GALWAY CIRCUIT Criminal Court was told yesterday that two men left an elderly cancer patient penniless after extorting an estimated €400,000 from her.
The woman had been so charmed by the two conmen that she had described them as “angels from Heaven”.
Conor Murphy (42), of Castlepark, Ballybane, Galway, who was the “brains” behind the scam, pleaded guilty to six sample charges of theft and fraud, in that he got former US air hostess and widow, Mary Ellen Walsh, of Oranmore and more recently Craughwell, to make 49 cheques payable to him over an 11-month period between December 2006 and October 2007, totalling €367,100.
Murphy had convinced Ms Walsh he owned 35 acres of land in Moycullen and would sell it to her for €150,000, claiming she would make a huge profit in the transaction.
He owned no such lands, yet he extorted €9,000 from her for fake planning fees.
He told her he was suffering from cancer too, and brought a faith healer into her house, claiming they could be cured. He also told her he had visions of her dead brother and she later told gardaí she had thought the brothers were “angels from Heaven”.
Murphy claimed he was in the IRA and would use the “services” of the Border Fox, Dessie O’Hare, to take care of a local developer, whom Ms Walsh felt had benefited from land her family had once owned but which had been repossessed by the banks back in the 1970s. She was shown a revolver and was told Conor Murphy had shot this developer dead.
Murphy’s brother, Jimmy Murphy (46), with an address in Mallow, Co Cork, pleaded guilty to two charges of extorting €28,500 from the victim by claiming he needed the money to get Conor Murphy out on bail.
His brother was not in jail at the time.
The court heard Jimmy Murphy drove Ms Walsh to her bank in Galway city in October and again in November 2007 and convinced her to hand over €13,500 and €15,000 respectively.
Ms Walsh was recovering from a serious operation for cancer in November and still had a lot of stitches when he left her at the bank to make her own way home to Craughwell after she parted with the money.
Her ATM card was used to withdraw €11,000 from her account, sometimes twice a day, during the 11-month period. Ms Walsh was in hospital for 18 days during that time and could not have withdrawn the money herself.
The brothers befriended her after hearing she had received €3.3 million for the sale of her farmhouse and five acres of land at Glenascaul, near Oranmore, in 2006. She gave half of the proceeds of the sale to her only son in Cork and bought a house for herself for €335,000 in Craughwell. She put the remaining money in a deposit and current accounts at Permanent TSB in Galway.
Conor Murphy had €14,479 in his own Bank of Ireland account when he first started lodging cheques from Ms Walsh’s into his.
The last cheque lodged was on October 9th, 2007, but by April 2008, there was only €2.56 left in his account.
Det Sgt Martin Glynn said Conor Murphy told him he had given the money back to Ms Walsh but the woman had not received a cent.
She was now in financial difficulties and had only her pension to survive on.
Both brothers, the court was told, are in receipt of invalidity payments since November 2003, while Conor Murphy gets an additional €500 a month for an “injury at work” claim.
Sgt Glynn explained Ms Walsh was very ill, vulnerable and “naive to a fault”.
She is awaiting another operation, he said, and could not be in court for health reasons and also because she feared the brothers might harm her or get someone else to harm her.
Ms Walsh’s friends told her to contact the Garda when they heard about the revolver incident. She had ignored legal advice not to have anything to do with the brothers over the proposed land deal.
Judge Raymond Groarke adjourned sentencing in the case to January 13th and he remanded the brothers on continuing bail to that date.