A jury has been shown a bloodied and bent knife that a man who denies the murder of his wife at their rural Co Mayo home said he used in the killing.
The Central Criminal Court has been told by the prosecution that while the accused James Kilroy admits killing Valerie French Kilroy four years ago, psychiatric testimony from expert witnesses will be central to their verdict in the case.
Mr Kilroy (50), a park ranger, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to the murder of Ms French Kilroy (41) at their rural home at Kilbree Lower, Westport between June 13th and 14th, 2019.
In his opening speech, prosecution counsel Dean Kelly SC said the jury will be hearing “quite a lot of expert evidence compared to other trials” on psychiatric matters.
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In outlining the case, he said the jury will hear that at around 2.30am on June 14th, 2019 a witness heard banging on her door and spoke to a man whom she did not know. He said he had “travelled around the world many times and hers was the first house with the light on”. The woman later called gardaí but they could not locate the man, who the prosecution contends is Mr Kilroy.
About six or seven hours later, another local saw a naked man through the window of his home two fields away while he was having breakfast, said Mr Kelly. The neighbour made a call to gardaí, who went to speak to the man, who turned out to be Mr Kilroy.
Counsel said gardaí detained him under the Mental Health Act and made “significant efforts to get a doctor but availability was bad”. Mr Kilroy was taken to hospital in Castlebar and was assessed. He then told the doctor he had “something to say to the gardaí”, counsel said.
“He [Mr Kilroy] tells them he had killed his wife,” said Mr Kelly.
A number of gardaí then went to the house in Kilbree Lower at about 3pm and found a “Ford camper van parked face-first into a shed”. Alongside the camper van there was a large amount of blood and inside they found the body of Ms French Kilroy.
A postmortem carried out by Chief State Pathologist Dr Linda Mulligan reported the cause of death to be ligature strangulation, blunt force trauma and a stab wound to the neck.
Mr Kelly said the jury will have to consider the “issue of sanity” and what impact someone’s mental health can have on their “ability to wilfully commit crime”.
Counsel said the jury would have to first deliberate on whether or not the accused was suffering at the time of Ms French Kilroy’s death from a mental disorder, which is what the defence has told the court.
“You must then consider if that person did not know the nature and quality of the act, that they did not understand the essence of what they were doing,” said Mr Kelly.
“Either they didn’t know what they were doing, or, secondly, didn’t know what they were doing was wrong, or, thirdly, was that person unable to refrain from committing an act,” counsel told the jury.
“You will not be particularly concerned with who it is who killed Ms French Kilroy – it’s likely it will not trouble you greatly.”
Counsel said it was open to the jury to also consider the verdict of not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter due to diminished responsibility caused by an established mental health issue.
“This is a difficult decision and there is difficult evidence,” he said, adding that the jury is “required to leave all of your human sympathy or outrage outside the door”.
Det Sgt Michael Doherty of Castlebar Garda station, who was one of the senior investigators in the case, showed the jury a 20cm knife bent sideways to almost a 90 degree angle. The knife was found by the camper van and forensic analysis revealed it had Ms French Kilroy’s blood on it.
Det Sgt Doherty said the knife was shown to Mr Kilroy while the accused was detained “and he identified it as the knife used by him on her”.
A loose seat belt that had the deceased’s blood on it was also shown to the jury, while a hatchet found “immediately proximate” to Ms French Kilroy’s body in the camper van was found to have Mr Kilroy’s DNA on it.
Det Sgt Doherty said that on June 14th, gardaí went to answer a call about a naked man walking in a field “in the direction of Croagh Patrick” and arrested him “for his own protection”.
The detective said that when gardaí searched the house at Kibree Lower and found blood in the camper van, the bathroom of the house and on the ground at the shed, “it was clear [Ms French Kilroy] met a violent death”.
Det Sgt Doherty said Mr Kilroy told gardaí that he had used drugs at various times of his life and had been in inpatient care in 2001 for a psychiatric incident. The witness said Mr Kilroy told gardaí that he had killed Ms French Kilroy with a knife and “went into some level of detail in describing the knife” by sketching it and also demonstrated how he killed Ms French Kilroy.
Det Sgt Paul Curran told Mr Kelly that gardaí searched the camper van, the house and then the wider area where a suitcase and travel bags were discovered bundled together in a field. In a rucksack, an air-pistol in its holster was found by gardaí.
In the briefcase, said Det Sgt Curran, was an Irish provisional driving licence, two envelopes, a registered post stamp and an international vaccination booklet among other items.
The trial continues in front of Mr Justice Paul McDermott and a jury of seven women and five men and is expected to last up to three weeks.