Original subtitles

INTERVIEWER: Let's start at the beginning.

What do you remember of Julia coming into your life?

I remember people calling her by different names as a child.

MAN: Probably all of us have a little sense of the dark triad

in us for certain things.

We just don't go as far as Julia did.

She wanted a hug.

She wanted to be told that we loved her.

There was no way she was getting the kids,

and that's all she wanted.

Julia Parrish, Croein Ruttle.

He had invested $392,000.

I think she was compelled to con.

She had pretty much swindled half the businesses in this town.

Yeah, but what if I'm wrong?

Because apparently she's dying of cancer.

There was no feeling, no emotion in her eyes.

She would just...

You're looking there for a second, saying, right,

he shot her, he shot himself. Evil is what you call her.

Just pure evil.

INTERVIEWER: What did you know about her past life?

That she told me or that I found out?

And when? That she told you.

Okay, this is fun. You ready?

Buckle up.

(intriguing music plays)

REPORTER: On the 18th of May, 2015, a gang of thieves who broke

into this house in Boolaglass in Askeaton to steal scrap

metal made a grim discovery.

You know, burglars finding two dead bodies,

reporting it to us before our knowledge.

Could we have predicted who this woman would become in our

investigation?

There was names coming at us, different first name,

different second name. Julia...

appeared to be the common trend.

Put this lady's name into a search engine and... up it comes.

This lady was infamous.

She was wanted by the PSNI for fraud offences.

She had been convicted in the United States.

She certainly burned a lot of people.

Who is this woman?

We had to identify what kinda footprint,

and it was a big footprint that this lady left.

For Cecilia Julian McKitterick, life begins in the small

rural town of Castlederg.

Born in 1952, there's very little known about her early years.

What is established, though, is that when she's 19,

she marries a British soldier.

She has a son with him, and then when he's six

months old, she leaves.

I guess the biggest date, the beginning of this whole

journey, was the abandonment of her son in 1972.

And then we jump forward 11 years to 1983,

and she's in Armagh jail, the women's prison.

We think she was in there because of some issue over

missing television sets.

Not a pleasant place to be.

You go forward another year,

she's then moving her mind into America.

But instead of going to America legally and getting a visa,

getting the tickets, getting everything done properly.

She goes into Canada, and then she skips into America,

and she does that illegally.

You embody the goals that guide the Republican Party,

and you represent the future, a future of opportunity.

Now is the time to become active.

INTERVIEWER: Can you remember how they met?

Yes, they met through mutual friends at a party.

Our parents had recently divorced in 1984, and we went from our

parents being divorced to this woman with us everywhere we went.

She did this thing where she would be very relatable to you.

I have a dog. Oh, I have a dog, too.

And I went here. Oh, I went there, too. Isn't it lovely?

And even if it was total farce, she was definitely

trying to relate to you in some way, and she wanted to insert

herself in every aspect of your life.

I don't believe that my dad ever saw his parents without her

after they met.

Yeah, she was charming. She was sweet.

We went from my dad being our caretaker when we were at his

home to Julia being our caretaker, and that happened overnight.

It happened in the of an eye, and there was no transition to that.

She just was so keen on inserting herself into our lives.

I think my dad was like, this is great.

It's a built-in mom.

JILLY: She marries this guy, poor Clyde Parrish,

not telling anybody that she's already married and

has never divorced.

So that's a bigamist marriage.

That's pretty big crime in most states.

My memories of Julia.

I first met Julie in March 2011.

Dad said he had split up with his then-girlfriend, who I'd

actually really grown to like.

She just came out of nowhere.

His mother told him basically everything to do.

And I think that's what he saw in her.

He was very kind, very shy.

He wouldn't be the one to put himself forward, but genuine.

If he said something, he meant it.

There was no bull with him.

He was a lovely guy.

Sure, I was with him. He was lovely. (laughs)

Tom actually said they met online, a dating app.

She saw him coming.

A man with two children, having him every second weekend.

Oh, this is lovely. I can go and hide

in that lovely little family group.

She was kinda running his life, I would say, at that time.

And that was only the first time I met them.

When we met her, she had constantly asked us,

do we love her? And we were... I was 14 at the time.

Maybe it was the first weekend that Ian came back and

he said to me that she keeps asking me, Mum, do I love her?

And she wanted hugs and everything.

And Ian just said, I don't know her mum.

I felt guilty that I didn't love her, but...

this is probably the second time that I met her.

She wanted this family image.

I don't understand really what it was about.

1972, her son is born and she leaves him.

She's in County Down by this stage and he's six months old.

He's left to be raised by his paternal grandparents.

Very little. You wonder when the liar in her starts.

Paul died at 13 from leukaemia.

JILLY: I was sorry I knocked the door because...

the look on his face has never left me.

It was shocking to me when I found Paul alive and doing very well.

My heart broke for him because he said,

I don't want anybody to think I have anything to do with her.

She left that child

to become a professional fraudster.

Dodged a great big bullet by her leaving.

It was probably the best thing that could have happened

to him, was her leaving him.

It started in Houston.

She was going by Julia Holmes, Dr. Holmes, because

did you guys know that she said she

was a psychiatrist? With a medical degree?

Then it turned into a PhD, so I don't really know which one.

The reason it's so ingrained in my brain was that she was

actually seeing a little boy who was around my age and claiming

to be a child psychiatrist.

She had a framed diploma.

She saw patients.

She took money for those services, and she provided counselling.

It was a very strange thing. It was a very brazen thing to do.

The adults were so charmed by her, and they were enamoured by her.

She was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to them.

And the kids, we weren't so much.

One little mistake and one little error,

she would hit us, hard.

It was very cunning because she wouldn't do it in front

of other adults. We would say, she just hit me.

She would say, Oh, no, no, no. They're just saying that.

And she would spin it as, they don't like me because I'm

the stepmother, and they're trying to push us apart.

And as an adult, that sounds very reasonable because

she's a child psychiatrist, don't you know?

I think there was never a time until I was a teenager that I was

with her, that she wasn't hitting me.

My dad worked, and always has worked, very, very hard.

He's incredible work ethic.

He had a place on Korff, and then

I'm sure that the lease that he had

on that place, she probably messed that up in some way.

Then he had to run his shop out of our garage.

It was the first sign of, well, that's a big shift.

Within a year of her coming on board, he's now in a garage.

Julia had made a rule that we were not to see

my dad's parents anymore.

I guess at some point, they've realised that something's

a little off. Creditors calling, things that way.

I remember it like it was yesterday,

we had gone to my dad's, and it was a Saturday.

I was sitting behind my dad, so she whipped around,

and she said to me, you've been seeing your Pa and Granny.

We told you if you saw your Pa and Granny anymore,

you would no longer see your Dad and I.

And at this point, my sister's crying, I'm crying.

The entire way there, she berated us,

called us liars, called us everything you could

think of to a small child.

I don't know what my dad was thinking.

I don't remember him saying anything the entire time.

When we arrived back at my mother's home,

Julia lunged at my mother

and physically attacked her in our driveway.

Very soon after that, very, very soon, they left.

Looking back, I know now she had run up debts.

And picking a fight with me and having that reason to leave.

That was just the beginning of, We have to get out of here.

Oh, look at your daughters. They're so hateful.

They don't even appreciate that you're here.

I've always thought she always had an idea of where she wanted to go

next, and I've always felt like she had pre-planned it.

There was a jewellery store located next to

their print shop, and it was so crazy.

She somehow convinced them to allow her

to borrow jewellery,

and then she would go back and tell them,

I never borrowed that jewellery before.

I'd spoken to the jeweller, and they said, Oh, yes,

she stole all of that from us.

So there's this trail of crime that they're leaving behind,

but she's never been convicted yet.

It boggled my mind that she could continue to, and it probably was

the reason that gave her so much confidence.

At the end of March 2011,

I remember getting a phone call and I answered it.

It was Tom, and he was very different.

He was very cocky, very sure of himself.

And straight away, I went, something going on here.

I don't know what it is,

but I know there's something going on here.

So she came on the phone then and she eat the face off me

and told me I wasn't fit to be a mother.

You've met your match, and all this kinda stuff.

And I went, Oh, my God,

I don't know what is going on here.

My world just tumbled down right in front of me.

She's crazy. She's absolutely crazy.

She started telling me that they had been in a relationship

before, and I knew this was all lies.

Lies, lies, lies, everything.

Tom had only met her for three weeks.

A couple of days later, when Ian got his new card,

he accepted her request to be friends.

And she had put up a post about, I've met a fantastic man.

I'm really in love with him.

And in the package is two lovely boys.

In my head, I just saw red. That's it.

I know what she's after.

There was no way she was getting the kids,

and that's all she wanted.

I believe by the time they got

to Arizona, she was no longer a doctor.

But yeah, I remember her having all these different names,

and I remember people calling her by different names as a child.

Someone would call her Jay, and she had a big story when they

lived in New Mexico that she could not be known to be

a female business owner, so she had to change her name

to Jay, J-A-Y.

So the woman we got to know was Julia, started life as

Cecilia Julia McKittrick, but she had dozens of names

throughout her criminal enterprises.

Elizabeth Holmes, Parrish Watson.

Jay Holmes, Jay Parrish.

Julia O'Neill, Julia Hunter, Julia Greer, Julie Ruttle,

Julia Ruttle, Jules Ruttle, Julian Ruttle.

Julia Parrish, Croein Ruttle. I think Julia Greer or Julie Greer.

Silver Light Ruttle,

posing as a high priestess witch on Facebook (chuckle),

and she was also White Wolf, Quiet spirit.

And she posed then as a shaman on Facebook as well.

And people responded to her.

She started saying that her name was Bonnie Parrish

so that she could say that she and my dad were Bonnie and Clyde.

I think she would frequently use a different name

and then have to backtrack

and then try to gaslight you into believing

that she never said that.

She never said her name was PJ.

Why would you make that up, Morris?

Why would you do that? You're fibbing.

That's a lie.

And she was very convincing.

She was gaslighting before any of us used the term gaslighting.

Where do you store all that history

for when you want to convince your

next person that you're going to groom, who you are?

Do you keep a book?

How do you do that?

Because if you work from truth, you've only got one set

of memories to deal with.

But if you work from all of her lies, she had acres of lies.

That she told me or that I found out?

Okay, this is fun. You ready?

Buckle up.

(man chuckles) Okay.

She was the only girl, and she had two older brothers.

They owned all this land in Ireland, and they were very

wealthy, and they called her every Sunday.

I don't know who she was talking to, but she would have

conversations on the phone with someone in Ireland, supposedly.

They were always coming to visit.

But you heard the term catfishing, right?

She was doing a reverse catfish.

They have two little boys, exactly my sisters and my age.

I mean, we are just ecstatic. These are cousins.

They're coming to see us.

Before we go to the airport to pick them up,

Julia gets a call.

The entire family is wiped out. They're all dead.

They're all dead.

Fiery car crash on the way to the airport to come to Houston

to see his sister, his beloved sister.

His wife is dead. The two children are dead.

Fiery car crash, dead. All of them dead.

She had so much loss in her family of people who were coming

to visit us that just died.

It was the craziest thing.

I remember being really upset that these people had died.

And no, they weren't dead because they never existed.

She had to just go into the room and lock herself away,

and she was very distraught.

And, oh, my goodness, the entire world has ended.

She should have been an actress.

She would have won awards.

(crackly voice recording)

The only contact we had was text messages, phone calls,

but it was never dad that was on the other end of the phone.

It was always her.

She had him controlled at that point.

Three or four months later, she confronted me,

and and asked me, did I have a problem with her.

And it was that same day that she told me she was pregnant.

She would have been 59 that day, so not entirely sure

what that was about.

So they were going to get married.

And at this point, it was too crazy for me.

It was too crazy for me.

And she knew she wasn't getting the boys for this so-called

wedding, which wasn't a wedding, it was a blessing.

And she got very, very cross with that.

So then she made up that Ian was making the dinners and he was

looking after the kids, all this lies.

So she rang social services and said all that stuff to them.

And I was taken into social services.

She was doing everything in her power to get the lads.

We actually ended up going up to the house

a couple of months later.

There was nobody there. They weren't there.

Ian was really pining for his dad at this point.

So I stayed in the car and then they arrived into the yard.

There was nobody there.

So we went walking in the field where he usually has the bees,

and then they shut up.

I don't remember what they said or anything.

I just remember being behind Ian, just looking at the grass.

He just told me, just leave, just leave.

He said it was legal matter between him and my mum,

so we just had to leave.

It's a lot of feelings... that you kinda push down.

She didn't even look at either of us.

She just walked straight into the house.

There are three types of folks from East Texas.

You got law enforcement, you have preachers and you have criminals.

And on occasion, there might be one or two of the same.

As you look into the background of people, it's very interesting

to see to what extent they will go

to bolster their own reputation as

being reliable and dependable and someone that you can trust.

And that's essential to be a good con artist.

People have to trust you.

And for Julia and Clyde, both of them,

Claim to be ministers, people of the cloth.

In East Texas, this is not only the Bible Belt,

this is the buckle of the Bible Belt.

If you are a minister, you have very high

standing in the community.

But to be a minister, you simply need to proclaim you're minister.

And in Julia's case, she just put it on her business

card that she was Reverend Julia Parrish.

She was a rock star in Athens. She hit her stride in Athens.

She was part of whatever the county Republican Party Group

supporters were.

She was very involved in community service there and bought a little

piece land in town and put some mobile homes on there,

and they rented them out or sold them.

In East Texas, there's an organisation called

the Cattle Barons Association, and every year, they put together

a big gala, a big ball to raise funds for cancer,

and she was part of that and she even made a large donation.

The community saw that, and they saw that she was willing

to sacrifice her own personal funds.

Little did they know, they weren't her funds.

They were people she swindled.

She was making very large purchases, larger than anything

I had ever seen her make before.

The land, very expensive jewellery, very expensive coats.

I remember going with her and her telling these young ladies,

she was showing off her jewellery and her saying, If you get a rich

man, too, he'll buy you jewellery like this.

I remember thinking, my dad didn't buy her that.

There's something called the dark triad,

psychological traits that we often see in con artists.

There's narcissism, which is where people have a very

high regard for themselves.

She fancied herself to be a very strong political advocate,

a certain group, certain party.

She had photographs that she showed people

of her with Vice President Dan Quayle, for instance.

She had another photograph that she showed people where she was

with the actor Patrick Swayze.

But that helped bolster her narcissism there.

The other one is the idea that

you have psychopathic tendencies.

And what that is, is simply you don't have any kind of

empathy for others.

You don't feel there's a guilt from taking their money.

It's no big deal for a doctor to, take money from him because

he's making all this money.

People have insurance, so they rationalise through it.

But still, she had victims there.

The third part of the triad is machiavellianism.

The idea that you're cunning and you use this cunning

to manipulate people, get them to do what you want them to do.

There's certain levels of this dark triad that...

you see it in serial killers,

but you see it very often in the con artist.

From July 2012, the lads didn't see Tom at all from then on.

The last time, very last time I met him, Dad took Mum to court.

He was arrears in child support payments.

One of the ways I think that they wanted to get out was,

he was thinking that I wasn't his child.

So he wanted a DNA test done.

He did actually try to do this paternity test three times.

You wouldn't recognise him.

I just remember he was very cold, very distant.

Have you stooped that low?

How low are we going to go, like, with this?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

A 100%, she was doing it.

How can someone that looked after us and loved us so

much, go so cruel and cold in such a short amount of time.

2001 is when my second son was born.

So after that, we were seeing each other again.

I would go up and spend a few days.

And then whenever my dad was diagnosed with cancer,

I think my dad really wanted us back in his life.

One morning, I received a complaint from a doctor,

Dennis Rose.

He told me a story that was rather hard to believe

how he had been swindled out of nearly $400,000.

A lot of the victims will basically

say, okay, I lost it, and I'm not doing anything because

I don't want word getting out.

And again, somebody like Dennis Rose is

in a small town, small community, and word is going to get out.

Dennis Rose was Clyde Parrish's oncologist and a well-known

and well-liked doctor.

He got to know Julia very well during the time

of Clyde's treatment.

I think that my dad genuinely liked them, and he had no idea.

She's grooming the oncologist while the oncologist is

saving her husband's life. I find that kinda mind-blowing.

The opportunity was, that she had inherited a large bit of land

in Ireland, and that land consisted of old buildings.

She and a cousin of hers, who was an attorney,

had proposed to renovate these old buildings and turn them into

single-family dwellings.

If they would invest now, they could expect to receive up to

700% returns on their investment.

Based on the fact that they were friends

and the fact that

Dennis Rose had basically saved her husband's life,

this was a was a believable story,

and it was something that he was willing to take part in.

She mentioned to him that other investors

had not been able to come

up with the money, so this was an extra opportunity

that he had to invest more.

So he continued to invest incrementally until he

had invested $392,000.

Julia and Clyde started working on their friends.

From there on, they were able to get at least four

other people involved in the scheme.

So we had a total of $517,000 people had invested

into this scheme before it started to come unravelled.

But it was Dennis Rose that was her downfall

in America because he was

told that you'll get a lot of money back,

plus interest and everything. And he wanted his money back.

I would expect, if this was a legitimate

investment, that Dennis Rose's

cheques would be cashed and that she

would send that amount over to Ireland

for the construction project. None of that was taking place.

What I did find, though, was that Julia was writing cheques

for purchase of new vehicles.

She had Rolex watches, all kinds of expenditures that

were well above her means.

Looking things up online was sorta the new thing to do.

So I'd always been very interested in her past because her

past was so variable.

It just depended on the day.

I She managed to get a hold of the social security number she

was using, and I traced her back to a young lady who had

passed away who lived in Ohio.

I've often wondered if me looking into all that, threw up red flags.

Once you show your hand, they're scattering like rats.

They're going and destroying evidence.

She wasn't even in the country legally,

so she was a flight risk.

One of the best things you can do when you're confronting a con

artist is get them to lie to you.

Let her lay out what this investment was.

We took Julia into her office. We sat her down.

I introduced myself as an FBI agent,

and the colour went away from her face.

And I just sat there for a moment and just let her

collect her thoughts.

And I said, Okay, tell me about Dennis Rose.

She had gone 19 and a half years, and she had scammed everyone

that she ever met. She had become so proficient at walking that line

and playing that game.

I think she believed she was untouchable.

She explained the investment from top to bottom.

At that point, I said, Julia, I don't think that is true.

I think this is a fraud.

I think you defrauded Dennis Rose.

And she said, oh, no, no, I haven't done that.

This is an actual investment.

And then I put before her the telephone records.

You don't have any calls to Ireland.

And then she turned another shade of white.

And then I put before her the bank records,

and I said, do you see these bank records right here?

There's no indication that any of the funds that you've taken in

have gone over for any investments.

That's when she came up with her next lie.

You don't understand.

I've been involved in gambling, and I have all these gambling

debts, and that's what I was using.

I intended to send it over there.

And then I said, Julia, that's not the case.

You spend it.

You got Rolex watches, other investments.

Clyde had an ultra light aircraft.

And at that point, she pretty much said, Okay, you got me.

That's the point that I arrested her.

Between July 29, 2002,

and continuing until at least December 18,

2003, Julia Parrish,

who was then Clyde Parrish's wife,

devised a scheme and artifice

to defraud and to obtain money by means of false pretences,

representations and promises from,

among others, Dennis Rose.

There wasn't a whole lot of evidence that she produced

showing this investment in Ireland.

She was well in the community.

She was well respected in the community.

And if she said, I have this property in Ireland

and you can make money investing in it,

that seemed to be good enough.

The next thing is, is we got to keep her detained.

We can't let her get out on bail because if she does, she's gone.

So we made a case, a very strong case, that she was a flight risk.

And the judge listened to our side and kept her

in jail until we could be prepared for trial.

As part of the scheme, Julia Parrish, on various dates,

communicated via email with Rose to encourage him to invest.

In the federal system, if you use the internet as,

for example, send email, that's wire fraud

so she plead to that one count and got 27 months.

Once it was just presented to him, he was like, Oh, my God.

I had no idea.

Should he have known? Yeah.

But we all should have known.

Someone should have done something at some point.

Clyde ultimately wound up entering a plea

to what we call misprison of felony,

which in layman's terms means

that he knew she was committing fraud, and he helped cover it up.

He ultimately plead guilty and did prison time.

Clyde never went back into the dark realm of being a criminal.

As far as being a wife and doing the homemaking stuff,

she was amazing at that.

But at the end of the day,

it doesn't matter how well-kept you

are, you really have to know someone for who they are.

Even if he did see those things, I think that we all have blinders

on with people that we love.

She was above-average intelligence,

and I would have thought for sure

she would see the error of her ways and straighten up.

But that wasn't the case.

Strabane is a small town. Everyone knows everyone.

So to have someone blow into town the way she did this hurricane

of colour and energy and ideas and creativity, and she was going

to do this, and she was going to...

Yeah, it was fun in a sense.

She was American as well, which gave her this air

of mystique around here as well.

She was looking for an advertisement.

I invited her into the office, and she was there in her red coat

and the black hair, and she had a colourful scarf on.

And yeah, very confident and flirty and nice.

And she says, Hi, I'm JJ.

And I said, Okay, JJ, what's your second name?

And she's, don't worry about a surname.

Just JJ is fine.

She's calling herself JJ now.

She starts working then in Sand Mills in a spa,

Health and Wellness Centre.

She had somehow talked her way into that and was talking

about buying that business.

And that's what the advertiser ended up being,

about the well-being spa, how she had taken it over.

I suppose when we didn't get paid for advertisement,

(chuckle) that was slightly alarming.

It was a guy who was an Australian

and had been in a really serious accident.

He ended up getting compensation.

She groomed him.

She convinced him that she was a qualified,

trained and experienced psychiatrist,

and that she could help him through this PTSD

and help him deal with the trauma

that he'd lived with.

So the poor guy believed her, handed over his money,

and that was it.

She worked her magic on me pretty well.

And the initial amount that went in there

was approximately 54,000 euro.

It was hard to get anybody to be named.

I could see the evidence, I could see the proof,

I could sit down with people and look through

where money had gone missing.

Then I would have made an approach and they would have

been just mortified.

She had managed to work her way into clothing businesses,

furniture businesses, hardware.

She'd managed to get her house furnished.

She had pretty much swindled half the businesses in this town,

including the Strabane Chronicle.

I spoke to Denise Adams, a lovely lady.

Denise suffered very badly.

Tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands of pounds.

She'd either signed over the business or given a lot

of money to Julia Holmes out of her own pocket.

And I think it's almost bankrupt her.

When I'd done all my paperwork and there was no more to be done,

it was time now, what keeping you, JJ?

So then she started making excuses

that this million pound was coming,

million and a half was coming, and it never did come.

And she talked about receiving a letter from Julia Holmes,

just talking about, you'll be fine.

You're a very strong woman.

And I think she was just resigned to the fact that she

had lost money. She wasn't going to let it destroy her.

I think it nearly did.

I first came across her.

She was back in court in Down Patrick in County down

for another fraud of one gentleman

to the amount of £18,000.

She had already been in prison twice,

and she was at this stage heading for prison again if

she got into a trial.

When she came into that huge courtroom,

you could see her coming in to scan, and she scanned everybody.

And I know she would have clicked onto me.

I wanted her to see me.

I wanted her to see, I'm watching you.

She had a tag on at that stage, an electronic tag,

and she had applied for the tag to be removed because she

said it didn't suit her.

It wasn't meant to be a fashion statement, but anyway,

she wanted that removed, and then she just skipped town.

Her trail just vanished.

She could have been anywhere at that stage.

What an afternoon, about four o'clock,

I got a phone call on the shop phone

from a friend of mine who was in a hotel around the corner.

She said she was with this couple who were creating this honey.

Could she ask them to drop around to me and to try and get

the honey to the right people?

She said, just so you know,

Croein, the woman, is wearing a wig

as she has terminal cancer.

And I said, Okay, well, I'll see what I can do for them.

The gentleman Tom seemed a very nervous type of person.

Not at all comfortable.

Whereas she was quite forward, walked straight up to the desk I

was standing at, introduced herself and said,

Oh, we're creating this.

And if you can get these to maybe some of your friends in Dublin.

And I said, yeah, leave them with me.

I picked the phone and rang a friend of mine in Dublin,

a senior journalist, and said, look, I have some products here.

Some of it has been suggested to be sent to you.

But just instinctively, I feel something about this

that I don't trust, and I don't know why.

And she said, Oh, go with your instinct, Paul.

Go with your instinct. And I said,

Yeah, but what if I'm wrong?

Because, apparently, she's dying of cancer.

I only remember when we were beekeeping with him,

he even bought us the suits, the two of us.

He would have a special tool that you do to uncap the honey.

It would pull all the honey out into this bucket,

and then we just jar it.

They got invited to everything and anything.

I mean, they won an award for the honey,

as you probably know, the Blas na hÉireann,

which is a highly regarded, well-respected award for food

producers in Ireland.

They went to restaurant awards that everybody goes to,

made sure they got their photos posted with the right

people in the right places.

She was constantly tweeting quite a few of us

and showing photos and photos of products, trying to get

promotion and stuff.

One day, this person in the UK, tagged into our photos and to our

tweets and said, Don't believe that woman, she's a fake.

(phone notification)

So in May 2013, the PSNI were getting pretty

desperate to find Julia Holmes, and they launched a public

appeal through the media.

A glamorous granny who jumped bail

on fraud charges two years ago,

maybe in the Galway area, police had said.

Julia Holmes, who also goes by the name

of Dr. Watson and Julia Parrish,

vanished after being accused of an 18,000-pound fraud.

I found out that she had absconded and she had gotten away,

and they were looking for her. Then I was really sleuthing then

because now I'm doing international sleuthing.

She had created this fake company in which she was

claiming to have cancer and she had all these bees,

and this was harvesting honey from her own hives.

If you all stand over here. I'll stand in front of the beehive.

Hello, you.

Oh, you're not happy, are you?

They only found one beehive.

They obviously knew there was no way you could go into

production with just one.

And then it was discovered that they were just

buying honey from a reputable supermarket store

and decanting it into a posher jar, shall we say.

She was entering honey contests, and this is ending up on not

just social media, but media.

She's showing up in newspapers, so she's back to being

very brazen again.

Totally different name, of course, but it's still her.

I think someone had called out the fact that she wore wigs,

and that's where the cancer thing started was, Oh, I have cancer.

If the story had been true, if she actually had cancer,

and if they were creating that honey,

it was a good product,

obviously, and a genius, really.

This particular Sunday night was rather quiet.

As I said, it just landed a few days before.

So we were settling in and was getting to know the new unit.

One of my colleagues came out and said that there's a man

wanted to speak with you.

So went into the public office.

I saw a family that I would know locally,

the leader of the family,

and four young males belonging to him.

They were very upset.

They were blessing themselves with the holy pictures.

Brought them into a room out back.

The story then he started to tell us was amazing.

The four lads with him had gone out

on the Askeaton Rathkeale road, down near Nantinan Cemetery,

and they knew that the place had been vacant.

They reckoned that the people living in it had been

gone for some time.

He said that they set about looking for scrap

around the sheds and the yards,

and that it got to better them then

that when they weren't disturbed, they decided to break into the

house to see if they could find more.

Myself and Ian were in Limerick, and Ian was swimming

heavy at the time, right? So he was inside doing a gala.

So we said we got up the road

and we get a paper and a sandwich,

and there was splashed all over the front of the paper.

Two people absconded, blah, blah, blah.

Nobody knows where they are.

So we saw the article in Limerick Leader.

We went to the neighbours to see if there was any movement

in the last while.

We just went in and had a look around.

Looking back on the timeline, it would have been exactly

when everything actually happened,

the weekend that we were there.

She obviously had a plan, and that was that, really.

The leader of the family had said to me, the Ruttle man,

up from Nantinan Cemetery, was the house we were looking for,

and that the lady with him

was wanted by the police in the North.

Bear in mind, it's nearly 10: 00 to 3: 00 in the morning at this

stage, and we landed to the farmhouse.

I suppose what was in our head was we had to keep an open mind

that what the people at the station were telling us

might not be necessarily what's going on.

We climbed over this gate, myself and five colleagues,

and went in to a house with no power, no light, no electricity.

Scrap on the ground, place in total darkness.

We're all operating with torchlight.

Straight away, even though it was May,

you could feel the coldness in the house.

Walked then into a kitchen and you could see a big table

with a lot of notes and letters on the table.

If you find this, don't revive us.

We have said goodbye.

Words to that effect.

Got up to the top of the stairs, and the first door on the left

was slightly ajar.

I stood into the room.

And there they were.

As described, two corpses, very much decomposed,

had been there a long time, and a shocking sight.

It was an absolute shock for us all.

They didn't get to say goodbye to him or anything.

And there was a lot of things unsaid.

It looked for all the world to us that it was a murder suicide,

that there was a firearms used because of the position

of the bodies and her face had been damaged.

I took it that under bad light, that she may have been shot.

What I did notice was there was an ash bucket

at the end of the bed and there was other bits and pieces around,

but there was nothing remarkable else.

REPORTER: Tragedy calls to a rural community.

The bodies of Thomas and Julia Ruttle were discovered

by Gardaí in an upstairs bedroom at their home here just before

three o'clock this morning.

It was clear that both had died violently.

Then the postmortem took place

and there was no fireman discharged.

REPORTER: The inquest into their deaths

today heard how the embers of three

makeshift barbecues were found in a fireplace in the bedroom.

There was a chimney in the room, and there was windows

and whatever else, had all been sealed.

It cancelled all the air out of the room.

The state pathologist Mary Cassidy said the cause

of the couple's death cannot be confirmed, but the circumstances

were consistent with carbon monoxide poisoning.

Coroner Antoinette Simon said verdicts of suicide

were the only option.

It just seemed a really strange turn of events for her

to go out like that.

I just thought she would just continue on until she died,

a little old lady at 90 still conning people out of their money.

In the inquest, I really wanted to know who died first.

Did she force him to do that?

It's all those notes that they left.

She wrote them all.

Most of them lies, but she wrote everything.

She did it.

That's what I like to believe, anyway.

We'll never know, obviously.

Evil. Evil is what you call her.

Just pure evil.

Evil.

She was on the run the whole time,

but she didn't care about that trail of destruction

that she left.

You can always make more money, but the damage that she

did to families.

My whole personality is built around it.

I had to put up a wall.

That was Ian's birthday, and you were given out.

He was vulnerable, and this person just took him over

and took over his whole life, changed completely.

And yes, I'm angry because everything would have been so

different, and the boys would have their father,

and he would love

to see the men that they've turned out because he had

lots to do with it. (emotional) God, sorry.

Sorry, Lads. It's okay. Oh, my God.

I'm sorry, I didn't expect that.

Anyway.

Anyway.

Good? Yeah.

Yeah, and if he was alive, he would be a part of their lives.

Sorry.

Rationally, I have been assured

by police, that they did a DNA test,

and they are 100% it's her.

It just seems so unbelievable in such

a strange and very dramatic end for a person who lived

a very dramatic life.

There are days that I think, was it really her?