Gardaí investigating the suspected murder of a 31-year-old mother of two in north Cork believe that a phone call to the emergency services reporting that she had self-harmed will be critical to catching her killer.
Detectives investigating the suspected murder of Paula Canty at her top floor apartment at the Belfry on Bridewell Lane in Mallow are understood to be happy with the progress they are making since a postmortem on Saturday confirmed that Ms Canty had been the victim of foul play.
Ms Canty was found unresponsive with a stab wound to the upper body at the apartment around midday on Friday by paramedics after the emergency services received a call from a male reporting that a woman had performed an act of self-harm.
However, Ms Canty showed no signs of having self-harmed and Garda suspicions of foul play were confirmed by Assistant State Pathologist Dr Margot Bolster, who concluded following her postmortem examination that the fatal stab wound was not self-inflicted.
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Gardaí launched a murder investigation and a team of 40 officers have spent the past three days carrying out door-to-door inquiries, harvesting CCTV footage and seizing a number of mobile phones.
A source confirmed that gardaí have obtained a recording of the phone call reporting the incident to the emergency services and they have begun examining a number of seized mobile phones to see whether any of them was the device used to make the call.
Gardaí have also begun examining CCTV footage from Bridewell Lane and other streets in Mallow as they try to establish when Ms Canty was last alive and whom she was with in the hours before the fatal assault at her flat.
Gardaí have established that Ms Canty was alive and around Mallow town centre late on Thursday night in the company of two males and they hope to take witness statements from the two men as well as a number of other people as part of the overall investigation.
Gardaí now believe that Ms Canty was fatally assaulted in the apartment some time on Friday morning and they hope that a forensic examination of the scene by officers from the Garda Technical Bureau in Dublin will help them identify who was in the apartment in recent days.
Investigators have not revealed whether they have found a murder weapon, but the Cork County North Divisional Search Team began a search along Main Street and surrounding streets in Mallow on Saturday in the belief that the killer may have discarded such a weapon in the town.
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