An Irish man and sexual offender thought he got away with murder. Four decades later, It took five hours and 32 minutes for a jury to find Noel Long guilty for the cold case murder of Nora Sheehan.
In 1981, two forestry workers found Sheehan’s body in Shippool Woods, Cork, and alerted the West Cork police. According to RTE, the 54-year-old victim was found naked on her back and slightly on her side. At the time, an autopsy revealed that the body had been in the woods for at least six days, with bruising to the face and vagina. As a result, the Pathologist, Dr Dermot Coakley, swabbed semen from the deceased and sent it to the Forensic Science Laboratory in Dublin for more examination. There, the sample was well kept and preserved until the breakthrough of advanced DNA technology.
In addition, four days after Sheehan’s body was found, now retired Retired Detective Matthew Thorne had stopped Long in an Opel Kadett car with the registration number OZF 426 at Curraheen Road and lived nearby. Though authorities never disclosed the reason for the stop, the defendant’s car was searched. As a result, fibers and paint materials from the car were collected and compared to the victim’s dress and coat found next to her body. Analysis of the evidence showed Sheehan had been in Long’s vehicle at some point.
Years later, renowned Dr. Jonathan Whitaker, a world expert in the process of extracting DNA profiles, used a process known as Low Copy Number (LCN) to establish a DNA profile.
In 2021, a search warrant was executed by a new cold case unit on Long’s residence. They collected a beanie hat, extracted the defendant’s DNA from it, and compared it to the preserved DNA profile from the semen swabbed from Sheehan’s body. It was a match!
Long had a history of convictions from the age of seventeen, including sexual assault, theft, and larceny.
“Noel Long was a timid enough sort of fellow when he started offending here in Cork, but after his stint in the British army, he was very aggressive and angry any time we ever stopped him. He definitely came back a changed man,” said a retired officer, who was familiar with the defendant from his teenage years, according to The Irish Times.
During the trial, Long’s defense lawyer, Michael Delaney SC, argued prosecutors had not met the burden of murder being committed by his client since the cause of death was never established. Long is appealing the conviction.
Sheehan was married and a mother of three at the time of her death. However, her husband died four years after her demise.
Leave a Reply