Abigail Rieley

By this time tomorrow night Devil in the Red Dress will be launched and will have officially been sent on it’s way.  As the launch gets closer I’m reminded of the days I spent working backstage in the theatre.

I thought I would be more nervous about tomorrow night but I suppose growing up as a theatre brat has prepared me for first nights.  My folks are both actors and I spent a lot of my teens going to both first and last night bashes.  My first jobs, in my summer holidays, were ASMing (Assistant stage manager if you’re not familiar with the term) for shows they were in.

Actually my title tended to be student ASM but came with the the same duties.  I would organise the props and change the scenery and help the actors with quick changes.

I’ve seen plenty of actors suffering from first night nerves but being back stage just felt the adrenaline rush of knowing that you’ve done all the preparation you can and now it’s in the lap of the gods.

That’s how I feel about tomorrow night.  The book is written and printed.  There’s nothing more I can do about that; the editing is finished and tonight it’s probably already on the shelves in some bookshops.  Now it’s up to me to step into the spotlight and play my part.

As the hours pass and we head towards tomorrow my mind keeps going back to those provincial theatres and the feeling as the audience took their seats when the play was about to start.  It was my job to call the time for the actors; the half, fifteen minutes before curtain up, ten, five and finally three - overture and beginners to the stage.

I remember sitting staring at the back of flats in the blue light of backstage beside the prop table.  Taped to the back of the flats were the prop lists, marked out scene by scene and the prop table was covered in a sheet of paper, similarly marked with outlines of the props drawn on to make keeping track easier.

There was always a hole somewhere on the flats through which you could peer out into the audience unseen and unblinded by the lights.  This time however I’m going to have to take centre stage.  It’s my name on the cover of the book and it’ll be me doing interviews to publicise it.

But when it comes down to it, this is the bit I recognise.  The waiting for reviews, getting an audience, talking it up.  This might be the first time I’ve had a book published but I feel as if I know where it goes from here.

So tomorrow night I’ll put on the slap put on my costume and step out.  And we’ll see where it goes from here.

It’s only two days until Devil in the Red Dress is launched.  It should be on the shelves by the weekend.  Every time I walk into a bookshop I imagine how it’ll look on the shelves.  Now I don’t have long to wait to see if I’m right.

I’m concentrating on the book this week so I won’t be blogging about the current trials in the Four Courts.  I’ll be finding out about what happens in the Dane Pearse trial the same as anyone else - on the news.  It’s rather nice not to have to sit through another lot of post mortem evidence, even though after a while they become just data and facts.

A couple of us on the press bench were talking last week about the effect that following the courts has on you.  There was a general consensus that we’re generally speaking a cynical bunch.  Day after day seeing the worse side of humanity tends to have that effect.

One of the things that attracted me to the story of Sharon Collins and Essam Eid was the fact that with this trial there were no post mortems.  I’m not saying it wasn’t a harrowing experience for those who received a visit from “Tony Luciano” but the fact is that both Sharon Collins’ plot to kill her millionaire partner and his two grown up sons and Essam Eid’s scam to approach the “marks” and demand money to cancel the “hit” ended up miserable failures.

During the closing speeches in their trial, earlier this year, it was pointed out that, even without a body count, people had still been hurt.  Certainly listening to the victim impact statement given by Robert and Niall Howard at the sentence hearing it was clear that they had suffered immensely, living in fear since the incident and their relationship with their father seriously damaged by his refusal to give up on the woman who had plotted to have them killed.

But even taking their pain into account, this was still “light relief” compared to trials involving a violent death.  As I researched Devil the sheer breadth of farce in this plot kept taking me by surprise.  On this blog I have links to the websites that featured in the case…take a look, tell me, do these look like legitimate businesses?

Whoever happened upon hitmanforhire.net and thought they’d found the answer to all their problems was at best gullible, at worst deluded.  The fact that Sharon Collins admitted to buying a Mexican proxy marriage certificate from proxymarriages.com, even after receiving an email from the Mexican embassy telling her that double proxy marriages did not in fact exist in Mexico, is rather a strong indicator that her radar for a good Internet buy is a bit skewed.

I feel for the Howard brothers, as well as Sharon’s own two sons Gary and David Collins.  Even Eid and his co-conspirator Teresa Engle have children who do not deserve the humiliation of a connection with a case as ridiculous as this.  Sharon’s partner, P.J. Howard had to put up with the shame of having lurid sexual allegations made about him in court, allegation that he has since strongly denied.

But for an outsider’s point of view it’s an incredible story and despite all that humiliation, a comparatively victimless crime. Ricin may have featured but it was never actually called into play - if it had been we may have had a completely different story.

It might be a rather bleak and black comedy but it’s easy to see it as a comedy none the less.  Many have compared the plot to the Cohen brothers and it certainly would make a good companion piece to Fargo.  I hope that anyone who reads my book will get a sense of the story that reads like a movie plot.

It remains to be seen if it ever ends up on the silver screen but if it does, they won’t have to change a thing!

Devil will hit the shelves at the end of the week.  I got my first copy on Friday and it feels strange to finally hold it in my hands complete with glossy cover and new book smell!  Seeing it sitting on the bookcase it somehow looks as if it’s not my book anymore - it gets to go out without me and have a life of it’s own now.

It’s been a very intense couple of months with first the trial then researching and writing the book.  Now I have to start the next bit…selling it.  On Thursday, the book will be officially launched then it’s due to hit the shops on Friday.  All the digging and prodding and frantic typing are at an end.

It’s hard to believe that Sharon Collins and Essam Eid were only sentenced two weeks ago.  It was an extraordinary end to an even more extraordinary story and I’m glad that I waited to give Devil in the Red Dress that final chapter but it has meant a flurry of activity since that day to get everything out on time.

But now the writing’s done and all that’s left is the marketing.  I’ll be promoting Devil the traditional way but am also keen to explore the new opportunities offered by the Internet.  The story of Collins and Eid is so much a story of our time and every part of this story has been firmly rooted on the Net.

The initial hook was the Hitmanforhire website, the email correspondence between Sharon and the fictional “Tony Luciano” that cooked up the plot, the ingredients for ricin were allegedly bought online for the recipe that had been sourced there and the conspirators finally met their downfall due a garda investigation that relied on technical evidence to solve the case.

Even my research for Devil was largely conducted online.  I was able to research the American side of the story from my laptop and found out more than I could ever which to know about the toxic properties of castor beans in some of the less salubrious chatrooms out in cyberspace.

If ever there was a trial that was rooted in the world we live in today it was this one…it would be nice if Devil gets it’s own life online.

The Devil in the Red Dress is almost ready.  The first copies should arrive back from the printers this evening.  I’ve spent the day getting ready for the launch.

It’s a very odd feeling to invite people to my own book launch.  I’ve dreamed of having one, but now the one for Devil is only a week away it’s feeling all very real.  I’ve seen all the layouts for the cover and the text and the picture section but actually seeing it in a real book, actually holding it in my hands and seeing on the shelves.  That’s exciting.

Now all I have to do is find something to wear…maybe not red though…

The family of Mark Spellman sobbed quietly as they listened again and again to accounts of the horrific wounds he received in an altercation with Dane Pearse.  Pearse himself hung his head and looked at his hands as the court heard accounts of a fight with a tragic ending that broke out in the small hours of August 4th last year.

His defence counsel Diarmaid McGuinness fiercely cross examined Spellman’s friends about what happened to lead to the altercation.  We heard that the night had started well.  Mr Spellman had been out with friends from Google where he worked.  One of them, Finbar O’Mahony was leaving to go travelling and by all accounts it was a good night.

Mark, Finbar and another friend Oisin Hoctor decided to go back to Mark’s flat in Sandymounth to have a few more drinks and spend the rest of the night playing on his Playstation.  His two friends told the court that the three of them were in high spirits, fooling around and joking as they slowly made their way towards Sandymount.

Hoctor bowed his head and laughed to himself as he heard O’Mahony describe tipping Mark over a low wall they were sitting on.  The deceased man had been in good form that night both men told the court.  Stopping off at a Spar shop on the way, Mark opened the back door of a parking car and made to get in, once again fooling around.

But the testimony rapidly took a darker turn.  O’Mahony told the court he had seen Pearse stab his friend in the side.  Pearse denies the murder of Mark Spellman but his defense counsel have acknowledged that he went back to his house and came back out armed with a bat and an ornamental dagger he had in his bedroom.  It was this knife that inflicted the fatal injuries.

Lola Simpson, in whose garden Mark had lain dying, painted a vivid picture of a terrifying encounter, overheard from her bedroom above.  She described how she had been woken that night by people talking loudly as they passed by the house.  She was lying awake in her bed, she said when she heard some more people approaching.

It was just “chitter chatter” she said, “quiet conversation.”  They didn’t have local accents.  She thought that some had been from the country and one voice was “very refined”.  She listened to them pass and settled back down to sleep.

Then she heard screaming and the sounds of panic.  She smiled nervously as she asked was it acceptable to say the words she had heard in court.  “You are not allowed to censor the evidence.”  Mr Justice Paul Carney told her from the lofty height of his bench.

Her garden gate, stiff at the best of times was slammed open with great force.  Then she heard someone running.  “It was very frightening running, a stampede towards my front door.”

She said she heard a shout, like a howl, which made her jump out of bed and rush to the window. Peeping out of the shutters she could see someone lying in the long grass at the end of the garden.  She hurried downstairs, stopping only to put on her slippers and dressing gown and went outside.

There she found Oisin Hoctor bending over his stricken friend.  He was trying to lift him up.  “He got him up on his feet.  He just melted.  He melted between the guys hands onto the ground.” Her voice breaking with emotion she described the wound she could now see in Mark Spellman’s side.  Mark’s family wept openly as she described a gaping wound, with his intestines showing through.

Finbar O’Mahony told the court that he had his phone in his hand when Dane Pearse walked by him out of the garden a short time before Mrs Simpson came out.  He said Pearse had blood on his sleeve and turned towards him as he walked away with the girl in a white dress he may or may not have been arguing with a short time earlier.  “You’d better get an ambulance for your friend,” he said calmly, according to O’Mahony’s recollection.

The trial of Dane Pearse started today.  The 21-year old, from Londonbridge Drive in Islandbridge in Dublin 4, is accused of the murder of Mark Spellman (26) who died from stab wounds after an altercation on an August night last year.  He denies the charge.

Today we heard evidence from one of Mr Spellman’s friends, Oisin Hoctor, who told the court that he and Mr Spellman had been at a leaving do for a colleague of theirs from the Google offices in Dublin.

The evening had started out pleasantly enough, he said, with him enjoying a couple of pints in the beer garden of the Beggars Bush pub on Haddington Road. He was joined by Mr Spellman and his girlfriend and eventually, after a couple more pints they moved on the the leaving party which was being held at the 51 pub nearby.

At the end of the night, Mr Hoctor, Mr Spellman and another friend headed off.  There had been the suggestion of a party and Mr Hoctor told the court he was hoping to persuade Mr Spellman to go to that as the three of them walked along to a nearby Spar shop.

But the lure of video games and drink in the comfort of Mr Spellman’s Sandymount apartment was too enticing and a plan was reached.  They bought provisions; Pringles and some Coke for mixers, before starting the walk back.

Mr Hoctor described a normal enough night out.  He and his friend were fooling around, he said, and Mr Spellman was walking ahead trying to speed them up as the going was slow that night.  He said he had run home to fetch a bottle of vodka he remembered having and caught up the other two at a bridge crossing the Dodder.

He actually got there first, the others had slowed down again and took their time reaching him, he told the court.  But the evening that had started out so pleasantly was to have a tragic ending.

Mr Hoctor said he had barely noticed the couple walking ahead.  He and his friend were talking and didn’t notice that Mr Spellman had widened the gap between them.  He said he could hear some kind of shouting up ahead but didn’t think much of it.

When Mr Spellman reached Londonbridge Road, the corner of Londonbridge Drive to be exact, he stopped.  Mr Hoctor said he couldn’t see who he was talking to but told the court he and his friend speeded up because they knew Mr Spellman had got involved with something that wasn’t his business.

They arrived to see Mr Spellman talking to a man and a woman.  Mr Hoctor said the couple were both shouting and acting aggressively and he heard Mr Spellman say “Calm down, Buddy”.  He thought he was calling the man “Dave”.

Things escalated and Mr Hoctor told the jury that he saw the man run at Mr Spellman, who raised his foot and connected with the man’s chest.  The man ended up on his arse but seemed to calm down a bit.

There were more words and the two sides separated.  Mr Hoctor said they were laughing about the incident but he didn’t remember Mr Spellman explaining exactly what had happened.

A short time later they heard running footsteps and Mr Hoctor said he recognised the same man running towards them.  He said the man was holding what looked like two weapons one in each hand and was running straight at Mr Spellman.

The force with which they connected was enough to carry them into the middle of the garden of one of the nearby houses.Mr Hoctor told the court that he was panicking and couldn’t get the garden gate open.  It must have taken him several seconds and when he did get it open the man ran past him, away down Londonbridge Drive.

Mr Hoctor fought back tears as he described finding his friend in the darkness of the garden.  He saw a “shininess” in the light from the street lights and found a knife, he estimated to be about 8″ long.  He could see blood on the blade.

He swallowed as he described pulling Mr Spellman into the light so he could see how badly he was injured.  The court was quiet, apart from the sobs from Mr Spellman’s family, as he described seeing a knife wound on Mr Spellman’s right side.  He said he knew it was bad as he could see what he thought were intestines sticking out.

In the prosecution opening speech this morning we heard that two ambulances were called that night for both the deceased and the accused, who had returned home wounded.  We heard that Mark Spellman was pronounced dead at 3.25 that morning, August 4th.

The trial is expected to last until sometime in the middle or end of next week.  But once again, there are two families for who the events of that night will last much longer than that.

This week started, as do most of my weeks, with the Monday List in Court 1 in the Four Courts.  Everyone squeezes into courtroom to hear what they will be doing for the next week.

Members of the public called for jury duty jostle next to black robed barristers, all trying to hear what’s going on at the front of the room.  Women from Victim Support stand elbow to elbow with members of the prison service.  Members of the press lean forward to catch muffled words along with solicitors, accused men and women and the tipstaffs, there to watch the proceedings for the other judges, all strain to hear as Mr Justice Paul Carney allocates rooms, juries and judges to the cases listed to trial.

Every week the same ritual is played out.  The courtroom is filled to a hot packed crush and the cases for trial are dealt with in quick succession.  In the space of an hour or so all interested parties find out where they will spend their week.  Which courtroom, which trial and which evidence they will spend their days listening to.  It’s not the first time I’ve written about the throng and it won’t be the last.

Standing in the over heated crush, my arms pressed into my sides forcing me to hold my notebook under my chin, the pen held at an awkward angle all you can see are the bodies standing near by.  In the crowd it’s hard to see and hear outside your immediate vicinity.  The room is contracted to a disjointed series of vignettes.

From my habitual spot towards the back of the room, standing up against the radiator my bag stowed on the floor between my feet, I can see the annoyed expression of a woman as her name is called for a jury panel, hear the under breath huff as she pushes her way to the front.

There’s the secret smile as someone ducks their head in passing, their excuse accepted by the judge to allow them to escape jury service until their name comes round again.  The mother turning to wipe a tear away after pulling her son back to plant a kiss on his cheek as he is led away to start his trial another day.  The shaking of heads and laughter from the public when one of the solicitors objects to one more than their quota of dismissible jurors.

On another day when a trial is under way things happen in a well ordered, expected way.  On a Monday morning it feels like organised chaos and there’s a sense that anything can happen.  Tomorrow it’s down to work with the start of the trial of Dane Pearse.  Till then it’s on with the vignettes and the fragments.

I’ve been taking a little bit of a hiatus from this blog over the past couple of days.  We’re nearing the end game with the book and it’ll be soon enough when I have to sell The Devil in the Red Dress all over town and beyond.  There’s been a bit of a hiatus personally too so I’m dealing with that but I’ve been reading up on line.

One piece of excellent advice I read from was Moonrat, at her blog Editorial Ass. With a book so close to publication it’s hard not to start thinking about cold hard figures and with the global economic situation, well it’s enough to give a first time author a bit of a wobble.

So I’ve decided to take Moonrat’s excellent advice tomorrow and I’m going book shopping tomorrow.  Well for purely selfish reasons it makes excellent sense.  Bit apart from that, book shopping is something I love to do.  There’s nothing like the smell of new books or the sound of the pages opening for the first time or the feel of a lovely new somewhat silky paperback cover ready to be opened.

When I was a kid one of my favourite places was a second hand shop in my home town of Wimbledon.  Quite apart from the fact that they had the most amazing collection of vintage clothing from anywhere from the 1890s to the 1950s, my favourite part of the shop was the basement, where they kept the books, the whole place smelt of old paperbacks.

I grew up making sure all my coats and jackets had book sized pockets so I could always have with me whatever I was reading.

Now I write myself, I have an ever growing pile by the bed. It takes me for ever to get round to reading something but one day I will. I still get excited when I find a new book that I really want to read and buy it.  Then I go off about my business and there’s this familiar weight in it’s little paper bag.

Anyway, I’m going to rediscover the pleasure of buying books tomorrow. I have a feeling they’re going to feature highly on our Christmas list this year.  Maybe I’ll even get the chance to fit in some reading as well…

So it’s all done bar the shouting.  The Devil in the Red Dress is almost ready to hit the shelves and several months of stress and hard work is finally nearing fruition.  My story of lyingeyes98 and hire_hitman has finally come close to being complete, apart from a last bit of polishing.

The last couple of days, writing an end to the story and composing and epilogue, not to mention giving interviews in the first throws of publicity for The Book, I’m really beginning to appreciate the absurdity of this story.

Now there’s been a lot of discussion around the country about whether the jury were right or not to convict the Clare housewife of plotting to kill her millionaire boyfriend and his two sons.  I’ve heard a lot of arguments about whether Sharon Collins is innocent or guilty and naturally enough the conspiracy theories started flying before she’d even hit the prison yard.

I’ve spent the past couple of months researching the subject.  It comes in handy when you’re writing a book on the subject.  I also sat in court every day of that 32 day trial.  I have read all the emails sent to and from the website hitmanforhire.net, both those from Sharon to the mysterious Tony Luciano or Essam Eid, who may or may not have been a hitman (even a jury couldn’t agree on that one) and the ones from the two hapless guys who contacted the website looking for work (?).

No matter what you think of the hapless Mr Eid, who entered into a life of crime only to be arrested on both outings, the emails sent by “Bernie Lyons”, the woman who kept forgetting not to sign herself Sharon, point in one direction only.

There are a lot of emails.  It makes fascinating reading  - it’s not often you get to read a plot from beginning to end.  But one thing is clear, at least one of these parties was absolutely sure what she wanted.

During the trial both defence teams made a lot of effort to prove that neither Collins nor Eid had actually written those emails.  But when the emails from Tony Luciano are written in the bouncy but broken English that mirrored exactly the language in the statements made to gardai after his arrest in September 2006.  The emails from Lying eyes also have a haunting familiarity for anyone who sat through Sharon Collins trial.

I spoke to her several times during those eight weeks, I watched her give evidence over two days.  I’ve spent months poring over those emails and I’ve come to one inevitable conclusion.  Either the person who wrote them was a Pulitzer worthy author or an Oscar ready method actor or a certain blonde 45-year-old woman from County Clare simply didn’t cover her tracks sufficiently.

I know that it’s easy to look at a story this complex and see some hidden conspiracy but sometimes Occam’s Razor is the way to go.  As the gardai pointed out at Sharon Collins sentencing on Monday, she is the ONLY person who could have sent EVERY email to the wannabe hitman and who was also in the right country to place EVERY phone call to Mr Luciano.

There will no doubt be an appeal at some stage and they will find as they do, but I’ve read a hell of a lot of evidence during the writing of this book and anyone who could have set up Sharon Collins could have commanded a hell of a lot larger prize than the mere €100,000 demanded by Eid when he landed up on her “step-sons” doorstep and demanded money to drop the hit.  We’re talking world class hackers here.

I suppose I’m just asking the general population to look at the facts before they cry conspiracy.  It’s a complex case, believe me! But the outcome certainly appears pretty straightforward when you look at the evidence given in court.

We’re not talking about an innocent little ingenue here.  We’re talking about a 45-year-old divorcee and mother of two grown up sons who knew what side her bread was buttered on and wanted to secure her position.

Nothing wrong with that…but I wouldn’t recommend you look for the ultimate solution on Yahoo, or Google for that matter.  As Sharon Collins found out, there are an awful lot of fakes on the Internet!

So Sharon Collins and Essam Eid woke up this morning knowing how long they’d be looking at the same four walls.  It’s hard to believe that after all this time the story finally has an end.  Now all that’s left was to give my story an end which shouldn’t have been so difficult since they’re one and the same story.

It was a ridiculously busy day yesterday.  The sentence hearing went on most of the day and by the time I finished work it was almost ten o’clock so I was looking forward to a fairly gentle start to the day before settling down to writing.

But some time after 8 the phone rang and there was a voice saying they were calling from the Gerry Ryan Show.  Now Gerry Ryan is one of the top broadcasters in Ireland.  He’s also a pretty integral part of the Sharon Collins story.  One of the most lurid elements of the trial was a certain letter recovered by gardai from the hard drive of one of the computers Sharon had access to.

This letter, only part of which survived, had been written in a fit of pique around April 2006.  It was part of an email to the Gerry Ryan Show and the section that survived was a catalogue of allegations about PJ Howard’s sexual tastes.  Now Sharon has said that these allegations were taken out of context and PJ has said they are just totally untrue but the Gerry Ryan letter is still one of the most distinctive pieces of evidence.

Well today it wasn’t Sharon contacting the show, it was the show contacting me.  I ended up reminiscing with Mr Ryan himself about his appearance in court.  An unexpected start to the day to say the least.  And after the Gerry Ryan Show it was Neil Prendeville on 96FM in Cork to follow up on a piece I did for him before the sentence yesterday…all before 10.30 in the morning.  Then Spin 103 just before 2.  I suppose this is what they mean by publicity - I’m feeling positively over exposed but if it gets The Devil in the Red Dress out to a wider audience then needs must.

But the main work of the day was writing my final chapter.  In fairness this is a story that pretty much tells itself but there was still an awful lot to cover just giving an account of yesterday’s events.

It’s now almost done and now the real work begins.  It’ll be a while yet before I can stop telling this story but I’m beginning to look forward to moving into the next phase of this author business.  Right now though I’m so tired I could fall over so a more in depth post will just have to wait until tomorrow.