The Little Red Coat

Dr. Kevin Flynn, a family physician and a coroner in Ontario, Canada accidentally breaks a family heirloom and finds four documents that start him on the trail of documenting a family tragedy set in his school-teacher parents' home in rural Ireland nine decades past. His family in Ireland did not talk about the past and what little information became available in his younger years proved to be incorrect. Using his experience of death investigation in Canada for thirty years, his odyssey takes him back to the land of his birth in search of documents in the National Archives of Ireland and interviews with people still alive who helped to throw light on the mystery and to discover and document the truth about how two sisters, Philomena, age one year and ten months and Maureen age six years and nine months, whom he never knew, came to their deaths at the hands of a teenage girl. Mary Cole had been a pupil at the Camross National School and was taught by the parents of Dr. Flynn. They took the girl into their home after she finished her primary education to care for their family of five small children in the village of Camross, nestled in the shade of the Slieve Bloom Mountains in the Irish midlands. Mr. Flynn discovered that the live-in 15 year old girl, mature beyond her years, misbehaved with some local boys at night, and after she was confronted by her employers, she denied her guilt two times until the truth was revealed before the local Parish Priest. This true story of deceit and betrayal by a young girl who nursed, fed and cared for the children of the schoolmaster and his teacher wife unites the tragedy that unfolded with Ireland's recovery from a brutal civil war with the transition from the English colonial education system that suppressed the proud traditions of the Irish language and history until the War of Independence that fostered the rebirth of national pride. It is a tale of revenge for being exposed twice before the priest and the perceived loss of her good name at the cost of two innocent and vulnerable children. So ingenious was Mary Cole that two deaths and two fires were deemed to be accidental, even after an inquest by the local coroner until after Michael and Statia Flynn had left Camross for the town of Tipperary where the author was later born and where he grew up thinking that he was 'one of ten' instead of 'one of twelve'. Astute investigation by An Garda Síochána detectives based their suspicions on a simple red woollen coat, hand made by the children's mother. Read how the poignant discovery of the little red coat in the National Archives in Dublin and the striking out of Maureen's name from the school roll book by her teacher mother were revealed.