Gardaí are hopeful a four-year-old girl who was present when her mother and father were fatally stabbed at their rented home may be able to shed light on how they were wounded.
The girl is one of two children of Angelique (27) and Cornelius Billing (44) who died after being stabbed at their apartment over a shop on the main street of the village of Kildysart, Co Clare, on Wednesday evening.
Gardaí are trying to establish if they stabbed each other and both succumbed to their injuries moments later or if it was a case of murder-suicide.
Third-party involvement has been ruled out and gardaí believe the fatal incident was a domestic dispute that escalated.
The postmortems have confirmed they died from stab wounds. Blood spatter patterns are being analysed and an extensive study of the crime scene apartment by the Garda Technical Bureau has been completed in an effort to piece together what happened.
The couple, who were from South Africa, were separating after enduring a number of difficult years in their relationship. They were also in dispute over who would care for their two girls, aged two and four years, when they separated and Ms Billing had unsuccessfully tried to bring the children back to South Africa.
Garda sources said while the youngest child would be too young to be a witness, specialist interviewers have been assigned to work with the older girl to establish the sequence of the stabbings and who was responsible.
The couple were both found on Wednesday evening wounded and covered in blood, but still alive, by fire fighters and gardaí who had gone to the village of Kildysart to deal with an unrelated fire.
Ms Billing ran from the couple’s rented home onto the main street at about 7.30pm with her four-year-old daughter before collapsing in front of gardaí.
She lost consciousness and was pronounced dead on the street.
Gardaí saw her daughter running into the family’s nearbyapartment and followed her. They saw Mr Billing standing at the top of the stairs,bleeding heavily from a neck wound and holding a knife. Gardaí shouted at him to drop the weapon and he did so as he collapsed.
He exchanged words with gardaí in the seconds before he died. Because gardaí have ruled out third party involvement,the inquiry into the deaths is not a criminal case. It has been undertaken to inform the inquest process but a source said every step would be taken to establish how the fatal wounds were inflicted.
