A Dublin woman has been accused of sending a lewd Valentine’s card, a g-string and a bullet to a garda.
Julie Conway Browning, 49, from Dermot O’Dwyer House, Hardwicke Street, addmitted sending the card and the underwear but denies sending the bullet to Detective Sergeant Michael Buckley.
Ms Conway Browning is not being charged in relation to the sending of the card.
She is accused of giving information she knew to be false or misleading to the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission (Gsoc)in October 2012, in relation to a complaint. She has entered a not guilty plea.
The trial at Dublin District Court today heard claims of bullying and harassment in the serious crime team, a section of the Garda National Bureau of Criminal Investigation, based in Dublin.
Ronan Kennedy BL, opening the case for the prosecution, told Judge Bryan Smyth a complaint had been submitted to Gsoc in 2011 from the wife of Det Sgt Buckley who is attached to the serious crime review team.
She told Gsoc her husband been subjected to “harassment and bullying” by two named colleagues including a Detective Garda David O’Brien.
She alleged that in a February 2011, her husband received an envelope in the post containing a Valentines card. Inside the card was a poem of a “graphic sexual nature” as well as a “black and red g-string and a 22 calibre bullet”.
Ms Buckley told Gsoc she feared for her family’s safety.
The court heard her husband carried out his own investigation and established the letter was sent by the accused.
A Gsoc officer later interviewed Det O’Brien and Ms Conway Browning and both claimed they had not seen each other since the 1990s.
However Gsoc analyst Angela Murray told the court communication data was retrieved from two phone companies showing the accused and Det O’Brien contacted each other’s mobile phones on 291 occasions between February 1st, 2011, and March 26th that year.
Gsoc investigator Sivan Govinder told Judge Smyth the defendant told him she had been having a chat with her father and had asked him if he remembered “Dave the guard”.
The court heard her father told her that Det O’Brien was having “a problem with some pr**k at work”.
She told her father that “I should send the card and for the laugh”. Her father, she claimed in her interview, agreed and “suggested I do it”.
“I sent it because I wanted Michael Buckley to have a bit of laughter that is all I wanted to achieve,” she also said.
The lewd poem in the card referred to a Michael Buckley and she also added some lines to it, she said when questioned by the investigator.
She admitted mailing the envelope at Dorset Street post office and that it contained the card, the poem and the g-string. She said she did so on her own. However, she told Gsoc, “I did not send any bullet”.
She maintained she had not sent the mail on behalf of any of the officers in the serious crime review team including Det O’Brien.
“I feel Michael Buckley put the bullet in it, gardaí should look at the people he locked up, ” she told Gsoc.
The trial continues.