Standing 600 metres tall, three times higher than the Cliffs of Moher, Sliabh Liag’s sheer fall to the Atlantic formed the backdrop to the terrible end of Robert ‘Robin’ Wilkin.
The 66-year-old’s head had been beaten in with a rock before his killers threw him to the waves.
[ Alan Vial and Nikita Burns found guilty of murdering man (66) whose body was thrown over Sliabh Liag ]
It would be eight days before the Irish Coast Guard recovered Mr Wilkin, floating in the waters below where tourists normally look on in awe from the heights above. Seaweed clung to his body, his flesh eaten away and his bones broken by the fall down the rocky cliff. The decomposition and damage were such that pathologist Dr Margot Bolster found it impossible to establish the cause of death.
Near the viewing point where Mr Wilkin’s killers, Nikita Burns and Alan Vial, had bundled him over the Co Donegal cliffs, gardaí found the dead man’s glasses, watch, neck chain and a bloodstained casing for a rear-view mirror from a car.
Nearby was a flat rock, covered in blood and matted with hundreds of hairs. DNA analysis would confirm that the blood and hairs had belonged to Mr Wilkin.
Half way down the cliffs, abseilers discovered Mr Wilkin’s jumper and a blanket, both stained with his blood.
Long before they had confirmed that the remains plucked from the sea were those of Mr Wilkin, gardaí had a good idea of how he died and came to be in the water.
They knew because less than 24 hours after Mr Wilkin’s death, a drunk and possibly high Burns arrived at her friend Chris Quinn’s home and told him, and anyone else who cared to listen, how she and Vial had “battered” a man with a rock “until his face was out the back of his head” and that she liked it.
Burns, who seemed “deranged” and high on drugs to Mr Quinn, held nothing back despite the presence of Mr Quinn and three others, including Gavin Mitchell. When Burns heard Mr Mitchell on a call to a mutual acquaintance, Sharon O’Dowd, she demanded the phone so she could spread the word further.
Ms O’Dowd recalled Burns saying that she and Vial had “beat some man’s head in”. She knew Burns to be a vulnerable person and was so concerned that she started recording the conversation using a second mobile phone. In the recording, which Ms O’Dowd immediately brought to gardaí, Burns could be heard talking about using a rock during a fight with Mr Wilkin. “Alan got pissed and dragged him out the back and started caving his head in,” she said.
She said it happened “a wee bit outside Killybegs” and afterwards she and Vial drove until 3am “and we pushed him off Sliabh Liag”. She also said: “They won’t find him; he was thrown off Sliabh Liag – they won’t find him.”
But Burns had already ensured that not only would gardaí find the body, they would also secure convictions against both his killers.
Vial was described by his barrister, Shane Costelloe SC, as a sad and pathetic middle-aged man. Vial had gone to Australia with his wife but the marriage failed due to his excessive drinking. He came home to live in the unfinished house he had begun building some years earlier at Drumanoo Head in Killybegs. With no plumbing or electricity, Vial relied on his brother Bruce, living up the N56 in Ardara, when he wanted a shower or to wash his clothes.
Alan Vial had a long history of offending in Australia and Ireland, including driving offences, drink driving, possession of drugs and possession of a weapon. He could be belligerent and a nuisance when drunk and was barred from a number of pubs in Donegal.
In February 2023, just a few months before killing Mr Wilkin, Vial took his father’s lorry, crossed the border into Northern Ireland to evade a Garda pursuit and sped towards Strabane where police stopped him at a checkpoint.
Three months after that, in May, he met Mr Wilkin in a bar. Mr Wilkin was a Tyrone man – 6ft and weighing about 90kg (14st 2lbs), he had a powerful frame despite his 66 years. He had worked in concrete and paving all his life, but he was struggling and had taken to living rough or sleeping in his car. Vial offered to let him stay at his home if Mr Wilkin would help to finish his garden and teach him how to work heavy machinery.
For the next month they did “pretty much everything together”, Vial would say in his own testimony during the trial. They worked together on Vial’s garden and managed to secure a paving contract worth €9,000. They ate and drank together and, on occasion, they would lose their temper and shout at one another. Others who met them during those weeks noticed that Mr Wilkin would talk down to Vial and one man witnessed him slapping the younger man on the back of the head to get him to shut up.
It was Mr Wilkin who brought Burns into Vial’s orbit in late May or early June. After a weekend visit, she ended up living at Drumanoo Head and began sleeping with Vial.
Burns was 16 years younger than Vial and had lived a difficult life. She did not finish school, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety, spent time in psychiatric units and sometimes lived on the streets.
In the weeks before the murder, she contacted her brother Ruben, sent him photographs of her with Vial and Mr Wilkin, and said she was in a relationship with Vial and was “doing better”. But Ruben became concerned when she told him she was off her medication and appeared to be drinking during the day.
Burns did her bit on the paving contract that Vial and Mr Wilkins had secured, pushing wheelbarrows filled with concrete and doing odd jobs to speed the work along. When the job was done and the money paid, Vial and Mr Wilkin spent €1,000 on a Volkswagen Passat, paid Burns a small sum and split what was left.
On Saturday, June 24th, 2023, Vial awoke around noon with Burns beside him. The house was otherwise empty. According to Vial, they had breakfast, drank six cans of Carlsberg each and walked to the Fleet Inn in Killybegs.
They ordered vodka. Vial mixed his with Lucozade and Burns mixed hers with white lemonade. CCTV footage showed Mr Wilkin arriving and remonstrating with Vial before the three left and got into the Passat.
They drove to McIntyre’s Bar in Dunkineely where the drinking continued. They hopped from McIntyre’s to McLoughlin’s and finally to Mac’s Bar where they remained until closing time.
As the lights went off and staff began cleaning the pub, Burns and Mr Wilkin left through a side door, but they got split from Vial, who left through the front. When they found one another again, Mr Wilkin was annoyed and blamed Vial for delaying them.
What happened next can only be pieced together from snippets of CCTV, Vial’s unreliable testimony and Burns’s vague recollections in her Garda interviews.
Mr Wilkin drove while Vial, who would normally sit in the front, sat in the back because he knew Mr Wilkin was annoyed with him.
“It was pretty quiet, very tense, there was no communication between us,” Vial said.
They were driving towards home in Killybegs on the Roshine Road near a factory building called Atlantic Dawn when Vial claims he broke the silence. The car had begun shaking going up a hill so he told Mr Wilkin to drop down a gear.
“Don’t tell me how to drive,” Mr Wilkin replied before pulling in at a factory named EK Marine.
Vial claimed in his testimony that Mr Wilkin turned around in his chair and punched him several times in the face. He said he grabbed Mr Wilkin’s wrists to prevent further blows and, as they grappled, Burns appeared at the front passenger side door and struck Mr Wilkin twice with a rock on the back of the head, causing him to stop breathing.
As Vial told his story, tears flowed down Burns’s face in court and her leg trembled. When the jury had left the room, she could not contain her anger any longer and she shouted at Vial: “What are you getting out of telling lies? This is my life.”
When the jury had returned, Vial claimed that he and Burns disposed of the body and came up with a “bit of a story” for anyone who might ask what happened to Mr Wilkin. They would say that they had gone to Sliabh Liag to view the sunset but Mr Wilkin began sexually assaulting Burns, sparking a fight with Vial.
In his Garda interviews, Vial said he got the better of Mr Wilkin, winded him and left him alive and breathing near but not over the edge of the cliff. In his testimony in court, he accepted he had lied in his Garda interviews, but said he did it to protect Burns because he “still had feelings for her”.
The jury clearly rejected Vial’s testimony, but the truth of what happened is impossible to know.
The pathologist, Dr Bolster, had identified two blows to the back of Mr Wilkin’s head which she said were entirely consistent with having been caused by the rock that was found near Mr Wilkin’s belongings at the top of Sliabh Liag.
But she was unable to identify a cause of death and could not say what other blows had been inflicted on Mr Wilkin before he was put over the cliff.
What allowed the jury to reject Vial’s claims is that, having lied repeatedly for 20 hours during his Garda interviews, it was clear he had pieced together a new version of events that fit neatly with the pathology evidence. Vial was, as Bernard Condon SC, prosecuting, said in his closing speech, a cynical liar who had woven a tale based on his knowledge of the book of evidence.
The evidence picked apart Vial’s story, so at his trial he got in the box to try again. However, he again came unstuck when he claimed that the two blows to the back of the head caused Mr Wilkin’s instant death.
Burns’s lawyers asked Dr Bolster to be recalled and she told the jury that those two blows would not have killed Mr Wilkin instantly. While they would have knocked him unconscious and caused extensive bleeding, death would mostly likely have taken 15 to 20 minutes, she said.
It was also clear from the amount of blood in the car, spattered on the roof and soaked into the back seat, that Mr Wilkin had bled extensively for a time.
There were further reasons for the jury to reject Vial’s claims. After disposing of the body over the cliff, Vial drove to nearby Teelin Pier where he waded into the water to wash the blood from his hands and clothes and threw his bloodstained shirt into the sea. Mr Condon asked the jury to consider whether these were the actions of a man trying to protect Burns or an attempt to destroy evidence of what Vial himself had done.
Why, if Vial were so concerned for Burns, did he not urge her to get in the water to destroy DNA evidence that might link her to the crime?
CCTV from the car park at Sliabh Liag showed that Vial and Burns returned to the cliff a few hours after the killing and then later in the afternoon. They admitted that they wanted to see if the body was visible or if anyone had raised the alarm. They left, satisfied that they had successfully disposed of the evidence.
On the day after the killing, the drinking continued and, Vial said, they bought cannabis which they smoked back at Drumanoo. They had more money now because, before putting him over the cliff, they had taken money from Mr Wilkin’s wallet – the cash he had been paid for the paving contract. Each one blamed the other for the theft and denied that money was the motive for the killing.
They drove to Bruce Vial’s house where they borrowed a vacuum cleaner and used cleaning sprays in a failed attempt to clean their victim’s blood from the car. When Bruce Vial got the vacuum back, it was full of blood that he mistook for “red wine vomit”.
Alan Vial and Burns drove on. As Vial sped drunkenly along the road at Finntown, about 13km from Glenties, he crashed off the road into a ditch. When Garda Aaron Meenaghan arrived at the scene, he found Burns vomiting on the side of the road and drinking from a cider can. Vial was trying to convince a tractor driver to pull the car out of the ditch and became aggressive when the garda told him an ambulance was on the way.
He was “acting unpredictably”, Gda Meenaghan recalled, became enraged and was pacing up and down the road and seemingly looking for an argument. When backup arrived, Gda Meenaghan arrested Vial for drink driving, but he became so aggressive that the officer used pepper spray to subdue him.
Gda Meenaghan also noted blood spatter on the interior roof of the car and cleaning agents in the back seat. He told Letterkenny Garda Station of what he had seen and they seized the car.
Burns went to hospital in an ambulance, but left a short time later and went in search of Vial. When she realised he was in custody in Letterkenny and due to be charged with drink-driving, she went to her friend Mr Quinn’s house nearby where she made the confessions that sparked the Garda investigation into Mr Wilkin’s death.
That investigation involved gathering hours of CCTV footage, witness statements and days of interviews with Burns and Vial. The Irish Coast Guard spent a week searching for the body. Specialist abseilers rappelled down the cliff face to recover Mr Wilkin’s jumper and a bloodied blanket.
Geologist Dr Sophie O’Connor used her expertise to conclude that the bloodied rock found near the top of Sliabh Liag was not natural to that area. She discovered a wall at the scene where Mr Wilkin was assaulted in Roshine which was missing a rock of similar size. When she checked Google Street View, she found the wall had been intact in 2021 and the rock that was now missing was similar to the bloodied rock at Sliabh Liag in shape, size, curvature and surface features including lichen staining.
Vial, from Drumanoo Head, Killybegs, and Burns, of Carrick, Co Donegal, were convicted on Wednesday of murdering Mr Wilkin on June 25th, 2023. They now face the mandatory term of life imprisonment.
