Her final email to me left a similar trail.
It contained the name Connor Sullivan, listing him as one of five casual laborers employed by a maintenance firm working in Owens Park during the preterm summer of 2011. As Evelyn must have immediately seen, it was also the name given by Fintan Murphy as his alibi for December 17, 2011, the day that Zoe Nolan disappeared. Far from being an alias or the invention of a fevered mind, Connor Sullivan was Fintan Murphy’s birth name. According to Greater Manchester Police, the alibi Sullivan gave for Murphy was corroborated by officers in 2011. Unfortunately, neither one of the constables taking the statement at Sullivan’s home had been involved in the search of Owens Park. They could have no idea that Sullivan and Murphy were one and the same, not least because Sullivan was able to provide two items of legal identification and spoke with a broad Mancunian accent. Connor Sullivan—Fintan Murphy—was born in Stretford, England, and was some six years older than he claimed to be, an old soul, as so many people went on to describe him. He had never so much as traveled to Ireland. Most disturbingly, despite his many claims to the contrary, authorities have been unable to find any evidence that he ever met Zoe Nolan, much less that he was her treasured friend.
Sullivan changed his name to Fintan Murphy in 2009 after being convicted of the 2008 assault of a Manchester Metropolitan University student. The young woman, who has asked not to be identified, discovered him hiding beneath her bed in the early hours of the morning, clutching a bag filled with her personal possessions. He had twice been cautioned for stealing clothes from young women, although authorities concluded at the time that these crimes were not sexual in nature. Sullivan’s sexual preference was for men, and while he expressed no interest in identifying as a woman, he admitted to an obsession around certain objects, considering them to be talismans that would aid his fertility. Searching his home in 2008, authorities found a large collection of stolen clothing, hairbrushes and used tampons.
Sullivan often talked about wanting children, starting a family, “righting the wrongs” that had been done to him. It seems, in spite of his temperamental dishonesty, that there was some sad truth in the back story he wove for Fintan Murphy. His mother really had struggled with profound mental health problems, resulting in a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia and Sullivan’s placement into foster care at the age of thirteen.
Registrars at Manchester University confirmed that no persons giving the names of Connor Sullivan or Fintan Murphy were ever enrolled in any course during the 2011–12 term, nor at any time prior. It seems that a man matching Sullivan’s description was asked to leave the first meeting of the Choir and Orchestra Society held at St. Chrysostom’s church that term. While it’s tempting to believe that this is where he saw Zoe for the first time, the truth is likely far more sinister. The professional working theory is that Sullivan discovered the crawl space unique to apartment 15C while performing maintenance in Tower Block, working for Fairfield Property Management under his birth name, some months before Zoe even arrived in Manchester. The odds of him going on to meet or become infatuated with a young woman who happened to live there seem small. More likely, Sullivan positioned himself inside the apartment—was already inside the walls—when Alex, Kimberly, Liu, Lois and Zoe arrived in the week commencing September 24, 2011.
After that, he fixated on Zoe.
His presence accounts for Zoe’s missing underwear, Liu’s sense that a man had been inside the flat, the voices Lois heard at night, and perhaps even the ghost that Alex claimed as her roommate. His presence accounts for the vicious essay left on Zoe’s computer, the theft of a personal recording made by Andrew and Kimberly, and the assault that took place on January 30, 2011, in which a prospectus was taken by force from Kimberly’s hands. Evidence recovered from Sullivan’s home suggests that he studied the personal texts, direct messages and emails of Zoe, his easy access to her room giving him ample opportunity to do so. He discovered that she was in a clandestine relationship with Professor Michael Anderson, whom she had met as a fifteen-year-old music student. It’s impossible to say whether Sullivan led the investigation in Anderson’s direction out of a desire to help expose an abuser or out of a desire to provide a promising suspect. It’s impossible to say if the apparent rift between Anderson and Zoe—her aggressive spending of what was likely his money—was a result of Sullivan’s interference or not. It’s impossible to say whether Sullivan followed Andrew and Jai to Tree Court, whether he stole their flatmate Harry Fowles’s keys and was also responsible for the thefts that took place there.
It’s impossible to say, because Connor Sullivan—Fintan Murphy—took his own life on March 25, as well as the life of Evelyn Mitchell. Greater Manchester Police discovered a so-called suicide kit in Sullivan’s home, suggesting he had long been prepared for his eventual outing.
Frustratingly, no evidence of Zoe’s whereabouts was found.
On the evening of December 16, 2011, with advance knowledge of the Christmas party taking place at the tower, Sullivan moved freely through the building, using the name Fintan Murphy and affecting to be an invited guest. Such was his boldness that he even introduced himself to Kimberly as a close friend of Zoe’s. Although he claimed to have left the building following Andrew and Jai’s physical altercation, Mahmood has never been able to recollect being escorted outside. The most likely scenario would see Sullivan stealing the sex tape recording from Kimberly’s laptop in the days leading up to the party, then leaking it in an attempt to isolate Zoe from her friends. Knowing of Zoe’s burgeoning reliance on pills, Sullivan would have had a chance to attack or subdue Zoe on the roof, creating a diversion with the smoke alarm （or perhaps just taking advantage of a real emergency）， before storing her body, dead or alive, inside the crawl space beside her own bedroom. A crawl space he had already remade as a shrine to her, decorating the walls with photographs stolen from Jai and dressing a mannequin in clothes taken from Zoe’s room.
Perhaps Sullivan intended to hurt Zoe, and perhaps he didn’t.
Perhaps, having grown so obsessed, he could not bear the thought of her leaving for the Christmas holidays. DNA evidence showed no traces of Zoe’s blood behind the wall, but police noted at the time that the space had been “forensically” cleaned. Had he stowed Zoe’s body there, his options for removing her would have been ample, with fully forty-three days passing between her disappearance and Sarah Manning’s discovery of the crawl space. With that said, Sullivan’s best opportunity to remove evidence came on the morning of Zoe’s disappearance, when around a thousand students moved their belongings out of Tower Block for the Christmas break, unimpeded by the police. Under his birth name, Sullivan made money by renting out speakers and DJ equipment. A young woman who hired speakers for the party on the fifteenth floor has since identified the man who delivered them as Connor Sullivan. Although she did not remember seeing him collect the speakers the following day, she claimed that both the equipment and the flight case it had arrived in were gone when she woke up on the morning of the seventeenth.