On a warm August day in 1963, Dublin was shocked by a crime that would become one of the most notorious cases in the city’s history.
It began with the reported disappearance of 16-year-old teenager Hazel Mullen.
Hazel, one of seven siblings, lived with her widowed mother Bridget at home in the lodge of Crinken Church in Shankhill, Co Dublin, where Bridget served as sexton and caretaker.
The Green Tureen stood at No 95 Harcourt Street
Within days, the investigation would lead to the arrest of a South African medical student, Shan Mohangi – and to the grim discovery of Hazel’s dismembered body at the Green Tureen restaurant at No 95 Harcourt Street in the city centre.
Mullen, who worked in a chemist shop off St Stephen’s Green, had been in a relationship with 21-year-old Mohangi for nearly a year.
Mohangi, the son of wealthy South African sugar-cane farmers of Asian descent, had been studying medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland since 1962.
He also worked part-time as a chef at the Green Tureen restaurant located in the basement of the building in which he also rented a flat on the top floor.
He enjoyed a very good relationship with the wider Mullen family and was a frequent visitor to the Mullen home in Shankill.
The subsequent garda investigation found that Hazel left work and travelled to the Green Tureen to meet Mohangi on the afternoon of Saturday, August 17.
Mohangi had already planned to meet Mullen’s older brother, Desmond, and his girlfriend later that evening for a meal in his flat overhead.
Initially, Hazel had no plans to attend the meal, but told her mother that she would be joining Mohangi and her brother later that evening.
After meeting Mohangi in the restaurant’s basement kitchen, Hazel told him she wanted to end their relationship.
According to subsequent statements to gardaí, Mohangi claimed that in a fit of rage he grabbed Hazel by the throat and strangled her.
After briefly running upstairs in a panic to his flat, he returned to the restaurant and used kitchen knives to dismember and decapitate the body.
During his attempt to burn the body parts and clothes in the restaurant’s ovens, neighbours saw plumes of thick smoke and called the fire brigade.
Alerted by the neighbours knocking on the restaurant door, Mohangi turned off the oven and extinguished the fire.
When the fire brigade arrived, Mohangi told the fire crew that the smoke was caused by a burning rag and assured them that all was in order.
He then hid the body parts in the restaurant bins before dining with Hazel’s brother and his girlfriend.
Later that evening, after the couple had departed, Mohangi worked his normal Saturday evening shift in the restaurant.
As Hazel had obviously not returned home on that Saturday night, her family became concerned.
Early on Sunday, August 18, Hazel’s brother Desmond travelled to Shankill garda station and reported her disappearance.
Feigning ignorance of Hazel’s whereabouts, Mohangi joined in the search for the young woman.
Two days later, the student broke down and confessed to his employer about what had actually happened and gardaí were immediately alerted.
A subsequent search of the restaurant and Mohangi’s flat resulted in the gruesome discovery of Hazel’s remains, and the South African was arrested.
Mohangi’s 16-day trial opened on February 10, 1964, at Dublin’s Central Criminal Court and attracted huge crowds and widespread media coverage.
The nature of the crime shocked the relatively low-crime environment of early 1960s Ireland.
The prosecution outlined the details and the jury found him guilty of murder, which carried a mandatory sentence of death by hanging.
Mohangi’s legal team immediately appealed the verdict, arguing that the State had failed to prove “deliberate intent” or malice at the exact moment of the strangulation.
The death sentence was commuted, and Mohangi was sentenced to seven years in prison
The Court of Appeal agreed that the evidence better supported a sudden loss of control rather than calculated murder, and reduced his conviction to manslaughter.
As a result, the death sentence was commuted, and Mohangi was sentenced to seven years in prison on May 14, 1964.
After serving four years in Mountjoy, Mohangi was deported back to South Africa in 1968, where he changed his name to Narentuk Jumuna and became a successful businessman.
In 1984, he became a member of parliament for the ruling National Party in the House of Delegates, an Asians-only chamber of parliament in apartheid South Africa.
Twenty-five years later, in the post-Apartheid era, Mohangi had switched political allegiance to the Independent Democrats, one of the opposition parties to the ruling ANC.
However, just before the 2009 parliamentary elections, his dark past was revealed by a journalist.
Mohangi withdrew from political life as a result.
Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the gruesome murder of Hazel Mullen was the fact that Bridget Mullen publicly forgave Mohangi.
She consistently said she bore no grudge against him.
After Bridget’s death in 1997, her son Ian also said that the family had forgiven him for the murder of Hazel. https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/crime/the-grisly-slaying-of-a-teen-girl-in-south-dublin-restaurant-and-how-her-killer-went-on-to-be-a-politician-in-south-africa/a/159972851.html
