Judge's interjections bring relief

As the Callaly relatives sit in the same little huddle, miserable hostages to the bloody detail of a loved one's violent death, the pace of the proceedings may be the only positive element of the week.

Twenty-two witnesses took the stand yesterday, propelled along by the dry interjections of Mr Justice Barry White. "I have many years to go before I retire . . ." he said wearily after prosecution counsel Denis Vaughan Buckley had used up a deeply tedious 35 minutes checking, individually, if more than 100 samples had been logged by forensic scientist Dr Diane Daly.

"Why should we have to wait an hour listening to 100 items, if only half a dozen are of any significance?" asked the judge.

The bizarre Case of the Book of Evidence in the Jury Room emerged after lunch when the judge announced in a low-key fashion that the book was found lying there yesterday morning when the jury arrived.

After a painstaking explanation as to why a jury should see neither sight nor light of such a document, that "it was NOT a document intended for the jury's use" because it contained all sorts of things such as Garda statements which were not edited or might not be legally admitted, and evidence which is known as hearsay, he asked the question on which - it turned out - the trial would survive or collapse.

"Did any one of the 11 of you read any portion of it?" he asked.

All 11 replied "no", upon which the judge said he would have had to stop the trial and discharge them if any had done otherwise.

There was no attempt to establish how the book had migrated into the jury room.

Earlier, the Callalys had had to sit through the distressing conclusions of Dr Daly, after a short explanation of the science of BPA, or blood pattern analysis.

Impact spatter: "when wet blood receives a blow or an impact".

Cast-off staining: "blood coming off perhaps a weapon in a change of direction or velocity".

To the evident distress of Rachel's sister, Ann Callaly, Dr Daly noted that the pattern of staining on the ceiling and under Rachel's body suggested that she had been "violently beaten over a sustained period of time while she lay on the ground" and that "at some time during the assault, the assailant was crouching or kneeling over her".

Anthony Callaly, Rachel's brother, glared angrily across at the accused man while Tara Kenny, a childhood friend of Rachel's, told of a conversation on the day of the funeral, when Joe O'Reilly said that Rachel might be alive had he not told her to stay at home from the gym that morning [there was evidence of a "minor hockey injury" two days before].

He mused that it was "ironic" that "here we are [a week later] at the church at 10 when she was killed at five past 10 and here at two o'clock when her body was found at 10 past two".

The defence, questioning whether the witness had been "following the publicity", then produced an October 7th copy of the Evening Herald- four days before the funeral - and asked her to read the front page article, with the headline "Burglar beat Mum to death with hockey stick", which reported that a man was spotted lurking there at 10am on the day of the murder.

There ensued a wry exchange about the media wherein Mr Justice White recalled a slogan on the front page of the Irish Press, "The Truth in the News" - "which used to be referred to as 'The Truth OR the News'", he declared, to much tittering in the court.

The media reassumed its customary sheepish air.