Sometimes Jacqueline Connolly imagines a different reality, one in which her sister Clodagh and her three children, Jacqueline’s nephews, had not been murdered by Alan Hawe, Clodagh’s husband and the boys’ father. She thinks about how she and Clodagh might have gone to the pub together for a drink and a chat. Her nephew Liam could have come to collect them. “He would be a great age,” she says. “He’d be driving us home.”
She is meeting The Irish Times in a country house just outside Virginia, Co Cavan, close to where Jacqueline lives. She has chosen to wear red today, she says, because red stands for control, and she wants that control back, through her appearance and her words. She has written a memoir that sets down her story and the story of Clodagh and her three boys, who were murdered in their Castlerahan home by Hawe, vice-principal of Castlerahan National School, on August 28th, 2016, the night before they were due to return to school after the summer holidays. Liam was then aged 13, a popular boy who adored his brothers, Niall (11), a budding baker, and Ryan (6), a tricycle enthusiast.
In the initial shock and rush to analysis, Hawe’s actions were deemed to be an act of out-of-the-blue madness, the deranged behaviour of someone unhinged temporarily by depression or psychosis. It took years to unpick that account and – via a second investigation by the Garda Serious Crime Review team, completed in 2023 – uncover a far more complex portrait of the killer.
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Outside the window, a cluster of daffodils sits at the kerbside, a splash of yellow against a grey and monochrome day. It brings to mind the daffodils Jacqueline says she found in the garden when she and her mother finally succeeded in March in getting the house in which Clodagh and her children died demolished. They were from bulbs Clodagh had probably planted, and Jacqueline views them as a symbol of hope. She believes Clodagh and her family look out for her from above. “I believe I’m protected by them,” she says. “I feel they’re with us all the time.”
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This is her first interview about the book. She is a warm, impressive presence. She cries several times during the interview. She is candid and vulnerable but also hopeful. The memoir will, she believes, be a way to help others. It will offer a path forward for other people grieving their loved ones, including the 27 cases of murder-suicide recorded in the State between 2007 and 2021. It will call attention to the need for better legislative practices and protections for relatives in the aftermath of familicide, particularly around inheritance.
“Out of respect to Clodagh and Liam, Niall and Ryan, we must uncover the real facts about why they died,” Jacqueline states in the book, written with Kathryn Rogers. “If we don’t fully understand why this happened, how can anyone stop it happening again?”
The book also tells another, lesser-known story about Jacqueline’s life. She writes at length for the first time about the shocking tragedies she suffered before 2016, when she lost both her husband Richie and her brother Tadhg to suicide.
Jacqueline, now 44, believes childhood trauma shapes much of our adult life. As she details in Deadly Silence, for her and Clodagh and their younger brother Tadhg, growing up in Clontyduffy, near Mountnugent in Co Cavan, times were hard. “Between 11 and 15 it was extremely difficult,” she says. Her father was often absent as their parents’ relationship deteriorated. “My mother was a nurse in Cavan General Hospital. That was back in 1991, 1992, 1993; and separation, it was unheard of. When my parents separated, it was a big thing, everyone was so shocked. It was a big thing in my head that I was nearly different from everyone else. I felt a bit ‘less than’.”
[ Clodagh Hawe’s sister: ‘We don’t know what the truth is’Opens in new window ]
Clodagh was a high achiever at school. “Clodagh was the golden girl,” says Jacqueline. “She aced her Leaving Cert: she got 515 points. I did mine twice and still didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was the one caught smoking in the bathroom at 13, the window open, the Impulse spray out. I wanted to be in town with my friends. That would not have interested Clodagh.” There were four years between the girls. “She was 17, nearly 18. She took on an adult role, looking after myself and Tadhg, and looking out for my mom. They were like best friends.”
In their different ways, both girls were vulnerable, anchorless and desperate to fix things. When Clodagh met Alan Hawe at teacher-training college and he asked her to marry him, telling her he would take care of her forever, she was barely out of her teens. Jacqueline thought Hawe was boring. “I didn’t get on with Alan; I didn’t like him.” She often felt undermined or stupid around him. The girls’ relationship began to suffer. “He never let me get too close.”
Once, when Jacqueline questioned why Clodagh was worrying so much about Hawe’s return drive home to her on a particularly windy night, Clodagh slapped her across the face, an entirely out-of-character incident for the quiet teacher. “My point for leaving that in [the book] was: this is what it could look like; this is how the fracturing of your relationship with your sibling might look at the start of an all-consuming relationship.”
It is, she thinks now, an incident that shows how Hawe had started to control Clodagh. Jacqueline was asked to be Clodagh’s bridesmaid for their wedding in the summer of 2000, but when she and Clodagh went shopping for the dress, Hawe insisted on coming along, which distressed Jacqueline, a self-conscious 17-year-old in the throes of an eating disorder in the wake of her parents’ separation. Things continued to change between the siblings. If Jacqueline wanted to visit the house to see her sister and her little nephews, she had to phone first to ask permission. Hawe was rarely out of her sister’s presence. Clodagh told her, “If you tell me something, you tell Alan.” Jacqueline lived her life – dating, dancing and socialising – while the Hawes retreated, and the distance between the two sisters grew.
“It’s not easy to pull the wool over my eyes, but it happened there,” Jacqueline says now. “I knew there was something not right with Alan Hawe. I knew that what I was seeing was too perfect. But I didn’t know. . . where do you approach your own sister and say I don’t think this is normal? How do you intrude on someone’s marriage?” As she adds in the book, “Alan Hawe was a wolf in sheep’s clothing who fooled us all.”
In 2009, Jacqueline met the Clondalkin man who would become her husband, Richie Connolly. They were happy, living together in Kildare and were making plans for the future. “Too happy, I thought. I thought: something is going to go wrong,” she says.
At that time it looked like her brother, Tadhg, was doing well: a “beautiful blend of funny and caring”, as she calls him. He’d been a bit wild, a drinker out with the lads, but he’d got his trucker’s licence. “He’d bought a new car, he was doing better than he ever was. To me he was really happy.” On September 2nd, 2010, Tadhg returned to the family home in Mountnugent from a Guns N’ Roses concert in Dublin and took his own life. He was 26.
The phone call came at 2.20am from her mother. “It just came out of the blue. The night he died, I thought I was going to die too.” She pauses. “I’m going to get upset.” She starts to cry softly.
During the agonising months that followed, the bright spark in Jacqueline’s life was Richie. In the book, love pours from the pages as she characterises him: his liveliness, his wit, his kind way with people. She takes out her phone to show photos of the two of them, their faces pressed together on their wedding day in 2011. She shows a photo of their 11-year-old son, Gary, who has the same mischievous sparkle in his eyes as his dad. “Gary’s very like him,” she says fondly. “With Richie, there was no, ‘Oh, he accepted me for who I am’. We just were.”
I knew in the pit of my stomach there was something wrong
— Jacqueline on her late husband, Richie
In 2013 Richie had recently changed jobs and his new role in hospitality services wasn’t working out as well as he had hoped. On a Friday night they sat at home watching The Late Late Show. Jacqueline told Richie he could always return to his previous role at St Vincent’s hospital in Dublin, where the pair had first met. “You never go back,” Richie told her. The couple had been married 16 months, and Jacqueline was three months pregnant with Gary. “I could tell Richie was stressed,” she says. While she watched television, he was on his laptop researching new jobs.
The following day, she drove to the National College of Ireland where she was studying part-time for a postgraduate diploma in human resources management. Richie went to play golf. She texted him at lunchtime, but didn’t hear back. Having suffered from hypervigilance in the wake of Tadhg’s death, she texted again and again to no response. Suddenly terrified, she jumped into her car. “I knew in the pit of my stomach there was something wrong,” she says. She found Richie in the hallway of their house in Kildare. She rang the emergency services. The paramedics took six minutes to arrive, but Richie, her husband and the father of her unborn child, was dead. A brief suicide note held no answers.
Jacqueline has had years of counselling – she praises several psychologists for their support in the book, particularly Dr Paul Gaffney – but healing isn’t linear. She believes people form negative judgments about her because of her bereavements. “I’ve found there is a stigma attached to grief,” she says. “There is a stigma attached to how you’ve had your losses. People’s comments are retraumatising.”
She has had to learn resilience, and to find solace where she can; in a cluster of daffodils, and in her belief that Richie and her family are watching over her, protecting her. One of the first things she says when we sit down is something Clodagh said to her the last time they met. “Clodagh had had an incident where someone had brought up our brother’s suicide. She was upset and she said, ‘Don’t ever be defined by what’s happened to our family, Jacqueline’.”
Those words have lingered in her mind over the years. What she knows now is that her sister had begun to agonise about her marriage in the months leading up to her murder. Clodagh had been googling “parenting alone at Christmas”, the first Garda investigation found before they prepared a file for the coroner. The sisters had started to draw closer again. Desperate to repair the bond between them, “I’d type up lesson plans for her,” says Jacqueline. “I did it in a heartbeat because I was so happy she wanted me to do them. She’d never confided in me about anything. We were just starting to get to that. From the girl who slapped me, there was a chance we might go for a coffee.”
On the day that Clodagh and her three children were murdered, Jacqueline thought she might spot her on the road to work. Instead she was taken aside in her job as head of human resources in Clontarf orthopaedic hospital in Dublin and told what had happened.
He had me thinking they were the perfect family
— Jacqueline on Alan Hawe
It was months if not years before Jacqueline and her mother scratched the surface of understanding the psychology of the man who had joined their family. “You’ve got to go to a very dark place to think about what he did, and how he kept going,” she says, haltingly. “It’s awful writing about it. It’s hard to portray it.”
Jacqueline and her mother were crippled by loss, and desperate for answers. They were not allowed to read Hawe’s letter, which was left in the kitchen and addressed to the family, as it was part of the Garda investigation. Just a few lines from the murder letter (Jacqueline does not call it a suicide note, as the term does not give expression to his crimes) were read out to them. It scars her that Hawe was originally buried with Clodagh and the children, at the graveyard at St Mary’s Church in Castlerahan. “My poor mam didn’t go in to see them in the viewing room, but of course Jackie always has to see it to believe it. I was so angry with myself that I looked at the man who murdered my family all beside him and didn’t have the bandwidth to go, ‘What are we doing here?’ He had me thinking they were the perfect family.”
Many people in the community and in the media were suffering from the same delusion. It took the hashtag #HerNameWasClodagh trending on Twitter to point out what the family feel should have been obvious: the focus of the reporting was all on Alan Hawe, and Clodagh’s story was being suppressed.
Spirited and defiant, Jacqueline got access to Hawe’s murder letter via her and her mother’s solicitor, who had a copy of it in his files. She ripped out the wooden grave marker for Hawe herself, and succeeded, with permission from the Hawe family, in getting his body exhumed.
At the inquest in 2017, a consultant forensic psychiatrist told Cavan Coroners Court he reviewed the notes generated during Hawe’s 10 counselling sessions, notes from his GP visits, his suicide letters and also applied the benefit of hindsight and believed Hawe had suffered from depressive and anxiety-based symptoms for almost a decade, which had progressed to “psychotic” symptoms by the time he murdered his wife and three sons. The inquest concluded that Clodagh, Liam, Niall and Ryan were unlawfully killed, with a verdict of suicide for Hawe.
Her mother stopped proceedings, asking the simple, pointed question: “Do you never interview families? Did you consider interviewing families of the people who were murdered or the family of the murderer?”
Days after the inquest, the head of St Patrick’s Mental Health Services, Paul Gilligan, wrote an article in the Irish Examiner saying depression “shouldn’t be used as the first excuse in murder-suicides”. The tide was turning. Jacqueline and her mother always refused to accept the deaths were because of mental illness.
On a Claire Byrne Live special on RTÉ television in February 2019, Jacqueline and her mother gave an emotional interview calling for a full inquiry into the four murders. At a meeting with Garda Commissioner Drew Harris the following month, they were told that a second investigation would be carried out by the Serious Crime Review team.
What was discovered over 4½ years in the second investigation was startling. Jacqueline recounts in the book how one of the investigative team asked her, “Did you know Hawe saw you as a threat?” In a clear instance of coercive control, her text messages to Clodagh had all been forwarded by Clodagh to Hawe. “I couldn’t get over it,” Jacqueline says. “He was afraid I’d see through the mask.”
A secret phone that had been used to access pornography was discovered in the house in the second investigation. A number of images recovered were classified as concerning.
Notes from a therapist session Hawe had attended revealed he was “very ashamed about porn/masturbation. Tried on Clodagh’s underwear”. In a report prepared for the Serious Crime Review team by Prof David Wilson, the Scottish forensic criminologist says, according to the book, that “familicides are linked to control, and that family annihilation is often planned by men masked as loving fathers and husbands, who harbour deep-seated fears about their masculinity and social standing”.
“He didn’t know what he was” was how one of the Serious Crime Review team characterised it. A rigid thinker, Hawe had obsessive-compulsive characteristics and struggled with change. “He was very hidden, very dark,” says Jacqueline. Deeply narcissistic, Hawe appeared to regard his family as his possessions. The murder of his family was not a spontaneous act, but one of meticulously planned violence. He used a hatchet and a knife as his weapons. Afterwards he sat beside the body of his wife, writing a five-page letter of nearly 1,000 words that used the word “I” or “me” 118 times. Before he died hours later by suicide, he left a note on the door warning people not to enter and saying that the guards should be called. He dictated who should get Clodagh’s jewellery and told his brother to sell the car. Even after his death, he was trying to exert control.
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When there is no killer alive to be tried for murder, Jacqueline says she got a sense from the criminal justice system that there’s no point in fighting to discover the details. She wants this to change. “Your whole family has been wiped out. Of course you’re going to want to find out why. Finding out why is not going to bring you peace or closure, as people call it. That word ‘closure’ drives me mad. What is closure? Grief is love lost. You’re never going to not feel that hurt. But because of all the questions we had, it was so frustrating. If he had been standing for trial, it would have been a completely different investigation.”
There were also practical hardships. Because Hawe moved his money from the couple’s joint account before his death, and because he was the last person to die, his estate went to his next of kin: his parents. Jacqueline and her mother managed to gain control of the house, thanks to the precedent set by the Celine Cawley case, the woman killed by her husband, Eamonn Lillis, in Howth, Co Dublin, in 2008. Still, they had to issue legal proceedings to do it and the costs were considerable. “Our legal fees after eight years amounted to €180,000,” Jacqueline documents. Proposed legislation governing inheritance in murder-suicide cases was published in 2017, but has not been passed into law. “Why are we still waiting for a Bill to close this loophole in inheritance law allowing a spouse or their successors to benefit financially from domestic homicide?” Jacqueline writes in the book.
In 2023 the serious crime review report on the Hawe murder-suicide was finalised. The family were not given a copy of the 800-page report, but in the book Jacqueline recounts how two investigators gave a “marathon” presentation of their findings in her mother’s kitchen in Virginia in January 2024, detailing how the review team were critical of three key elements of the first investigation: the mishandling of CCTV evidence by gardaí, the collection of key witness testimonies without proper expertise, and missed digital evidence.
The report made a number of recommendations around the preservation of evidence and witness interviewing protocols, and, significantly for Jacqueline, emphasised the need for a victim-centred approach in all investigations. “They acknowledged that while the original investigation had provided a service, it had failed to deliver the professional standard that victims’ families deserve,” Jacqueline writes in the book.
In a statement the Garda said a presentation on the findings of the review conducted by the Garda Serious Crime Review Team was presented “to all interested stakeholders” in January 2024. It said “reviews conducted by the Garda Serious Crime Team are not published for operational reasons” but the “findings and recommendations... are incorporated into senior investigative training”.
The report now “gathers dust on a shelf somewhere in Garda headquarters”, Jacqueline says. She believes this is a terrible mistake.
“Drew Harris owes us an apology. We’ve been put through two investigations... He hasn’t been in touch with us since we met him in March 2019. He hasn’t made a statement... Drew Harris should publish the details of the serious crime report for learnings and for safeguarding purposes.”
Jacqueline wants a brighter future for herself and her son. She is naturally sparky, and she doesn’t want her life to be defined by her tragedies. “I learnt that I had probably suffered from PTSD since the day I’d found Richie,” she writes in the book. She has an ongoing battle with disordered eating. She has a lot of fight in her, but it’s hard too, day by day. She’s grateful for her mother, who helps mind Gary at home in Virginia while she’s at work. “She’s really close with Gary – they have a lovely relationship, especially as he’s got older and he’s nearing the same height as her.” She’s incredibly grateful for her son.
Although she finds much that is “toxic” about small towns, she notes kindness, too. “Two mothers said to me in recent years, ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve sat my son down and I’ve said, ‘Please look after Gary, because he’s lost his dad, he’s lost his cousins, he’s lost his auntie, his uncle.’ Gary would remember the boys, especially Ryan and playing with Nerf guns.” I ask if she could tell me about a happy day she’s had recently. “Myself and Gary recently sat all day in our pyjamas watching movies. I had the fire lit, the blinds down and we just cuddled and watched movies. I say to Gary, ‘I love you’. And he says, ‘I love you too’. I’ll go, ‘How much?’ And he goes, ‘Too much!’”
Jacqueline doesn’t have any tattoos, but if she were to have one, she says, she would want it to be of a phoenix. “Rising?” I say. She nods. And so, instead of a phoenix, there is this book as an offering: an illuminating and deeply distressing account of experiences nobody should have to bear. There’s a reader advisory warning prefacing the book and it’s there for good reason, but Jacqueline hopes its larger purpose will be not to traumatise, but to inform people and potentially save lives.
“We have to educate each other on our personal experiences,” she says. “We’re coming out of that generation where we don’t talk about things. This can’t all be for nothing.”
Deadly Silence by Jacqueline Connolly is published by Hachette
- The Samaritans can be contacted on freephone: 116123 or by email, jo@samaritans.ie
- Pieta‘s freephone crisis helpline is 1800-247247, or text HELP to 51444
- The bodywhys.ie helpline is at 01-2107906, or email alex@bodywhys.ie
- Women’s Aid support services are listed at womensaid.ie/get-help/support-services
