Death
Desmond Noonan was last seen on the night of Friday 18 March 2005 drinking in the Park public house in Northern Moor, Wythenshawe at around 11:30 am. Early on Saturday morning, Sandra Noonan received a phone call from her husband Desmond Noonan telling her that he had been stabbed. He asking her to pick him up in the suburb of Chorlton. By the time she arrived Noonan was lying unconscious in Merseybank Avenue. Sandra Noonan called for an ambulance, but Noonan died of his wounds before arriving at Manchester Royal Infirmary.
His funeral was held in south Manchester on 22 April 2005. Reportedly attended by hundreds of local residents with a kilted pipe band playing as his coffin arrived in a horse-drawn hearse at St Aidan's R.C. Church, Northern Moor.
Derek McDuffus, a drug dealer from south Manchester, was charged on 15 June after appearing at Preston Crown Court, and was eventually convicted of Noonan's murder, for which he received a life sentence. He was subsequently placed in solitary confinement to protect him from retribution by the Noonan family. Desmond Noonan, suspected to have developed a crack addiction towards the end of his life was thought by the authorities to have been coercing local drug dealers into supplying him with narcotics, and had left the pub intoxicated in search of a drug dealer. McDuffus was charged and found guilty of his murder. It is believed McDuffus stabbed Noonan and threw him out of his residence, following which he bled to death in the street.
Noonan died four days before the broadcast of journalist Donal MacIntyre's documentary MacIntyre's Underworld, Die On The Wall featuring him and his brother.
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