John Sweetman

Because in reality, nothing really bad had happened.

But it was the threat of it.

It got no media coverage really at the time, but we since put an episode out on it, which got a lot of attention.

And it really what it was, was a series of letters, very nasty kind of threatening pornographic letters started coming in to the document section for examination from journalists.

different Garda stations in the Midlands.

You had at Lowne and Burr and Tullamore and maybe one or two others.

And these letters, some of them had been sent to schools, you know, and some of them had been sent to the actual Garda stations.

But I got one of these letters in and did what I normally did, went down through it, sketched out all the different bits and bobs.

I think in the first letter there was 20 or 30 pages of it, like, you know, and this was foolscap pages, front to back, no fecking gaps, nothing.

It was just full of this stuff.

But the only thing is there was no suspect, so I had nothing to compare it with.

And I checked it for indentations, but I was getting nothing except what was already visible from one page to the next.

You know what I mean?

There was nothing there that might point towards who the author was.

But I just went through, did what I did, sent a report out.

But then only a few weeks later, another one came in from a different station.

And I remember the minute I saw the writing, I said, I've seen that writing before, you know.

So I went back and sure enough, it was the case that I'd done a couple of weeks previously.

And then over the next several weeks or months, several more letters came in and they were all coming in from different guard stations, you know.

And I don't think at the time each investigating member was aware of the other cases.