THERE was a teenage girl of about 16 in Dalkey at the time who, it was commonly known, was pregnant. Gardai checked out the girl's circumstances after the mutilated baby was discovered in the bag in Dun Laoghaire on 4 April 1973. They ascertained that the girl, who was unrelated to Cynthia Owen, had been delivered of a healthy baby and that mother and child were prospering.

In Dun Laoghaire, a woman who had left her husband and was living with her boyfriend in a flat in the seaside town was rumoured to be expecting a baby and unhappy about it. Gardai paid her a visit and discovered that she was still pregnant.

Other females with reputedly unhappy pregnancies were visited elsewhere. A special notice was posted in the Garda inhouse publication, Fogra Tora, on 13 April, giving descriptions of the baby's abandonment and the green polythene bag used for her disposal. An appeal was broadcast on RTE's Garda Patrol and a story about the baby in the bag was broadcast on a popular television programme called Tangents.

As gardai see it, no stone was left unturned in their endeavours to establish the identity of the murdered baby girl.

"It was a thorough investigation, " insists a garda, adding that cases of infanticide were virtually impossible to solve in those days of social taboo and, besides, with Dun Laoghaire being a port town, the baby could have been brought over on the boat from Britain.

The murder file has remained open for 34 years. In that time, only one woman has come forward to claim maternity of the baby, now known as Noeleen Murphy, and a jury at the Dublin County Coroner's Court has unanimously upheld her claim. Yet, some garda sources persist, in off-the-record comments, in arguing that no direct link has been established between baby Noeleen and Cynthia Owen. Proving maternity beyond doubt is now an impossibility, however.

As the minister for justice is considering a fullscale inquiry into the original garda investigation and Cynthia Owen is considering a civil lawsuit against the state, ever more inconsistencies surface in the garda version of what transpired.

No forensic evidence was taken from the polythene bag or the partial bedsheet and Evening Press and Irish Press newspapers in which Noeleen was wrapped, along with the afterbirth. No blood samples were saved, nor the bag itself, and the baby was buried in the communal Little Angels plot at Glasnevin cemetery within a week after being found in Lee's Lane, beside Corrig Avenue in Dun Laoghaire. It has been disclosed that half the investigation file is missing.

Unsolved riddles A further puzzle emerged during the inquest when the only surviving senior garda who worked on the case disowned a statement, contained in what remains of the murder file, purporting to have been made by him back in 1973. Eddie Russell, who later retired at inspector rank and about whom there is no suspicion whatsoever, was a station house sergeant in Dun Laoghaire when the baby was found. He was on a day off at home in Dalkey when he got a call that a dead baby had been found by two 11-year-old boys at 6.20pm. Russell told the inquest that, as he had to dress in his uniform, make domestic arrangements to go to work and was reliant on public transport to get to Dun Laoghaire, he did not reach the scene in Lee's Lane until before 10pm. By that time, he said, Noeleen's body had been removed.

He was unable to explain how a statement was contained in the murder file bearing his name and recounting, in detail, his attendance in the car park while the baby was still present and how he subsequently removed the body to the morgue in St Michael's Hospital.

"I never made that statement, " Russell told the inquest.

"How come we have a statement from you which was not made by you?" he was asked.

"I'd like to know, but I certainly didn't, " he answered.

Even though Russell made his statement to gardai in 2005 disowning the 1973 statement, no evidence was produced at the inquest to indicate that any inquiries were made to solve this riddle, such as an attempt to prove the authenticity of the signature.

Off-the-record, gardai accept that Cynthia Owen was probably subjected to sexual abuse as a child but some are still sceptical that baby Noeleen was borne by her. While proof of the baby's maternity is now beyond reach, the evidence that Cynthia was the mother is persuasive. According to her testimony at the inquest, her baby, conceived when she was 10 and born in her family home in Dalkey when she was 11, was repeatedly stabbed with a knitting needle by a person identified as B, now deceased, shortly after birth. The state pathologist, Dr Maurice Hickey, also since deceased, found that the baby had probably died on the day she was born and that death was caused by wounds to her neck caused by "a pointed but not very sharp implement". He described the baby as a mature female infant, 18-and-a-half inches long and appproximately fiveand-a-half pounds in weight.

Since Cynthia Owen went to police in Stockton, England, in June 1994 with allegations of incest and infanticide, gardai have forwarded five files to the DPP on foot of renewed investigations in Dun Laoghaire. Though many individual gardai are convinced that she suffered severe and sustained abuse in a "very dysfunctional family", no charges are expected to be brought, due to insufficient evidence. A decade after making her complaint as an adult, the garden of Cynthia Owen's former home in Dalkey was excavated by gardai searching for a second baby, a stillborn boy she calls John and to whom, she claims, she gave birth at the age of 14. Ten years before the garda dig commenced, her parents had been rehoused by the local authority, following the suicide of one of Cynthia's brothers in the Dalkey house.

(Another brother and her half-sisterniece are also believed to have killed themselves since then. ) One of Cynthia's siblings has told her that baby John was re-interred in the garden at one stage when a small hand had protruded through the ground.

Pattern of abuse In the 1970s, Cynthia's maternal grandmother was a distinctive figure around Dalkey, always dishevelled in appearance, dressed in floor-length skirts and exuding a foul unwashed smell. Her daughter . . . Cynthia's mother, who died last year . . . had given birth to a son before she married Cynthia's father and, though that boy lived with the family, he was always known by his mother's maiden name. Local rumour had it that he was the child of Cynthia's paternal grandfather, her mother's father-in-law.

Cynthia's mother was an alcoholic and kept a low profile in the village.

Cynthia grew up in a two-bedroom cottage with a single room downstairs.

The occupants numbered 12 children, including a child born to one of Cynthia's sisters but raised as their sibling, plus the two parents. Her father initially worked as a chimneysweep around Dalkey and was later employed by the local authority as the caretaker of the town hall. He was apt to recall in casual conversation that he spent time as a child, along with a brother who grew up to be a well-known cat-burglar, in a children's home in Kill Avenue. Now in his 70s and in ill health, it is believed that he applied to the Residential Institutions Redress Board to be compensated for child sexual abuse while in care.

Cynthia has alleged that she and her siblings were regularly violently and indecently assaulted and raped in the family home by family members and outsiders alike. Accounts offered by neighbours who remember the children tally with this portrayal of neglect and abuse. Many neighbours recall that the children were shabbily dressed and permanently infested with head lice. Evidence given by inquest witnesses, contemporaries of Cynthia, that she was visibly pregnant in school at the age of 11 is supported by one businessman whose daughter was in her class in school. This man says his family talked about the child's bump at the time.

It is therefore surprising that, when gardai were checking out the circumstances of females known to be pregnant in the locality in 1973, Cynthia Owen's name was never mentioned. This seems especially odd as one garda who worked on the investigation and who took statements from witnesses was known to be a friend of Cynthia's father.

Furthermore, the two eldest sons in the household were frequently in trouble with gardai when they were schoolboys. On one occasion, one of the boys had to be talked down from the roof of a local building which he had climbed onto intent on making trouble. The boys were known to gardai in both Dalkey and Dun Laoghaire stations and Cynthia records in one of her statements that gardai invariably called to the house to deal with complaints about the boys.

In 1973, Dalkey was not the 'Bel Eire' magnet for rockstars and billionaires that it is today, though it was a relatively comfortable suburb of the capital city. These days, pink convertibles and internationally recognisable faces might clog the small main street but a core community remains of generations-old Dalkeyites.

This fact was reinforced two years ago for the writer and artist Brighid McLaughlin, who was the first person to write Cynthia Owen's story for a national newspaper. She claims that, a few months before Cynthia's old garden was dug up by gardai, she was threatened by a man she recognised and warned off writing further about Cynthia's claims.

"I'm a member of the rowing club in Dalkey, " says McLaughlin. "An older member from previous years, in his 60s, who had rowed in his youth, arrived at the club one day and told me I was a fantasist and Cindy [Cynthia] was a fantasist and that if I kept writing about this I would end up in the sea. . ." She claims that some days after this incident "four or five dozen eggs" were thrown at her house in Dalkey and she believes both incidents are connected.

"It made me aware of how close I was to the truth, " says the writer. "Cindy Owen is one of the most impressive people I have ever met in 22 years' journalism. She is utterly, utterly truthful."