Death on the Hill hit the shops this week. To coincide with this I’ve been hitting the publicity trail. The last week has passed in a blur of corridors and studios and next week promises to be no different. It’s a necessary part of bringing out a book but it’s one of the more surreal parts of the job.
As a journalist I’ve been in a fair few studios over the years. I started out working in radio and it’s great to get the chance to be sitting in front of a mic again albeit on the other side of the desk. It’s strange to be answering questions rather than asking them and being an item on the running order, a part of the story.
It’s very different from the daily business of court reporting. Taking notes, checking facts, always on watch to catch the smallest detail that will make the picture that you paint at the end of the day all the more vivid. It’s quite a passive line of work, an observer not a contributor. Definitely not a position that tends to land in the spotlight.
Of course when you write a book it’s a different matter entirely. You’re no longer simply a story in the paper, waiting for tomorrow’s chips. You’ve pinned your colours to the mast and embarked on a project that involves, of necessity, some hard sell. Suddenly you’re flashing a smile and plugging away and getting ever more removed from the violent facts that you’re recounting.
Covering murder is an odd business. When you do the job for any length of time you develop armour so that the gory details slide off you like drops off an umbrella. You become flippant when faced with brutality, treating each tragedy lightly because it’ll only be followed by another. That’s not that you don’t have compassion, just that it get’s rationed, metered in the face of relentless details that bleed into one another as trial follows trial follows trial.
The details of each successive trial settle on each other until your brain is clogged by the fallen details of dozens of deaths, dozens of post mortems. You learn to leave the job at the end of the day and put aside the details and the pain of the victims and their families but your sense of humour gets a blackened edge and gallows laugh.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my job – well love is probably the wrong term, but it’s what I do and the work suits me. But when you’re selling a book it tends to come home that while you are happy to have a book with your name on it you’re also constantly retelling somebody else’s personal tragedy with each bright and breezy interview. It’s more than a little surreal.
All you can do is try to keep the balance. A balance between the book I’ve written, telling a story as a writer and a journalist, and the dark, tragic truth at the centre of it. It’s the nature of this kind of book. Most of the time I don’t navel gaze but when I find myself sitting in another corridor waiting to go on air to do another interview it can get a little introspective. Tomorrow starts with two such corridors. You have been warned.
Veronica McGrath rubbed her face hard. Today was her third day on the stand and the tension in the courtroom was palpable. Through hours of cross examination from barristers representing both her mother and her ex husband she had steadfastly stuck to her account of what happened the day her father met a violent end.
Facing her was her husband’s barrister, Conor Devally SC. His questioning had started gently enough, a break after the more antagonistic approach of Patrick Gageby SC, defending her mother. She frowned through the early memories of the early days of her relationship with her ex, Colin Pinder, who denies murdering her father Brendan Brian McGrath in the spring of 1987 but admits his manslaughter.
She had been living in a bedsit in Liverpool, a teenage runaway out of touch with her dysfunctional family. This flat had been broken into and Pinder had come in like a knight in shining armour and whisked her away to the safety of his flat a couple of streets away. That first night he had given her his bed and slept on the couch but it wasn’t long before a romance developed.
Ms McGrath denied telling him that the rift with her family was the fault of her father, a former inmate of the Artane Industrial School now grown into a man of violent rages and the suggestion of madness. She had also denied conspiring with her mother to have her father committed to St Loman’s Psychiatric Hospital, clinging instead to the idea that her father was fair and reasoned man who had no problem with anyone. It would have been unfair, she agreed from the stand, to tell stories which resulted in her father being sent away for a week in St Loman’s.
Mr Devally had turned to the details of the night of her father’s death, by her own account a horrific, brutal event carried out by her mother and her fiancé. Mr Devally put an alternative scenario to her. That her father had taken exception to her choice of mate when she and Mr Pinder had returned to Ireland shortly before they were due to marry. She was adamant that she had never heard her father say that he would never have a “darkie” staying under his roof.
She absolutely denied the account put to her, his client’s instructions Mr Devally explained, that her father had come home on the night her died to find Colin Pinder in his kitchen. So unhappy was he about the thought of his daughter’s future husband that he had arranged for the caravan they were staying in to be towed to a neighbours land miles away from the house.
She denied that her father was so angry to find Pinder in his kitchen that he had lost his temper and attempted to throw him out, that Pinder had hit him – hard – and that he had fallen and hit his head on the kitchen range.
She denied that all three had been convinced he was dead and taken the “body” outside only to see her father rise like Lazarus. She again denied her and her mother urging Pinder to finish the deed and taking up arms themselves when he refused. It was absolutely not true,she said ,that she and her mother had threatened that he would never see the child he thought she was expecting if he told anyone.
She will have to face a third day of gruelling cross examination tomorrow. Her fourth day in the stand.
The sun was shining today. Here in Dublin that’s no means a guarantee at this time of year, even on Midsummer’s Day. Sitting in the Criminal Courts of Justice you can see the lucid blue of the sky, see the sun on the backs of the birds that flew past and on the motes of dust that hung over the judge’s wig.
But what we were listening to this afternoon conjured images that jarred with the serenity of that blue outside the squares of glass. In a quiet, hesitant voice, touching her hand frequently to her face or lacing her fingers nervously together, Veronica McGrath described how she had watched her mother and fiancé brutally assault her father.
I’ve not been back to court since the Drimnagh screwdriver trial and recently I’ve been somewhat preoccupied with the launch of the new book, Death on the Hill. Today though the day to day business of the courts ground on despite the sun, regardless of any distractions or outside concerns.
It’s the second day of this trial. A cold case from 1987. Bernard Brian McGrath is the deceased and his wife Vera and former son-in-law Colin Pinder are accused of his murder.
His eldest daughter, another Vera, today gave her account of his death. She described how she and Pinder were due to marry in April 1987. They had moved back from England, where they had met and had been living together sometime in February or March and were living in a caravan beside the family home as they prepared for the wedding. She was 18 years old, Pinder a few years older.
But from their little love nest they could hear the nightly rows that marked her parents unhappy marriage. When a neighbour visited with a hitch on his car they took the opportunity to move the caravan to a field beside another neighbour.
She had no real problem with her father she insisted, despite the constant pressing from her mother’s counsel Patrick Gageby SC. She had no memory of complaining of his violence towards her to her local GP although she did remember visits from the doctor, the local priest and the gardai at various times during her childhood. She could also remember going to stay, with her mother and three younger brothers in a women’s refuge on the Howth Road in Dublin.
However, when her mother visited one evening, some time in March or April, and said she wished her father dead, Veronica didn’t think anything of it. It was a common sentiment, she told the court. Nothing to worry about. She heard her mother tell her fiancé that he was not man enough to kill Mr McGrath and she heard her fiancé answer that he had just the thing to carry out the dead. A heavy spanner, perhaps a torque wrench.
She and Pinder accompanied her parents back to the “home place” later that night, just for a cup of tea and a chat. The back door was locked so her mother climbed in through a bedroom window and opened the door. During the original investigation she told detectives that her father had refused to do the gallant thing when he was asked, telling her mother to do it herself, if she was so fit.
Then it all happened so fast. Pinder produced the hammer and brought it down on her father’s head. She said she heard her dog, tied up in the back field, barking unhappily so she went to calm it. She didn’t see what happened next but when she came back down her father was lying face down.
He wasn’t dead though. Veronica told the jury that her mother went into the house and came out with additional weapons, a lump hammer and a slash hook. She gave them to Pinder. Veronica said her father managed to get up and made a run for the small boreen, a narrow road, little more than a lane, that ran beside the house. Pinder slashed him in the thigh with the slash hook as he ran. She went and sat down the garden. She thought she had her teddy bear with her.
Her father ran to the ditch that ran along the side of the boreen where the trees hung down low. Pinder was hitting the bank of the ditch with the slash hook but wasn’t making contact with her father. She jumped down into the ditch and her father said to her that his eyes were stinging, he couldn’t see.
He pleaded for his life, asked for mercy, asked for his car keys and promised to drive out of their lives and leave them the house. The attack moved back the house. Veronica said it was there her mother hit her father with the lump hammer. She didn’t know where she had hit, but said her mother and her fiancé had laughed at the blow.
Her father was lying face down at the back of the house, near the garage. She could hear him making a gurgling noise. Her mother told her that was the “death rattle”. Later when he was dead, her mother and fiancé carried him up to the back field wrapped in a grey blanket. They buried him in a shallow grave.
She didn’t remember going to sleep but must have. The next morning her mother shook her awake where she was sitting in a kitchen chair and told her there was cleaning to be done. The ground outside was covered with blood and mucus and her three young brothers were still asleep upstairs. She helped her mother clean up the blood and, at her mother’s instigation daubed tar on the wall where the porous stone had sucked up too much blood.
Shortly afterwards she and Pinder got married in a registry office in nearby Mullingar. After the wedding her mother took her three brothers to England for a couple of months and she stayed in the home place with her husband. When her mother returned the body was revisited. The shallow grave was not sufficient, Veronica said. Her mother and husband dug up her father’s body and lit a fire. The body burned over several days. The smell on the first day was horrible. Visiting the field during that time she saw her father’s rib cage in the embers.
Eventually the fire went out. Her husband raked through the ashes with a shovel and brought fragments of bone back to the house in a biscuit tin. Some went in the range in the kitchen, some went in the septic tank.
The marriage did not last. The following year, when her son was still new born, Pinder went back to his native Liverpool. She did not see him again. Some time later she, as well as her mother and three brothers, moved back to England.
Six years later she couldn’t live with the secret any longer. She told a social worker what had happened and was put in touch with the police who contacted the gardai. A search of her parents house discovered the remnants of the fire and bone fragments missed in the charred ashes.
It wasn’t until 2008 that the bones could be formally indentified and her mother and former husband were charged. She’ll continue her evidence tomorrow as the sun continues to shine. The wheels of justice don’t stop turning for a spell of good weather.
It’s been reported in the papers today that Celine Cawley’s family are suing her husband Eamonn Lillis for a greater share of his wife’s estate. Lillis was convicted back in February of killing his wife – he hit her over the head three times but the jury decided that the prosecution had failed to prove that he intended to kill her. Under Irish succession laws he loses the right to inherit his wife’s half of the estate after being convicted of her manslaughter but he will still inherit his half of any property and assets the couple owned together.
The reports today say that Celine’s brother and sister Chris and Susanne Cawley are suing Lillis to ensure that his daughter with Celine will inherit a larger share of the couple’s €4 million fortune. The girl, who’s 17, is living with her mother’s family since her father was sent to jail. She will turn 18 in November and will come into her inheritance. She will also lose the anonymity guaranteed her as a minor so closely linked to a criminal trial. At Lillis’s sentencing, in a heartfelt victim impact statement Susanne Cawley spoke about the families concerns for the girl. It’s unsurprising therefore that they want to make sure she has the resources to protect herself from any unwanted attention.
Her parents owned three properties. Rowan Hill on Howth Head, where the family lived at the time of her mother’s death, a dream holiday home in France and an earlier home in Sutton. As things stand at the moment, Lillis could veto any property sales his daughter may choose to make. Her mother’s family wish to change this.
It’s not the first time that Celine Cawley’s will has hit the headlines. Soon after the trial, while I was working on the book of her tragic death and the subsequent legal proceedings, I wrote here about Lillis’s stepping down as executor of his wife’s will. I commented at the time about the curious politeness that has followed these horrific events. It appears now that the gloves have come off.
Mr Justice Paul Carney hit the headlines again this week. The most senior criminal court judge in the country, he’s never been one to mince his words. The comments that have excited comment this time were part of an address to a criminal law conference in University College Cork, where he is adjunct professor of Law.
He was presenting a paper on “Victims of Crime and the Trial Process” and made the point that as a judge he would rather not be able to identify the victim’s family during a trial. In the new courts complex on Parkgate Street the family of the victim sit in the rows of benches directly in front of the judge and equidistant from the accused and the jury. Mr Justice Carney said that ideally the family should not be within the line of sight of judge or jury although they should be moved into places of prominence after a conviction.
These comments have provoked an angry reaction from victims families. They understandably feel that they should be allowed to stare down the person who killed their loved one in court, and make them see the lives they have damaged by their actions. It’s always going to be difficult to balance the right of the victims’ families to show their grief and anger at what has happened with the necessary presumption in law that the accused are innocent until a jury decides otherwise.
I’ve heard arguments many times from those who have lost someone in violent circumstances that killers do not deserve that kind of dignity but the problem is that until they are convicted they are presumed innocent of all charges. That is the law we have in this country and it is a fair one. Everyone has the right to be judged by their peers and it is up to the Director of Public Prosecutions to prove the case against them. I know that if I was on trial for a criminal offence I would much prefer to be tried under our presumption of innocence than have to prove my case when the default judgement was guilty.
With the presumption of guilt an innocent man could be unable to prove his innocence without witnesses or forensic evidence. I can’t help but feel that it’s better the innocent have a chance to defend themselves than the occasional guilty man (or woman, of course) walk free. If I was wrongly accused of a crime I’d rather the deck was stacked a little in my favour.
When you cover a lot of trials you get used to making your own judgement about the guilt or innocence of the accused. We hear all the legal argument and frequently the gossip that passes around the court that juries are quite rightly shielded from. You can usually call the outcome of a trial and contrary to some opinions I think that generally the outcome is the right one. You could be forgiven for thinking that there is a never ending stream of those who have eluded justice but that simply isn’t what I’ve seen. There have been occasions when a verdict has surprised me, or that I’ve disagreed with one, but out of all the trials I’ve covered I can probably count those verdicts on the fingers of one hand.
I may have commented here about the bizarre animal that is the jury, the tendency of perfectly sane, rational people to seem to be overcome with a kind of madness as soon as they set foot in the jury room but I can’t think of any better way of doing it. Jury trials and the presumption of innocence together with thorough garda investigations and competent prosecutions and defence are the fairest way to do things. If it was up to the gardai to try those accused of crimes or the legal profession alone or even us press, justice would be poorly served. Too much familiarity breeds an unhealthy cynicism and those twelve men and women need to come to the task with fresh eyes and as few pre conceptions as possible.
It might seem heartless when a trial judge like Mr Justice Carney says he doesn’t want to know about the grief of those who are the living victims in a murder trial. He has to be neutral and he has to be careful that he does not sway the jury. It’s a difficult job but that reserve, that separation, is necessary for the jury to do their job properly. They aren’t jaundiced by exposure to too much violence and tragedy. At the end of each trial they are urged to judge the case as if it was someone they loved in the dock, to give the accused the same chance they would wish for themselves or one of their own.
It is one of the great difficulties of the legal system that the victims’ place in this is, of necessity, therefore reduced. It would be inhumane to ban them from the courtroom entirely but their very classification as the “victim’s” family presupposes that there was a victim, and leans towards the presumption of a crime for that victim to fall foul of. That simply doesn’t sit with the presumption of innocence. When we are writing about a trial we have to bear in mind that the victim for the moment is probably best termed “the deceased” and the language kept as neutral as possible while still telling a gripping story.
For those who have lost someone to a violent death this must feel intolerable. For them it isn’t simply an academic exercise of checks and balances to tip the scales one way or another. They’ve been with this from the start. They had to have the news of the death broken to them, the indentifying of the body, the horror of the post mortem results and the garda investigation that made funeral arrangements so much more stressful. They’ve had the glare of the media spotlight pointed at them, searching for signs of anguish as the journalists follow the story of the latest brutal death.
For the media it’s just another story, for the barristers, gardai and judges it’s just another case out of however many, but for the families it’s their lives. It’s not something they will ever forget, not something they will ever leave behind, something that will scar their hearts for ever more. When the gardai come to them with a suspect and they follow the tortuously slow progress to the courts it is personal and raw.
But it’s this very anguish that can get in the way of justice. Grief can be blind to the nuances of law, the clinical deliberations that should be granted to anything that will take away a person’s liberty. It doesn’t matter what they’ve done, the only thing you can do is trust that justice works and the system will creep forward to the right conclusion. As long as we live in a civilised society those checks and balances need to be there. If the shoe was on the other foot you’d be thankful of them.
But the problem is that sometimes the presumed innocent person in the dock isn’t innocent and those giving evidence have seen their guilt with their own eyes. In those cases it doesn’t matter how visible the grief or anguish, if they’ve sworn to tell the truth you have to assume that’s what they’re doing. The jury will judge what weight to give their evidence but there will be cases when people are telling the truth and have seen terrible things which they have to relive in the court. In his speech Mr Justice Carney also commented on another peculiarity of the layout in the new courts, the fact that witnesses must pass within arms reach of the open dock where the accused is sitting. It was a similar layout in the Four Courts but a situation that really should have been rectified when they built the new courts. There seem to have been rather a lot of practicalities of the workings of a criminal trial that weren’t considered when the new court complex was designed.
It’s not the first time Mr Justice Carney has hit the headlines from comments he’s made to the UCC Law faculty. In 2007 he caused uproar when he criticised Majella Holohan, mother of Robert Holohan, who used her victim impact statement to raise matters that didn’t come out as part of the trial. He’s an outspoken judge and will be in the news again I’m sure. His comments are always thought provoking at the very least and the coverage they provoke allow for wider discussion about important points concerning the criminal justice system. People need to understand the law of the land and discussion is part of that.
Today Death on the Hill is officially published. You probably won’t find it in the shops just yet – it usually takes a couple of days for book stocks to move from warehouse to shop floor. Which makes a publication day rather peculiar.
I’ve had my author copies of Death on the Hill for a while now. They’re sitting in a neat row in our front room and every now and then I go and take a look at them – I still get a kick out of seeing my name on the spine of a real, live book with pages and everything. I’m excited about seeing copies in bookshops but publication day itself is a marker in time that’s even more confusing than a mid life birthday.
You wake up and the morning is the same as the one before. When I was a child dreaming of being a writer I thought there would at least be streamers. The appearance of a book in print with your name on it would signify an end to the normal daily grind and an emergence into the artistic realm like a butterfly emerging from it’s chrysalis. I was a rather romantic child.
The reality is generally rather more prosaic. Today I got up at the usual time and headed off to court. There’s a new murder trial starting this week and there were several cases in the Monday list that I wanted to keep an eye on. Then I went grocery shopping. Life goes on.
In the days and weeks to come things will get busy. There’ll be interviews to do, publicity. I’ll start haunting book shops and counting their stock and fretting about sales figures. I’ll be pestering everyone I know to buy, or read, or review and shouting about the book from every available rooftop. This evening though it’s my publication day. A moment in time where the one thing that matters is that the book is written. It’s real and will very, very soon be coming to book shops all over Ireland. That’s something to be pleased about.
