It didn't quite divide the sexes; just revealed something about their thought processes. When a breathless newcomer erupted into a packed pub on Tuesday to relay the verdict, the reaction was as bizarre as the trial itself. Rapt silence followed by a frantic babble. "Well, I'll be able to sleep easy in my bed tonight," blurted a relieved male to the general bafflement of the females. "I wonder will she be psychiatrically assessed when she gets to Mountjoy?" wondered a female aloud.
Commentators have struggled in recent days to explain the compulsive nature of the Nevin trial: a woman as defendant, a gift of a woman who rejoiced in the attention, courting it by changing her clothes, coiffure and nail colour every day; the jaw-dropping revelations such as her wish to have her husband shot and die publicly in her arms; the pathological lying exemplified by the story of bearded Anorak Man lurking in the shadows of her livingroom and forcing various substances down her throat; the cartoon characters peopling the Finglas pool hall - Mickser and Redser, straight from central casting.
But the commentators missed the point. While women for the most part thought Catherine Nevin so detached from normal human behaviour as to be verging on the insane, men took it a tad more personally. There was something about Catherine Nevin and her breezy, murderous, lying defiance that resonated with their most deep-seated fears.
They were the ones seen to be devouring the detailed despatches from the court and scrutinising the pictures (before the court banned the latter along with colour reporting). And they were the ones heard to exhale most fervently on Tuesday evening, before raising a pint to the destruction of a woman who constituted the stuff of all their nightmares. The Black Widow had been bested.
You know her, of course. Even if you never saw her in the flesh, you've glimpsed her in the movies and in the rich language of the tabloids. She was the one with the "scarlet fingernails" and "scanty underwear"; the one who used her "silken boudoir" within her "den of sleaze" to "bed a bevy of sex-hungry men" while "plotting her husband's murder"; the one who turned up for the verdict, smiling, clad in "a clinging black dress, slit to the thigh" (every word culled from tabloid reports about Catherine Nevin).
But in what could be another life and often in the same story (slipped in, no doubt, because people could see the truth for themselves, at least on television), she was also the "maternal blond", the "beak-nosed and bespectacled" one who "dyed her hair blond before the trial began". Sadly, they weren't able to "reveal" any of this explosive information during the trial because of the ban; nor other details of vital importance such as "how she wore a different outfit on every day of the hearing" (not true). But never mind, drink up, because there are more Black Widows out there, lots more, what with all those brazen females, asserting themselves more and more . . . No wonder men can't sleep easy in their beds.
It's a myth, of course. Women who murder remain as scarce as silken boudoirs above country pubs. Women who actually plan a murder aren't even on the scale. That's why this trial proved to be so compulsive. Woman as scheming, seductive murderer in the split-to-the-thigh, clinging black dress (which actually did precious little clinging from where most people were standing), and the constructs built around such a creature through myth and media and the visceral fears of men, will always guarantee packed houses and fat returns.
Compare and contrast with another case involving someone else accused of soliciting men to kill a spouse. The body of Philomena Gillane was found in the boot of her car, far from home, in May 1994, having been shot and stabbed to death while heavily pregnant. Her husband Patrick got eight years for soliciting two men to kill her, one of whom, Christopher Bolger, claimed in court that people could read his mind because "a microchip which is connected to my mouth was placed in my skull when I was 28".
To this day, we know more about the sadly transparent Bolger than we do about Patrick Gillane. Did we get a look inside Gillane's boudoir or boxer shorts? We did not. To be sure, he didn't court that kind of coverage by wearing a different tie every day (or maybe he did and no one noticed) but the scale and nature of much of the Nevin coverage suggests different standards for the sexes, right down to the "Wicked Widow Trial" logo adopted by one tabloid.
The fact is that despite the hype, men still have a lot more to fear from one another than from the likes of Catherine Nevin. Male murderers outnumber females by 12 to one, according to criminologist Paul O'Mahoney. And a third of those killed by women are female themselves, all of which suggests that men may sleep very soundly in their beds. The outstanding difference is that when women kill, it tends to be a spouse who has been abusing them or a relative, and the killing is usually on impulse.
So while Catherine Nevin fits the pattern at one level (her spouse was the victim), at another she is out on her own. Premeditated murder by either sex is very rare indeed; from thousands of cases featured in one US study, only five per cent were found to be premeditated. Excluding gangland feuds, the Irish figure may be even lower, which makes Nevin even more of a rarity. She was no abused wife, yet she had been planning to kill her husband over an awesome five years.
So undoubtedly, she killed for gain. She wanted her world to remain intact, one where she was the undisputed empress and not of just half an empire. What kind of person does this? How do they reach the point of being ruthless enough to simply snuff out another life to get what they want? Could she have been stopped?
Not unless thousands like her can also be stopped. Everyone knows a version of Catherine Nevin, maybe hundreds of them. Ruthless, narcissistic sociopaths who feel no guilt or remorse and fail to take the feelings of others into account - "the sort of personalities you see all over the place, are really nasty to deal with on a personal level and are terrifically successful", says Paul O'Mahoney. "I know dozens of people who are sociopathic and who stun me all the time with their bare-faced lies and their selfishness and rationalising."