondering whether you can trust someone you don't completely know, perhaps she wondered if the people in her life could care about someone who was not everything she seemed. Perhaps she was certain that my family cared about her only because of the image she showed us and that we would stop caring if she ever told us the whole truth. I like to think she was wrong. But I won't have a chance to ever know.
Lisa Belkin is a contributing writer for the magazine.
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