Mark Delaney was in another room, with different detectives from the same unit, and his interview was also filmed.

It probably goes without saying that Snow and Mark weren’t allowed to talk to each other, mainly because the cops would have wanted to stop them from colluding, and because there’s always the chance that if you suggest to one of them that the other one is coughing up details, they might decide to talk.

Each was allowed to have a lawyer, but Mark Delaney didn’t seem interested in that. He wanted only to exercise his right to silence. As a result, the transcript of the interview between Mark Delaney and the two JERT detectives makes for pretty dull reading. They take turns asking questions, and he basically says nothing other than, ‘I ain’t got nothing to say.’

The transcript of the interview between Snow and her detectives is much more interesting. She clearly was not bothered about maintaining her right to silence at that point.

Bear in mind that while these detectives were talking to Snow, there was a team of doctors and social workers from the welfare department working behind the scenes, frantically trying to identify each of the kids who had been removed from Delaney House; whether (and how) any of them had been harmed; how many of them had parents that needed to be contacted (most of the children found in Delaney House had been formally relinquished to the care of the State); and they were also trying to match the numbers on Snow’s collars to data from their own files.

One of the first things to become clear as that process got underway was that there were way more children in the house than there ever should have been. According to the Department’s own guidelines, there should have been a maximum of six. But Snow was quite happy to explain to the police how she ended up with three times as many, saying, ‘They kept bringing them, so we kept taking them.’

One of the detectives – the one playing ‘good cop’ in the ‘good cop/bad cop’ thing (although, if you study the transcript, it does seem like both of them were playing ‘good cop’ for a while there) – said, ‘The Department must have been so grateful. I imagine it’s difficult to get people to take children with such severe disabilities. You must be a saint to take so many in.’

Snow responds, ‘From my point of view, it’s the more disabled the better.’

The detective said, ‘And why’s that? Because you feel with your qualifications that they’re better off with you than perhaps with somebody who isn’t a nurse, or doesn’t have the same training?’

Snow said, ‘No, it’s not that. I only take Category Two. If it’s just a matter of them lying there in bed and having the tube, I can take as many as they want. It’s not like it’s difficult.’

To their credit, neither detective responded to that, although it must have been tempting.