Olive Wiley has a mixture of brisk efficiency and warmth and it’s no surprise to find out she was a nurse. Now retired, for decades she worked in intensive care at the now closed Tyrone county hospital – including in the dark days after the Omagh bomb. She’s still dealing with those memories. Olive has never got over the death of her younger sister Katrina – Reenie to her family – who died in 2006. The way their large family worked, you looked after the sibling next in line. Katrina was Olive’s responsibility. And that weighs heavily on her. Katrina Fulton – her married name – was always a free spirit. She thought it was funny to keep Olive on her toes, her sister recalls - one time going missing for several weeks until Olive tracked her down. But the sisters were very close – and Katrina kept in touch with relatives throughout Ireland and England. “She’d have been able to tell you what anybody was doing and what was happening with their kids,” says Olive. On the surface, Katrina’s life looked picture perfect. “Katrina was really, really tidy, her house was absolutely perfect, she just seemed to have her life so under control, her kids were always immaculately dressed.” But when Katrina’s marriage ended, she turned to alcohol. Gradually, she became part of the circle of drinkers on the Mullaghmore estate. Olive would call around to Katrina’s house on the estate regularly, often after a busy shift at the hospital. After all, she was the sister charged with keeping an eye on Katrina. She got to know the circle and liked them. The only one Olive never liked was Noel Knox, who she describes as obnoxious, nasty and rude. “I hated him,” she says. “He wasn’t a pleasant person. When you went into the house and there were a number of people there.

He always had to be the dominant person, the person who was speaking the loudest.

Olive and Noel argued. Whatever the subject, Noel knew better, she says – even when Olive was advising Katrina to take her medication. Olive would ask him to leave her alone with her sister and Noel would refuse. Katrina always backed Noel up. Katrina never admitted to Olive that she was in a relationship with Noel, but her sister is confident she was. The circle of drinkers fell apart – some died, some went their separate ways, until it was only ever Noel that she saw when she went to Katrina’s house. Sometimes her sister wouldn’t let her in and would shout out the window that she wasn’t to come in as she would only fight with Noel. Sometimes Olive was happy enough to leave, knowing Katrina was OK without having got through the door. Katrina often had bruises, but as a nurse Olive knew she was more prone to them because of her heavy drinking. She didn’t particularly worry until the hospital phoned her three years before Katrina’s death to say that she had suffered a head injury. When Olive got there, Katrina was having stitches applied to the wound. She was drunk and confused and it was not clear what had happened. As she was being taken to the ward, Katrina’s condition suddenly deteriorated. She’d had a massive bleed in her brain. Doctors held out little hope but, miraculously, Olive says, Katrina recovered. After a week, Katrina returned to her house. From then on, Olive says Katrina let few people other than Noel into her home. Katrina thought he looked after her, says Olive. “He was doing things like getting money out with her bank card and probably buying alcohol for both of them,” she says.

I just think that he bullied her and manipulated her and made her believe that he was the only person that she needed to be around.

Olive still called around but more often than not, her sister wouldn’t let her in. Olive thinks she was frightened of angering Knox. One April day in 2006, another relative of Katrina’s went to check on her.

“He came into the house and went up the stairs and walked into the bedroom and Noel Knox was standing there,” says Olive. “As soon as he walked into the bedroom Noel Knox walked out.” The relative went over to the bed and found Katrina seriously ill, in a semi-conscious state. He rang Olive. They couldn’t get an ambulance so she helped him carry Katrina to her car. As they were putting her in, Noel Knox re-appeared. “He came slinking around the corner and said: ‘Did I leave my coat in there?’” He went into the house, got his coat and left without asking how Katrina was. He never did ask about her condition. Days later, she died.

Katrina Fulton's death certificate

Katrina Fulton’s death certificate records her death as due to broncho-pneumonia, caused by advanced liver failure, due to cirrhosis of the liver. But Olive says her sister seemed normal when she had seen her just a few days earlier. “I just wonder at that man being in that room and what he could have done to her,” she says. She can’t understand why Noel Knox didn’t call an ambulance for her sister. “He wasn’t doing anything, he wasn’t making any attempt to help her, or get help for her, or tell anyone that she was ill.” She now wishes the police had investigated how Katrina had become so ill, so quickly. “I think they just assumed it was her alcoholism made her semi-conscious without looking to see if it could have been something different.” She remembers clearly what a medical professional said to her about the Mullaghmore circle: “It’s just a drinking den, they’re all drinkers and they’re all gradually going to die off.” Olive questions how fully the authorities investigate the deaths of alcoholics.

Just because they were drunk, doesn’t mean that whatever happened to them just happened out of drunkenness.

That’s something Coroner Joe McCrisken rejects. “It’s never assumed that this is a person who has died because they’ve had a high level of alcohol taken,” he says. “The fact that someone has chronic alcoholism and a medic or pathologist thinks that is the cause of death, if I think there are other issues around that, I’ll question that.” Olive is a childhood friend of the journalist Anton McCabe. After the inquest into the death of Mairéad McCallion in 2017, he put her in touch with Patricia O’Brien. As they spoke on the phone, the two women noticed striking similarities in their sisters’ relationships with Noel Knox. They compared how their sisters became isolated from their families, how they were pursued by Knox, how he used to phone or text them “non-stop” when they were away from him. Patricia recalled her sister, Mairéad.

Mairéad was a smart girl but he had beat her down so much that she thought nobody else loved her and that’s what he was constantly telling her.