Murderer Noel Long lodges appeal against ‘cold case’ conviction

The man jailed for life earlier this month of the murder of a mother-of-three 42 years ago has lodged an appeal against his conviction for the killing.

Noel Long (74), of Maulbawn, Passage West, Co Cork was sentenced on August 4th to life imprisonment after he was convicted by a jury at the Central Criminal Court of the murder of Nora Sheehan (54) from Kilreendowney Place, Ballyphehane, Cork.

Long had denied the murder of Ms Sheehan, between June 6th and June 12th, 1981 at a place unknown in the State but the jury at Central Criminal Court at the Criminal Courts of Justice in Dublin took five hours and 32 minutes to unanimously find him guilty.

Mr Justice Paul McDermott sentenced Long to the mandatory life sentence but on Tuesday, lawyers for Long lodged an appeal against his conviction.

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The case, which made Irish legal history as it marked the longest span between a murder being committed and a conviction being secured, followed a lengthy cold case investigation opened by gardaí into 2008 into the murder.

It relied heavily on the great advances made in DNA technology over the intervening four decades to link Long to Ms Sheehan.

[ ‘A big relief’: Family of Nora Sheehan respond to cold case conviction of Noel Long ]

The trial, which ran for three weeks following a pretrial hearing, heard evidence that a partial DNA profile generated from semen found on the body of Ms Sheehan and preserved for decades had matched DNA found on a beanie hat obtained from Long in 2021.

Dr Jonathan Whittaker of the UK Forensic Science Services said the probability of the DNA profile from the semen recovered from Ms Sheehan, originating from someone unrelated to “the man in the beanie hat” would be one in 23,000.

Forensic biologist Dr Dorothy Ramsbottom of Forensic Science Ireland said that based on a database of the Irish population, it was at least 20,000 times more likely the recovered DNA was a match to that found on the beanie hat than an unrelated person.

There was also evidence that Long had been in the same area as Ms Sheehan when she went missing, that fibres recovered from the victim matched those taken from the carpeting of Long’s car. Paint fragments removed from the victim’s clothing also matched paint taken from Long’s vehicle.

Long, a sex offender with 31 previous convictions, was a suspect from the time Ms Sheehan, described as “a vulnerable woman” was murdered but a number of issues, including the death of a pathologist working on the case, meant he was not tried at the time.