Transcribe your podcast
[00:00:03]

You're listening to the Nobody Zone Episode five, you will need to have heard the first four episodes before this one. If you haven't heard them already. Before we get this episode started, I want to read to you from a newspaper article published in the Dublin Evening Herald on October 6th, 1953, he got a 25 year old Kieran Kelly, No Business of 43. Harcourt Street was charged with stealing a violin, cello, oboe and a violin valued at 75 pounds.

[00:00:43]

Describing the arrest, Detective Officer Lang said that they went to the defendant's house and saw him some distance away on the other side of the street. He apparently recognized them as police officers and ran away. In so doing, he was struck by a motor van on the leg.

[00:01:00]

Fortunately, he was not injured. But Kelly then ran into the Chaumont Street area after a chase of about four or 500 yards. They lost him. Detective Officer Dorice found him in a tenement building later, and it was there that he resisted arrest. Kelly was remanded in custody on bail of 50 pounds. The defendant's father said he would like to have him medically examined. He had been acting strangely of late and the father did not wish to pay bail for him at present.

[00:01:41]

What went through your mind after that one named Kelly because you went back on March? I went back to Atlanta. He went away a few times over there. And that's that's got me and my junk food.

[00:01:55]

And he murdered. Are you a spy? But just trying to defer to permanently. But life is a lot less likely to. Some of the place in that newspaper article, Kelly's father says he won't pay bail and he says he wants his son examined because he's been acting strangely of late.

[00:02:32]

He doesn't really seem to want him around. It does sound like Kelly's acting paranoid. Sounds like he's been changed by something. And the date, October 1953.

[00:02:45]

That's just a few short months after Kieran Kelly says he killed his best friend, Christy Smith, in the London Underground.

[00:02:54]

However, as we heard last time, the police were unable to find any evidence that that man, Christy Smith, had died on the underground or anywhere else in 1953. They had trouble finding any evidence that he'd ever even existed. So just as the police were back in 1983, we are faced with the possibility that Kieran Kelly is simply delusional and that Christy Smith may be just a figment of his imagination. Ian Brown, the man in the room, the policeman Kelly actually confessed to, has his own thoughts on the subject.

[00:03:35]

I think he killed Christy Smith. I think Christy Smith existed. Because that's where all the confessions start, and if that's a lie, so does everything else. And yet we know that Kelly always refers to Christy Smith as being the start of it all.

[00:04:03]

So here's the question, Christy Smith. Can we prove that he existed and in so doing, prove that Kelly's confessions are indeed true?

[00:04:14]

That's the first. That's the big one. Don't you understand?

[00:04:20]

Let's look at the best. In fact, the only piece of evidence we have so far that Smith did exist, that confession tape. Did he and Brown miss anything back then?

[00:04:33]

Fine. And Mr. Brown is going to ask you now about Christy Smith's go over that again at the point that Brown is talking to Kelly here on the tape.

[00:04:44]

He already knows that the investigation is turning up a blank on Christy Smith. So he's asking Kelly a few questions to try and get some other names and some other details that might give him some better leads.

[00:04:55]

What happened to Kathleen? And I never saw her again after he was seen and never seen this, you know, happened. I don't I don't really know.

[00:05:05]

Now, it seems there was someone else with Kelly and Christy Smith who'd come over from Ireland with them, a woman called Kathleen and showed that she came from the same area.

[00:05:14]

As you know, she came from car. Yeah. Were they going out together? Just going out together. She was on the game. She wasn't the guy that was on the game. You were the one that you brought over as well. He was he brought the treatments over.

[00:05:32]

So there were two women who traveled over with Kelly and Smith. They were both on the game, as Kelly says, both prostitutes. So we have a group of four young people. Kelly would be 23 around this time, trying to make their way with petty crime and whatever else they can think of to make some money. And it seems their first port of call in the U.K. was Liverpool at that time.

[00:05:55]

And it was a bit rough at that time, but Liverpool hadn't worked out.

[00:06:01]

Kelly says it was too rough in Liverpool.

[00:06:04]

That's where I couldn't stand at.

[00:06:07]

The next stop was Manchester, where Kelly says the two women had tried their luck again as prostitutes.

[00:06:12]

And in the square in Manchester, three in the morning that it seems things got tense between the four of them, Smith and his girlfriend, Kathleen Kelly, and the other girl, which was only, you know, was a bloke and carried and therefore Canadian all the time.

[00:06:30]

And you think you're drinking and you're sleeping in one room with them and it's still fun and you see your head start dropping down. So you say don't know.

[00:06:41]

So they head south to London following Kelly's lead.

[00:06:45]

So you came down to London from Prudential anyway. So she said, well, I'm going with you, too. So you said I've got to. Now, she was she always said, we don't want you didn't want to didn't want to know the bulk of our government. The other one I didn't want.

[00:07:06]

Kelly says she kept coming over to my side, by which she means she was coming on to him and he could have had a bunk up. He could have slept with either of the two girls, but he wasn't interested.

[00:07:18]

Well, of course she was on the going. No, not really that way.

[00:07:25]

At some point when they're in London, the tension gets too much. And Kelly murders Smith in the underground, according to Kelly. But that may or may not be true.

[00:07:34]

And when you did when you did, Christy. And obviously that played on your mind a lot. Yeah.

[00:07:44]

And that played I mean, the bottom line is that Kelly gets away with it. He keeps quiet about what he did. He tells no one. He becomes understandably paranoid and he's going to spend the rest of his life looking over one shoulder.

[00:07:58]

When I see you jumping up and kicking them, they're going to need you for that. Yeah.

[00:08:06]

Kelly doesn't know what happened to Kathleen or the other woman. He says he never saw him again.

[00:08:12]

So you don't know what happened to her after that. She could have stayed in London. She could have gone back while she was standing on pick up. You know, you trust your strength, you know, I mean, she went back to you because she was erm she knew the molenaar Christian because because I know she knew plants.

[00:08:35]

So someone called Kathleen who didn't know what happened to Christie, knew Christie's mother and someone called Paul Smith. He's talking about Christie's family. Yeah. The police didn't follow that lead in 1983. But we have when I say we, I mean the entire team inartistic, I mean, of course, they've been digging around in every archive. They would let them in looking for everything they can find connected to Kelly and of course, anything they can find that might point towards Christine Smith.

[00:09:12]

This is journalist and documentary maker McLean, grea I've become a little bit obsessed with finding Kristi Smith over the last couple of months.

[00:09:21]

And just a quick note here. In case you're not Irish, you might not know that Kristy is a common Irish short version of the name Christopher. You also might not know that Smith is probably the most common surname that is in the United Kingdom and it's very common in Ireland to starts as a bit of a needle in a haystack looking for records of Christy Smiths in Ireland and in Dublin. But if you go to the UK and start looking, it becomes a needle in a really big haystack.

[00:09:56]

To cut a very long story short, McLean and the team looked very hard, but found nothing that matched the death of Christy Smith in London or anywhere else in the U.K. Same result as the police had in 1983.

[00:10:13]

So the next place to go is back to Ireland to see if it's possible to track down a birth certificate that would at least prove that Christy Smith had been born, Kelly and Smith were friends of a similar age. So this helps. Kelly's birth certificate did show up. We know that he was born in 1930, so Smith must have been born around that time to. Between 1927 and 1934, I found 28 Christopher Smith's Nicolay needs to find a Christopher Smith who can match up with Kelly by age and location.

[00:10:51]

There's eight in Dublin and of those eight in Dublin, there are four in Dublin, eight just for Christie Smiths to choose from in south central Dublin.

[00:11:01]

There are assumptions that we're making here. And, you know, there are dangerous things to make and we don't have to make assumptions about everything.

[00:11:11]

We know that Kelly lived at 43 Harcourt Street in south central Dublin in 1953. We know that for sure because of the newspaper article and electoral records, if Kelly and Smith were friends. It's more than likely, given the way Dublin was back in the 1950s, that they lived reasonably close by. So now we come to the crunch. We did find one clue on the police tape, Paul Smith.

[00:11:40]

She knew that she knew Kelly saying she Kathleen New Paul Smith, none of the Kristy Smiths Nicholson could find had a father called Paul Smith. So could Paul Smith be Christy Smith's brother? Luckily, Paul was not such a common name for a baby boy born around this time.

[00:12:07]

There's about five or six Paul Smiths born around that time. But what I was looking for was somebody whose mother had the same maiden name as one of the Christopher Smiths that I had found.

[00:12:19]

It's a bit complicated what nicotine's doing here, but basically just by looking at birth certificates, if she can match the maiden names of the mothers of her five Paul Smiths to the maiden names of the mothers of any of her four Christopher Smiths, we'll know if they were brothers and found just two maiden names that could be a match.

[00:12:42]

There was done and there was Hanle. So first of all, actually got that done. Birth certificate and no, it was a different done. So the next one was Hanle and went in and got Paul Smith, whose mother was O'Hanley, got his birth certificate. And yes, it was Kathleen Hanley, the same mother as one of my Christopher Smiths.

[00:13:12]

The address was the same 12 Appropriate Street Dublin ace. The father was the same James Smith, a labourer. So this was pretty exciting.

[00:13:24]

So there was a young man called Kristy Smith who had a brother called Paul, who lived in the same area of Dublin as Kieran Kelly did this. Kristy Smith was born in December 1933 to a poor family of seven. Paul was his younger brother. Kristy Smith would have been nineteen and a half in the summer of 1953. Kelly was 23. We could find no later records in Ireland that relate to this Kristy Smith. But there is one piece of possible evidence that did show up.

[00:14:01]

There's one more clue.

[00:14:04]

There's a newspaper article that we found from 1951 which names a 17 year old Christopher Smith in trouble with the law for stealing from a car. The dates match in terms of him being 17 in 1951 would match with his date of birth being December 1933.

[00:14:21]

This Kristy, 17 and in trouble with the law, could very easily have known Kieran Kelly. They walked the same streets at the same time. Smith and Kelly not averse to a bit of criminal activity. They decide to travel to England with the two girls and try to make some money any way they know how. But only Kelly returns. And when he does, he's acting strangely changed by something maybe like the mysterious Kathleen he talks about. He still knew Christy Smith's mother and his little brother, all knowing that he'd murdered Christy Smith and terrified of being found out, maybe petrified that Kathleen herself might suddenly show up again, suspecting something that would play on his mind for sure.

[00:15:15]

That's all conjecture, of course. But we finally do have some facts at least that suggest that Kieran Kelly was not lying about Christy Smith. And just as Ian Brown does, we can believe, Kelly, when he says that he killed him.

[00:15:32]

It had to be, in my opinion, Kelly murdered Smith. How? Where? I honestly don't know. But how could Kelly or anyone else, in fact, explain the disappearance of Kristi Smith, why wasn't he missed his Nicollette? Grea again, you might think that if a family with a son, just if the son just disappears, that they would be then calling the police and putting in a missing persons records. But, you know, Arland, in that time, there was so much poverty.

[00:16:14]

There was so many men were leaving Arlin's and going to England to get work and further afield as well, going to America, getting on boats and going away. And, you know, it wasn't that uncommon for men to go away and to never be heard of again. You know, there was a huge amount of shame involved as well that they had gone away and maybe life hadn't life and panned out the way they had wanted it to. So, you know, it's not unthinkable that a man would go to the U.K., go to England or London under the family, wouldn't necessarily hear from them again, and that they mightn't think that that was unusual and people could just disappear off the radar, particularly particularly SINGLEMAN Actually, I think it's fair to say and that could be what happened to Christy Smith.

[00:17:08]

So Kelly had without knowing, without planning it, chosen the perfect victim for getting away with murder, that's something he'd repeat time and time again. He'd killed someone who didn't count, somebody who wasn't missed. As far as the victim's family knew, it just disappeared. Maybe they hoped he was making it rich somewhere on the other side of the world, but of course, Kieran Kelly knew better.

[00:17:37]

Kieran Kelly knew he was dead because he'd murdered him in London and he'd gotten away with it.

[00:17:43]

Kelly says. I got away with it for years and ultimately I thought, well, who cares if I kill somebody? Doesn't matter. I've got away with it.

[00:17:55]

And he worried he got away with Christy Smith. It all goes everything goes back to Christy Smith.

[00:18:21]

When Kelly says that killing Smith started it all in 1953, he's talking about what happened next and we know quite a lot about what happened next. Kelly's life story, we know that Kelly was born in Rathdowney in the midlands of Ireland County, Leisz. We know the family moved to Dublin and he's confirmed in a church in Dublin, age 12. We also know he joined the British army when he was 18. The Irish Guards regiment, he was booted out of the army in 1951 after going absent without leave in Dublin for nearly a whole year after 1953.

[00:19:04]

After he murdered Smith, he'd go to jail three times in Ireland in the 1950s. He'd get two years for that theft in 1953, the one in the newspaper article, he'd get nine months just after that for over 40 counts of theft and housebreaking in 1956. He'd go back inside again in 1957 for another two years. Kelly quit Ireland for good and went to England in 1960, 30 years old, and things started looking up for Kelly. We found out that Kelly was married in 1961 in Camberwell, London, to an Irish woman whose marriage was unusual for the Times, as his bride already had five children by her previous husband, including a new baby.

[00:19:52]

But Kelly stepped up and became the man about the house and fathered two children of his own with this woman. During this period, Kelly is on the straight and narrow. He's supporting a family with seven kids and there are no criminal convictions for a four year period. But in 1964, it seems Kelly's marriage failed and Kelly was out. There are plenty of criminal charges, mostly for offences connected to drunkenness and theft throughout the rest of the 1960s.

[00:20:24]

Kelly finally ended up in Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital in 1969 after attacking a woman in her own home with a knife. He's in Broadmoor when he turns 40, and that's the Kelly paper trail up to that point in his life.

[00:20:41]

It's mostly a list of all the bad stuff Kelly did, but he got caught for. But it's not really a full description of the man as a whole side missing, of course. Besides, you'd only know about if he'd actually known Kelly, you know, when he was sober. Let's say now he hadn't been for a day or two and he walked in here. You couldn't assist me to a nicer fellow.

[00:21:04]

And we found someone who did know Kelly around this time.

[00:21:09]

And he was polite when he was sober, but he had a drink or two. He's a different human being altogether, you know, chalk and cheese or of the other phrase people use or the guy that was in Jekyll and Hyde, he was a typical Jekyll and Hyde.

[00:21:26]

There's a very peculiar reason why we actually managed to even meet this man. His name is Brian Sliman. He's a builder and he's Irish, but he's lived and worked in South London since the late 1960s. The peculiar part is that he's also the man who the journalist and documentary maker Robert Mulhearn. We've met in previous episodes, called up one day when he needed some building work doing on his house. This happened just last year. Here's Robert to explain how it happened.

[00:21:55]

He's doing the job and the house finishes the job. And me and my wife say, listen, let's bring him over for dinner and just thank him for the work.

[00:22:05]

And sitting in a pub, they got into telling stories. He goes, I'll tell you another one. I actually worked with a guy who got sent down for a double murder. Hold on a minute. What was his name? He kind of stopped and he was like he was his name was Ken, as I can, who he was like Ken Kelly. And I was like, Ken Kelly. You mean Kieran Kelly? And he was like, Yeah.

[00:22:28]

Kieran Kelly. Ken Kelly McCann.

[00:22:30]

It's a bizarre coincidence. After all of Rob's research, all his hard work looking into Kelly Sliman, just land in his lap, Rob and Sliman, just look at each other for a second.

[00:22:42]

And he was like, how do you know Kieran Kelly? And I was like, well, how do you know Kieran Kelly? I think I'm making a documentary about him. I've been searching for years for somebody who knew him. And he was like, well, I knew Ken. He worked for me for four years. We were just here for a second. And like, I think I have my own phone there. And I brought up a portrait picture of Kelly like Head and shoulders image.

[00:23:07]

And Simon was like, that's him. Yeah, that's him.

[00:23:10]

A few days later, and Rob shows up at Brian's Lyman's house to hear the story of the man Sliman described as. A real Jekyll and Hyde character with brain here. Yeah, I think you are going to want to go.

[00:23:28]

Brian Sliman remembers the very first time he met Kieran Kelly sometime in the early 1970s. This would be not long after Kelly had been released from Broadmoor.

[00:23:38]

First time I was in a house and back again and we were stripping out some of the larger stripping out and there was dust everywhere. So I went sometime. I went out for a cigarette and I was by the front gate and we just had to skip delivered. So I'm having a cigarette covered in dust and this racket three doors off me.

[00:24:03]

A gay boxer punching a hole in run, the house was derelict and he's battling the fence, which was covered in galvanized. And I saw him and he looked at me. He walked down, he stood in front of me, held down his eyes, hands clenched red in the face, he said, anyone can here. And I said, Can you finish? Skip here is stuck in the wall. And I took my cigarette and the bed in the skip.

[00:24:33]

And I walked back into the house and he went away, disappeared the next morning. And of course, where to? Got to the house and he was sitting out of the house. That that's not the guy from yesterday, which is totally different and quite Smiley says we met yesterday. Is the work still on? I said, OK, so I took him in, told him we had to do fill up a skeptic to the plaster off the walls, rotted floorboards to come out without particularly high hopes.

[00:25:01]

Sliman returned later the same day to check on the job and check on Kelly went down to the job and there got to the city having a cigarette and the skip was full. I mean, we both really felt I couldn't believe it when I seen it. When I walked into the house, said you should have finished. This was gone six o'clock. Now, that time we we from here to six, I said you should go to six. You know, he said I was just having a cigarette.

[00:25:28]

I couldn't believe inside. It is clean. And it tidied up the and I couldn't believe it. Even three days when everything was as neat and as clean as a whistle. So that's why I started working for me.

[00:25:40]

Sliman, the kind of man who give anyone a fair chance if they put in a good day's work. And Kelly had just put in three day's work in one, he was a good worker.

[00:25:50]

The only thing I couldn't leave on his own, because having been gone, what is with me, he was always on time, clean, doing a good day's work. But John just couldn't leave on his own. Never worked. I've done it a few times and he'd gone to the pub and that would be it.

[00:26:07]

Sliman wasn't aware that Kelly had been in prison many times when he met him, though he might well have guessed that he was surprised when he was there. He had a black eye when he got into trouble over weekends and things like that, but didn't seem to bother him.

[00:26:20]

Over the next few years, Kelly became a regular with Sliman and Sliman, got to know him well, even invited him home several times. Kelly was actually popular with Simon's own kids.

[00:26:32]

Every child like him for some reason, even my eldest son, he said I thought he was OK of all the people who'd come to the house because in them days had lots of people, bloke, you know, different types of workers, but kin. He was always like an all young kids liked him and he loved kids. You'd never dream of thinking he'd veto anybody. That's the type of guy who was I mean, he's very charming.

[00:26:55]

Oh, he could be very charming.

[00:26:57]

Kelly was also popular among his workmates, especially in the pub after work. He used to be pot to piss in pubs where, you know, people get up and just do a song or something.

[00:27:11]

Yeah, but he used to imitate me all here. He commentates on a football match beating over me.

[00:27:17]

How do you even rate this going down this way? So I got to a lot of pain, but very few of them and all of the money probably put me in all that.

[00:27:28]

And he makes the U.S. going along. That was he's part of his people used to beg him to go and do it, but he feels children won't be able to do it. So you had to get him at the right at the right time, you know what I mean?

[00:27:40]

To the point where that line of defense in front of him at this stage of the game, I'm sure he will. Sliman got to know both sides of Kelly, his Jekyll and Hyde character. He remembers a time when Kelly completely lost it while he was at work.

[00:27:58]

Kelly was at the bottom of a hole digging a tunnel under a house to find a broken drain right under the standpipe before all the bathrooms and all the toilets in a small block of flats and under the seats I put in order.

[00:28:14]

Please do not flush until these signs are removed.

[00:28:17]

One of the ladies on the first floor used the law and flushed it, and he's down in the hall and he couldn't escape from it right down to them and he started screaming. Now he wasn't drunk or anything.

[00:28:31]

He was actually foaming at the mouth and holding down the hole with a shovel. So the husband came out and the husband was a big fat fella and he screamed down at him and I pushed. I said, get please get away to get out of here. I said, get indoors, lock the damn door. Then you just lost it completely. Now, look, I'm back and he wants to kill them.

[00:28:53]

Luckily, Sliman is a big man and he was armed with a shovel. Kelly is a very small man, skinny, and he was at the bottom of a muddy hole so Sliman could keep him in the hole until he calmed down.

[00:29:07]

And when he called down, had lived down there for half an hour because he thought he might even kill me. He was foreman. Eventually I come to quieten down and got him out of the war. But that night I'm convinced now, knowing what you've told me, what he's been accused of, that if I had been there and he got out of what he would have killed them. I think I've never seen a man in that anger as he was that night because he was a tough he wasn't a big fella, but he was a tough cookie.

[00:29:32]

I mean, you know, he was no pushover as to say. So I'm looking back and I think, you know, did they actually save their lives? I probably did. So Simon's intervention might just have saved everyone from a very dangerous Kelly that day who was literally foaming at the mouth with anger. But it wasn't always bad news and bad times for Kelly.

[00:29:53]

Kelly had a way with women, it seems.

[00:29:56]

Sliman remembers one time Kelly got himself into a comfortable situation with a woman living next door to a job they were doing, so we had to dig a hole again and I had to go away.

[00:30:07]

I said, look, I won't be back later. And when I got back, the tools were there, the hole was covered and his Wellingtons, but no sign of him. So I searched for him. Could he have gone to so although I know he had no shoes with them, so not to the local pub, no signs for the second time, he kind of went home without his Wellingtons anyway. Go back to the job and it seemed the ladies have enough next to an elderly lady who thought so I knocked.

[00:30:33]

She came to the door, said he hadn't seen the guy that was working here today. Yesterday he's in here. He's having some tea. So she brought me and there he was sitting at the table. She had given him dinner. He wasn't doing it to you having a beer? I couldn't believe it. So he says, I've moved in here. So the shacked up together a nice looking woman. I mean, you wouldn't have put the two of them together if you'd seen them.

[00:30:57]

But she was an alcoholic, I think.

[00:30:59]

Oh, my dear, I'm over here. I never would have come back. What keeps me here? All right, come on. The ladies and like. This was a common occurrence, apparently, Kelly, which is why in some way it's shack up with someone and then before long they'd come a time when it was time for Kelly to leave again. That a big falling out children let him in, so he took the whole set off, pushed into the letterbox.

[00:31:36]

He turned it on and full blast went into the flat. He hadn't been back after that. That was the last time he went there. That's the type of you know, I mean, he'd be so but I really don't that Kelly would go off the radar from time to time, but then he'd show up again, ready for work, weeks or sometimes even months later, Sliman would assume you need to be on a bender drinking or he'd been shacked up with someone he could drink with.

[00:32:02]

What's really hard to believe here, not least for Brian Sliman, is that during this period when Kelly was off the radar. He was killing people. It's during the time he worked for Sliman that Kelly was originally picked up by police in connection with the murder of Hector Fisher. But he managed to sober up that time, he changed his clothes. He denied any knowledge to the police. Hector Fisher was in 1975, but Kelly confessed to committing three murders back in 1973, all three of them were unknown homeless men who had beaten or stabbed to death.

[00:32:38]

All of this was happening at the same time he was working for Sliman. Kelly was good at this Jekyll and Hyde act. Unless he lost his temper. There was an event that happened around this time that really sticks out for Sliman, Kelly had been staying with another woman until they, too, fell out.

[00:32:59]

The woman who stayed with her daughter has some comments on Ken. And there's a guy there used to used to work for a truck driver and he had a van, used to park his van in there. And Ken got drunk, spotted a man with a chocolate van. And I know the Detroit number two man was scared him, I think. And he took him out to Redding.

[00:33:21]

The drunk and furious. Kelly forced the driver of a chocolate delivery van to drive him to Redding, not far from London. Yes, the house and writing.

[00:33:31]

And he went up and he smashed through the front door, the glass door, and he smashed that and he TV around her neck. Kelly's completely savage here. He raps the cable from a TV area around a woman's neck. Luckily, her husband manages to call the police and they arrive before he kills her.

[00:33:49]

So they're arrested and that's taking them out. He got into a fight with the police.

[00:33:53]

Kelly didn't exactly go quietly and they got him into a Panikar and he kicked the two sides after the Pentagon and he went to court and during here and he jumped over the dock and pulled the cap off.

[00:34:08]

The judge and police arrest him again. And all the way down to the cell, he broke the sergeant's arm, but not long he was back out again, come back to me looking for work.

[00:34:18]

I said I thought you'd have got 20 years of that. I said, no, no, I got out of it already. I think three weeks he was away or something like that, maybe a bit longer, but some it wasn't long. And I says how you get away with it. Let me out. It's only after the dawn of I've got to know that he was on record to Broadmoor.

[00:34:38]

On recall to Broadmoor, the secure psychiatric hospital. It seems odd maybe that Kelly wasn't considered a danger to the public and he was let go from Broadmoor, but there's Jekyll and Hyde again. Presumably Kelly was able to convince even the psychiatrist at Broadmoor that he had a gentler side and that he was in control of himself. But Kelly's self-control wouldn't last forever. Very last job with Kelly was sometime in the mid to late 70s. Sliman and his brother were fixing a roof for an elderly woman somewhere outside London.

[00:35:14]

And as they'd done so many times before, they brought Kelly along to help out her pick him up.

[00:35:21]

He was living this time down, Fullam, about 5:00 in the morning at 5:00 in the morning, picked them up and he was a bit pissed from the night before. I took him down to the job and started ripping off the roof, getting ready. So I had to drive into the town to them to do Bilharzia to get something.

[00:35:37]

When I got back to the job, I said was a question.

[00:35:41]

He said, I sent him home. He's no good to waste of time.

[00:35:46]

Twenty minutes later, the lady approaches. Mr. Simon, somebody stole my purse. I said, What? My purse is gone missing. I think she's mislaid because an elderly woman who I said her daughter said, you know, the laundry was three and I had it in my handbag and my and my bedside cabinet. Anyway, we anaesthetic. I'll go and look for it. And she knows it was three of us, so I got to get them back.

[00:36:16]

So I get him back. At least I can cover myself for one second. Did I think that he'd have done something like this?

[00:36:21]

Not for one second, knowing that Kelly would often be found skulking in a pub when he left work early. Sliman does the rounds of all the pubs nearby but can't find him until. Next thing I spotted him coming from the station, so I jumped out of the van. Oh, how are you feeling? Oh, no, he said. I've decided to go home. I don't feel well, what I said before you go home, you got to come back.

[00:36:45]

Oh, no, I. I can't go back if I don't feel. So you have to come back. I said the woman is accused of stealing the purse. Please come back then I'll drive you back. But you have to. Looking back and reflection, I shouldn't have said this to Melissa Duckett. Dead or alive, you're coming back with you like that. You've got to come back. You owe me that. So you're coming back now, believe me, you're coming back.

[00:37:09]

So eventually of great. And we'll get back to the house. And there's a policeman there, Sergeant. I said can empty your pockets. So we took out the money to change the coin. What was missing? So I said, look, now get tell the truth. Now he denied it. Now this money really matter. The lady lost. He decided to arrest him out of the car. He had the handcuffs on him. And as he got broken the back door of the car to get him in, I said, Ken, before you get into that car, I can help you now.

[00:37:43]

But the second that door is closed, there's nothing I can do for you. We can sort this out here. Enough porticos. Tufo, Nessie's client. So I did tell the truth. Yes, and Kim got arrested often, but that was the last thing we were flying.

[00:38:02]

It's an odd image of Kieran Kelly crying in the back of a police car after he'd been arrested for a relatively minor offense, especially when you consider that by this time, Kelly had already murdered several people. Kelly must have known it, blown it. He'd be unlikely to meet anyone as generous, forgiving and friendly as Brian Sliman ever again. Kelly seems to have taken his final slide down into permanent homelessness around this time. Sliman would only see Kelly one more time in his life.

[00:38:38]

He ran into him in a pub, but Kelly had become little more than a shadow.

[00:38:42]

I hadn't seen for a long time, and I'm one side of this barrier as I'm walking down a chance to walk the other side with Ken. And he stopped. We looked at each other, but he walked away and I thought we never spoke. That was the last thing. That's a long time back.

[00:38:58]

This happened several years after he'd stopped working for Slimer years in which Kelly had been in and out of prison, in which he'd been living rough, drinking, methylated spirits and churchyards, murdering people.

[00:39:14]

At this point, Kelly had already been arrested and tried for the murder of Edward Toal. We heard about that in the last episode. He was accused of strangling Toal and two witnesses saw him do it. But this time he was still capable of a convincing performance. When appearing in court, Kelly would still brush up pretty well sober, clean shaven with neatly combed hair. In fact, it was said he'd even stand to attention in the dock, always saying, yes, sir and no sir, like the soldier he was in his youth.

[00:39:46]

The witnesses, one of whom was the unfortunate Mickey Dunn, who he later tracked down and try and poison, would turn up in court after having drunk a bottle of methylated spirits.

[00:39:58]

And as we know, the case against Kelly fell apart.

[00:40:03]

By the time Kelly turns 50, he will have murdered as many as 12, 13 or 14 people and he has disappeared deep into the nobody's arm. And what do you what do you feel now when you when you do one, I mean, does anything go through your mind or don't you care anymore? Excuse me, sir, why now do you think I'm going to do what I want now know what did I know? I get up and walk away because I know now I do.

[00:40:41]

Kelly says on the tape that he feels clear of his crimes now after his confessions, Ian Brown thinks that Kelly may even have felt relieved to be going to jail for the rest of his life.

[00:40:55]

And one of the other things that's come across my mind is that, you know, when Kelly got caught lying to rights in the cell, I think it went through his mind, you know, I'm going away for life and there's nothing much I can do about it.

[00:41:12]

But having a bed every night and a pillow and a blanket and the mattress and food and going to be such a bad thing.

[00:41:23]

It's actually a big improvement on what I've got now.

[00:41:27]

And I think it was, you know, some of it was relief that I'm going somewhere safe.

[00:41:35]

There's a couple more significant events that we found that happened after Kelly went to jail for life in 1984. One has to do with his estranged family. He never saw much of his children after he left in 1964. We contacted his daughter, but she declined to be interviewed. We looked into Kelly's other child, his son born just before Kelly left home back in 64. Kelly's son died aged just 25 back in 1989. He was murdered in a bar fight in a pub in Clapham.

[00:42:15]

Very near the place that Kelly had killed Hector Fisher and just a few hundred yards from where he was finally arrested. The other significant thing we found happened in 1993 when a man in Rathdowney County, Leisz, was digging a hole in his garden. The garden belonged to the house that was once the childhood home of Kieran Kelly, and it's what he found in the hole he was digging. That's interesting. He found what appeared to be a decomposed skeleton with a wire noose around its neck.

[00:42:52]

And that's what would be looking into next time on the nobody's on, are you people don't take my advice. Across the ocean, but 32. Because you can't live without love, without live alone. Troops from the west, but nobody saw. But the summer is fine, but do winters the fridge? The battle scarred, the chattering class could never go home now because of the sheer. The Nobody's Zone is written and narrated by Tim Henman storyline and production is by Tim Henman and Christian Molson Original Idea.

[00:43:53]

Research and recordings are by Robert Mulhern, Roland Kelly and Liam O'Brien with production assistance from Sarah Blake tonelessly, Tim Desmond's, Nicole Greer and Michael Lawless. The title Music is The Song Missing You, performed by Christy Moore.

[00:44:09]

Original Music for the series by Tim Henman Graphics Marketing impressed by John Kilkenny, Laura Beattie, Amy O'Driscoll, Nigel Wheatley, Frederick Bill, Jerry Madonna, Alan Leonard, Brent Murphy and Donna Joyce. Illustrations by Alex Williamson.

[00:44:27]

The Nobody Zone is a collaboration between Archie's documentary on One in Ireland and Third-tier Productions in Denmark. If you wish to join the social media conversation around this podcast, please use hashtag the Nobody Zone or visit our Cedartown forward, slash the nobody on. And if you'd like to comment to share any information you might have on the story, we'd love to hear from you. E-mail us documentaries at Arcy Daschle. Until next time, thanks for listening.