Category: Devil in the Red Dress (Page 3 of 7)

A Blast From the Past

11th March 2010 / Abigail / 0 Comments

November 2008 seems like a lifetime ago. Back then I had only just started this blog and was preparing for my book Devil in the Red Dress to come out. Since May 22 I had been eating, sleeping and breathing the story of Sharon Collins and her hitman for hire, Essam Eid first during an eight week trial and then as I picked over the six notebooks of notes as I wrote my book. Then at the start of November Sharon and Eid were both sentenced to six years in jail and less than a fortnight later my book came out.

Today was the first time seeing the two of them again since that November day. Both of them are appealing and today marked the start of that appeal. The courtroom was different, even the building was different but seeing all the main players again in the flesh brought it all flooding back.

Both Sharon and Eid looked well. She came into the courtroom shortly before 11 o’clock, wearing the familiar black trouser suit and white blouse combination she had worn throughout her trial. She had lost weight since her sentencing and her hair was longer, twisted up into a loose French twist, her face framed in with a wispy fringe. She was looking very groomed, with far more makeup than she had worn during the trial, we were speculating whether she had been making use of the many trainee beauticians in the women’s Dochas prison where she’s spent the last year. She looked younger than her 46 years and very small and vulnerable.

Her elder son Gary had come to support her, he was the only one who was there for her today. There was no sign of her beloved PJ, the man she was convicted of conspiring to kill and of soliciting Eid to kill for her. His sons Niall and Robert were also absent, although that’s perhaps unsurprising since they obviously found the trial itself extremely wearing. Also missing was her younger son David, a constant presence during her trial, or the boy’s father Noel.

When his mother entered the court Gary immediately went over to her and sat beside her in the dock to exchange a few words and give her a hug. But mother and son only had a couple of tender moments to share before the doors to the cell area opened again and her co-accused Essam Eid made his entrance.

He cut a dashing figure today. Gone was the casual look he had sported throughout the trial, instead he was wearing a sharp dark grey suit with a snazzy red and black tie. His hair as well had grown in jail and was greyer than it had been. The moustache he now wore on his upper lip was pure grey. He looked far more imposing than he had before, graver than the smiling joker who had watched the evidence mount against him with amusement, one of those observing him remarked on his “statesman-like” appearance.

The legal teams were all back in force with one noted exception. Sharon’s senior counsel was no longer Paul O’Higgins. This time she went with the eminent Mr Brendan Grehan, one of the countries top defence barristers.

When the three judges had taken their seat Tom O’Connell SC stood up on behalf of the DPP to make a rather surprising announcement. He told the court that the DPP could not stand over Collins’ three convictions for conspiring to kill PJ, Robert and Niall Howard. The problem was that the jury had failed to convict Eid, the person named on the charge as the other half of the conspiracy. They had failed to reach a decision on the charges but the net result was that he was not convicted. If he hadn’t conspired then logically she couldn’t have conspired with him. The convictions were therefore “simply unsustainable” in the view of the verdict.

Eid’s counsel David Sutton SC stood up to announce that his client would not after all be appealing his conviction on charges of handling stolen goods and of extorting €100,000 from Robert Howard. However, he would be appealing the length of his sentence. His appeal has been put back until tomorrow to allow the three judge panel time to consider the issue of sentencing. Eid and his legal team quietly left the court and the stage was now clear for Brendan Grehan to set the stage for Sharon’s appeal.

She will be appealing on four separate grounds, Mr Grehan informed the court. Firstly that one of the defence witnesses, a Mr John Keating, had been erroneously treated as an alibi witness by both the defence and the judge in his summing up. Consequently his credibility had been attacked on the witness stand and this had the knock on effect of forcing Sharon to take the stand to fight her corner. Mr Keating had testified that he had been with her on the morning of August 16th, when she was supposed to have sent the first email to the hitmanforhire.us website to hire the services of the mysterious Tony Luciano.

The second ground on which Collins is hoping to get the soliciting charges quashed is that the judges charge did not sufficiently explain the charge of soliciting to the jury. Mr Grehan said today that the soliciting charges had always been there as a fall back for the prosecution, the whole thrust of their case had been centred around the conspiracy charges. He said that, given the jury’s verdict on the conspiracy charges it was unclear how they had approached the matter of soliciting.

Junior counsel Michael Bowman will handle the other two grounds. Today he explained the third ground, that key prosecution witness Teresa Engle should never have taken the stand at all. In the early days of the trial there was a week of heated debate over whether or not Ms Engle, Eid’s partner in crime and second “wife”, should take the stand. Today Mr Bowman explained that Ms Engle’s evidence had not made up part of the book of evidence. The defence had only been given her statements on May 8th 2008, less than two weeks before the trial was due to start. She had only made a further statement on the cooking of the lethal toxin ricin in the kitchen of the house she shared with Eid and his other wife Lisa at Camden Cove in Las Vegas. He said that the prosecution had not disclosed the information about Ms Engle sufficiently.

Mr Bowman said that Ms Engle should never have taken the stand. He also said that given the weight of evidence that had gone to prove Ms Collins was behind the lyingeyes98 Yahoo email address that had corresponded with Tony Luciano, the same weight of evidence had not been available to prove that Essam Eid was behind Tony Luciano. He said that because the FBI had not provided a similar forensic examination of the computers they had seized from the Camden Cove house, it was impossible to prove that Eid had been the one using the address. He pointed out that the date of birth given in setting up the account was that of Teresa Engle not Eid and that there was evidence that suggested she had been accessing email addresses for Eid, Tony Luciano and hitmanforhire.

Tom O’Connell objected that the defence had not raised the issue of the computers in the original trial and had simply been looking for Teresa Engle’s statements.

The fourth ground for appeal will be dealt with tomorrow, before the prosecution have their day on things. It will concern the ricin evidence itself. The defence complained during the trial that they were not able to independently test the samples taken from a contact lens case found in Eid’s cell at Limerick prison on the word of Ms Engle.

It’s fascinating hearing all these details again. I’ve worked on so many other trials in the mean time that the details of this, even after writing Devil, had faded somewhat. Today brought them right back. The issue of the ricin is an interesting one. I devoted a chapter of Devil to it and noted that it was strange that the FBI didn’t get more excited about the finding of a food mixer used in it’s production and still stained in a thick white silt of the stuff. When a man was found with a couple of vials of home made ricin in a motel room in Vegas the authorites were all over it and the Justice Department even noted how pure the stuff had been in their press release. There was nothing like that in the case of the search of the Eid home.

The suggestion that Engle could have been behind Tony Luciano is also an interesting one. It was vaguely alluded to during the trial but the tone of the flirty emails that went between the lyingeyes98 account and Tony Luciano always seemed to fit Eid better. Luciano also sent Lyingeyes several photos showing Eid. one in his prized yellow sports car and another with his daughter Aya.

It’s been interesting to revisit this case. It was always one of the most bizarre and it’s not disappointing on a revisit.

The Devil in the Red Dress Due Back in Court

7th March 2010 / Abigail / 1 Comment

On Thursday this week I’ll be back in court for the first time since the Eamonn Lillis trial came to a close. It’ll be a different court, Criminal Appeal not the Central, but the name on the list is another headlines grabber.

Sharon Collins was convicted at the end of 2008 of conspiring to murder her partner, millionaire property tycoon PJ Howard, and his two adult sons. She might have been successful if she had looked somewhere other than the Internet for her hitman, but as it turned out she ended up with hapless Las Vegas Poker dealer Essam Eid.

Sharon had no idea that Eid wasn’t what he said though and entered into a flirty correspondence with him, plotting all the gruesome details of the triple death. Eid had set up a website – you can see the archived page by clicking on the link at the right of this page – but he wasn’t very good at following through.

In September 2006, when the hit was supposed to go down, he arrived in Ennis, Co. Clare with his girlfriend / wife (depending on who you talk to) Theresa Engle. But instead of carrying out a hit they engaged in a bit of extortion instead. Eid turned up on the doorstep of Howard’s sons house and told them what was going on, then with a devastating failure to understand the fundamentals of the con, he offered people who had nothing to lose by going to the cops, an offer he thought they couldn’t refuse. To cut a long story short, they refused the offer and went to the cops.

The rest, they say, is history. The story is the plot of my book Devil in the Red Dress, so actually you can read all this is more detail by clicking on The Story Behind the Book at the top of the page. It’s going to be very interesting to see my cast again. I got to be on nodding terms and even chatting terms with both Collins and Eid over the course of the mammoth eight week trial in the Summer of 2008. I’ve not seen a trial like it before or since and then when I researched the book I realised the story was even more interesting than what we’d read of in court.

We don’t know what grounds either of them are appealing on but I will bet the events in a court room on the other side of the Atlantic at least get a nod. You see, only weeks before Eid arrived in Co. Clare, he had done the exact same thing in LA and his love interest Theresa Engle arrived back in the states to face those charges not long before her former lover was sentenced to six years in jail here. She was sentenced to eight months in jail, which she duly served and is apparently now back with her former husband who was even good enough to act as a character witness for her when she faced trial.

Here in Ireland the twisted story that was the love life of Essam Eid and his two wives was very much an after thought but researching the case I found it absolutely fascinating. There are also some extraordinary parallels with the kinky goings on that Sharon described to the Gerry Ryan show when she wrote to them complaining about her relationship.

It’s been a while since I’ve covered this story but I will be back on Thursday for old time’s sake. I’ll be blogging here and I’m sure updating on Twitter as proceedings go on. It’s been a busy year so far so it’ll be nice to step back onto familiar ground once more. I’ve never come across a case that reads so much like a Cohen brothers film and it was a fun one to write. If you’re interested in the whole story, it’s all in Devil emails, letters and all At the risk of a shameless self plug, it is definitely worth a read.

Appeal Date Set for the Devil in the Red Dress and her Hitman for Hire

7th December 2009 / Abigail / 0 Comments

It’s been a while in coming but the date has finally been set for Sharon Collins’ and Essam Eid’s appeal. The pair will find out whether they are to serve out the remainder of the six year sentences they received at the end of their 2008 trial in March next year. The two appeals will be heard on the same day and the whole procedure is expected to take two days.

If you’re not familiar with the case you can find out all the gory details here. That’s right, it’s the one I wrote the book about…that’s Sharon Collins herself on the cover on the right. The pair at the centre of one of the most bizarre trials to come before the Irish courts years were convicted after a six week trial last summer.

She’s a Co Clare housewife who decided to shop for more than groceries online. He’s a former Las Vegas poker dealer who had decided to branch out into the “hitman” business. Needless to say it didn’t end well, although at least the plotting came to naught and no one was killed. In the end Sharon was sentenced to six years for conspiring to kill PJ, Robert and Niall Howard. Eid was also sentenced to six years for trying to extort €100,000 from Robert Howard and also for handling items stolen from the Howard family business.

He had already served almost two years in jail after his arrest in September 2006 so will be the first of the two to finish their sentence. However he will have to face additional charges when he returns to the States. His former “wife” Teresa Engle has already served 8 months for her part in a similar scam to the one they tried to pull in Clare, that the pair attempted to pull of in California shortly before their trip to Ireland.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens next.

On the Perfect Trial and the Bane of Tax Returns

21st October 2009 / Abigail / 0 Comments

I haven’t been writing about murder here much for the past few months. There’s a reason for that. Apart from the fact I’ve been busily immersed in a fantasy of my own creation (the book I’ve been working on not some kind of breakdown) it’s been very quiet in that department since July.

The courts summer break, through August and September, is always a quiet period. It’s one of the things I love about working down there…I have two clear months every year to write without a daily deadline. Last year I wrote Devil in the Red Dress, this year I spent the months editing my novel.

The courts have been back since the beginning of October but it’s been a slow start. The trials passing through the doors of the Central Criminal court haven’t been the type that would easily tempt an editor. One of the least savoury aspects of this job is the fact that you rapidly start to see trials from an almost commercial standpoint. There are certain cases that get everyone talking, the one’s with the “water cooler” edge and those are the ones you look out for.

It’s not that journalists are unnecessarily ghoulish, it’s just that we know the trials the public want to read about. Cases with elements that mark them out of the ordinary so that they stand apart from the standard details of these brutal crimes. It’s a sad fact that familiarity really does breed contempt so if there are too many of a particular type of trial the public, and consequently the press lose interest. Every murder used to be big news in the days when there were only a couple a year. These days we can have one a day so the process of selection begins. Anything unusual about a trial will elevate it to something of interest. The bigger the violence, the tragedy or the irony the bigger the splash will be. It’s not unusual, the selection process was no different in the Victorian press, even if the style of writing may have changed over the years.

Anyway, trials like this have been thin on the ground since the courts went back. It might seem as though there is always a big murder in the news but that’s not always the case. There can be a run of trials at some times and nothing for months at others.

So here I am at home waiting on news of one book and the next one not yet started. This is a time to catch up with all the minutiae of self employed life; updating the diary, filing notes and cuttings, filling in tax returns. Tax returns are the bane of the self employed existence. I’m not organised enough to find myself an accountant ahead of the deadline so in the middle of October you’ll find me up to my elbows in receipts, tearing my hair out and shouting at my calculator. I like the freelance life but taxes are our penance for a bit of freedom.

If you’ve never filled out a return you are very, very lucky. It’s a labarynthine form and if you’re not mathmatically inclined or, I’m increasingly inclined to thing, in possession of a qualification in advanced cryptography, trying to understand them is like trying to run while waist deep in mud. They’re doable, eventually, but at the end I always feel as if I’ve handed over a portion of my soul as well as a chunk of my bank balance.

Speaking of which I’d better get back to them.

And Now For Something Completely Different!

22nd September 2009 / Abigail / 0 Comments

For the past couple of months I’ve had my head buried in Word as I worked on finishing my second book. As the end approached I got more and more tunnel visioned and consequently my updates here have been sporadic to say the least.

Well today I sent the finished opus off to my agent. Changes have been made, characters further developed and endings tweaked until I was as happy as I was ever going to be. I’m not saying that I will never write another word in that particular manuscript – there may be changes suggested along the way from agent or, eventually a publisher – but I am now stepping away and saying enough.

It’s been a long journey with this particular book. The opposite experience to last summers frenzy to get Devil in the Red Dress finished so that the book could be released as soon as possible after the sentencing in the trial. The new book is not a trial book. It’s fiction, fantasy fiction at that.

It comes from an idea that had it’s seeds in my childhood. The manuscript I sent to my agent today might have had very little in common with the story I wrote on my mum’s manual typewriter at the kitchen table one winter when I was about 11, but that was the genesis. One or two of the characters share names with the earlier attempt, a few bear a passing physical resemblance but the story is a totally different animal.

I’m happy with my finished draft. I think it can stand up on it’s own but ultimately it doesn’t matter what I think. From now on it’s on it’s own. I’ll be open to suggestions with any last minute tweaks but the story I wanted to write has now been written and it’s time to start something new.

For the past couple of chapters in the edit I’ve been thinking ahead to what comes next. This book will have a sequel, a few chapters of a preliminary draft already exist. Then there’s the world that this blog and Devil belong to. Mainly concerned with crime and courts.

The courts are back in a couple of weeks and I’ll need to check the diary and plan what to do next. I’ve also started thinking about a follow up to Devil but that’s a story for another day.

One thing I’ve learnt about writing over the past year or more is that it never stops. You’re either writing something or you’re thinking about writing something. There is no time when a little part of your brain isn’t looking and noticing and filing away anything that might be useful. This is just the way the mind works in this kind of job, it’s a nervous tick, a habit you get into.

I’ll miss the characters I’ve spent the summer with. They were my first, old friends who I know as well or better than people I see on a regular basis. I’ll never work with them in the same way again and that’s a little sad but I’m excited about what comes next.

It’s been a long time since I’ve explored the thrill of the blank page. I’m looking forward to the blocking and the researching and the roughing that must all come before I’m back to the polishing.

So tomorrow I’ll get up and start that something completely different. The notebooks will be unearthed from their summer resting places and I’ll be back dealing with reality. There’s a couple of weeks to get organised before the courts are back and I’m raring to go.

So I’ll be writing here more regularly from now on. The summer’s over and normal service has been resumed!

An Honourable Mention

20th August 2009 / Abigail / 1 Comment

I was absolutely chuffed a couple of weeks ago to be asked by Chapters Bookstore here in Dublin to do a Q&A for their blog. They have a regular post in which writers answer 5 questions. My answers went up today.

I was honoured to be asked. Ask anyone in Dublin who loves to read and they will tell you that Chapters is the best book shop in town. That’s not to say there aren’t other great ones but Chapters is the largest independent book shop in town and is always a treasure trove of both new and second hand finds.

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know and I am now going to go and try and shrink my head a little!

What I Do On My Summer Holidays…or How to Avoid the Silly Season

5th August 2009 / Abigail / 0 Comments

August is always a quiet month. Even if you’re in a newsroom this is the month when the “silly season” hits. The courts and politicians are all on holiday and so the news that’s there to be covered can be rather thin on the ground. In terms of general news the silly season hasn’t fully hit…one of the few plus points of a rather nasty recession. If, like me, you work in the courts, however, the shop is well and truly shut from the very start of August until the beginning of October.

Some of the courts still sit – the High Court and the Children’s Court still process cases from time to time as needed. The District court too has a constant stream of miscreants, but I don’t work in any of those courts. My bread and butter is the Central Criminal Court so August and September are extremely quiet as there’s simply nothing doing. People may get murdered, other people may get charged, but the actual murder trials are on hold until term starts in October.

So every summer I have a choice. Either sit at home and twiddle my thumbs for two months or try and find something productive to do. Two years ago I was making trips down to the Mahon Tribunal to take down our former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern’s testimony. Last year I wrote Devil in the Red Dress. This year it’s an altogether different project.

I’m writing a novel – well to be more exact, I’ve already written the novel but it still needs further editing before it’s in a state I’m happy to send out to publishers. I’ve mentioned it on numerous occasions on this blog but now I’m several weeks into the editing process it’s become more of an obsession and less casual material for this blog.

Editing is far more of a slog than the free flowing drafting that initially creates the story. This is the time when you are chipping away at the raw material and trying to make it into something that’s actually readable. When I’m drafting the words might flow and the plot might spring into place organically (if I’m very, very lucky) but editing is down to the minutiae, the technical nitty, gritty of the writing process.

This is the time when you realise how often you’ve used certain words and phrases and get over your initial blushes to fix the problem. This is when you take out the irrelevant words; the ands, thens, or whiches that can safely be chopped to make a cleaner more fluid sentence.

Because no matter how fluid your writing may feel when you’re drafting, it will always benefit from a strict vetting with a red pen. When you’re in the middle of it it can seem counter intuitive that this sometimes tortuous process can be the thing that frees up a page but that’s how it works. I always liked the analogy of editing being like a sculptor chipping away at his marble until something beautiful emerges.

Of course, you edit with journalism and non fiction as well but it’s a far more perfunctory affair than with fiction. With journalism you are writing in a much more rigid structure so while it can be cleaned up or streamlined, the kind of in depth surgery that a larger piece requires just isn’t necessary.

So I’ve been spending large chunks of every day sitting at my laptop. I left behind the red pen some time ago and now we’re down to the actual physical changing of the words in the manuscript. When it gets to this stage it really becomes an obsession. The manuscript becomes a god, a drug. Every moment you are away from it there is an ache that simply will not stop.

I’ve been working for the past few weeks on a little table in front of my bedroom window. It’s not a perfect setting. I’m used to working at my desk with all my touchstones and paraphernalia that I like to think make me a better writer, or that help the inspiration to flow. Much as I love my desk, it’s in a rather busy place, fine when I’m on my home in the house but not really workable when there are other people in the house and this summer we have a prolonged guest.

So I sit at my little table and look at the trees outside the window. It’s the kind of place I would have picked to work in the past, before deadlines became an issue and publication of any kind was a simple dream. The fact that the internet up here is sporadic at best and there’s no direct light and there’s not even space to put a mug of tea would drive me up the wall if I was writing my usual fare, which is generally fueled by caffeine and online research.

But for this job of editing, which I have promised to finish before the courts go back (after way too many years almost there) my little table is an oasis. A different space that allows me to have the quiet and the concentration to do the chipping away that I must.

Up here, I wouldn’t now a silly season if it beat it’s wings against the window, although I’d probably be momentarily distracted. It’s another world, far away from deadlines, and column inches and the Four Courts. In the end it’s all work but I’m feeling very fortunate this year to spend the summer writing in the bedroom and watching the sunshine and the barbecues going on below.

Signing on the Dotted Line…

4th June 2009 / Abigail / 0 Comments

Today I officially signed with an agent. One of the most exciting things about writing Devil in the Red Dress has been the opportunities it has opened up. It was impossible to guess when I went into Court 1 in the Four Courts a little over a year ago that the trial I was about to cover would actually change my life.

We knew when Sharon Collins and Essam Eid first came into court that it was going to be an interesting trial. Not many trials pass through the Four Courts that have quite that combination of sex and scandal. There was money, there was an internet plot and Eid himself looked like the quintessential mafiosa…he even had a Las Vegas connection. Even though nobody had died, or maybe because of it, it had all the elements of a first class thriller. It was hardly surprising that one of the main topics of conversation during those long weeks the trial was running, revolved around who would play what in any eventual movie.

Even the accused chipped in to that one. Eid was quite happy to offer the suggestion of Al Pacino to play himself. Sharon wasn’t quite so forthcoming – I think she had her sights set on writing the script herself!

As far as I was concerned it was a book waiting to be written. I had been wanting to write a book for some time and had been looking around for the right plot. I’ve wanted to be an author since I was little…I used to look at the books on the shelves in the library and dream of my name being on the spine of one of them. Ever since I can remember I’ve made up stories. I became a journalist so that I could earn my living from writing and telling stories – even if they weren’t ones I had made up myself.

I might have got waylaid for several years in radio but I’m finally where I set out to be…writing for my living. Devil was something that was an extension of that living, a true crime book like those written by many of my colleagues. I’m proud of it and still get a kick out of seeing it in book shops but I didn’t really expect it to lead anywhere beyond that. A local story for the local market. Don’t get me wrong, I love what I do and Devil won’t be my last foray into the non fiction market but true crime books written about high profile trials don’t always have a very long shelf life.

What’s been remarkable about Devil is that is has opened more doors than I thought it would. For the last few years I’ve been working on a novel. It’s very, very different from what I do on a day to day basis but it’s something I love doing and I have always believed in the story. In case you’re curious it’s a satirical fantasy, not the swords and sandals variety but more rooted in reality, a little like the work of Jasper Fforde or Malcolm Pryce although it sounds so cheesy to compare myself to two successful authors when I’m only starting out.

Being totally subjective I’m not even sure it’s as funny as either of them or if I’m even making a fair comparison. I’ve spent so long pitching the book to various agents around the place that pat comparisons like that have a habit of tripping off my tongue whenever I describe the book to anyone – something I’m going to have to work on if (when?) it finds a publisher. Basically the plot, without going into much detail here and trying not to be overly cryptic, has journalists, a referendum, dodgy politicians and a sociopathic, womanising mythical beast as one of the main characters. As I said, it’s a little different to the stuff I write on a daily basis…I don’t do the politics beat.

Before Devil came along the novel had been sitting in a yellow folder in the top drawer of the filling cabinet and, to be honest, I was thinking of passing it over and started on something else. But last summer changed all that and that is how I came to start this post with the sentence “Today I officially signed with an agent”. She will be handling the novel, and it’s two sequels and, as anyone reading the last couple of days posts will have realised, this summer I will be working on fiction rather than fact (except when I have to pay the bills).

I still feel slightly awkward writing about fiction in anything other than a purely theoretical basis. I normally write this blog as a journalist and changing key in this way feels like baring a private part of myself that I’m not used to sharing. But this is getting serious now and with any luck I’ll be writing the blurb by this time next year. Today was the first step towards that and I’m looking forward to the work ahead.

Devil in the Red Dress Steps Out Into the World

8th May 2009 / Abigail / 2 Comments

My book, Devil in the Red Dress is now officially available in the UK. It’s the first time it’s been available outside Ireland and I’m interested to see how the story will translate somewhere that hasn’t been so familiar with the whole Lying Eyes, Tony Luciano affair.

One of the reasons I was attracted to writing the book was the fact that the story reads like a thriller and could have happened anywhere. Even the barristers made references to the Coen Brothers and film noir. To be honest you simply don’t get cases like this cropping up in Ireland and it was simply too good a tale to pass by.

I was aware while I was covering the trial and later researching the book over last summer that the story had gone truly global. I did a lot of research on line (fittingly enough) and every time I searched people involved in the story I got hits from further and further afield. Even doing a search now you can find accounts from the Telegraph, The Guardian and the Daily Record in the UK and CNN in the States. I’m not surprised particularly, it is a great story.

What did amaze me though was how far the coverage extended, there’s coverage from Spain, Hungary and even Vietnam. Now my Spanish, Hungarian and Vietnamese aren’t great, so I’m not sure what spin they were taking but it’s the first time I’ve covered a story that has become such an international talking point.

When you work in a country the size of Ireland it’s easy to get caught up in the local aspect of news…there’s frequently little else but the odd time, when a story arrives with a truly international dimension, that spans from the west of Ireland to the casinos of Las Vegas with a pitstop in Spain, it’s difficult not to get excited.

A lot of the Irish press focused once again on the local angle, the fact that the scheming femme fatale behind the internet plot to kill her millionaire boyfriend was a County Clare housewife from an old Ennis family. Certainly this is a case that has gone down in Clare legend and it’ll be a long time before it’s forgotten in Ireland as a whole.

But there is another side to the story. The so-called hitman Sharon Collins hired to do her dirty work was an Egyptian poker dealer in Las Vegas. His story and his conquests had travelled through Ohio, Michigan & Illinois. Much of the plotting took place while Sharon was staying with her partner PJ Howard at his apartment in Feungirola in Malaga. This was a dimension that lifted things out of the parochial into the international.

I was fascinated by the international dimension and explored the American angle in far more detail the majority of my colleagues. I’m not saying clever me, simply that this was the bit of the story that interested me. It’s not often the bright lights of Vegas shine on an Irish court case after all.

It remains to be seen how my account of the whole twisted mess does on it’s first foray abroad but I wish it well. It’s a story that should reach a wider audience. But we’ll just have to wait and see.

A Collins in the News Again…

19th February 2009 / Abigail / 0 Comments

When Sharon Collins decided to hire Essam Eid to kill her partner PJ Howard and his sons Robert and Niall she ensured that anyone connected with the case would become a honey pot for the Irish media for months, if not years, afterwards.

Sharon herself can guarantee the column inches for merely catching a cold while the intensely private Howard family have complained that they can no longer conduct their property business in Ennis, Co Clare without being constantly aware of prying eyes and smutty jokes.

Well today Lying Eyes effect can be seen again. Sharon’s former husband, Noel, the father of her two sons and a familiar face to anyone who attended her trial, has appeared in Dublin Circuit Civil Court in an employment law scuffle.

It appears that Noel, when working as a security company manager, had allowed a security manager to sleep on the job and had got the sack as a result. The full story is here.

It’s the kind of story that runs through the courts all the time without comment. What makes it suddenly news is Mr Collins proximity to the notorious Devil in the Red Dress. I can’t help feel sorry for the man. All he did was stand by the mother of his children and give support to his sons, now he will be in the deflected spotlight for a very long time to come.

That’s the thing with high profile trials…the story keeps running long after the verdict has been announced. For all those connected with the Ennis femme fatale this means that their lives are now flagged on the paparazzi antenna. They might not have done anything but they too will pay some of the price. That’s just the way things are – but that’s unlikely to be of any comfort to Noel Collins as he suddenly steps into the limelight.

The Books

Tags