The marriage of Joe and Rachel O'Reilly was not happy, a jury in the Central Criminal Court has been told. Jacqueline Connor, a nurse who had been a close friend of Rachel O'Reilly since they were in secondary school, told Denis Vaughan Buckley SC, prosecuting, that Ms O'Reilly would often confide in her.
The last time she saw her was on Friday, October 1st, 2004, and that she was in "fairly good spirits". However, on one occasion, her friend told her their marriage "wasn't happy" and that "the family was suffering". She also said Ms O'Reilly was "often on her own" because her husband worked so hard.
On the day of the killing, Ms Connor said she arrived home from a night shift and went to bed. She woke up when Joe O'Reilly called to ask if she had seen his wife. After temporarily falling back to sleep, she became concerned and decided to call out to her friend's house. When she walked into the kitchen at about 2.20pm, Mr O'Reilly was there with Rose Callaly, Rachel's mother, and a neighbour. She said all of them looked shocked and tables and chairs were overturned.
Mr O'Reilly asked her to go to the bedroom to see whether she could do anything.
"I saw Rachel's body lying at the door of the bedroom. There was loads of congealed blood around her head and a gash to the right side of her head. I checked for a pulse. Her hand was cold. I felt nothing," she said.
She noticed the bedroom was untidy, that drawers had been pulled out and that there were blood splatterings high up on the wall. As she left the room, she looked across to the boys' room, where she noticed a bloodstained box of books.
Ms Connor also described an incident on October 25th when Mr O'Reilly asked her to help him prove his innocence. She said she went back to his mother's house after his son Adam's birthday party and that when they began speaking about the murder, he told her he thought he was being framed.
When she asked him whether he had an alibi, he replied: "There are just a few hours I was not accounted for but Rachel was."
She described Ms O'Reilly as "outgoing and active. She was a very caring person. Very sporty. She was also very self-sufficient. She worked one day a week in a solicitor's in Donnybrook." She also worked as an agent for Avon and Tupperware and that she would often buy products from her.
Ms O'Reilly had also told her about a key she kept under a pot at the back door, but that she never used it.
Naomi Garrigan, whose child attended the same montessori as Adam O'Reilly, said she saw Ms O'Reilly at the crèche on the morning she was killed. The following week, she saw Mr O'Reilly outside the crèche and told him how sorry she was for his loss.
"I said if he ever needed anything or any help with the children, I could help," she said. She saw him on a couple of occasions with their children after that.
At her own son's birthday party on November 5th, Mr O'Reilly offered to lend her dumbbells to help ease a pain in her arm she had told him about.
Asked by Mr Buckley what she felt about him offering her dumbbells, she replied: "To be honest, I panicked, because that's what the speculation was in the newspapers, so I got a bit of a shock." After that, she said she collected Adam a few times from the crèche.
On November 9th, when Mr O'Reilly met her at the Little Chef restaurant to collect his son, he told her he was going to be arrested but denied any involvement in the killing. He also warned her that the papers were saying they were having an affair.
She "got very upset" and went home to her husband. "I thought I was doing a good thing," she said. The next contact she had with Mr O'Reilly was when she heard two people had been arrested in relation to the killing. "I texted him and said everything was going to be okay. Then he texted back and said 'as long as they get the right people'."