Unsolved Murders: True Crime Stories

The Ghost of Sligo

In the early morning of June 16th, 2009, a sea fog was hovering over beach, in Co Sligo. It was just beginning to lift soon after 6am, when Arthur Kinsella and his son Brian drove into the beach's car park after a short journey from their home, in Cartron.

Brian Kinsella was training for a triathalon, and he ran ahead of his father across the sand, eager to enter the Atlantic and swim.

"He looked about 65, I thought. We walked around the body, just to make sure that he was dead, and I actually placed my hand on his ankle, and it was marble cold"

The tide was out that morning, and as Arthur Kinsella came on to the beach he caught sight of something unusual to his right. He knew Rosses Point beach intimately from many morning expeditions. He went closer, to the unfamiliar object not far from the slipway, close to rocks.

This is what Arthur Kinsella found. "It was the body of a person, and he appeared to have drowned and was lying face downwards on the sand."

He called to his son to come back from the water. The fog had almost totally lifted by then. He noted that there were no footprints anywhere around the body, which appeared to have washed up.

"He looked about 65, I thought," he says. "We walked around the body, just to make sure that he was dead, and I actually placed my hand on his ankle, and it was marble cold."

SEVEN KILOMETRES FROM Rosses Point, Sgt Terry MacMahon had been on duty since 6am at Sligo Garda station. He was 45 minutes into his shift when the call from Arthur Kinsella came in about the body on the beach.

MacMahon dispatched a car but did not go straight away himself. "I actually went to a storeroom here in the station, and did a bit of hunting and got a tarpaulin kind of a thing, because we knew one of the things we needed to do if there was a body out there was to cover it, away from the public gaze," he says.

MacMahon arrived with the blue tarpaulin about 10 minutes after his colleagues, who were taking statements from the Kinsellas.

"It was quite obvious he was dead," MacMahon says. "A grey-haired gentleman, he looked to me like he hadn't been that long in the water."

MacMahon noted that the dead man was oddly dressed for a swimmer. He had on a pair of purple striped Speedo-type swimming trunks, with his underpants over the top and a navy T-shirt tucked into them. This was only the first of a number of strange things about the dead man on the beach.

ON THE AFTERNOON of June 12th, 2009, a Friday, a tall thin man with short grey hair and glasses was captured on CCTV cameras at Derry bus station. He was wearing a black leather jacket and carrying two black bags, one a holdall-type bag, with two handles, the other a laptop-type bag slung over his shoulder.

He was looking for the Sligo bus, which was leaving at 4pm. Two hours and 28 minutes later the man was seen, again on CCTV, getting off it in Sligo.

The town's bus and train stations are both within walking distance of several hotels. The tall thin man appears to have been unaware of this, as he got into a taxi and asked the driver to bring him to a cheap place to stay.

The driver first went to the Crúiscín Lán guest house, on Connolly Street, but it was full. Although taxis do meet buses and trains in the town, Sligo's one official rank is on Quay Street, outside Sligo City Hotel, and it is to this hotel they went next.

CCTV recorded the man, who was later reported to have had an Austrian or German accent, entering it at 6.52pm. A receptionist checked in him. A decade ago a single-occupancy room with breakfast cost €65. The man paid in cash, in full, for three nights and was allocated room 705.