Galway Advertiser 2001/2001_05_17/GA_17052001_E1_014.pdf 

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4*4 In t h e c o u
Accused in murder and rape trial said he hadn't gone out with girl for three months - court hears
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teenage girl told a jury yesterday (Wednesday) that a man now accused of raping and murdering a schoolgirl in County Galway had tried to chat her up and told her how long it was since he was with a girl when she spoke to him in a pub on the night of the killing. In the Central Criminal Court a 26-year-old County Galway man - who cannot be identified for legal reasons - is on trial for the murder of the 17-year-old schoolgirl and to two counts of rape of her in the early hours of December 6 1998. He denies all the charges. Giving evidence to Mr Denis Vaughan Buckley SC, prosecuting, the teenage girl said she was in a local village pub in the company of others. Her father was also in the pub. She spoke with the accused there for around twenty to twenty-five minutes. She told Mr Vaughan Buckley that there was only one thing she could remember the accused saying - "That he hadn't gone out with a girl for three months and that was the longest time he had ever gone since he was 13 without a girl." "I had the impression that he wanted me to go with him", she told the court. She said the accused was also "slagging" her about another youth in their company and had asked would she go with that youth. Her answer was no. Mr Buckley asked had she been anxious to go out with the accused either, and she replied, "No." Cross-examined, the girl agreed that she got the impression that the accused was trying to chat her up. Mr Barry White SC, defending, said: "I suggest to you that you got the wrong impression and that he was doing no such thing". "Well, that's the impression I got," the girl replied. She said the accused left the pub at around 9:50pm. Other witnesses told the court that the accused was upset and agitated when they saw him later outside a local hotel at times around midnight. The jury has already heard that gardai were called to the hotel after the accused hit his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend near the door of the hotel. A male witness said that shortly after 12:30am, he saw the accused sitting on a wall opposite the hotel. The accused asked him if he had seen his exgirlfriend or her new boyfriend. "He asked me if I saw him, to tell him that he was outside waiting for him and that he'd sort him out." The witness said that later that night, at 2:45am, he again saw the accused at a local chip shop. He was having an argument with a different blond-haired man, and "hit him two punches". A 23-year-old factory worker said he saw the accused walking around outside the takeaway shortly after 2am and spoke to him later at around 2:25am or 2:30am. "He was upset and agitated at that stage, I don't know why," the witness said. He said he gave the accused a lift in his car, and the accused explained he had had a row with his ex-girlfriend. Later, he said, "I offered to give him a lift home, and instead he got out at the takeaway." At 2:50am, the witness then gave other youths a lift home, and as he was done a course with his brother and knew him. She said he was agitated and upset and spoke about his ex-girlfriend, the mother of his three-year-old daughter. She agreed with Mr White that "His concern was he didn't want [his ex-girlfriend's] new boyfriend around his daughter". She agreed that he kept on going on about his child and was repeating himself. "He was making accusations about the boyfriend," the witness said, "I knew the conversation was going nowhere and I was also conscious of the gardai presence outside [the hotel J." So she said she left the accused there. "He looked very cold", she told Mr White. "It was a freezing cold night. It wasn't that he was cold "/ had the impression that he himself, it was that he would make you cold, like, looking at him. And one of our parting words to him wanted me to go with him" was [in Irish]: "Don't get cold there son, go home The jury has already heard from returning to the village, he met the accused's car for yourself." local gardai who were called to the fight at the hotel coming from the village. They stopped and spoke and the accused said he was going home. It was shortly before midnight. They had twice told the "around 3am". A female witness said she saw the accused to go home. The prosecution alleges that it was after that fight and before the fight in the chip accused on the footpath outside the hotel. She told Mr Barry White SC, defending that he called her shop that the accused raped and murdered the 17over and she decided to go over because she had year-old schoolgirl. "because the top was tight, really tight". She agreed that it looked like it was too small on him and he wasn't wearing anything underneath it. Asked how she knew, she replied, "Because I pinched him on the chest. It was a see-through top, if he was wearing anything, I would have seen it." The witness said that later that night when she saw the accused in a local pub at around 10pm, he was wearing "the exact same top". Later again, at around 2:30am, she saw the accused on the path outside a local junior dancing venue, across the road from a chip shop. "It was about half two, 20 to three. He was wearing black clothes - a black tee-shirt and I'm nearly sure, black jeans." The witness was not crossexamined. Another young woman told the trial that she saw a fight break out between the accused and another man between about 2am and 2:30am outside the chip shop. She said he was wearing a black tee-shirt with 'Metallica' written on the back of it. She knew because she listened to the band herself, she told the court. A friend and neighbour of the accused told Mr Vaughan Buckley that he went into a local pub at around 2:30pm the day after the killing and saw the accused standing at the bar counter. He was wearing a dark tee-shirt, "it must have been black or something similar", he said. He said he noticed "marks on his arm, a scrape on his arm". It was just one particular scrape, he said, and it was ovalshaped. "I said in Irish, "Was somebody hungry last night'", the witness said. The reason he said that was "because of the shape of it - it was of the top set of teeth, like that, oval-shaped", he said. The accused told him it must have happened the night before "up at the chippie" where he said "some guy had started at him and he had to give him a couple of clouts". In cross-examination, the witness agreed with Mr White that the accused was not making any effort to hide the mark, which was openly on view on his arm. The accused man denies the murder and the two rape charges, and his counsel, Mr Barry White SC has told the jury that the gardai who patrolled the village area on the night in question "cannot say that he wasn't in the village all that night".

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he accused man wore different clothes later on a night he is accused of raping and murdering a schoolgirl than those he was seen wearing earlier, his trial heard on Monday. The jury also heard a friend and neighbour of the accused give evidence that he saw an oval-shaped scrape on the accused's arm "like the top set of teeth" the afternoon after the killing. The jury had already heard that the accused was involved in a fight outside a hotel nightclub with his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend shortly before midnight. Witnesses - including garda witnesses - to that incident and its aftermath, have said the accused was wearing a white ribbed v-necked jumper. The trial heard on Monday from the last person to see the schoolgirl before she disappeared from the village area on the night she was killed. A part-time waitress at the local hotel, who was returning there to get an asthma inhaler for her friend, said she met the deceased girl on the roadway at around 12:45 or 12:50am. The schoolgirl greeted her and she said hello back, and the schoolgirl continued

walking in a direction away from the hotel. The jury has heard that the schoolgirl left her companions to go to the toilet. The asthma sufferer, another waitress, said she was sitting on a wall waiting for her friend to return with the inhaler when she saw a car coming from the hotel direction. It stopped near by, close to the entrance to a roadway. She heard a car door open and close but did not see anyone. The car moved off. When it was stopped, its lights were off, she said, and she noticed its left indicator was on, which she thought strange because it turned right down the road. Cross-examined, the girl said it was a dark-coloured car. She agreed with Mr Barry White SC that in her statement to Gardai she said she thought it was green or blue but wasn't sure. The accused's car was a red Ford Mondeo, the trial has heard. A male witness who had worked with the accused for "a couple of weeks" before the killing told Mr Denis Vaughan Buckley SC, prosecuting, that be and the accused spent the day of December 5 in Galway city, moving around a number of pubs, drinking.

At around 9pm that night, when he met him in a pub in the local village, the accused was wearing "a white top, woolish top, with the sleeves rolled up", the same clothes he had been wearing earlier. Shown a while Adidas sweatshirt, the man said this was "definitely not" the top the accused had been wearing. Cross-examined by Mr White, this witness agreed that the labouring work he did with the accused involved contact with steel, concrete and barbed wire. A young woman who was in the same school year as the deceased told the trial she was celebrating her 17th birthday in

Accused had marks on his arm - Court hears
Galway city when by chance, she met the accused while with her boyfriend in a hotel in Eyre Square. The young woman said he was wearing a while V-neck wool top with the sleeves pulled up to his elbows. Asked had she made any comment to him about it, she agreed she had slagged him off. "I called him a puff", she said.

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wo day after the schoolgirl's body was found on a County Galway foreshore, the man accused of her murder and rape told a friend he was talking to her on the night she died. A Central Criminal Court jury heard on Tuesday from the former friend of the accused of a phone conversation they had two days after the killing. At one stage, the youth was himself arrested as part of the Garda investigation into the girl's rape and

murder. A pub doorman also told the jury yesterday that he refused the girl entry to a village pub on the night she died, because she was underage. The girl was last seen at around 12:45 or 12:50am outside the pub after leaving a friend's car to find somewhere to go to the toilet. In evidence, a former friend of the accused said he saw him twice on the night of the killing, once in the pub earlier on. and the second time, at a chip shop at

2:45am. He said he saw him again on the afternoon of Sunday December 6, in a local pub, and noticed "scratch marks on both arms". "He was distant, he was quieter than usual, very quiet", the former friend told Mr Denis Vaughan Buckley S C , prosecuting. He said that he heard another witness say something about a "bite mark" but the accused said "it happened at work or in a fight - he brushed it off

very quickly". Two days later, a Tuesday, the youth said he phoned the accused, who asked him first if the gardai had spoken to him and then what questions they bad asked. The accused went on to say that he had an alibi for his car, because it was parked outside the local hotel all night. (Continued on next page)