A former army sergeant accused of the 1979 murder of a Kildare woman, Ms Phyllis Murphy, told gardaí he could not understand why semen found in her body was his own. He said he accepted what forensic scientists were saying but he could not explain it.
The contents of four interviews Mr John Crerar had with gardaí following his arrest on July 13th, 1999, nearly 20 years after Ms Murphy's body was found in a forested area near the Wicklow Gap, were read to the jury yesterday on the ninth day of his trial.
In the Central Criminal Court Mr Crerar (54), of Woodside Park, Kildare, has pleaded not guilty to the murder of Ms Murphy (23), on a date unknown between December 22nd, 1979, and January 18th, 1980,within the state.
Yesterday the jury heard from Det Garda Mark Carroll that he arrested Mr Crerar because DNA evidence positively linked him to Ms Murphy.
It also heard from Det Sergeant Brendan McArdle of the Ballistics Section at Garda headquarters that, on two occasions in 1998 and 1999, he travelled to a forensic science laboratory in Abingdon, England, to hand over material for analysis by a forensic scientist, Mr Matthew Greenhalgh.
Det Sgt McArdle said that in January 1998 he learned of the results of fresh analysis on nine swabs taken from the body of Phyllis Murphy from Dr Maureen Smyth of the Forensic Science Laboratory. He travelled to Abingdon in March and delivered the nine swabs there.
In September he delivered 23 stain cards containing samples of blood taken from men at the time of the killing. Out of 52 samples, a total of 49 were eventually analysed, one of them a sample from Mr Crerar.
Det Sgt McArdle said that in February 1999 he handed over the rest of the stain cards to Mr Greenhalgh, along with 12 new samples. The result of the analysis on the first batch of stain cards was negative, Det Sgt McArdle told Mr Michael Durack SC, prosecuting. He told Mr Greenhalgh to proceed to analyse the second batch.
Det Garda Mark Carroll told the trial that he arrested Mr Crerar on the morning of July 13th, 1999, at the Seisiun stud, Co Kildare, on suspicion of murder.
In the course of interviews conducted by members of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation with Mr Crerar that day, the results of DNA analysis were put to him, as were the contents of a fresh statement from a man he had worked with as a security guard in 1979.
Det Garda James B. Hanley told the trial that in the first interview Mr Crerar was told that when a sample of his blood was examined, the results suggested that the profiling provided extremely strong support for the view that the semen found in swabs taken from Ms Murphy's body came from Mr Crerar.
The case continues on Monday before Mr Justice McKechnie.