A man accused of murdering and raping a schoolgirl whose body was found on a rocky foreshore in Co Galway told a friend he had gone home to bed on the night of the killing but had later "returned to the village to look for a man he had had a fight with earlier".
A 26-year-old Co Galway man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, is on trial in the Central Criminal Court for the murder of the 17-year-old girl. He also faces two charges related to rape of the girl in the early hours of December 6th, 1998. He denies all the charges.
In court yesterday, the girl's best friend identified the second of a pair of half-heart friendship pendants she and her friend had bought a year earlier. The schoolgirl's pendant and chain were found in a laneway where it is alleged she was raped on the night before her body was found.
The jury also heard evidence from a man who was involved in a fight with the accused man outside a chip shop sometime after 2 a.m. on the night of the killing.
The trial has heard that the accused man was involved in two fights on the night of the killing: one shortly before midnight with his former girlfriend and her new boyfriend outside a hotel nightclub; the second outside the chip shop.
The ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend, an American, have both given evidence that, although the accused man hit them, they did not inflict any blows or marks on him.
The man involved in the fight with the accused man outside the chip shop said yesterday that he, too, believed he had not hit the accused man. The defence put it to him that he did not know.
A number of witnesses have described seeing "scratches" or a "mark" on one or both of the accused man's arms on the day after the killing. The prosecution case is that those marks or scratches were not inflicted in either of the two fights.
Giving his evidence in Irish, the man involved in the chip shop row admitted that he was "quite steamed" by the time he left a disco in the hotel nightclub, "sometime after the music stopped". He did not recall the exact time, he told Mr Denis Vaughan Buckley SC, prosecuting, but thought it "could be around 2.30 or perhaps afterwards".
Two brothers who were watching a video at home on the night of the killing gave evidence of seeing a car travelling at speed past their house between 1.50 and 1.55 a.m. The car came from the direction of the beach where the girl's body was found.
A neighbour of the accused man told Mr Buckley that when he was being dropped off close to his house at about 2.45 or 2.50 a.m. on the night of the killing the accused man pulled up behind him in his car and they had some small talk.
He said the accused man "seemed a small bit agitated" and said he had been in two rows that night, one at the chip shop a few minutes earlier and one outside the hotel nightclub.
It was "exactly three o'clock" when he got in home, the witness said. He knew the time because his mother had been waiting up for him.
The trial continues today.