A man protested his innocence in the Central Criminal Court after becoming the fifth defendant to be convicted of the murder of a father of seven in a Co Kerry graveyard two years ago.
Michael Dooley (29), of Carrigrohane Road, Cork, was one of six accused who denied the murder of his cousin, Tom Dooley (42) at Rath Cemetery, Rathass, Tralee on October 5th, 2022.
Michael Dooley reacted with disbelief as the registrar read out the jury’s guilty verdict in the Cork courtroom, which came after more than 16 hours of deliberations.
“It isn’t fair, judge. I had nothing to do with it, I’m an innocent man,” he shouted at Ms Justice Mary Ellen Ring. “It isn’t fair, an innocent man is going to jail. There is no justice. Where is the justice in an innocent man going to jail?”
The jury last Thursday convicted three other men of the murder – Michael’s brother, Thomas Dooley Snr (43) and his nephew, Thomas Dooley Jnr (21), both also of Carrigrohane Road, Cork, as well as a teenager who cannot be named.
The jury on Friday returned a guilty verdict in the case of a fourth accused, the dead man’s brother, Patrick Dooley (36), of Arbutus Grove, Killarney, who told the court he had been trying to help rather than attack his brother in the cemetery.
The jury were sent home by Ms Justice Ring on Tuesday and told to return on Thursday to resume their deliberations in the case of the last accused, Danny Dooley (42), of An Carrigin, Connolly Park, Tralee, who is also a cousin of the deceased.
During the trial, which began at the start of June, Tom Dooley’s widow, Siobhan Dooley said she and her husband and their four youngest children had travelled from their home in Killarney to attend the funeral of their friend Bridget O’Brien in Tralee.
Ms Dooley said her husband and their three young sons were a few steps ahead of her and her young daughter as they entered the cemetery when she saw some men ahead and she recognised Tom’s brother, Patrick and his brother-in-law and cousin Thomas Snr.
She said all six men were armed with weapons and they attacked her husband as he fell to the ground. She said one of the men shouted at another of the accused, Michael Dooley, “shove over, give me a chance”.
Ms Dooley was cross-examined by Michael Dooley’s senior counsel, Ray Boland SC, who put it to the witness that she was not in a position to identify everyone present “but you knew in your heart they were there”. She said she had wrongly identified one person as being among the group who attacked her husband but gardaí had found CCTV footage in Cork which showed he was not in Kerry at the time and he was never charged in relation to the murder.
Mr Boland put it to Ms Dooley that she wanted “to bring as many Dooleys as possible into it to get revenge on all the Dooleys”. She denied being motivated by revenge and the suggestion that she was trying to implicate as many Dooleys as possible was a lie.
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