Phyllis Murphy's eldest sister, Barbara, heard that the Kildare gardai had arrested somebody in connection with her murder at 8.15 a.m. yesterday. Barbara's husband, Michael Turner, took the call. He just had time to tell her the news, when a plain-clothes garda arrived at their home in Mellitta Park. "He rang Michael first and said he was on the way. We were in shock."
The ice had been broken, at least. The garda said simply that somebody had been taken in - and explained the ramifications of the DNA testing.
How did she feel? "It was always at the back of our minds that it was going to happen. You hope and hope and then you put it in the background. There's even an element of fear that the case could be re-opened again, and nothing more would come of it. But now we're glad. No matter what, we would prefer to know the full truth."
Among the nine surviving Murphy siblings, three boys and six girls, who are all "very close", says Barbara, there has been a shared sense of chronic injustice ever since their raped and strangled sister's body was found, almost by chance, in the Wicklow Gap. Phyllis was third youngest in the family.
But there was no time to think of her own feelings, yesterday. As the eldest, Barbara, saw it as her clear duty to tell the others - even though the detective garda volunteered to do everything.
"He wanted to contact the others, but I couldn't let him - the shock would have been too much."
One brother was in England, and she also had a brother and sister in Australia. "I rang them immediately. They all broke down." The rest of the family lived locally, except for a brother in Dublin. She tried desperately to contact him, but he had left for work. : "It was on the nine o'clock news. He heard of it at work. It was a terrible shock."
There was almost a festive air in Mellitta Park yesterday as neighbours came in and out with sandwiches, hot tea and total empathy with the Murphy siblings, all of whom had made it home - with the two in Australia on the way.
Barbara talked, almost hesitantly, about Phyllis. Her last memories of her sister are of "a very quiet girl, sensible and cautious". She worked in the Curragh Knitwear factory in Newbridge - and stayed in that town on many occasions.
Their mother had died 10 years before Phyllis's tragic murder and her father "died heart-broken" 13 years ago, not knowing the identity of his daughter's killer.