It is a drizzly morning in Tralee and few people seem to be paying much attention to the tall, bearded man in rain gear.
He is making his way across The Square in the Co Kerry town, just another person going about their business on another grey Irish day.
The man is Michael Kelley (53), a US army veteran from Maine, a northeastern state, but now resident in Tralee.
He is, to date, the only man to have been questioned about the murder of Kerry farmer Mike Gaine (56) whose dismembered remains were found two weeks ago at his farm outside Kenmare, two months after he went missing.
Kelley, standing 6ft tall and lean and muscular, is firm but polite when approached by The Irish Times and other media, saying he will not be doing any other interviews beyond what he has told The Irish Daily Mirror some days earlier.
He confirms that his reported comments are correct and that he was arrested by gardaí for questioning about Gaine’s murder. He denied any involvement in the killing during nine interviews over 24 hours of questioning by gardaí.
Kelley has alleged he is being framed for the crime by criminals.
“There may be elements that want to string me up – people who have an interest in organised crime – people who are involved in organised crime,” he has said.
He is calm and relaxed. He says he has been playing traditional Irish music, having been photographed playing the flute with a local busker some days earlier.
As he agrees to pose for a photograph, he jokes that he will have to “start charging $10 for pictures”.
Little is known about Kelley, who has become the suspect in an investigation into Gaine’s gruesome murder.
Kelley, whose ancestors are understood to be from east Galway, grew up in a rural part of the US, outside the small village of Swanville, which has a population of about 1,500 and is in Waldo County in central Maine, about a two-hour drive northeast of Portland, the state’s most populous city.
He was born on July 27th, 1971, the second child born to New Yorkers Patrick and Janice Kelley, who moved to Maine in 1967 with Janice’s son, Damon, from her first marriage. The family settled on a five-acre holding at Upper Oak Hill Road in Swanville.
Janice Kelley had lived in the East Village in New York with her first husband and she stayed there after their marriage ended, becoming acquainted with many of the folk musicians on the coffee shop circuit and some of the leading figures in the 1960s counterculture scene before they became famous.
She participated in the famous 1963 March on Washington, where she heard Martin Luther King make his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. This was to inform her political thinking in later life, when she became an ardent Democrat strongly opposed to Republican Donald Trump.
She and her husband set up a small business where she would design houses and he, a skilled carpenter, would build them. She taught her children an appreciation of nature and growing their own food.
Janice and Patrick Kelley divorced in 1974, and she moved with the children to Washington, Maine, but returned to Swanville in 1981, where she opened a second-hand store where people could buy music and jewellery as well as rock crystals and gemstones from around the world.
What role or influence Janice Kelley’s politics and philosophy had on her son Michael is unclear, but in 1991, aged just 19, he found himself in the US army on a military base in Germany, where, when not on sentry duty, he watched as the first Gulf war unfolded in Kuwait and Iraq.
Kelley told the Irish Daily Mirror he never killed anyone when in the army and became a conscientious objector when he saw the horror of the “Highway of Death”, when hundreds of Iraqi troops were killed at night in February 1991 by American war planes as they retreated from Kuwait.
What Kelley did after he quit the US army is unclear. He seems to have kept a low profile for more than a decade.
On April 6th, 2006, he married Karen Harden in Northport, Maine. The couple divorced on June 23rd, 2014.
On December 22nd, 2009, he found himself the subject of critical comments from Judge Donald G Alexander of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court after he appealed a decision by Judge Michael Westcott of Maine District Court over the custody of his two daughters. The judge’s criticisms are outlined in a detailed eight-page published judgment.
Kelley had been in a romantic relationship with a woman called Alicia Snow, and they had two daughters. After they separated Kelley brought a parental-rights action over his right of access to the children, who were living with their mother, a qualified nurse.
Initially the relationship between the separated couple was cordial but Kelley later claimed that Snow had breached the court order, which ruled that the children could live with her, when she took them on a visit out of state to Chicago, Illinois, to their grandfather without Kelley’s consent.
Judge Westcott found for Snow in the initial hearing. Kelley appealed it to the state supreme court, where he represented himself. He called his wife, Karen, as a witness. After hearing testimony from both sides, including Snow and her father, Judge Alexander affirmed the earlier court order.
He said that Kelley’s allegations and fears that Snow intended to move out of the state with the children were “unfounded”. He concluded that Kelley’s ability to determine fact from fiction was “questionable”, and that both Kelley’s testimony and that of his wife was “untrustworthy”.
He said Kelley was an inflexible parent “who makes false allegations that Snow is a witch and that she practises witchcraft on the children”, while he also found that Kelley refused “to take responsibility for his role in this conflict”.
It suited Kelley to be living off the grid as he wanted to be under the radar
— A local in Kenmare
Judge Alexander agreed with Judge Westcott when he “specifically stated why it did not find the testimony of Kelley and wife to be credible, including the unsupported allegations that Snow is casting spells on the children and an unwillingness to take responsibility for conflicts.”
Attempts by The Irish Times to contact Alicia Snow and her attorney Thomas F Shehan proved unsuccessful, but Kelley did confirm to the Irish Daily Mirror that he had lost custody of his children, now adults with whom he is in contact, after falsely claiming their mother was a witch.
Kelley says he arrived in Ireland seven years ago. From inquiries by The Irish Times, it appears he first surfaced in Kenmare about six years ago, squatting on a boat while working for a man harvesting kelp in Kenmare Bay.
When that job ended, he reportedly lived in a shed in Templenoe, a village about eight kilometres along the Ring of Kerry route west of Kenmare, before taking up residence three km away in Scully’s Wood near Dromquinna. There, he lived in a tent and reportedly used survivalist skills to live off wildlife.
It was while he was there that he met Mike Gaine.
“Mike was out shooting deer with a friend in Scully’s Wood when they came across Kelley,” says one local.
“It was around 2022 and Mike offered him the use of his old, abandoned family farmhouse at Carrig East in return for doing jobs around the farm and Kelley agreed.”
Gaine’s farm at Carrig East is about seven kilometres from Kenmare, near Moll’s Gap, the scenic spot popular with tourists.
“Kelley used to earn his keep working for Mike, feeding the animals and such like. They used to go hunting together – it was a very informal, loose arrangement, there was no lease, no contract – it suited Kelley to be living off the grid as he wanted to be under the radar,” says the local.
“There was no electricity in the farmhouse, but that didn’t seem to bother him – he was rarely in town – Mike used to drive him every so often in to Aldi or Lidl to do his shopping, but beyond that he never hung around, never went into pubs.
“He was just this very reclusive American drifter.”
Kelley told the Irish Daily Mirror that he applied for asylum when he first arrived in Ireland but had been refused.
Garda sources confirmed he was served with deportation order four weeks ago, though he remains living in Tralee.
“I’ve asked for an ombudsman to review my asylum but that’s gone nowhere,” he said.
“I’m not surprised – I may have a claim to Irish citizenship based on the standing laws of this country based on my ancestry ... [but] I don’t see that they are going to deport me in the middle of this case.”
