Burglars Make Horrifying Discovery Inside House, Call Police — But Story Was Just Beginning


A gang of traveling burglars targeted a home in Limerick, Ireland, in the middle of the night Monday — but what they discovered when they broke into the rural house was so horrifying that the crooks themselves called police.

Not only did police show up and uncover the dead and extremely decomposed bodies of the middle-aged couple who lived in the home — the corpses had apparently been lying there since March — but when they investigated further they found a grim story right out of a Hollywood film noir thriller.

Ireland’s Gardai — the national police force in that country — have not released the cause of death for 56-year-old Thomas Ruttle and the woman found next to him, Julia Holmes, 63. A.22 caliber rifle was found next to the bodies, but the police do not believe the gun had been fired. The cops are now exploring another possibility: the couple was killed by poison.

But why?

While the police are still not sure, they know one thing — Julia Holmes was not who she said she was.

For an update to this bizarre story, see the bottom of this article.

In fact, Julia Holmes — whose given name was Cecila Julia McKitterick and who has reportedly used dozens of aliases over the years — was a convicted con artist on the lam, a native of Northern Ireland who had to flee her home country in 2011 after she was charged in connection with a $28,000 fraud case there.

That case was nothing, however, compared to the alleged $500,000 land fraud case in Texas that got Holmes deported from the United States in 2006.

On top of that, according to sources speaking to the Irish Mirror newspaper, Holmes was a polygamist — marrying one man while still married to another — who has been involved in an untold number of scams, including recent cases in which she claimed to be a witch, and another when she tried to bilk money out of a children’s charity.

The sources speaking to the Irish Mirror now believe that her most recent husband, Thomas Ruttle, was unaware of her dark and bizarre past and had no idea that she was still married to another man back in the United States.

When Ruttle finally found out who his wife really was, he murdered her and then committed suicide. At least, that scenario is what the sources speaking behind the scenes appear to believe.

In public, however, the Irish police are still putting together the pieces of what happened to Ruttle and Holmes. The burglars who discovered the decomposing bodies contaminated the crime scene just by being there, making the job of investigators even more difficult. The crooks, however, have cooperated with police in the bizarre case.

UPDATE: Julia Holmes’ own son — her only biological child — refused to claim her remains, saying that she was a “wicked and selfish” person who abandoned him as a baby. Her stepdaughter from her previous bigamous marriage also wanted nothing to do with Holmes — whom he knew as “Julia Watson” — even in death, condemning her as “a violent, manipulative liar.”

With her final husband, Ruttle, she became a beekeeper and producer of artisinal honey. Except that she was reportedly passing off store-bought honey as their own brand.

Finally, her ashes were claimed and returned to her birthplace of Askeaton, County Limerick, Ireland. But who it was who claimed the ashes of Julia Holmes and why remains a mystery.

Also still a mystery, the actual cause of the couple’s death. They were badly decomposed when fond by the burglars. Police now believe the couple died in a suicide pact — but how they killed themselves has yet to be determined and toxicology tests on Julia Holmes and Thomas Ruttle were still in process at last report in June.

[Image via Irish Mirror]

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