A Dublin man has been jailed for life for murdering his friend and dismembering his corpse with a chainsaw before dumping the body parts in the Grand Canal.
Paul Wells Snr (50), of Barnamore Park, Finglas, admitted shooting fellow Dubliner Kenneth O'Brien (33) but argued that he had acted in self-defence.
Wells claimed that the pair ended up in a tussle after Mr O’Brien brought a gun to his house and asked him to kill his partner on January 15th or 16th, 2016. He said the gun fell to the floor during the skirmish and he got to it first, at which point he shot Mr O’Brien in the back of the head.
He said he then panicked, ‘chopped him into pieces’ with a chainsaw Mr O’Brien had lent him, put his torso into Mr O’Brien’s suitcase and dumped it in the canal.
However, he was found guilty of murder by a jury at the Central Criminal Court.
The O’Brien family said the image portrayed of the deceased in the course of the trial was not one of the family man they knew and loved.
In a statement prepared with his wife Susan, Gerry O’Brien, Kenneth’s father, said there were “no words to describe the trauma and desolation felt by our family since our Ken was murdered”.
“Our lives will simply never be the same again. We have been left without our first-born child and his own son has been left without his father for the rest of his life. Lee and Janine have been left without their brother and Eimear has been deprived of her partner in life,” read Mr O’Brien.
“The worst part of it all was being told our son was a torso in a suitcase, the utter disregard shown for our child as a human being and the barbaric nature in which he was treated and discarded, it was an affront to all who knew him.”
Gerry O’Brien said the family could not function “until the rest of Ken was found and could be given a proper burial. We still have never recovered his hands”.
“He was a lovely child to rear,” they recalled. “He was a joy, fun-loving and carefree...It’s impossible to sum up his 33 years in a couple of pages.”
Gerry O’Brien thanked the jury, the judge, the prosecution team, the gardaí, and their family and friends for the support provided over the past 34 months.
‘Fresh start’
In a victim impact statement read to court by a garda, Eimear Dunne, the deceased's partner, said she had hoped for a "fresh start" when Kenneth moved home from Australia, just a month before his death.
“ This was our fresh start, our new beginning: Kenneth, myself and the apple of our eye,” she said, referring to their four-year-old son.
Ms Dunne said she knew a text message she received around the time of the murder from an unknown number, claiming to be her partner, was “from someone pretending to be Kenneth”. The message said he had lost his phone, was going for a drink and spending the night in a hotel.
She later received another message stating: “So here it is. I’m heading for the ferry today. I can’t handle being home and I want out. You care more about… your family anyway, so f**k the lot. I met someone else and she came to Ireland yesterday. I met her today. I’m going with her. There’s no point in talking. All I’d get anyway is a row.”
Ms Dunne began calling family and Mr O’Brien’s friends, including Wells, who confirmed that her partner had been having an affair. Ms Dunne collapsed mid phone-call. Wells drove straight over to her and showed her photographs that Mr O’Brien had sent him, proving that he had been seeing someone else.
Despite this news, she and family members were still worried, and Mr O’Brien’s aunt reported him missing that evening.
By then, a couple out walking had spotted a suitcase in the Grand Canal at Ardclough, Co Kildare, near to where Mr O’Brien had previously run a garage. The suitcase was found to contain a man’s torso and a DNA sample from Mr O’Brien’s mother confirmed that the torso was his.
Shopping bags
More human remains were later found in a number of shopping bags elsewhere in the canal, with 10 body parts in total retrieved.
In her statement, Ms Dunne said: “I knew that Kenneth didn’t send that message and I knew something was very wrong...I cannot put into words the feelings I experienced over the next few days and months after finding out that Kenneth had been murdered in the most gruesome of ways.”
The investigation into Mr O’Brien’s death included a trawl of the deceased’s bank accounts which showed that he had made a stream of lodgements to Wells’s bank account during his last 18 months in Australia, totalling almost €53,000.
Wells’s home was searched and he was arrested in early February. He denied involvement in his first interviews, but confessed after the statement of his own son, Paul Wells Jnr, was put to him. He had ‘self reported’ the fact that his father had sent the chainsaw to him days after the killing.
The accused later told gardaí he had given the money back to Mr O’Brien as cash. He alleged that the people for whom Mr O’Brien had worked in Australia were involved with biker gangs, prostitutes and drugs. He described the deceased as devious and highlighted a number of incidents where he had deceived people.
However, a forensic accountant gave evidence of nothing untoward appearing in Mr O’Brien’s accounts. The money he had transferred to his family and to Mr Wells had come from his wages.
When Wells finally confessed, he gave a story that the prosecutor described as ‘bizarre’ and his own barrister described as ‘staggering’.
In her statement, Ms Dunne said that no mother should have to tell their boy that his father was never coming home. She said that she would do everything in her power to make sure that her partner’s memory would be kept alive and and that their son would remember all the good things about him.
Michael O’Higgins SC, defending Wells, said his client had asked him to say that he and the deceased were close friends and that he deeply regretted what had happened.
While he respected the jury’s verdict, he contended it was an error.
‘Dignity’
Mr Justice Paul McDermott expressed his condolences to the O’Brien family, Ms Dunne and their child.
“The circumstances of the late Mr O’Brien’s death quite clearly were shocking and distressing,” he said. “I just want to acknowledge the dignity with which they have borne that in court, during which many upsetting things were heard and absorbed by them.”
He said that the law was quite clear and that there was only one available sentence of imprisonment for life. He imposed that sentence, backdating it to 6th February 6th, 2016, the date Wells was arrested.
Wells, who sat angled away from his victim’s family throughout the trial, then turned to face them.
“I’m very sorry” he said, before being led away.