Two mothers, two sons, one tragedy. Kathryn Holmquist talks to the mothers of the two young men at the centre of this week's murder case, which saw Brian Willoughby jailed for the killing of Brian Mulvaney
Killer's disorder left 'untreated'
Eight years ago, Therese Willoughby came to The Irish Times and pleaded: "My son needs help before he kills somebody." Five years later, he did just that. Brian Willoughby confessed to the murder of 19-year-old Brian Mulvaney on March 10th, 2000, to gardaí in Templeogue, bragging that he had "danced" on Mulvaney's head and shouted "carnage" as he did so.
On Tuesday last, Willoughby was convicted. Therese is devastated.
"Brian's life is over. He hasn't just lost his freedom. He has no freedom in his mind, which is more important. My life is over. I don't see any reason to keep living and neither does my son," she says, weeping.
After talking to Joe Duffy on Liveline on Thursday, she was on a bus and overheard strangers talking about what a neglectful mother she must have been. Yet from the time her son was seven years old, Therese's efforts to find help for Brian were a full-time job that exhausted the family financially, emotionally and physically. They spent nine years waiting for a diagnosis, but by the time they got it nothing could be done. Both she and her husband, Stephen, were forced to quit their jobs as a nurse and a salesman. Theirs is a familiar pattern to experts and other parents of sons who have brain disorders.
"Mrs Willoughby genuinely tried to help her son. There are thousands of families out there whose sons at age nine, 10 and 11 have developed brain and behaviour disorders and who have sought help without success," says John Lonergan, governor of Mountjoy Prison, where Brian is serving a life sentence.
"Self-righteous people who complain that the parents are to blame, for not seeking help or being unable to control their sons, are doing these parents a great injustice. It is the system that is to blame. There are no resources and very little expertise to deal with these boys. Parents looking for help are hitting their heads against a wall. It's a scandal and a disgrace and I have been talking about it for years with no result.
"There are many victims in this tragedy . . . Brian Willoughby is a madman. He needed help as a young boy and, despite his parents' efforts, he did not get it, because the help does not exist in this country."
Brian Willoughby was a "loving and loveable" little boy who, by the age of four, was showing signs of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), such as lack of impulse control, poor concentration, no fear of danger, and clumsiness. By the age of seven, he was labelled "disruptive" in school. He was a giddy daydreamer and his teachers kept saying that if only he would pay more attention, he'd be fine. By the age of 10, when he fell from a tree and damaged his spine, he was hearing strange noises in his head. At 12, he believed he could fly from a balcony to a distant roof. He had no spatial sense.
"I'm wired backwards," he kept telling his mother, repeating to her the label that he often heard from peers and teachers.
Therese persisted in seeking help, but Brian was 16 years old before a private psychiatrist, Dr Michael Fitzgerald, diagnosed him with ADD. By then, it was too late. Experts such as Dr Deirdre Killilea, a psychologist specialising in ADD, assert that early intervention, ideally before the age of seven, is the only way to help children like Brian, and to protect society.
ADD does not in itself cause violent behaviour. Young men with ADD are far more likely to kill themselves than others, as a result of the low-self esteem they develop when they are constantly criticised for not being able to conform. Their attention spans last 15 minutes at most and their ability to focus is patchy and constantly fluctuating. The confusion of being able to concentrate on one thing one day, but not understand it the next, makes children with ADD feel perpetually off-kilter. They can grow to detest themselves.
"I hate myself. I want to die," Brian often told his mother, starting at the age of 10.
In some situations, children with ADD develop conduct disorder, also known as oppositional defiant disorder, in reaction to their low self-esteem and to the atmosphere of conflict and stress in their families, who understandably cannot cope without support. It is this psychiatric disorder that can push some boys, such as Brian, to become murderers.
In 1997 and 1998, Brian's homophobia, aggression and violence had reached a peak and he stabbed two men, one of whom lost an eye. The other required 100 stitches. On probation for these crimes, Brian was supposed to be under constant psychiatric supervision and spent time in psychiatric units and St Patrick's Institution, but he was mostly thrown back on the resources of his parents.
"There is no place in Ireland to detain these young men," says Lonergan.
Therese says: "After Brian reached the age of 16, getting help was even harder. He was in a constant state of total negativity. We tried probation officers, social workers, doctors, GPs, psychologists, psychiatrists, everybody. People had a name for what Brian had [ADD and conduct disorder], but people still knew very little about it."
Brian would refuse to attend the psychiatrist and was out of school. He became homophobic, victimising "faggots" in two completely unprovoked and random attacks. A third victim was assaulted on a bus when Brian was part of a gang that wreaked havoc. Then he had a motorbike accident in 1998, which left him on life support for a week and with permanent head injuries. A consultant neurologist's assessment declared that he would need constant supervision and medication for the rest of his life.
The brain injury kept him off the streets for nearly two years, while he received therapy from Headway Ireland. Video nasties became Brian's daily cultural diet. He constantly used words like "carnage", which came from the violent imagery that he watched and recorded obsessively, providing his own commentary. By the time he reached the age of 21, he was "highly explosive" and "dangerous", says his mother, who herself was the victim of his violence.
Brian had a fearful reputation in Templeogue. After he murdered Brian Mulvaney, Therese overheard a local teenager saying: "There's a madman out there and he's killed somebody and his parents are worse for letting him out. They let him go around like that without getting any help for him."
On Monday, March 6th, four days before the murder, Therese returned home to find blood in the hall and on the stairs. Brian had slit his wrists. She dialled 999 and brought him to Tallaght Hospital, where she begged for her son to be detained in a psychiatric unit. He was a "demented madman" at this stage, so much so that security guards had to be called. Yet Brian was refused in-patient care. Therese was sent home with her dangerous, overpowering son and a prescription for ever stronger doses of psychiatric medication, including Largactil.
This made Brian a zombie, so on the Thursday, three days after the suicide attempt, Therese took it upon herself to reduce the dose so that she could get him into the car to bring him to a psychiatric appointment. She does not know whether Brian took any medication at all on Friday, the day of the murder.
"It was the alcohol and drugs that inflamed him and made him more aggressive," she says. "His brain injury meant that one drink had four times the effect on him as on a normal person."
The murder of Brian Mulvaney, was "waiting to happen", Therese believes.
The previous Monday, the psychiatrist in Tallaght had advised her to throw her son out of the house. But Therese could not do that because she was fearful that he would kill someone. He did this anyway.
Therese has tried several times to talk to Annie Mulvaney, the mother of Brian Mulvaney, to apologise and try to explain that she had done her best to protect her son, and to protect society from her son. But by the accounts of both mothers, Therese was rebuffed.
"I wanted to shake hands and say I am terribly, terribly sorry for the griefand suffering you have gone through," says Therese, who is a daily communicant in the Catholic Church. "We did not do it, but our son had problems that were not addressed. I want the Mulvaney family to know that we are so sorry and we pray for them and for their son Brian every day.
"I would prefer it if Brian was dead. I would rather be in Annie Mulvaney's position. At least she knows that her son is safe in the afterlife. I will have to live with the fact that Brian is in prison, untreated for his disorder and suffering for the rest of my life."
Therese is determined to find some kind of hope for other parents in her situation. She is considering suing the State for its failure to provide services for her son, and wants to campaign for legislation that would create services for children with ADD and psychiatric disorders such as oppositional defiant disorder.
"I want to prevent this happening again," she stresses. "I don't want any family to go through what we have gone through."
I felt 're-victimised' by the law, says victim's mother
Brian Willoughby is evil, not mad, asserts Annie Mulvaney, whose 19-year-old son Brian was murdered by Willoughby three years ago. "He is a vicious, evil person and if he is ever let out he will kill again," Annie says. "His mother is going on the airwaves saying that she did everything she could and that he had Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). That is ridiculous."
Annie refused to speak to Therese when Therese approached her in the Four Courts. The two families were crammed together on a hard bench at the back of the court and even met accidentally in the toilets and in pubs at lunchtime. Annie felt "re-victimised" by the three-year legal process.
While gardaí were "wonderful", she felt she lacked the legal representation as a victim that she would have had in her native France.
She and her family have been "devastated" by the loss of Brian, a sprinter and basketball player, who was "fun-loving, passive, cool, anti-violent, vibrant and adventurous" and popular with girls.
On the night of March 10th, 2000, Brian Mulvaney, an architecture student, was invited by a group of local girls to a party in the Orwell Estate in Templeogue, where he took ecstasy and danced with a girl with whom Willoughby had been infatuated. He also had hash and Valium in his system. He linked up with the homophobic Willoughby, who called Mulvaney a "faggot".
Annie says her son was so confident and easy-going that he was completely unthreatened by Willoughby's frightening reputation. So the two young men left the party and went to a local petrol station to buy cigarette papers so they could roll a joint. Annie believes that her son was "lured".
At the petrol station, the two Brians met two other young men, Neil Barbour (who was acquitted on Wednesday) and Stephen Aherne (who was only 15 at the time and was convicted of manslaughter on Wednesday).
Brian Mulvaney was assaulted, then managed to escape and was chased for 100 metres before he was dragged down by Barbour, so that Willoughby and Aherne could kick him in the face. His mother is haunted by the image of her son struggling to escape.
Mulvaney's facial injuries caused swelling so severe that his father, Larry, identified his body by his feet. Yet there were no bones broken and the injuries were not fatal in themselves. Knocked unconscious, Mulvaney gradually choked to death on his own blood, as Brian Willoughby "jumped and danced", according to Barbour, on Mulvaney's head.
Annie Mulvaney heard this gruesome graphic story over and over again in court. There were many days when she didn't want to get out of bed and get dressed, yet she knew she had to be in court to represent her son.
"The jury needed to know that my son was a human being with a family," she says. "The victims have no voice. I feel very lucky that the State represented us well."
Dublin's youth culture of drink and drugs is partly to blame for her son's death, Annie believes, but the ultimate culprit, she asserts, is Brian Willoughby. "I was surprised that my son had ecstasy in his blood, but if I could live it all over again, there is nothing I would have done differently. You cannot put your 19-year-old son in a box," she says. "My son was in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people."
Aoife Mulvaney (18), a psychology student, was left an only child when her brother was killed. "At the age of 15, I realised that the world is a horrible place. I had to grow up fast. Discussions in our house now tend not to be about trivial matters any more. The only issues are the big issues - but there are no answers."
There are many strange coincidences in the murder of Brian Mulvaney by Brian Willoughby; their shared Christian name is only one of them. One coincidence is that Brian Willoughby was brain-injured in a motorbike accident in 1998 exactly two years to the night before he murdered Brian Mulvaney. Another is that, in 1998, Brian Mulvaney's friend, Stephen Morris (17), was killed by Vincent Flynn (19). Stephen's brother, Rory, who described his family as "broken" by Stephen's murder, was a friend of the Mulvaney family.
Like Brian Willoughby, Vincent Flynn suffers from ADD and his parents had, like Willoughby's parents, made exhaustive attempts to get help for him. And like the Willoughbys, the Flynns were castigated in the media for being "bad" parents.
Flynn is now in Limerick Prison, where he is seen regularly by an ADD visiting committee, set up in the jail due to the large number of ADD sufferers there. A member of the committee told The Irish Times that these are young men who never got the help they needed, so their crimes became inevitable.
William Wilkinson, a Galway-based expert on ADD, has written a book describing the condition as genetic. But not everyone agrees.
Ted Fleming, an educationalist in Maynooth and author of the report into delinquency, In Trouble from Day One, believes that inadequate parenting is the cause.
Annie would tend to agree with Fleming. Her son's killer and his parents have no excuse, she insists.
"I am angry, but not bitter," says Annie, who keeps busy as a volunteer with the Special Olympics and Victim Support. "Brian loved life. I love life too, and I want to live whatever life is left there.
"We must look at society and recognise that there is a problem," she adds. "Something went wrong and my son died. It is too late for Brian, but may not be too late for somebody else."