Sinéad O’Neill pays tribute to her boss for saving her life

A woman who was raped, assaulted and controlled by a man she met on an internet dating website has paid tribute to her boss for saving her life.

Sinéad O’Neill, from Killybegs, Co Donegal, suffered a horrific six-week ordeal at the hands of Dean Ward (36) of Ballintlea, Hollyfort, Gorey, Co Wexford, who was jailed for 17 years on Thursday.

She has waived her right to anonymity to encourage other victims to find help.

After meeting Ward, he effectively moved into Ms O’Neill’s home, sprayed mace into her face, tied her up, choked her, raped her, threatened her with a hammer and punched her in the face.

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Taking over her online accounts, he controlled her access to friends and family, logged on to her online banking, monitored her whereabouts, social media and mobile phone use and removed her contraceptive device as she slept.

Speaking on Friday, Ms O’Neill said she believed she would not be alive but for the persistence of her boss, in whom she confided about what she was going through.

“She completely took the reins, if it wasn’t for her – a lot of people are to be credited for me being alive – but initially if it wasn’t for her I wouldn’t be alive,” she said.

“She completely took over. She kept getting at me every day ‘you need to do something’ and I just kept saying ‘no, just leave it, just leave it, I have it under control, it’s going to be okay’.

“But she kept telling me ‘Sinéad you’re not going to live through this. You’re going to die. He’s going to kill you’ and I thought you’re being a bit dramatic, it’s going to be fine.

“But she kept pushing and kept pushing and thank God she did and eventually I was just like, ‘right, fine, but whatever’s going to happen, it has to be a solid plan’ – it had to be that he can’t get away.”

Ms O’Neill said she was made to feel “so embarrassed and ashamed of everything” Ward had done to her, and “didn’t want anybody to know and I had convinced myself that I was strong enough and maybe even smart enough to get myself out of the situation”.

“But things became very intense, very fast and there were so many threats on my life that one day at work I broke down to my boss and told her what was going on,” she said.

Ms O’Neill met Ward on a Friday and the pair spent the weekend together.

By Sunday, she asked if he had work to go to and Ward lied about working on a construction site in Mullingar and that he had to attend a safety course and that he was also going on annual leave.

Ward stayed at her home until the following Wednesday when he told her he was travelling to Letterkenny, Co Donegal, for the safety course. She became suspicious when he said he would return “very late” on Thursday night.

“But that’s when he came clean and said that he had lied to me and he was actually living in Dublin, which of course was another lie, but I told him at that point that no, I didn’t want him to come back,” she told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland.

“I put my phone on silent and oh my goodness, he just blew up my phone with text messages and calling and I ended up turning it off. I went to sleep and then the following morning I got up around 10 o’clock, had a shower, I was getting myself ready upstairs and he walked in through the door.

“I didn’t know what to make of it. I was like ‘okay, I’m not sure what’s going on here’. That’s when he had told me that he had slept in my shed and I kind of laughed it off because it was a strange thing to do I suppose. But he had made a comment about a candle I had left burning in the kitchen; he wouldn’t have seen that had he not been out the back of my house.”

Ward then accessed Ms O’Neill’s social media accounts and “deleted everything that I was on, bar my Facebook. He said the only reason that he didn’t delete that was because I had no signal at the house, that was my only source of keeping in contact with my family.

“I was very stuck, he was monitoring all my messages. He was tracking my phone so any messages I was receiving or sending. At the time I couldn’t understand it, but he was able to see them even before I had seen them. He was tracking, I think it was through Google, all my movements from the phone.”

Before the first sexual offence, Ward broke into Ms O’Neill’s home, punched her in the face and told he was going to kill her. He took her upstairs and pulled out a knife which he used to cut a towel into shreds. He then used the shreds to tie her up and began choking her from behind. Ward then raped her.

The offences happened between June 11th and July 17th, 2019.

With the help of her boss, Ms O’Neill came up with an escape plan while alerting gardaí. Armed response teams captured Ward as he tried to flee over a back wall. He was carrying incapacitant spray at the time.

Ms O’Neill also praised gardaí, stressing “it wasn’t difficult” to talk to them.

“But also there was this element of how the heck is anybody going to believe this?” she added.

Ms O’Neill pleaded with other victims to “please reach out”.

“When you’re in that situation you just think there’s no hope and there’s such an awful stigma connected to abuse,” she said.

“You know where there’s shame and embarrassment and you shouldn’t be ashamed or embarrassed. The person who is doing this to you should have the shame and embarrassment.

“There is nothing to be ashamed of – you didn’t ask for it, you didn’t want it and there is, especially now, there are so many resources out there and there’s so much help and I think a big thing too is, it is being believed, it is being taken seriously.

“I don’t know if it is the training here or I was just very fortunate, all the gardaí who were involved in my case were absolutely amazing from the very beginning. I never felt like I did something wrong. I never felt like I should be ashamed. They were just unbelievable and I couldn’t say more about them. They are just amazing people.”

Ms O’Neill said it had been “a long three years” to achieve justice but “there’s a lot of relief” now that Ward had been jailed.

“For the past few years I pretty much locked myself away from everybody, again going back to being embarrassed and ashamed which is ridiculous,” she said.

“But also it leaves you with a lot of paranoia, a lot of fear. It wouldn’t be logical to anybody else, unless you’ve been through it, you couldn’t possibly understand it.

“There were times where I would say to myself ‘Sinéad he’s in prison, he can’t touch you’, but it didn’t matter. It was my body reacting to the trauma, I think is the best way to put it.”

Ward does not accept the verdict and continues to protest his innocence.

Ms O’Neill said she did not believe he “is capable of changing”, adding that he had shown no remorse.

“I would imagine in his mind I caused this, I did this, which is really, really scary,” she said.

“What is his mind going to be like when he comes out? I know that it’s something that I just need to let go of. I do understand that I have to rebuild my life and get on with things and I will. I have an awful lot of support and I know I’m strong enough to do it, but that’s definitely something that kind of haunts me.”