The text message was ominous.
At 5.57pm on April 22nd, 2014, Eoin O’Connor texted a family member: “Have to go to the country, Woodlands in Ballyjamesduff, if anything happens to me.”
A few hours earlier, O’Connor and his partner Karen Roche had been in Smyths Toys with their youngest daughter, picking out presents for her fifth birthday.
After leaving the toy shop, the couple went home to St Teresa’s Gardens in Dublin 8 to blow out the candles on the child’s birthday cake before O’Connor set off for Cavan with his close friend Anthony Keegan at about 5.30pm.
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“I never saw him again,” Roche later told a Central Criminal Court jury.
Hours later, O’Connor and Keegan were shot dead and their bodies later dumped on an island in a Co Cavan lake.
On Wednesday, Ruth Lawrence, the girlfriend of a drug dealer who crossed paths with the two men, was found guilty of the murder of both O’Connor and Keegan.
[ Ruth Lawrence found guilty of murder of two men in 2014Opens in new window ]
O’Connor was a drug dealer, Lawrence’s murder trial was told. Roche, his partner, said in the week leading up to his disappearance the 32-year-old wasn’t himself; he had been very quiet and had not appeared in the right frame of mind.
O’Connor had been in Ballyjamesduff the previous day, Easter Monday. He told Roche on the way home he found “the fellas” he was looking for.
When Roche and O’Connor were in the city centre on the day he disappeared, he had taken a phone call at about 3.50pm. She said he didn’t seem happy about it.
O’Connor told his partner he would have to return to Cavan that evening.
‘My brother never spelled the word like that’
Rory O’Connor was at a football match in Coolock when he last spoke to Eoin O’Connor, his younger brother, at about 7.30pm that night. Rory O’Connor was immediately worried when he found out where his brother was. He knew Eoin O’Connor was owed money by two men living in Ballyjamesduff, he told the court.
The two men were a small-time drug dealer named Jason Symes and a bigger player in the drugs trade, Neville van der Westhuizen, a South African man.
Rory O’Connor rang his brother’s phone at about 8.45pm but got no answer. He found it unusual that Eoin O’Connor hadn’t replied to his text messages, as his younger brother would always keep in contact with him.
Another brother, Brian O’Connor, texted Eoin O’Connor between 8.30pm and 9pm and Eoin replied that he was waiting on “somebody to turn up”.
When Brian O’Connor texted Eoin O’Connor at 9.45pm to say he was getting worried and asked if he was okay, he received a one-word response: “Yeah.”
“My brother never spelled the word like that, he normally spelled it ‘yea’,” Brian O’Connor told the jury.
The court heard that Eoin O’Connor’s phone just rang out after this point.
Rory O’Connor was so concerned that he drove his van at 2am to the house of Jason Symes, a low-level drug dealer Eoin O’Connor had been selling cannabis to, in the Woodlands estate in Ballyjamesduff in search of his brother.
When he received no answer, Rory O’Connor drove past the local Garda station in Bailieborough to see if the car Eoin O’Connor had been driving – his mother’s 2004 silver Ford Focus – was parked outside. It was nowhere to be seen.
Rory O’Connor understood that Symes and van der Westhuizen owed Eoin O’Connor “a substantive debt”.
The South African man, in fact, owed Eoin O’Connor about €70,000 and an immediate payment of €15,000 was to be forthcoming.
Eoin O’Connor had told his brother Brian O’Connor he met Symes the previous day and “everything was sorted”.
“Eoin said he was told by Jay Symes to call back the following day and he would have half or some of the money,” Brian O’Connor told the jury.
Concerned about the whereabouts of their sibling, the O’Connor brothers returned to Symes’s home on the evening of April 23rd but there was no answer.
Rory O’Connor made an official missing-person report about his brother at Santry Garda station in Dublin at 9.45pm the following night.
‘Always a bit mad’
Anthony Keegan, who was also known as “Bod”, had grown up with Eoin O’Connor in Coolock on the northside of Dublin. He had travelled with O’Connor to Cavan that night and was there “in a supporting role” in case of trouble.
Margaret Keegan last spoke to her adopted brother Anthony Keegan just after 6pm on April 22nd. She described him as “always a bit mad” and told the court he had been “in and out for doing sentences”, as the adoption had affected him.
When Margaret Keegan went on to Facebook the following morning, she saw messages from the O’Connor brothers from the previous night, indicating that Eoin O’Connor was missing.
When she found out that Eoin O’Connor and Anthony Keegan had gone to Cavan to collect €15,000 from Symes, Margaret Keegan went to Mountjoy Garda station on April 23rd and filed a missing-person report.
Symbiotic relationship
Neville van der Westhuizen had been living in Co Cavan for several years before 2014. His father Peter had moved from Durban in South Africa to Ballyjamesduff in 2000, with Neville following three years later. The father and son had worked in the Liffey Meats processing plant in Co Cavan.
Peter van der Westhuizen said he knew his son had a partner – a “quiet” girl named Ruth Lawrence who had worked in the nearby Crover House Hotel and was also a tattoo artist.
In December 2013, Lawrence and Neville van der Westhuizen began renting Patricks Cottage on the Westmeath side of Lough Sheelin, a picturesque lake straddling the borders of Meath, Westmeath and Cavan.
Retribution
The trial was told that Lawrence and van der Westhuizen were in a Dublin pub in 2013 when a plan was formed to rob drugs from Eoin O’Connor’s house.
The jury heard that a person identified in court only as Mr CD, who had initially put O’Connor in touch with van der Westhuizen, wanted O’Connor’s drugs stolen as retribution.
Also in the pub that night was Stacey Symes and her father Jason Symes, who began selling “weed” for van der Westhuizen in Ballyjamesduff following the meeting.
Stacey Symes was attending a post-Leaving Certificate course at the time and the jury was told she sold “insignificant quantities” of cannabis on campus.
The Symes would later become State-protected witnesses, coming forward to the Garda in 2014 to give voluntary statements about Lawrence and van der Westhuizen’s involvement in the murders of the two missing men.
In her evidence, Stacey Symes recalled a trip to Dublin before Easter 2014 when van der Westhuizen collected a gun.
She said van der Westhuizen was sitting beside her in the car with a gun on his lap, which he told her was loaded.
Stacey and Jason Symes alleged that they were left for hours in Burger King on O’Connell Street on Good Friday April 18th, 2014, when Lawrence and van der Westhuizen used Stacey Symes’s Nissan Micra car to rob drugs from Eoin O’Connor’s house.
Boating weather
Jason Symes testified that Eoin O’Connor had visited his house on Easter Monday, April 21st, as he owed the drug dealer “stupid money” for cigarettes. He said O’Connor was trying to make contact with van der Westhuizen, as van der Westhuizen owed him €15,000.
Stacey Symes, who was also in the kitchen that morning, said her father had telephoned van der Westhuizen, who was “stonewalling, trying to tell him not to let Eoin know where he was”.
On the same day, not far away, Lawrence was inquiring of her landlord whether she could hire a boat to go out on Lough Sheelin.
Boat builder Declan McCabe said that when he was collecting the rent that day, Lawrence had asked about a boat with a cabin but all he had was a lake boat.
“Maybe she wanted some shelter but no reason was given,” he told the jury.
Last contact
The following evening, April 22nd, Eoin O’Connor drove himself and Keegan to Ballyjamesduff in his mother’s Ford Focus to meet van der Westhuizen.
The trial heard the men’s phones used cell sites in Dublin at 5.43pm before travelling in a northwesterly direction, consistent with a journey along the N3 towards Cavan.
At 6.05pm Eoin O’Connor sent a family member a text message saying: “He won’t meet if anyone with me, bod is with me and I’ve someone halfway.”
There was a phone call between Eoin O’Connor and van der Westhuizen at about 7.10pm where it is assumed a specific meeting point was suggested.
Lawrence’s phone and another phone associated with the couple had used cell sites consistent with travelling towards Cavan town and being in the town after 6.25pm. The last activity on Lawrence’s phone was at 7.36pm.
The last contact on Keegan’s mobile phone was at 8.32pm, while the last text Eoin O’Connor received was at 8.38pm.
The prosecution’s contention was that both men were likely murdered later on the evening of April 22nd.
Prosecutors believe O’Connor and Keegan were shot in a field not far from Patricks Cottage – the rental home where Lawrence lived with van der Westhuizen – before the bodies were moved to Inchicup Island on Lough Sheelin later that night.
‘Mayhem’
Stacey and Jason Symes went to Patricks Cottage the following evening – April 23rd – as she said her father had received a phone call informing him that there were men at his house looking for O’Connor.
The atmosphere in the cottage that night was described by the Symes as extremely intense and “just mayhem”.
When she walked in the door, Stacey Symes said she was greeted by Latvian national Vytautis Bitaris, who was “hyper, like he was on speed”.
Stacey Symes described van der Westhuizen and Lawrence as “quite hypey”, with Lawrence trying to talk to her and van der Westhuizen trying to talk to her father.
“I think we were sitting around in the kitchen, they were coked out of their head,” Jason Symes told the jury.
“I remember Ruth saying she had shot Eoin but it went wrong; that he had twisted or something,” Stacey Symes said in evidence.
Asked again by the prosecutor what she could remember hearing about the shooting, the protected witness said: “Just that Ruth shot him, he twisted, it went wrong and Neville took over.”
Stacey Symes told defence counsel: “She is not a murderer because Neville murdered the two of them.”
Jason Symes recalled there was “something said about ‘the job is done or it’s done’” in relation to what happened to the two men.
“Ruth said that whatever she’d done, she’d done and that’s it, and I think he took over,” he said.
Former chief State pathologist Prof Marie Cassidy told the jury she conducted a postmortem on O’Connor’s remains and identified three gunshot wounds; one to the head, one to the abdomen and another to the left hand.
In her evidence, Cassidy said the gunshot wound to the head was the fatal injury, whereas the bullet through the abdomen was “a potentially fatal wound”.
In his closing speech, prosecuting counsel Michael O’Higgins SC referred to the Symes’s testimony about shooting O’Connor in the stomach – the twisting and headlock details.
He asked the jury to consider: “How is all this information coming forward if it wasn’t heard?”
A gun in the countryside
In her evidence, Stacey Symes said van der Westhuizen had instructed Jason Symes to “say certain things”.
When they returned to Patricks Cottage, Stacey Symes said the couple told her they had put O’Connor’s body under a tree and asked for their help to move the bodies.
“Ruth kept pointing behind me down towards the field down towards the water ... they said there was a ledge and they had to swim ... she said they had to put them [the bodies] on top of each other and under a tree,” Stacey Symes said.
The bodies were to be moved by boat, she said. “Ruth wanted her and me on the boat, so if someone saw it, it looked like two girls on a boat,” she said.
Stacey Symes also said Lawrence had shown her “a little black” gun in her bedroom and had demonstrated how to load the bullets. The witness told the defence that the accused “was in the countryside with a gun; that’s not a normal thing”.
Vytautis Bitaris testified that van der Westhuizen had asked him to do some cleaning or building around the cottage on the day after the men were last seen alive.
When he arrived, Bitaris said he had noticed a fire burning between the house and the sheds and had seen bags of clothes.
It was the prosecution case that these clothes belonged to Lawrence and van der Westhuizen, as the deceased had been fully dressed when their bodies were found.
Later that evening, Bitaris said he had helped load four “big stones” or H-blocks into the boot of van der Westhuizen’s car.
The State had argued the couple was aware that Inchicup Island was not a safe location for the men’s remains “in anything but the short term”.
It is believed that there was a plan for the men’s bodies to be put in a boat, weighed down with the H-blocks and sunk in a part of the lake where there was much deeper water but this had never materialised.
‘Still waiting’
The trial was told that van der Westhuizen, Lawrence and the two Symes then fled the area. They slept in a disused house in the town of Ashbourne for a few hours on April 25th before travelling to Rosslare Port in Co Wexford that evening. There they boarded the 8.45pm sailing to Fishguard in Wales before continuing on to London.
Within a few days Lawrence and van der Westhuizen flew to South Africa, while the Symes later returned to Ireland.
When Declan McCabe accompanied gardaí to Patricks Cottage later that week on April 29th, H-blocks weighing 40kg were found at the rear of the house.
The Ford Focus car that Eoin O’Connor had driven was found at Lough Owel car park on the N4 in Westmeath on April 25th.
It was the prosecution case that O’Connor’s car had been “dumped” there by Lawrence on the morning of April 23rd.
O’Connor’s mobile phone was located in the driver’s door and had been switched off. There was an unsent text message on the phone from 8.38pm.
The message had no recipient and read: “Still waiting on him, phone off again.”
‘Dreadful smell’
Pat Smith told the jury that he was fishing on Lough Sheelin on May 18th, 2014 when he detected a “dreadful smell coming off” one of the lake’s 10 islands, about 100m offshore. He had to pull the boat away from the shoreline because of the strength of the odour.
He said he became suspicious because the previous week he saw the Garda Water Unit “diving elsewhere” while searching for the “two bodies, the missing men”.
On May 26th, two bodies were discovered with the help of a Garda sniffer dog.
Inchicup Island was declared a crime scene, with the bodies of O’Connor and Keegan removed from the island on May 27th, 2014.
Keegan had died from two gunshot wounds to the head and neck, which the prosecution called “targeted shots”.
It was the prosecution case that Keegan had been fatally shot first, as he was there as O’Connor’s protector and was the person most likely to be shot first.
In her evidence, Stacey Symes told the jury that Lawrence thought it was funny that Keegan had said he would die for his friend O’Connor.
Extradition
The Symes contacted gardaí in 2014 when they returned to Ireland and gave voluntary statements about Lawrence and van der Westhuizen’s involvement in the murders of the men.
An arrest warrant was issued for Lawrence in 2016. It would be 2023 before she was extradited from South Africa, almost a decade after the men’s bodies were found.
Van der Westhuizen is currently serving a 15-year sentence in Westville Prison in Durban for a 2020 conviction for kidnapping, attempted murder and murder.
An application to extradite van der Westhuizen to Ireland to face trial will take place when he has finished serving his sentence in South Africa.
