Tag: Journalism (Page 4 of 14)

Failure to Prove Intent

29th January 2010 / Abigail / 1 Comment

The camera men shoved forward towards the front door of the Criminal Courts of Justice this evening. Eamonn Lillis had just been found guilty of the manslaughter of his wife Celine Cawley. The press had gathered outside the door in the hope that the Cawley family would say a few words but the convicted man was first on the scene.

As he came out of the doors the scrum pushed forward and the barrage of flashguns was blinding. He pushed through, as he had through the crowds of onlookers every day of his trial, his head lowered and his hands stuffed into his pockets. But he was now a guilty man, who will learn his punishment next Thursday, and the snappers were not going to let him get away. As he disappeared down the road they ran after him and his footsteps could not be heard over the snapping of the shutters.

The verdict had come at 6.25 after the jury had been deliberating for almost nine and a half hours. There had been a lot of false starts in the day, as the jury manager appeared with a request for a smoke break or a point of clarification but when he appeared at around ten past 6 the whole room could tell this was it.

The room filled quickly and the tension heightened. The families took their seats and Mr Lillis sat into the small box that looks suspiciously like a dock in the new courtrooms. He looked visibly nervous and was biting his lip as he waited for the judge. A couple of rows behind the jury box his family were also showing the stress of the three week trial.

Eventually Mr Justice Barry White took his seat and the jury came out. They looked tired after their three days of deliberation. The registrar asked the foreman if they had reached a decision on which at least ten of them were agreed. He said yes and handed over the issue paper.

There was a moment of bated breath as the registrar turned and unfolded the paper, reading it through for a moment before reading out the verdict. Mr Lillis was guilty of manslaughter. The foreman had also noted down which of the four possible reasons they had decided on for this result…that the prosecution had proved that the death of Celine Cawley was an unlawful killing but not that Mr Lillis had intended to kill her or to cause her harm.

Mr Lillis barely flinched as the verdict was read out. He sat, his head cocked, as he had for the majority of the more damning evidence in the trial. His family took the news with a slight look of relief…it could after all have been so much worse.

In the bench at the back of the courtroom where the Cawley family had sat throughout the trial, Celine’s niece wept openly beside her grandfather. Celine’s sister Susanne’s emotion only showed as they left the courtroom, the tears welling up as they headed to the offices of the Courts Service Victim Support.

They stayed hidden from sight until they finally came to be confronted by the wall of photographers. It was announced that no statement would be made until after the sentence had been handed out then posed with quiet dignity for the photograph. The press parted with minimum fuss as they headed towards the steps and they were left to leave unobstructed.

We will all gather at the courts next week to find out what will happen next. Until then Eamonn Lillis will sign on twice daily as he puts his affairs in order. He is now, as Judge White pointed out, a convict, even on bail.

A Difference of Opinion

21st January 2010 / Abigail / 0 Comments

We were back to the forensics today. Assistant State Pathologist Dr Michael Curtis took the stand to tell the jury his findings from the autopsy of Celine Cawley.

We’ve heard various different scenarios for what happened on December 15th 2008. We know that the account Eamonn Lillis gave of his wife’s death to gardai, emergency services and members of his wife’s family was a lie. At the start of the trial last week Mr Lillis’s defence counsel Brendan Grehan stood up at informed the jury that Mr Lillis admitted that his account of a violent attack by a brick wielding burglar was a complete fabrication.

The fictional burglar has made a number appearances over the course of the trial but we’ve all been waiting to the alternative account of events that Mr Lillis said his solicitor advised him not to tell.

Then yesterday his former mistress Jean Treacy took the stand. She told the court that Mr Lillis had told her how he had fought with his wife and in the struggle that followed she slipped on the frosty decking outside the spacious house in Howth and cracked her head on a cobble brick left over from paving the patio.

Today Mr Lillis’s daughter gave a very similar account. Speaking through a video link from a room in another part of the court complex the 17-year-old recounted the account her father had given her of her mother’s death.

She had seen him after he was released from remand in jail. She had spent the Christmas and New Year in Austria but it had been “the world’s worst Christmas” for her. She told the court that her father had told her he and Celine had scuffled during an argument about putting meal worms out for the local robin and she had slipped.

She said her father told her he had panicked after his wife had died and lied. “He did it for me but I didn’t really appreciate that he did it.” She said that she had forgiven her father for what had happened but not for the lie. “I asked me could I forgive him and I said yes but I couldn’t really forgive him for the lie.”

Eamonn Lillis sat with his eyes fixed on his daughter’s face as she gave her evidence. It was the first time in the trial he had looked up for the majority of a witness’s evidence but this morning it looked as though he had more difficulty looking away.

She told the court that her father had told her her mother had hit him with the brick she had hit her head on and had bitten his finger.

This afternoon we heard another possible sequence of events. Dr Michael Curtis told the court that he doubted that the wounds Celine Cawley had received to her head were all the result of a fall. One wound, on the back right side of the head, could have been but the other two, one toward the front on the left above the ear, the other towards the top of the head on the right side were in unusual positions for this kind of cause.

He said that he did not think the account given by Jean Treacy was plausible, especially a reference to Celine falling then bouncing back up like a beach ball. He told the court “In my opinion that account does not in any way sufficiently explain the injuries of the deceased.”

He went on to say “I don’t think she suffered the three wounds from a single fall and I don’t think that she fell three times and I think two of these wounds are in positions that are not typical of scalp wounds caused by falls.”

Dr Curtis said that in his opinion Celine Cawley had been hit with a blunt implement to the front of the head causing her to fall onto her face. She was then hit two further times to the back of the head causing scrapes and bruises to her face. He said that the weapon would have been wielded with only moderate force.

These head injuries would have resulted in concussion and loss of consciousness but there was no internal bleeding in the skull and no skull fractures. The cause of death was listed as blunt force trauma to the head but also obesity and an enlarged heart which had meant that, with her breathing restricted from her position she would have suffered oxygen starvation and this too had caused her death.

He told the court that her injuries taken individually would not necessarily be fatal and that her life could have been saved if she had received prompt medical attention.

Dr Curtis disagreed when Brendan Grehan suggested that he could not speculate on how the wounds were delivered or in what order. He said that he had been told by gardai that Ms Cawley was discovered lying face down and this meant that the wound to the front of the skull would have had to be dealt first.

He agreed that if Ms Cawley had not been lying on her front his theory would have been weakened. He said that blood spatter on the wall near the living room window could either have come from a wound or a blood soaked weapon. Any further analysis, he said, was the work of a forensic scientist not a pathologist.

The trial continues tomorrow.

Text Messages and Blood Spatters

18th January 2010 / Abigail / 0 Comments

Over the course of their ten week affair Eamonn Lillis and Jean Treacy sent each other over 300 messages. The messages stopped abruptly when Mr Lillis’s wife, Celine Cawley was died violently at the couple’s home.

Today Mr Lillis’s trial heard details of the texts that passed between the lovers over a couple of days in the middle of December 2008, the days surrounding the death of Ms Cawley.

The court heard last week that Jean Treacy was a massage therapist at the Howth Haven Salon who was having a passionate affair with Mr Lillis.

Today the court heard that the first text found between the two was sent on November 2nd. They continued, getting more frequent until December 16th when Ms Treacy texted Mr Lillis to suggest they stopped seeing each other for a while.

On Sunday December 14th, the day before Ms Cawley died, Eamonn Lillis texted Jean Treacy at 12.17 that afternoon. “In car with [his daughter, who cannot be named for legal reasons] Will contact you in 30.x” Sure enough half an hour later he texted again. “Hi my love. Thanks for the text on the way home from the stables. C is getting car to see horse. I really miss you my baby. Call or text asap. I love you.”

That night Ms Treacy texted him just before 11p.m. “Transporter 3 good. Love Jason Statham.You staying at home tomorrow? K going into office for part of morning. Could meet you somewhere. Miss you so much. x”

The reply did not survive but a couple of minutes she texted again. “No pressure though, OK Baby? x”

A couple of minutes later she sent a third text. “Well as usual I’ll have to play it by ear. Will contact you as soon as possible in morning. Good night my angel. Love you infinitely. x”

The text morning she sent an empty text at 9.44. Then at almost 10.30 she sent to two words “Everything OK?” This would have been almost half an hour after Mr Lillis called the emergency services saying that he and his wife had been attacked and he couldn’t find a pulse on his wife.

At 11.14 she texted again. “Getting a bit worried now Babe.”

The next day she texted him just before 3 o’clock in the afternoon. She had obviously heard what had happened. The message was simple. “[His daughter] that’s what you really need to focus on. I’m not abandoning you. You just need to concentrate on you & [daughter] and what’s happening to you. To do this I don’t think we should have any contact until things have calmed down (for both our sakes). I know you will understand. Everyone is looking for a story. This is not an easy decision for me to make. Will be thinking of you and be with you every step of the way. Bye. x”

That night she texted again. At ten past 11 she sent; “I wanted you to know I still feel the exact same about you OK. I’ll keep the appointment times in case you need them. See you at the funeral. Best of luck with everything always. x”

We also heard that Celine Cawley’s blood was found spattered about five feet up the wall between the double doors into the utility room and the window into the living room near where Ms Cawley’s body was found at the back of the house of the Windgate Road in Howth. The spatter was too far away from the main pool of blood where Ms Cawley was found to have been made by the same incident but would have happened at around the same time.

Forensic scientist Dr Stephen Doakes agreed with defence counsel Brendan Grehan that the spatter could have been caused by someone hitting their head on the sharp edge by the window. There was no blood on the window so whatever happened would have happened over towards the double doors into the house.

There were also drops of blood on the steps that lead to these double doors. Dr Doakes said the drops would have come from a narrow object that was heavily bloodstained and dripping blood. Something like a finger or a brick but not a head wound.

The trial will continue tomorrow.

Is the Grass Always Greener?

14th January 2010 / Abigail / 0 Comments

Eamonn Lillis was quite definite when he told gardai he had not had an affair. After his arrest, six days after his wife’s death on December 15th 2008, he was woken in his brother-in-laws house and arrested on suspicion of murdering his wife, Celine Cawley.

In a series of interviews that Sunday he refused to comment when he was asked about his relationship with his wife. He agreed they had slept in different bedrooms as a rule but this was down to her heavy snoring and thrashing about in the bed.

He was quite definite that he had not been having an affair in the ten weeks leading up to his wife’s death. He had known Jean Treacy only as the woman who gave him his weekly massage, he told them. Celine went to her as well.

The gardai told him they had been speaking to Jean and she told a different story. A story in which an advance was made over a massage and a kiss was snatched in the salon where she worked. They suggested regular weekly meetings on a Monday when she wasn’t working, three visits to his home.

At first Mr Lillis was determined in his denial but as the details stacked up he admitted the affair. A mid life crisis, he called it. He had been infatuated but wasn’t a jealous man. He said he had known she was due to marry the following year and it didn’t bother him.

He told them he had worked out a “resolution list” with his mistress and then discussed the list with his wife over a bottle of wine. The list covered things he was unhappy about in his life, the man he wanted to be, what he wanted to change. The talk was very therapeutic, he said, it helped the marriage.

He denied that Celine had found out about his affair on the day that she died although he agreed he was due to meet Jean in their regular Monday meeting. He couldn’t do that to his wife, he said. He didn’t have it in him.

He refused to comment when gardai suggested that his wife’s death had been a terrible accident, that he had just snapped under intolerable strain. He couldn’t do something like that to Celine he said. He wanted to speak to his solicitor.

He also told gardai that he had changed his clothes after picking up an Irish Times in a local newsagents. He had been going to take the dogs for a walk so had changed into combats and walking boots. He had put the jeans he was wearing in the wash room and changed his dark top and black boots with white trim.

The jury was shown the contents of a black bin liner, found in a small suitcase under some cameras and lenses. The suitcase had been submerged under boxes of children’s toys, dolls and children’s books. In the bin liner were a pair of jeans and a black V neck sweater, a pair of white socks and a pair of boxers. All the clothing was bloodstained. As was a dish cloth, a pair of men’s outdoor gloves, a pair of rubber gloves and several wads of kitchen roll. The bag also contained an empty sauce bottle and a yoghurt pot.

The jury were also shown a bloodstained grey polo shirt found in the upstairs bedroom used by Mr Lillis and a pair of black boots with white trim with blood stains on the soles.

We now have a very good idea of the layout of the house in Howth where this story played out. This morning the prosecution played a video tour of the house filmed by gardai. The camera swung slowly round the property showing a home in the run up to Christmas. Gold tinsel was draped over every picture and the Christmas tree made another appearance.

Breakfast things were abandoned on the counter in the kitchen and beds were dishevelled. The house had an empty, deserted look, made more acute by the inscrutable eye that looked on it in the aftermath of a forensic investigation.

The camera lingered over the soft toys in a bedroom, clutter on a bathroom shelf, an ornamental cow with daisy spots across it’s back in the garden. All the trapping of lives lived before events that would change them forever. A Marie Celeste moment before tragedy struck at the start of an ordinary week just before Christmas.

Concessions and Lies

12th January 2010 / Abigail / 0 Comments

Eamonn Lillis told gardai and the emergency services that both he and his wife, Celine Cawley, had been attacked by a masked attacker in their Howth home. He said that this balaclava’d and gloved man had hit his wife over the head with a brick and then turned on him.

This morning, after prosecution counsel Mary Ellen Ring had finished her opening speech, Mr Lillis’s counsel, Brendan Grehan stood up to make a number of concessions. It’s normal enough to hear that the defence aren’t going to argue over the conditions of their client’s arrest or the way the scene what preserved and the evidence gathered, the technicalities of the investigation of a serious crime. In total Mr Grehan made eight concessions that there had been no hiccups in how the gardai did their job. Then he came to the ninth admission.

Mr Lillis, he said, admitted lying to gardai and emergency services about the circumstances in which his wife had suffered the injuries that led to her death. There had been no burglary, no intruder, no one apart from him in the house when she was injured.

According to the prosecution’s opening speech, the post mortem evidence will show that Celine Cawley died from a combination of factors, three blows to the head with a blunt object and more mundane complications after a fall when the now obese former model had been unable to breath after falling unconscious on her front.

We were also told, in the prosecution’s opening argument, that Mr Lillis had been having an affair in the months before his wife’s death. Gardai had discovered a significant amount of phone traffic from phones belonging to Mr Lillis to phones belonging to a woman called Jean Treacy.

Ms Treacy is sure to be a major witness, as we have been told that she will also tell the court about the account Mr Lillis gave her about his wife’s death…a fight that turned physical, an icy deck and a fatal slip. But so far all we’ve heard is the outline of the prosecution case, the evidence will come later.

The new courthouse, which will be officially opened by the President of Ireland at the weekend, is hosting it’s first murder trial. As proceedings got underway today there were some noticeable teething troubles. Soon after the jury had taken their seats there was a loud alarm and a disembodied voice began to announce an evacuation but was quickly cut of in mid sentence. But despite the technical gripes there are certain new high tech whizz bangs that certainly add to the experience of the initial rather dry evidence.

The first couple of witnesses in a criminal trial are almost always maps and photographs. Before the trial goes any further the jury are provided with maps of the area in question and photographs of places or objects that are going to be referred to by subsequent witnesses. Normally if you’re sitting in the body of the court this evidence is rather dull. They don’t hand out maps to the whole courtroom and it’s the same with the photos so unless you’ve got extremely good eyesight there’s a lot of talking about things you can’t see.

Now though, the maps and photographs appear on large screens behind the judge. We can all see the high hedge that surrounds the house on Windgate Road in Howth. The trappings of a privileged life of the occupants are visible to all; the large garden, stables, hot tub. We can also all see the bright red stain that covers part of the decking outside the kitchen,

Crime scene photos are always uncomfortable windows on a tragedy, the flotsam and jetsam of normal lives mixed in with the detritus left by the emergency services. On the kitchen table a portable oxygen mask sits beside a black woman’s handbag and the Irish Times. The sad remnants of a Christmas cut short are visible in each picture, tinsel draped over pictures, a Christmas tree standing forlornly in the corner of the living room.

In an upstairs bedroom the gloved hand of one of the garda forensics team holds a grey top. A bedside table home to a scatter of change, a Lotto ticket and a watch that we are later shown has traces of blood and tissue on it.

In her opening speech, Mary Ellen Ring told us that Mr Lillis had called the emergency services shortly after 10 o’clock on the morning of December 15th 2008. After lunch we heard a recording of that call. Mr Lillis’s voice rang across the courtroom, sounding strangely high pitched and almost hysterical. We listened as he was led through the CPR procedure by the emergency phone operator from Dublin Fire Brigade. He could be heard breathing raggedly and deeply as he listened to the instructions, his voice rising even higher as his actions failed to get a response.

We also head from members of the fire brigade and gardai who responded to Mr Lillis’s frantic call. Garda Colum Murray described arriving first on the scene and being greeted by a Mr Lillis who was “very unsteady on his feet” and “not making much sense”. Mr Lillis also had visible injuries, scratches to his right cheek and two bruises on his left cheek and forehead that looked as if they had been made by a heavy object.

Barbara Cahill, from Kilbarrack Fire Station also arrived at the scene that morning. She told the court how she had needed to salt the slippery decking after one of her colleagues slipped and fell on the icy surface.

The trial will continue tomorrow and the story will develop.

A Fair and Swift Verdict

10th December 2009 / Abigail / 2 Comments

The jury only took half an hour to return their verdict on whether Ann Burke, who hit her husband Pat 23 times over the head with a hammer while he slept, was guilty of murder or manslaughter.

The verdict, when it came was the expected one. Both prosecution and defence were in agreement on the facts of the case and the psychiatrists both sides had produced to give evidence were agreed that Ann Burke was suffering from a mental disorder at the time of the killing. The verdict of not guilty by reason of diminished responsibility was a logical one, given the evidence in the trial.

The jury were at liberty to come to a range of verdicts from acquittal right through to murder but even the defence informed them that there was no doubt this was an unlawful killing and as such should result in some form of guilty verdict.

The trial was a brief one, only one garda gave evidence, rather than the endless procession you will usually find in a murder trial. Even the post mortem evidence was simply read into the record since there was no debate about it’s findings. The only other kind of murder trial that generally moves this quickly is one where the verdict is not guilty by reason of insanity.

In this case, both sides were careful to tell the jury, insanity was not an issue. Ann Burke had suffered from a severe depressive illness at the time of the killing but this was not counted as insanity. But in both sorts of trials, when both side agree on the medical diagnosis, the jury is instructed more than usual.

In a standard murder trial a jury is free to weigh up the evidence put before them and come to any one of the available verdicts. These will usually be acquittal, manslaughter or murder. Frequently it’s difficult to tell what the outcome will be, the evidence must be weighed carefully and the line between the options isn’t always clear cut.

But in cases where there’s a solid psychiatric diagnosis like this one, the verdict is almost a foregone conclusion. The jury must be the one’s to make the final decision. There’s only one situation where the judge will tell them to sign the issue paper a certain way and that’s when, for various reasons, the prosecution case has a serious undeniable flaw and the judge decides the only option is an acquittal. If the verdict is to be a guilty one then the accused still has a right to be judged by a jury of their peers.

Ann Burke will get to spend Christmas with her family before she is sentenced on January 25th. In the meantime a psychiatric report will be prepared and victim impact statements made by her family.

A Childhood in the Shadow of Violence

9th December 2009 / Abigail / 0 Comments

Linda Burke’s earliest memory was standing in her pyjamas with her older brother at the top of the stairs looking down at her father. He was holding a loaded shotgun and shouting that he would blow their heads off. She would have been three or four at the time.

Her mother Ann is on trial in the Central Criminal Court, charged with murdering the man whose abuse was catalogued for the jury today. Linda described sitting in school on a Tuesday, the day her father was paid his dole when she was a child. Those days her mind was not on her lessons as she worried about what row would meet her when she went home.

When she was six her father taught her to tell the time. When she got the little and big hands mixed up he hit her across the face. When she cried in the face of the stinging pain he hit her to shut up and when she couldn’t he picked her up and threw her across the room.

Her father and mother were always fighting, she told the court. When she was thirteen her father hit her mother over the head with a sweeping brush, splitting her forehead open. He wouldn’t let Linda call for an ambulance forcing her to treat her mother herself as best she could.

Ann Burke had also had a childhood marred by violence. Her father, a carpenter, would hit the pub every Sunday, arriving home to batter his wife and children and throw the dinner on the floor. She told psychiatrists after the killing about lying in bed waiting for her father to come home drunk on a Sunday night.

Her mother eventually took a stand when she was diagnosed with cancer. Ann’s eldest brother was still living at home, a quiet man who had never married and who was completely unable to stand up to his father. Their mother got a barring order against their father banning from the family home but by then the damage had already been done and Ann, the baby of the family, was already destined to follow in her footsteps.

She left school at thirteen to follow her siblings into a knitwear factory. She met Pat Burke when she was 18 or 19.

Ann Burke didn’t consider it odd when her new husband beat her. It was all she had ever known. But the abusive life eventually took it’s toll. She started drinking because it was the only way she had enough courage to stand up to her husband’s drunken rages. She had tried to leave but always went back to him. The barring order she eventually took out in 2004 was short lived. Pat Burke simply refused to go.

By the time August 2007 arrived she was suffering from a severe depressive illness. Her self confidence was destroyed, she felt worthless and thought that her children’s lives would be better if she took her own life, sparing them the constant rows. She told the psychiatrists she spoke to that her husband had taken to raping her when she refused him sex and she could not see any way out of her situation.

On August 19th 2007, after her husband had arrived home in the small hours of the morning drunk and abusive yet again, she picked up the hammer that was lying in the bedroom and hit him over the head around 23 times, shattering his skull and irreparably damaging his brain. Pat Burke would have died quickly from his injuries. Ann Burke wanted to follow him.

Psychiatrists for both the Defence and the Prosecution agreed that she acted with diminished responsibility as a result of the mental illness she was suffering from. They told the jury the depression existed even when she wasn’t drinking and alcohol, while present, was not the driving force between the attack. Her feelings of desperation had driven her to the violent and tragic act.

The case is expected to finish tomorrow. The speeches won’t be long. Then it’s up to the jury.

Once Again the Irish Courts Ignore the Press

25th November 2009 / Abigail

Photo by Michael Stamp

Today the Central Criminal Court sat for the first time in the new Criminal Courts of Justice Complex at Parkgate Street in Dublin. The €140 million complex is the largest major court development since the Four Courts were built in the 18th Century.

It’s a massive complex – 23,000 square feet which house 22 courts and 450 rooms. In January, all criminal matters will be dealt with there – the Central, Circuit, District and Special criminal courts will all move in, leaving the Four Courts the preserve of civil matters.

It’s an impressive building – large, airy and imposing. There are state of the art jury facilities, cells and victim support quarters. Today in Court 6 photographers and cameramen were allowed in to mark the historic moment when Mr Justice Paul Carney took his seat to preside over the first list.

There were a couple of initial teething problems. As the first trial got underway the witnesses had to affirm as they were sworn in because no one had thought to bring a Bible into the new complex. There were delays as prisoners were brought up from the cells but matters by and large continued without a major hitch.

If you are a journalist however the new courts pose quite significant problems. Once again the concept of designated seating for the media has been ignored and a single bench provided, if we’re lucky enough to get to it before someone else is sitting there.

The new media rooms, which we had been promised such great things about, turned out to be two bunkers on the ground floor, next to the toilets. Low ceilinged, with no windows whatsoever the new rooms are little more than boxes.

While other offices are equipped with sinks and ample space for kettles and other necessities of office life, the press rooms have no such facilities. The one provided for print, radio and photographers has space for a mere ten people (little use in a high profile trial which can easily attract 40 or 50 journalists on any one day). There are only plug sockets on one side of the room. Even if your battery holds up there’s no reception for phones or 3G modems. One of the more venerable reporters on the scene commented that facilities had been better for the press in the 1950s.

The TV journalists fare little better. RTE and TV3 will have to share a room only slightly larger than the box shared by print reporters, radio and photographers. Hardly ideal when a deadline is approaching for everyone.

There was a great feeling of anger and disappointment from the press benches today. We had been promised the sun, moon and stars with the new facilities but now found ourselves longing for the old media room in the Four Courts. We might get locked out once the office staff go home at 4.30 (a major problem if you’re waiting for a jury until 7 or so) but they actually have windows and over the years people have brought in a kettle, microwave etc. It’s quite civilised. It’s even bigger than the space we’ve been given now.

The most depressing thing about the paltry facilities is that they don’t really come as a surprise. the Irish Courts Service tends to tolerate journalists at best. We’re seen as an inconvenience, a drain on resources. The idea that we are representatives of the public and our presence ensures that justice is carried out in public – as laid down in Article 34.1 of the Irish Constitution – is simply not considered. In the case of certain trials, like rape, where the general public are banned from the court, we’re the only public representatives allowed in.

In Irish courts the press frequently have to argue their right to attend and the grudging facilities provided in the new courts are symptomatic. We don’t have automatic rights to see certain court documents but rely instead on the kindness of court staff and barristers.

While there are court staff who will bend over backwards to help the press they are in the minority. Sadly the attitude that we are little more than vermin seems to be spreading and matters will only get worse as familiar faces retire and are replaced with new blood.

Whatever you might think of the individual media outlets in Ireland it’s a sad state of affairs when a country’s media are disregarded to this extent. Court stories have always made up a large part of the news since the earliest days of the media and it’s right and proper that they do. We don’t simply follow trials to pick over the lurid details of the latest high profile murders. Court stories also cover miscarriages of justice, shine a light on injustices, show the failings of the state – and the rest.

In a country where the Taoiseach will say publically that Freedom of Information is a waste of resources and so many of those in power have shown utter disregard for the good of the electorate there needs to be greater transparency not less. The press weren’t consulted on what facilities were needed in the new courts and the attitude is that we should make do with crumbs. Ultimately though this isn’t to do with the lack of a view from the press room, it’s to do with something far more fundamental. I’m writing this from a personal perspective but this stuff is important and these attitudes shouldn’t be allowed to continue.

Going Postal?

17th November 2009 / Abigail / 1 Comment

Sharon Whelan was getting ready for Christmas. She rang her parents three times that Christmas Eve to let her father know when it was safe for him to drop round the presents her parents had been keeping hidden from their two grandaughters, Nadia and Zsara.

Eventually, at around 10.45, she rang her dad to tell him that the children were finally asleep and it was safe to bring round the presents without spoiling the suprise of Santa’s visit. He drove the short distance to the run down farmhouse she was renting and parked a short distance away so as not to wake the children. Sharon came to meet him at the gate and took the presents from him. That was the last time he saw his daughter alive.

Today, 23-year-old postman Brian Hennessy admitted to murdering Sharon, Zsara and Nadia. He will serve two life sentences for his crimes as the sentences for the murder of the two children will only start after he has served one for killing their mother. Dressed in a greyish brown suit, his wavy blonde hair reaching his collar, Hennessy wept as Sharon’s brother John Whelan read a victim impact statement on behalf of the family, telling Hennessy that he had destroyed Christmas for the family for ever more.

Last Christmas, Hennessy had just finished four straight nightshifts in the sorting office in Kilkenny post office. He arrived home from work after his shift finished at 8am on Christmas Eve and rested for a while. At 10 o’clock his mother sent him out to get the turkey for the next days festive dinner then, after another brief rest he went to see his girlfriend of three years.

His birthday had been the day before so he was due to meet some work colleagues for celebratory drinks at the famous Kytlers Inn in Kilkenny town itself. They met at 3.30 that afternoon and stayed until 8 when they were joined by his father and his brother. Hennessy and his family then went back to a pub nearer the family home in Windgap, Co. Kilkenny and the evening ended at the local, Guineys. Hennessy had now been drinking for 10 hours and was definitely the worse for wear.

When Guiney’s shut it’s doors at around 1.30 Hennessy and his sister headed back to his parents’ house but he soon left again, saying he had left his jacket at the pub. Revellers making their way home saw him weaving his way down the middle of the road in the direction of the pub but he never got there. He would later tell gardai that he decided to go looking for sex.

Sharon Whelan was the older sister of an ex girlfriend of his. The relationship had been short-lived, only two months some four years previously, and he only knew Sharon through that. There had never been a relationship between the two but he decided that the 30-year-old single mother was the one to satisfy his urges that night. He told gardai that he had bumped into her one day and she had told him he should call up to the house some time. He decided that Christmas Eve was to be the time.

Brian Hennessy is the only one who knows what happened when he knocked on Sharon Whelan’s door in the small hours of Christmas morning and he claims not to remember the exact details. Sharon Whelan’s body was found to have extensive bruising around the vaginal and anal areas and bruising to her face, legs and knees. She also had all the classic marks of strangulation, bruising to the throat, a broken hyoid bone and tiny pin point haemorrhage’s around the eyes and face.

Hennessy denies raping her. He told gardai that the sex was consensual, that she brought him into the bedroom she shared with her two daughters and that they had quite and gentle sex in the bed where her 7-year-old daughter Zsara was sleeping, while 2-year-old Nadia slept in a cot nearby. He says that afterwards, as he was leaving, Sharon threatened to tell the local gossips that they had slept together and he did not know what came over him. He strangled her to stop his girlfriend finding out. The prosecution contend that it wasn’t an illicit liaison she was threatening to tell about but a horrific rape and it was this secret he killed to protect.

Hennessy says he killed Sharon in the living room of the house. He described to gardai how he put his hands around her throat and squeezed for several minutes until she fell to the floor dead. He said he sat with her for several minutes deciding what to do before making up his mind to destroy all trace of his crime.

He said he took Sharon back into the bedroom and left her there. Then, using a cigarette lighter he found in his pocket he set fire to a pile of clothes left sitting on the kitchen table. He thought he had set another fire in the living room but couldn’t remember. Fire investigators discovered two clear seats of fire when they examined the gutted building.

Neighbours waking on Christmas morning saw smoke coming from the old farmhouse and raised the alarm. Hennessy had returned home at about 7 that morning and told his mother he had spent the night with friends. He was sleeping it off as Sharon, Zsara and Nadia’s bodies were pulled out of the burning building. All three were dead.

Sharon’s family were all in court today, to see her killer sentenced. She had been informally adopted, along with her brother and sister by Ann and Christopher Whelan, and had grown up with their five children. Her foster brother John took the witness stand today for an emotional victim impact statement.

He told Hennessy that it was obvious human life meant nothing to him. “It is beyond belief that anyone with any humanity or conscience could carry out such an act of pure evil” He had not only stolen the lives of three people who had gone to bed that night looking forward to Christmas but had ruined that time of year forever for all those who loved them. “Christmas for us is no more. It does not exist.”

He said that his parents had become shadows of their former selves, simply existing rather than living life in the wake of such bitter loss. The voices of the children playing in the local school serving as a daily reminder of the grandchildren they had lost. He said that the twice daily pilgrimages to the graves were all his parents had left. There was nothing that Hennessy could serve that would come close to righting that wrong.

Nadia’s father, Joseph Delahanty, spoke of the loss of his little girl, recently diagnosed as autistic, in a statement read to the court. Both families sobbed openly as the catalogue of loss was read out to the packed courtroom.

Handing down his sentence, Judge Barry White told Hennessy he had not been man enough to admit his guilty at an earlier stage to save the Whelan family the pain of court. Judge White told Hennessy that his actions had meant that Christmas, for all those connected to Sharon and her two daughters, would be a time of anguish, pain and grieving. He said that Hennessy’s stated remorse had not been enough to make him face up to what he had done before the case reached court.

Speaking outside the courthouse Sharon’s brother, John Whelan spoke of the family’s relief at the sentence.

Back in the Saddle

11th November 2009 / Abigail / 0 Comments

After a break of several months I’m back into murder mode this week. Next week I’m back in court for a trial and this week I contributed to a new series on murder that’ll be shown in the New Year. After spending the summer working on fantasy, this week reality came back with a bang.

Normally when I’m working I flit between journalism and fiction easily enough. I’m used to working on both so it’s a question of what the circumstances demand and I can flick from one to the other pretty easily. This summer however I had the luxury of writing only fiction. The courts were on their summer recess and I had an October deadline to get my novel ready for my agent to send around publishers. I was free to spend my days in a world of my own creation, working on my characters and my plots…all those things that you don’t get to create as a journalist. One or two have tried but that’s not my way of doing things at all!

So I’ve been writing fiction for the past couple of months, doing the whole writer thing, sitting in my pajamas, drinking too much coffee and hardly leaving the house. It’s quite different from what’s generally required in journalism.

But that little idyll is now at an end and the day job beckons. Maybe one day I’ll make enough money from fiction to hang up the Press hat for good but for the moment the media is well and truly the day job.

It’s been a nice break but now I’m back to juggling.

The Books

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