Tag: Murder (Page 3 of 4)

The Ramblings of a Pompous Ass!

27th September 2009 / Abigail / 1 Comment

So Joe O’Reilly has been corresponding with the media. One can’t help but wonder what possessed him to enter into an exchange of letters with journalists from the Star Sunday. Has he not learnt by now that his proclamations of innocence continue to fall on deaf ears because most people in his country are too familiar with the facts of his wife’s brutal murder; she was bludgeoned to death so thoroughly that her blood spattered the ceiling above her body.

Today’s Star Sunday contains O’Reilly’s thoughts on his conviction and his life in jail. He comes across, not as an evil cold blooded killer but as a none too bright pompous snob who boasts about the book club he set up in the Midlands Prison and once again tries to talk his way out of murder in the way he has ever since his wife was killed.

During his 2007 trial it came out that O’Reilly was in the habit of blabbing to anyone who would listen. He commented to a friend that the gardai were looking in the wrong place for the murder weapon, ran through a blow-by-blow (excuse the pun) account of the murder for his wife’s family and talked to half the journalists in town about how he was the number one suspect.

Despite the fact that these tactics quite spectacularly failed to keep him out of jail, it appears that he still uses them. His dazzling critisism of the mobile phone evidence that placed him near the murder scene at the time was confused to say the least.

“I will leave you with these thoughts/questions. 1. Ever had a dropped call? 2. Ever lose your signal? Have you ever stretched your arm 800 yards down a hill, past a door, through two doors, turn left, down a hallway, left into a bedroom, kill someone then leave the way you came without being seen? No? Me either. But I HAVE dropped a call and I have lost a signal…SO, hardly water-tight technology eh?”

Brilliant! I’m sure the combined forces of the DPP and the Gardai are quaking in their boots at such brilliant point scoring! This is a man who genuinely thinks that he will be able to convince the journalists he is writing to, and presumably the public, that he loved his wife and was dead against domestic violence. He conveniently forgets that his mistress, Nikki Pelly has been a regular tabloid fixture since his conviction and that vitriolic emails about his wife that he sent to his sister were one of the highlights of the evidence against him.

O’Reilly is either delusional or so arrogant that he thinks his charm will wipe any previous knowledge from the minds of those he addresses. He obviously has some intelligence but not half as much as he thinks he has. What struck me about the article was not his claims about the flaws in the prosecution or his cheeky suggestion that whoever murdered Irene White must also have killed Rachel. The details that said most about the character of Joe O’Reilly were the priggish comments about films and books, details that reveal a snobbish idiot who crows about how only he and the prison librarian really enjoyed Barrack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope.

“That was one of the books a few of us read in here, as part of a small book club we have. That actually makes it sound more grandiose than it is. All the ‘book club’ is, is an initiative myself and a few others started up through the school and the library to get (well try to) people in here interested in books and reading. Then giving them a platform by which to give an opinion about the book for that month.”

So now we have the the crusading teacher of the less fortunate. The man’s idiocy truly knows no bounds.

These letters represent a massive coup for the Star Sunday. Fair play to them for getting him to talk but ultimately what today’s article shows is how little the unrepentant convict has to say. All you will hear when you talk to someone like Joe O’Reilly are justifications and obfuscations. He’s not going to suddenly admit what he did, so you are left with the surreal ravings of an insubstantial alibi. The same kind of idiocy that made O.J. Simpson write If I Did It. It’s arrogance and attention seeking at their worst. But it does make great copy!

A Savage Animal

20th July 2009 / Abigail / 0 Comments

Gerald Barry was today facing a life sentence for the second time this year. He is already serving a mandatory life sentence for the murder of Swiss student Manuela Riedo in Galway in September 2007.

Today we heard, in chilling detail, how just eight weeks previously he had brutally raped a 21-year-old French student. There were haunting similarities between the two attacks and the graphic account given by the first victim must to some extent mirrored how Manuela spent her final hours.

The victim of the rape, a few years older than the Swiss girl, had been out with friends that night. At the end of the night, not being able to find a taxi, she decided to walk home. As she was walking through the Mervue area of Galway she passed a man. A few steps later she realised he was following her.

Barry grabbed her by her hair and pressed something she thought was a knife to her throat. Then he dragged her into the grounds of a local GAA club and subjected her to a horrific rape.

He repeatedly both orally and anally raped her while he threatened to kill her if she tried to escape. During the attack he also asked her if she was enjoying it. After the final anal rape he saw that she was bleeding and told her “Hey, you’re bleeding. Great.”

In a victim impact statement read to the court the student, who was not present in court, said she was still coming to terms with what had happened to her. She said that she was receiving counselling but could only get as far as the moment Barry had grabbed her because the memory of the rape itself was still too painful.

She called Barry a predator, “He is not a human or a man. He is a liar, a rapist and a murderer. I beg you not to let him out because he will do it again.” The woman said that she still felt very insecure whenever anyone came up behind her or touched her back or her neck.

She told gardai that she could not work out why she was still alive, why Barry hadn’t killed her as he would later kill Manuela. “I am surprised that I am still alive. Why was I let go? Why I am still breathing?”

The woman also criticised media coverage of her ordeal. She said “It happened to me, not to them” and said that the media did not understand the harm they did to others. I’ve noticed that line has not been widely reported by my colleagues. We don’t listen to these details or write them up for some kind of gratuitous entertainment. The public have the right to know that animals like Barry walk around and do harm to people. If we gloss over the details of their crimes we absolve them of the full horror of their actions.

Barry is undoubtedly a menace to society. If people don’t know what he is capable of then they might not see quite how much of a menace he actually is.

Less than two months after he had raped the now 23-year-old woman he was to murder Manuela Riedo. Then he would also have been visiting an ex girlfriend. He would also make a pretense that the encounter was consensual, although in Manuela’s case he said this to gardai – we will never know if he aid as much to his victim.

Gardai were still investigating the rape when Manuela took her final walk home. The rest is tragically known.

Judge Paul Carney has asked whether he has the option of imposing a life sentence, the very highest sentence allowable for the very worst kind of rape. He will pass his sentence on Friday in Galway. It remains to be seen just how severe a sentence he hands down.

The Depressing Monotony of Murder

23rd May 2009 / Abigail / 0 Comments

So the inquest of Swiss student Manuela Riedo took place in Galway yesterday. Earlier this year Gerald Barry was convicted of her murder after one of the most emotional trials I’ve ever covered.

The 17-year-old had only been in Ireland for three days when Barry dragged her off the path she was taking to meet friends in Galway city and horrifically raped and murdered her. From the time of the murder this was a crime that caused utter outrage across the country. It has scarcely been out of the news since Barry was found guilty with news that an Irish businessman had donated money to set up a foundation in her memory. There’s to be a fund-raising concert in her home town of Bern later in the summer and her parents were back in Ireland only last week to launch the foundation.

They have been back to Galway many times since their daughter’s death and after the trial spoke of the firm friendships they’ve made there and the people who supported them. They weren’t at the inquest. I don’t blame them. During the trial I wrote about her father’s tears as he spent his birthday listening to the post mortem evidence. Manuela was Hans Peter and Arlette Riedo’s only child. The trip to Galway was her first trip alone. It was an unspeakable tragedy that she should have encountered an animal like Barry on that trip.

The inquest jury warned against taking the shortcut Manuela took that night. During the trial there were several journos who knew Galway well, all knew the route known locally as the Line, knew how desolate it was in broad daylight, let alone after dark. The days when you could walk the isolated byways of Ireland in safety are long gone – if they were ever there in the first place and not simply the product of sugar coated nostalgia.

It would be naive to think that murder and rape only became an issue in Ireland in recent years. Of course they didn’t. But it’s an undeniable fact that they have become a more frequent occurrence than they may have been in simpler times. When I first started working in the courts I worked for a specialist news agency down there. My boss told me that when he started that beat, over twenty years ago the agency could tick over with just him and maybe one other person. Murders were few and far between – noted events when they happened.

These days there will frequently be as many as three happening at once. This week for example there was the Ronnie Dunbar trial, the trial of Gary Campion, who’s accused of a murder in Limerick (that one’s been going for over two months out in Clover Hill) and Noel Cawley who’s accused of killing a pensioner in a robbery. That’s just the murders – there are even more rapes going through the courts.

I’m not going into why there are so many more serious crimes going through the courts. There are a multitude of reasons, some obvious, some less so, some proven, others mere speculation. But the fact remains that the prevalence of these cases is a fact of modern life. We know about the growth of gang violence, that accounts for some of it. Random, drunken fights that went too far is another factor. Money increasingly seems to play a part. When it comes down to it though people kill for the same reasons they always have. If these days there is less value placed on human life…well as I say, I’m not getting into that here – it pays the bills after all.

It’s sad that these days murder is no longer so unusual that any loss of life is a news event. Dozens of trials pass through the courts that get little or no media attention. They are usually the trials where drink was involved, and young men with volatile tempers. Trials that are in danger of blending into one another after a while if you watch enough of them. It’s easy to forget when you cover nothing but murder that each death is a private tragedy for the families involved. It’s easy to dehumanise the accused, to make assumptions.

Some trials will always get more interest, they have a “hook” to pique the interest of the media. It could be the victim, a pretty schoolgirl like Manuela or an attractive young mother like Rachel O’Reilly. It could be fact the accused came from a background where violence is less likely to be so overt, like Dublin 4 resident Finn Colclough or the killing of Brian Murphy outside Annabel’s nightclub. These are the trial that make the headlines, the one’s I’ll usually be covering, but there are many others that don’t register.

When I was working for the agency I got to see the other trials. The ones that go on in empty courtrooms while the main event is happening on the other side of the Round Hall. I would usually be the only journalist there. The stories I wrote each evening would often not be used. But each trial was the story of a life that had been cut short, at the wrong time, by someone who didn’t have the right to do so. A violent death is always a tragedy. It’s just not always a story…sadly.

Dangerous Mammy’s Boys?

31st March 2009 / Abigail / 0 Comments

I’m used to sitting beside people accused of murder. When you work in a courtroom that doesn’t have a press bench you have to sit wherever you can. An Irish courtroom doesn’t have a dock so the two roomy benches facing the jury tend to be a favourite perch for both the media and the accused. OK the accused is usually less than happy to be seated there, but for us it has it all – space, somewhere to rest a laptop, a good vantage point.

Being left handed, I’m usually the one sitting furthest on the left, closest to the accused. I’ve sat beside the Colcloughs, Dane Pearse and Gerald Barry (who we were warned had a tendency to bite). Most recently I sat beside David Bourke when he told the court how he killed his wife. I was close enough to feel the bench shudder as he sobbed into his hands when he sat back down. I was close enough to see how he crossed his ankles, white socks with black shoes, while he listened to the evidence stack up against him.

It’s hard to be absolutely objective when you’re sitting in an emotionally charged courtroom all week. All you can do is make sure partiality doesn’t creep into your copy but outside of that every one of us will have an opinion on the guilt or innocence of the accused. When it’s a case that falls into a category, say wife killers or gangland or fratricide, there are a whole lot of extra preconceptions garnered from sitting through far too many of these cases to begin with.

Bourke was of course firmly in the wife killer camp. He might have differed in some ways from those who had gone before; Joe O’Reilly, Brian Kearney, Anton Mulder, but you can’t help but compare.

One thing I’ve noticed about the rash of wife killers who’ve passed through the courts over the past couple of years is how many of them are the same basic generation with similar quirks and weaknesses. Very often, for example, you will see an extremely close relationship with the female members of their own family. We frequently have to share the long bench not only with the accused but also with droves of the extended family there to offer their support. It’s often the case that it’s the women who give us the hardest time, who look at us as if they just scraped us off their shoes and tut as notebook pages are turned.

Joe O’Reilly’s mother has always been one of his most trenchant supporters, his sister was the one he emailed joking about her beating up his wife Rachel. Brian Kearney’s sister spent much of his trial stroking his back when he got stressed. It’s a common pattern. Bourke seemed to fit the bill in this respect as well.

I’m not for one moment saying these women had anything to do with their male relation’s murderous tendencies but sitting looking at them during their trials it was commented on that these were men who came from a generation when men in a female dominated family could be treated like little tin gods. Picked up after, fed, made to feel they were the centre of the universe. I’ve met men like that over the years. They had a difficulty encountering a strong minded woman.

These men also show childish impulses. O’Reilly had a room dedicated to Star Wars memorabilia. The way Bourke cried on cue smacked of a kid used to stamping his foot and turning on the waterworks to get what he wanted.

I’m not making a hard and fast rule here. There have been plenty of men on trial who were simply bullies and abusive thugs but the highest profile killers, the one’s branded middle class and media fodder, these were the ones who tend to fit the bill. The cossetted princes of their own little fiefdom who simply couldn’t understand how the woman they had deigned to allow to step in to look after them should want her own way.

It’s staggering how often you hear stories from the witness stands about how the accused would niggle and bitch when he didn’t get his way, would throw a tantrum when things didn’t happen the way he liked it. After you’ve seen the same story played out half a dozen times you can’t help wondering what the hell has the Irish mammy bred?

Was it this cosseting, this deference, that made them the time bombs that suddenly went off in their wives’s faces? It’s a horrible thought. Because if it did happen to be true how many more will there be?

A Family Ripped Apart

30th March 2009 / Abigail / 0 Comments

David Bourke has been found guilty of murdering his wife, Jean Gilbert. He stabbed her four times in front of their three children, one morning after making the kids’ breakfast. It took the seven men and five women in the jury a little over seven and a half hours to come to their decision and when it came it was with one dissenter, a majority verdict.

We’d all been expecting a majority, even a hung jury. As the trial unfolded over a week even the judge made it abundantly clear that this was a clear case of manslaughter through provocation. Jean Gilbert had been in love with another man and had made no secret of the fact. She was planning to leave her husband and her children and run away with a former lover, a musician who shared her Buddhist beliefs.

The phrase Judge Barry White used repeatedly in his summing up to the evidence and his charging of the jury was “the straw that broke the camel’s back”. The question the jury had been asked to consider was whether this previously mild mannered, devoted husband and father had encountered this straw and “snapped” or whether he had petulantly murdered the woman he professed to love because she was no longer his.

The two possible verdicts polarised people. Over the past week I’ve heard particularly dogmatic opinions on either side. The judge even asked the prosecution (in the absence of the jury) to find out who decided Bourke would face a murder charge rather than manslaughter. I think in the end what it boiled down to was the verdict that was perhaps technically correct, manslaughter by dint of provocation, to the one that seemed morally correct, that is murder. The jury went with their hearts. I’m glad they did.

Bourke was undoubtedly under tremendous stress in the days and weeks leading up to his wife’s death. She had told him she did not love him, had never loved him. He read letters and emails written to and from her lover. The family that he held so dear, that he talked about to anyone who would listen, was being torn apart, a bolt out of the blue that he had never seen coming, a tragedy of the domestic kind.

But did that justify his actions? The jury certainly didn’t think so. They obviously asked themselves the question, is it ever justifiable to kill the person you love? Is a crime of passion a lesser crime than a spur of the moment attack against a stranger? They decided it wasn’t.

It can sound strange when you hear closing arguments to hear the defence of provocation argued. That being, really, really pissed off because of someone’s actions is an actual defence to murder. It calls to mind cases of neighbour playing boy bands at full volume in the middle of the night, every night. Undoubtedly there are times when people are goaded into violent action, unfortunate taste in music doesn’t have to feature. The law allows for this kind of loss of control and it was this defence that David Bourke was using.

He said in evidence that he had wanted to hurt his wife the way she had hurt him, when he went into the living room brandishing a knife. He said she looked smug, satisfied and happy, having just returned from an early morning tryst with the man she would leave him for. He had never raised a hand to her before. Was this the straw that broke the camel’s back and if so did that make it all right?

David Bourke was a very different man to the wife killers who’ve sat on that bench facing the jury over the past few years. He didn’t claim a phantom intruder had killed his wife, as Joe O’Reilly and Brian Kearney did before him. He didn’t deny dealing the fatal blow. His wife wasn’t threatening to take away the children, only herself.

When the verdict was read out he sat very still. His face reddened but he stayed composed. Only when the judge left the court to allow for discussion about his wife’s family’s victim impact statement did he show any emotion. As people milled around him and the journalists behind chattered excitedly and compared their notes he sat down heavily as his family closed in. He was quickly surrounded and hidden from view. He looked in shock, disbelieving.

Jean Gilbert’s family eventually gave their victim impact statement. Her brother Robert spoke about the sister with infectious laugh and dazzling smile, who brought passion to everything she did. The women who was proud of having created the first jelly bear sweet with no artificial colourings or flavours.

But it was the quoted words of the three children who had watched their mother die that hit hardest. Bourke nodded very slightly as his daughter was quoted “I will never forget my mum. She was the best, so nice. I loved you and miss you so much.” He swallowed as his son’s words were read to the court. “I just really miss her. I want my mum. I want to go home to my mum.”

Speaking outside the courts the family were brief. They decided to draw a veil over whatever had gone on within that family. Whatever hurt the parents inflicted on one another it is the children who will have to come to terms with the loss of any normal family.

The more obvious verdict from a legal point of view might have been manslaughter but that verdict never did sit quite right. It would have meant a jury saying that it’s OK to kill your wife if she pisses you off enough. They obviously didn’t agree.

Postscript

23rd March 2009 / Abigail / 0 Comments

Gerald Barry is in jail, the Manuela Riedo trial is over and it’s time to move on to other things. Before I do though I just have this to share. This is the press call Arlette and Hans-Peter Riedo took outside the Four Courts just after Barry had been sent to jail. I’ve posted a couple of similar files so this one can join them.

Justice Is Served

21st March 2009 / Abigail / 1 Comment

Gerald Barry was found guilty of the murder of Manuela Riedo today. The Swiss student was found semi-naked throttled to death in October 2007. Barry has denied her her murder throughout, saying that it was the accidental outcome of a casual sexual encounter.

Manuela’s parents had to sit in court and listen to him on the stand describing fondling their daughter’s breasts and vagina – something that simply didn’t happen, at least, not while she was conscious.

She had been heading into Galway City to meet friends the night she died, only three days after she had arrived in Ireland for a two week language course. It was the first time she had been away without her parents, she was only 17.

In an incredibly powerful victim impact statement her father Hans-Peter told the court that he and his wife had always been protective of their only child. “As her father, I often drove out with the car at night to pick her up so that she would arrive safely back home. No way was too long for me to bring her back.”

The courtroom was emotionally charged as he talked about his beautiful and special little girl, the girl who only wanted to help others, who had made particular efforts to include a classmate with a physical handicap in all her activities. He described a Manuela who loved to dance, a girl who “had a special place in the hearts of many people.” She was the centre of her parent’s life, their “sunshine”.

As he read out the statement in German, translated by their garda liaison, Manuela’s mother Arlette clutched a set of rosary beads and wept. There were many in the court who wept as well.

Passing his sentence the trial judge, Mr Justice Barry White was unusually strong. He told Barry he agreed absolutely with the jury’s verdict as would anyone who had read about the case during the trial.

He told Barry that he trusted he had not been “unmoved by the evidence given by Mr Riedo of the devastating impact of his criminal behaviour.” “One often loses sight when somebody loses one’s life violently; that person is somebody’s son or daughter, somebody’s brother or sister, somebody’s grandparent, or somebody’s child.”

It’s unusual to see a trial judge speak so personally after a verdict but this a been a trial that everyone involved, except perhaps Barry himself, has found this a traumatic trial to follow. Judge White also said that the Courts Service had been receiving mail for the Riedos throughout the trial offering messages of sympathy and support. This doesn’t usually happen.

Speaking outside the courtroom in the usual media scrum Hans-Peter and Arlette Riedo thanks the Swiss and Irish authorities and the people who had supported them through what can only have been a horrendously difficult time. Asked how she was coping Manuela’s mother said a little better than she had been but she always had the support of “her man, her husband.”

Throughout the trial they’ve presented an extremely close picture. I’ve sat across from them, in the seat we press shared with the accused and watched Arlette take her husband’s coat from him as they arrived in court after a particularly hard day’s evidence, folding it tenderly and placing it behind him as a cushion. At the more traumatic pieces of evidence they would sit with hands clasped. It’s not often you see a couple that close. It seems all the more unfair that they should lose their only child.

Barry was a tragedy like this waiting to happen we were told today. He grew up in a severely dysfunctional family, and when I say dysfunctional I mean potentially Fritzl level dysfunction. Superintendent P.J Durkan, who gave evidence of Barry’s more serious previous convictions, which I’ll get to in a moment, agreed with defence counsel Martin Giblin that if the social service had got involved with the Barry family when Barry was young we might not have been sitting where we were today.

You hear sob stories every sentence hearing. It’s hardly a surprise that a lot of people up on criminal charges come from less than ideal homes. But ultimately it can only be so much of a defence. Barry had a string of convictions that took quite some time to go through. The most serious three gave an indication of someone with little or no respect for human life.

In 1996 Colm Phelan, was attacked on Eyres Square in Galway. He died from his injuries. Barry was one of five people who were charged with “violent disorder” and the only who didn’t plead guilty.

Two years later he broke into the house of an elderly man who only had sight in one eye. After Barry had finished with him he was blind.

Then in 2006 he was given six months for a sexual assault on his then partner. An accident waiting to happen or a loose cannon? Barry was definitely heading for a bad end.

As Manuela’s parents told the press outside the Four Courts after the verdict, Ireland is a safer place tonight. Irish children, Irish women are safer.

A Tragic Accident Not A Murder

18th March 2009 / Abigail / 0 Comments

“I told her I thought she was beautiful and I leaned in and kissed her.”

So Gerald Barry described how a chance meeting developed into a sexual encounter. The 29-year-old is accused of the murder of Swiss teenager Manuela Riedo. Today, speaking in his own defence he told the court that the sex was consensual and her death a tragic accident.

Manuela’s mother broke down in tears as he described meeting her 17-year-old daughter near a shop in Renmore. He said they struck up a conversation then after around 20 minutes had sex in a grassy spot near Lough Atalia in Galway.

Afterwards, he told the court, she got up to go and meet her friends in Galway City but he pulled her back down to spend more time with him. It was then he said, as he hooked his arm around her neck to pull her down, that he accidentally throttled her.

He said that Manuela had been walking in the wrong direction from town so he showed her the right route to the shortcut she had used several times in the couple of days she had spent in Galway, there for a two week language class with her classmates.

They started talking after she had asked him for the time although didn’t say much as they walked towards “The Line”, a walkway that ran alongside the railway tracks.

Barry said he showed her how to get up to the path then sat down on a telegraph pole and skinned up a joint. After a couple of minutes she came back and sat beside him. She asked him why he was smoking. “I told her I liked the buzz. It relaxes me.”

Moments later he said he told her she was beautiful and they started kissing and “fondling”. They put their coats on the ground and lay down on them and had sex.

He said it was afterwards when they were lying together she sat up and talked about leaving. He had asked her was she cold but she replied it was far colder in Switzerland. He said he hadn’t thought he used any force when he pulled her back down but she just “slid down” and he realised she wasn’t breathing.

It was then, he said that he dragged her body into the bushes and put her jacket over her “out of respect”.

He could not explain why a button that matched the ones on her coat was found on the upper path or why long blond hairs were found snagged on the bushes from that path down to the spot her body was found. He told the prosecution barrister Una Kennedy that he had no idea how she got an injury to the back of her head or how a piece of skin two inches by three had come to be cut from her pubic area.

He said that he had not thrown a condom into bushes nearby the body in the hope that it would be taken away by the tidal lough nearby or that he had urinated it it in an attempt to dilute any DNA evidence. He had urinated because he was scared he said, no other reason.

Barry said he had lied to gardai because he was hoping that if he continued to deny everything it would just go away.

It’s been another hard day’s evidence for Manuela’s parents but they will get a day’s break tomorrow. The trial will resume on Friday when it is expected to finish. It will have been a long couple of weeks.

The Crowd

15th March 2009 / Abigail / 6 Comments

With any murder trial there are the gawkers. Members of the public who arrive on a Monday when the trials are doled out and work out which is the juiciest case to sit into. They’re not allowed into rape trials (under the In Camera rule only bona fide members of the press and interested parties are allowed into these) but if there is a murder you can bet they’ll come out from under their stones as soon as the jury take their seats.

Ray Bradbury wrote a short story called The Crowd. It’s about the people who come and stare at traffic accidents. He casts them, not as simple ghouls, but as force of nature with power of life and death. These are the people who raise of lower the thumb to decide if the victim lives or dies. It’s one of his most disturbing stories.

When you see the same faces sitting in the back of the court, trial after trial after trial it’s hard not to think of the Bradbury crowd. They come in every morning, pick a prime spot, usually in the middle of the extended family of victim or accused and settle in. The more gruesome the evidence the closer they lean. Well I suppose it beats daytime TV.

Now before you say it, I know I do the same thing. I sit through a trial day after day and have been known to grade trials according to their degree of interest. But there’s a difference. A big one. I’m paid to sit there and as a freelance, if the trial’s not interesting enough I’m not going to earn much money. I don’t do it for entertainment.

The hard core of the rubber neckers will get quite militant about their right to attend open trials if, in a packed courtroom they are urged to move to the upstairs gallery available for the public. They will treat the journalists with contempt, as if we are a corrupt filter attempting to stop them from accessing their god given constitutional right. They intend to exercise this constitutional right…in the Joe O’Reilly trial they brought sandwiches.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m in favour of the public having access to the courts. I think everyone should sit through a trial, to understand what goes on and see how everything works. Not to mention that justice should absolutely happen in public (the reason for our attendance in rape trials – as the eyes, so to speak.)

The thing I have a problem with are the people who come again and again and again and watch with such relish. In a case like the current one, in which a 17-year-old girl was found strangled and semi naked on wasteground, these watchers seem particularly inappropriate.

This isn’t entertainment. It shouldn’t be viewed as such. But the same faces in the Crowd will always come back for more. This won’t be the last trial they come to and nothing I say will put them off. They are a fact of public justice. But like Bradbury’s preternatural chorus the Dublin contingent creep me out.

Probabilities and Positives

13th March 2009 / Abigail / 0 Comments

Arlette Riedo took the stand today. Her purpose was to confirm that the mobile phone and digital camera Gerald Barry admits stealing had belonged to her daughter. Speaking through an interpreter she answered quietly but directly to every question. “Correct.”

She explained that the black Sony Ericsson W810i had been bought by the 17-year-old only a week before she travelled to Ireland. The same phone Barry sold to his sister’s boyfriend a couple of weeks after Manuela’s death and then travelled around County Galway as it was passed from one hand to another.

The silver Olympus digital camera had been a present from Manuela’s uncle. When it was found under the mattress of the bed Barry slept in, it still held the batteries her father had marked “2007” for the sake of efficiency.

Arlette Riedo was on the stand for only a few minutes but the proximity to the man accused of murdering her daughter in such a violent manner took it’s toll. When she took her seat she bent down, hiding her face from the watchful press who fill the benches beside the accused.

In any trial of this kind there is forensic evidence. Frequently that evidence will include a DNA analysis of certain items, to find a concrete link with either the accused or the deceased. Today we heard such evidence. Stripped down to statistical formula it is mercifully sterile, coming, as it does after a grim litany of swabs and samples that dissect a loved one even more completely than the post mortem evidence.

When a deceased person undergoes a post mortem the purpose is to gather as much evidence as possible. To find a cause of death, the state of the life that person once lived. Forensic samples are different. Sterile tubes holding over sized cotton buds and labelled with blunt anatomical terms. This can seem more brutal than any internal investigation the pathologist might do. There is an absolute distance from the person that once lived and breathed, a whiff of formaldehyde and disinfectant.

But while the post mortem can rarely speak in absolutes these swabs and glass jars can at least come close. Their results might still come in statistical long shots that duck an absolute definite but the shots are so long definite they may as well be.

The big test in this trial is the condom found hanging from a branch on a bush near Manuela’s body. Containing a substantial amount of a yellow liquid, which may or may not have been urine, it also contained semen.

Swabs were taken and tests were done. The results were definite as far as a 1 in 100,000,000 long shot. The semen belonged to Gerald Barry. Separate tests were done on the outside of the condom.

This yielded a mixed profile, one male, the other female. Once again it was a mere statistical equivocation. All the elements of the DNA that the scientists tick off for a match were there for both Barry and Manuela. There were no elements found that didn’t fit. Once again a figure almost bigger than comprehending 1 in 100,000,000.

That’s as definite as the scientists tend to go. It’s not exactly a litmus test – either red or blue depending on acid or alkali. But then the possibilities in this are so much greater.

The prosecution case is drawing to a close. But for now a break to allow for the festivities of Patricks Weekend.

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