THE BIZARRE CASE OF THE

DUBLIN BABY KIDNAPPINGS

WHEN BABY Patrick Berrigan was stolen from his pram in a Dublin street on December 18 1954 the incident triggered a bizarre sequence of events that became the biggest news story in years to hit two cities – Dublin and Belfast. It was to culminate not only in the recovery of  Patrick – but also in the finding in the same house of a little girl who had vanished four years earlier – also taken from a pram on a Dublin street.

A third baby was also missing. Pauline Ashmore was taken from her pram in Camden Street in October 1954. She had not been found when the Berrigan baby vanished. And she was still not found when he was tracked down in Belfast. It was to be some weeks before her disappearance would be solved in a dramatic media coup. That story would help change the face of Dublin’s evening newspaper market where, just 50 years ago, three papers were locked in a battle for readers: the venerable Mail, the dominant Herald and the brash new upstart Evening Press.

The taking of  little Patrick Berrigan from his pram outside a Henry Street shop just a week before Christmas provoked a huge nationwide search. And a fair degree of panic. Mothers in Dublin and elsewhere were panic-stricken. No baby was left unattended in a pram for even a split second. People wondered - where would the baby thieves strike next?

But the vigilance of one woman gave gardai the break they were looking for:  Mrs Louise Doherty was travelling to Belfast on the evening of December 18 and noticed a woman behaving oddly with the baby she was carrying. At one point, she was to tell a court later, the baby seemed to be carried upside down.  Mrs Doherty got talking to the other woman, who said the baby was distressed because it was hungry. No, she did not have a bottle to give it: her sister had given her one earlier but it got broken.

The RUC called to a house in Belfast a few days later and found Patrick Berrigan safe and well. He had been brought to Belfast by Mrs Margaret McGeehan. She had lost two babies of her own – the most recent being stillborn some six weeks earlier.

She soon admitted that she had taken Patrick, and he was quickly reunited with his delighted parents, who lived in Moore Street..

Then came a sensational twist to the story. One of the other children in the house caught the attention of the policemen. Bernadette McGeehan, aged 4 1/2, turned out to be another missing baby: she was in reality Elizabeth Browne, who had, at the age of 3 months, vanished from her pram in a crowded Henry Street where her mother was selling papers.

Mr and Mrs Browne travelled from their home in Ballyfermot and picked her out from a line-up of seven children. They had no doubts that she was their Elizabeth – and all doubts were removed by a birthmark.

Mrs McGeehan vehemently denied that she had taken this baby from Dublin. She maintained that she had been given the little girl four years earlier by a local woman called Ellen Brown (spelt differently) who had since died. In the court case afterwards she claimed that this Ellen Brown had been “keeping company” for some years with a Patrick McDonagh, whom she described as having “a stick leg” since the war.

Mr McDonagh (who indeed had a wooden leg as a result of wartime air-raid on Belfast)  turned up in court and said that he had lived with Ellen Brown in a rented house on Lonsdale Street.
 
In court he gave his occupation as “street vocalist” and said that Ellen had been his singing partner. They had had three children – all boys. She had never had a little girl. They knew Mrs McGeehan because she had rented the same house later.

A Dublin guesthouse owner produced evidence that Mrs McGeehan had been in Dublin coinciding with baby Elizabeth’s disappearance. Mrs McGeehan was later sentenced to two years imprisonment. Elizabeth, who had spent four years being called Bernadette, had been removed to a Belfast children’s home – and was returned to her real parents on 5^th February 1955 after the completion of legal formalities.

All these developments had been watched by another Dublin couple, Christy and Margaret Ashmore
of  Cashel Road Crumlin. They went through highs and lows of hope and despair as the Belfast saga unfolded: they had hoped that their missing baby Pauline might also be found in Mrs McGeehan’s home – but it was not to be.

But perhaps it was the intense spotlight on the baby stories that  prompted a mystery man to phone the Evening Press newsroom on Tuesday, January 25^th 1955. This man offered to sell the paper a story about what he called  “a medical wonder”. He knew where there was a woman who was about to give birth again – just three months after having had another baby. Pressed by the news editor about the birth date of this first baby, he said it was October 19^th.  This was the day Pauline Ashmore had vanished.

The only picture of  the missing Pauline had been printed in papers all over Ireland, and shown on cinema screens. The Evening Press (then just four months old itself) sent a reporter and a photographer, Jim Flanagan and Harry Stevens, to the address at Oliver Bond Flats that had been given to them by the mystery caller (who insisted on remaining anonymous). There they talked to a Mrs Hughes, whose daughter Mrs Therese Fitzpatrick was then in the Coombe Hospital to have her baby. Mrs Hughes gave the pressmen permission to photograph the little baby girl she was minding for her daughter. Then they raced back to the office, printed the picture and compared it to the one they had of Pauline Ashmore.

It matched. They had already alerted the gardai, who now brought the picture to Mrs Ashmore. She had no doubts whatsoever: this was Pauline. The gardai brought her to Oliver Bond House and she was reunited with her baby. The new evening paper had the scoop of the decade, and the story of the Dublin baby kidnappings was at an end.

Medical evidence given in Dublin Circuit Court on Ferbruary 25^th described Mrs Fitzpatrick as “unstable”at the time, and her own evidence was that she had not known what she was doing when she saw the baby and took it from its pram. Her husband told the court that when he came home and found her playing with this baby, he had jokingly asked her where she bought it. Therese Fitzpatrick was given a 12-month suspended sentence, and a kindly Mr Justice McLaughlin expressed the hope that the mothers of Dublin could now stop panicking.

ENDS

by Éanna Brophy (Published in Irish Times December 2004)