There were discomfiting interludes for Eamonn Lillis yesterday as well as a window into his life
FOR THE most part, Eamonn Lillis remains intent on the written evidence before him, occasionally raising his eyes towards a speaker in mildly interested fashion. But there are times when his interest visibly quickens, as happened when Garda Anthony Moloney slowly rustled through a series of evidence bags, unpacking items of clothing which Lillis claimed to have been wearing on the morning of his wife’s murder.
In a court again crammed with observers, the striped boxer shorts being held up for all to see was an intimate and discomfiting moment.
It was hardly the only one. His eyes were firmly trained on the documents in front of him as the State prosecutor, Mary Ellen Ring, read out statements given by him in the couple of days following his wife’s violent death, documents invariably signed off with the declaration that they are made in the knowledge that “I will be liable to prosecution if I state anything I know to be false . . .”
The central figure in these statements was an intruder – “about my height, 5ft 11in, strong, wiry . . . wearing a balaclava and black nylon-type gloves, definitely a white male . . . 20ish to 30ish . . .” – he said was crouched over his wife, then came at Lillis swinging a brick in his right hand and “floored” him, before the intruder “legged it” down the garden and escaped. His statement put a name on this attacker, added the prosecutor.
“Celine was a fighter,” he told detectives. “A tough nut. She would have confronted someone. She wasn’t a wallflower.”
But since his defence counsel, Brendan Grehan, opened his case on Tuesday with an admission that there was no such intruder on December 15th, 2008, it made for another discomfiting interlude in Eamonn Lillis’s day.
Tuesday’s apparent courts’ glasnost, when photographs of the house and surrounding crime scene were shown on screens to the court at large for the first time, faded yesterday.
Pictures of injuries allegedly sustained by Lillis during the incident which he now acknowledges led to his wife’s death were deemed either too sensitive to be shown to the court at large or technology failed. In any event, as the images of his scratched, cut and abraded face and bloodied ring finger were held up by Dr Haroon Khan on the witness stand, they were visible to anyone with decent eyesight.
Questions from defence counsel yesterday focused on those injuries; on the frosty, slippery steps leading out to the decking area where Ms Cawley’s body was found; on whether her head injuries could have been sustained by her body “moving towards the source of the blunt force trauma or the blunt force trauma moving towards the body”.
We also learned a little more about Eamonn Lillis’s life through his statements: that his parents are dead and his two sisters live in England; that he married Celine Cawley in July 1991 some 10 months after they met in Kinsale; that Celine had started the company – Toytown Films – and that he had come on board about two years later as a partner; that he describes himself as a film producer.
He also painted a picture of domestic harmony, saying that on the day of Celine’s death, he rose at 6.30am and did his exercises and sit-ups for about 20 minutes before letting the three dogs – Molly, Sam and Harry – out of the kitchen, where they stayed at night; that he then made tea, and brought a cup to Celine and to their daughter. He had slept upstairs and Celine had slept downstairs, he said, as she had a bad cold.
The couple watched television for a while – GMTV, BBC1, he said, before he went up for a shower and took their daughter to school. He remembered a brief conversation with the deputy principal there; he told her he had put up the Christmas lights and they blew.
On the way home, he stopped at the shop on the summit and bought The Irish Times before going back to take the dogs for a walk.
It came across as an attractive, leisurely lifestyle. Things at work were quiet, he explained in the statement, so they generally wouldn’t go in until 9.30 or 10, sometimes later. They had scheduled a meeting that afternoon with a pension adviser.
