The Murder of Moll McCarthy

A brutal murder in a small community leads an innocent man to the gallows.

The body of Moll McCarthy. Her murder in 1940 shocked the small community of Marlhill, and is unsolved.

moll mccarthy credit Irish Post

Prisons are not known for their beauty or charm, but the room in Dublin's Mountjoy Prison that Henry Gleeson entered in 1941 was a particularly grim one even by those low standards. Just a few square metres of grey stone, the one distinguishing feature there was also the most horrifying: a gallows occupied what little space there was in the small room's centre. Gleeson had been brought to the "Hang Room" of Mountjoy, and with the assistance of British executioner Thomas Pierrepoint, the sentence of death handed down to him earlier that year was enacted.

Gleeson was not the last person to die in the Hang Room. A total of 45 people--all but one of them men--met a grisly end there between 1906 and 1954. Many of the hangings were carried out by either Thomas Pierrepoint or his nephew, Albert, Ireland having no professional executioners of its own. And even though there were no executions carried out after that of rapist and murderer Michael Manning in 1954, the death penalty remained a theoretical possibility for many decades after. But he does have one dubious honour: he is the only person to have been pardoned by the Irish state after his execution. Almost 80 years after his death it can be said with certainty that Henry Gleeson, the supposed murderer of Mary "Moll" McCarthy, was innocent.

The pardon that was issued in 2015 by President of Michael D Higgins was, in the opinions of many, long overdue. In fact, the case of Gleeson is now widely considered to be one of the worst miscarriages of justice in Ireland's recent history. But the Irish judiciary in 1941 was not all that different from today's, so the question of how the courts got it so wrong that an innocent man was sent to the gallows remains.

Henry Gleeson was born in 1903 in Holycross in county Tipperary. In 1920, he was invited to move to the neighbouring community of Marlhill, an area near New Inn. He was asked there by his uncle, John Caesar, who owned a 70-acre farm. Henry was expected to work for free, but he probably thought it was in his best interest to do so, as Caesar had no children and Gleeson might therefore reasonably hope to inherit the land at some point.  But Caesar was not an old man, and Gleeson spent the next two decades labouring as a farm hand for nothing but room and board. 

Though rural and very isolated, the area of Marlhill was not without its scandals and secrets. A constant source of gossip could be found in the person of Moll McCarthy, who lived in a dilapidated cottage on land bordering John Caesar's. Moll would draw water from Caesar's well--presumably with his consent--to help raise her large family of seven children. Moll McCarthy was unmarried, which was scandalous enough in the ultra-conservative, Catholic Ireland of the 1940's. What was even more scandalous was how she earned the money to feed her children: in a sparsely populated, agricultural hinterland, Moll traded sexual favours for food and other resources. The seven children she birthed between 1921, when she moved to the area, and her violent death in 1940 had six different fathers. In an era when young, unmarried mothers were often sent by their families to the infamous Magdalene laundries out of shame, it is curious that a prostitute was allowed to operate with impunity in such a tiny community.

The crossroads of New Inn, Tipperary. New Inn is the closest village to the rural community of Marlhill, and it was authorities from here that first investigated the killing.

Seighean, New Inn Crossroads, colour by Irish Mysteries, CC0 1.0

But despite the local judge, Sean Troy, ruling that it was unnecessary to take her children into foster care because there was scant evidence that she was an unfit mother, Moll clearly had her enemies in Marlhill. In 1926, for example, the thatched roof of her cottage was set ablaze in an apparent arson attack. It is unknown who was involved in the attack, but it is reasonable to assume that the arsonists came from the local community. Moll and her children were lucky to escape with their lives on that occasion, but her luck eventually ran out in November of 1940. 

The murder of Moll McCarthy was savage. She had been shot twice, once in the neck and once in the face, and her body had been left in a field on John Caesar's farm. It was there that she was discovered on the morning of Thursday, November 21st by Henry Gleeson, who was out searching for Caesar's sheep. With few suspects and little in the way of motive--apart from the rumours that started circulating as soon as Moll's body was found, that is--Henry was promptly arrested and charged with her murder.   

There was much about the ensuing trial of Henry Gleeson that was questionable even by the standards of the early 20th-century, and--decades later--the Irish affiliate of the Innocence Network based in Griffith College, Dublin, would focus on the irregularities of the case in order to help secure Gleeson's pardon. The Irish Innocence Project raised awareness of some deficiencies in the case, and chief among these was the issue of the time of death. The prosecution insisted that Moll had been murdered and abandoned in the field some time on November 20th, when in fact the medical evidence strongly suggested that she had been killed in the early morning of the 21st. This might seem like a minor detail, but Gleeson's life was in the balance--he had an alibi for November 21st, but not November 20th. 

British executioner Thomas Pierrepoint. Ireland had no executioner of its own, so Thomas and his nephew Albert carried out most of the hangings conducted at Mountjoy up to 1954. Thomas executed Henry Gleeson in 1941.

thomas pierrepoint credit people pill

The behaviour of the local Gardai was also strange. Not long after the discovery of Moll's body, they allowed some of her children to openly accost Gleeson, which did the suspect no favours in terms of public opinion. It was also odd that the shotgun register for the area was not entered in evidence; firearms have been strictly regulated in Ireland for most of its history as an independent state, and the failure to properly examine the records of who had access to guns in such a tiny community is inexplicable. Some witnesses whose testimony would seem indispensable in a modern case were also not called by either prosecution or defence counsel: John Caesar, for example, or his wife Brigid. 

The prosecution's central argument was that Henry Gleeson had been having an affair with Moll McCarthy and was the father of her youngest child. The proposed motive behind the murder was that Moll was threatening to tell John Caesar about the affair, putting the possibility of Gleeson inheriting his uncle's farm in jeopardy. None of this was true; it is of course possible that Gleeson fathered a child by Moll McCarthy, but she also had no shortage of male punters in the area, including--if rumours are to be believed--John Caesar. But the prosecution successfully swayed the jury, who found Gleeson guilty of murder on February 27th, 1941, with a recommendation that mercy be extended in his case. It was not. Gleeson was hanged on April 23rd and buried in an unmarked grave. 

So what was going on in this strange case? Some claim there were larger, more political forces at work. For example, there is one plausible reason why the local Garda sergeant, Anthony Delaney, allowed Moll McCarthy to ply her trade as a sex worker in Marlhill for 19 years with little interference: she was, according to some, informing on local IRA members to the authorities. She moved to the area when the IRA was still fighting the British and, later, Irish Free State forces, and even after the cessation of the Irish civil war the IRA remained active. They posed an existential risk to the fledgling Irish state, after all, and any actionable information that state forces got hold of would have been invaluable. In 2015, author Kieran Fagan argued in his book The Framing of Harry Gleeson that a number of Moll's neighbours who had IRA connections discovered her status as an informant, and assassinated her. 

Sean MacBride, who served as junior defence counsel for Gleeson at his trial. Critics have argued that MacBride ignored evidence of IRA involvement in the case, but this has not been proven. MacBride was the son of Maud Gonne, long-time muse of WB Yeats. 

Unknown author, Seán MacBride circa 1947, marked as public domain, more details on Wikimedia Commons

Proponents of this theory also point to the fact that Gleeson's junior defence counsel in the case was Sean MacBride, a veteran of the War of Independence and Civil War era of the early 1920's. MacBride would become a government minister in later life, but what is relevant to the theory of republican involvement in the McCarthy/Gleeson case was that he was the chief of staff of the IRA from 1936 to 1939. Critics of Gleeson's defence argue that MacBride was willing to ignore the possible involvement of his IRA colleagues in the murder, in effect condemning the innocent man that he was helping defend to the gallows. It's a fascinating theory, even if it is hard to reconcile this picture with that of MacBride in his later years, the one who won the Nobel Prize in 1974 for his tireless work in the field of international human rights.

Perhaps there is no conspiracy in the case at all. Perhaps Gleeson's defence was merely unprepared, and the prosecution got lucky. Republicans may or may not have been involved, but it is also true that Moll's lifestyle and profession would have made her a target for violence in such a small community, either from the men who potentially fathered her children, or from their wives. The two victims in the case remain that: a pardon means little after the hangman has done his job, after all, and Moll McCarthy's murderer or murderers--whoever they may have been--have never been definitively identified. 

The murder of Moll McCarthy continues to provoke debate and fascinate; to date, two factual books have been written, two novels have been published, and there is both a documentary and a movie about the case. The real murderer may have been successful in ending the life of Moll McCarthy, and--indirectly--that of Henry Gleeson too, but their memories linger on.  

Henry Gleeson. A pardon issued by Irish President Michael D Higgins in 2015 was welcomed by his family, but the real killer of Moll McCarthy has never been found.

harry gleeson credit Irish Post