Friends of Rachel O'Reilly tell their story of what happened in the O'Reilly household in the months leading up to Rachel's murder, of what they knew about the marital relationship with Joe O'Reilly, and of the damning evidence that never made it to court, writes Kathy Sheridan.
The group of five women are standing around a bench, which was assembled by Rachel, in Jackie Connor's sunny back garden in north Co Dublin. The air is scented with lemon geranium - the only plant Rachel could grow - and they are drinking Rachel's favourite tipple, red wine. There's an extra glass of red on the table, as always, for their dearly missed friend. Jackie Connor, Paula Carney, Celine Keogh, Helen Reddy and Bríd Horan weren't always so close. Some hardly knew each other; Rachel was the common denominator.
In the days after her death, each eyed the other warily, wondering "what the hell she was doing here". Each had been led to believe that the other had not been a true friend to Rachel. It was eight months later, over a weekend in Carney's Tipperary home, that they realised that all the tales - all lies - had a common source: Joe O'Reilly. He had calculatedly sown the seeds of division between them, meanwhile isolating Rachel from her friends. He told her that he had met Paula Carney for lunch, for example, making it seem like a surreptitious act on Carney's part; in fact, it was four years since they had met for lunch. "He was cutting off her escape routes," says Carney.
These women believed him because they liked him, even loved him as a friend. "Joe was my friend as much as Rachel was," says Celine Keogh, a social worker, wistfully. "He was very good to me. He did things like hire a van to help me to move house. He was very kind, very supportive, just a nice guy who would sit down for a chat and a cup of tea. I was able to confide very personal stuff in Joe. I really liked him. I knew he wasn't happy in his marriage. I just got on with it."
At Keogh's karaoke and "murder mystery" nights, he was the quick-witted "hilarious" one. And he was kind. Bríd Horan, who knew him through softball, observed that if someone fell, he would be the first to run out with the first aid or to massage a tight muscle. "And he'd always have this funny banter and innuendo going on," she adds.
Women found him attractive then. He had two affairs - that we know of - in the last 18 months or so of Rachel's life; one with a sportswoman in the spring/summer of 2003, which fizzled out that same summer, and another, serious relationship with Nikki Pelley, begun following a work function in January 2004.
He was fitter and slimmer back then, says Horan, "very tall and gently spoken, quite good on the softball field, a Kempo black belt, and very, very, very kind . . . If you saw him back in the early days with Adam [his and Rachel's youngest son], he'd be always laughing".
He was also an achiever, working his way up from Arnott's stores, to senior management in Viacom Outdoor advertising at the age of 30, with responsibility for 26 workers.
His family life as a child in Kilbarrack had been turbulent and difficult; his little sister, Martina, was born blind with Down's Syndrome, his parents separated. His mother Ann drove a minibus to make ends meet.
He was 20 and Rachel only 19 when they met in 1992. She was one of the five attractive, adopted children of Rose and Jim Callaly, a plumber, the centre of a vast, hospitable circle of extended family and friends. Five years later they were married, a couple of the Celtic Tiger, good-looking, vivacious, athletic, working hard, moving up, and moving out of Santry with their two little boys, to a home on its own grounds in the Naul in May 2003, with two cars in the yard.
But by then, six years into the marriage, with their sons, Luke and Adam, still only three and seven months, Joe O'Reilly was already into his affair with the sportswoman, already confiding to her - 18 months before Rachel's death - that anything less than full custody of the boys was not an option.
Paula Carney dates the deterioration in the marriage from the time he joined Viacom. Disappearances on overnight bus inspections, sometimes to Limerick and Cork, were routine. She had a friend working as a bill poster there who was often out putting up posters at 10pm. "I'd say 'but why would Joe be doing overnight inspections?' and [my friend] said, 'he doesn't'."
For Rachel's 30th birthday in October 2003, Joe was on a softball trip to Florida, to which Rachel was not invited. Celine Keogh spent the birthday with her. That night, Rachel asked Keogh if she thought Joe was having an affair; Keogh said she didn't think so. Her friends knew that there was little love in Rachel's marital life. "She'd say she couldn't remember the last time she kissed Joe, or the last time they had sex and that their beds were like musical chairs. One would get in and the other would get out," says Carney. Meanwhile, Joe talked openly about "not getting any" at home.
"He'd have you believe she was withholding sex," says Bríd Horan, when they knew that the opposite was true.
The friends had concerns about the marriage. "We could see that Joe didn't treat Rachel with respect," says Keogh. "As far back as 2001, I remember him roaring, 'Are you f**kin' stupid or what?' at her, and she cowered, with tears welling up in her eyes."
In August 2004, the family holiday was in Blackwater, Co Cork. "He only went down for a day, said he couldn't get the time off. She was livid," says Helen Reddy.
He complained of a "bad shoulder" and said the physiotherapist had told him not to wear his wedding ring. In September, rumours of an affair surfaced again. An O'Reilly relative heard Luke refer to "Daddy's girlfriend Nikki" and told Joe to tell Rachel or she would be told by someone else. He told Rachel, in a jokey voice, that the relative "thinks I'm having an affair and that I should tell you".
Did the friends believe it then? "We had no idea," says Reddy. "She laughed it off," says Connor, "and said 'why would he have an affair when he isn't interested in sex?'." In a real sense, they had all lost touch with Joe in that last year. "Rachel did everything in that house," says Connor, "from the DIY, to the accounts to the parenting. At her funeral, her DIY book was brought to the altar as one of the gifts. The only thing he did was burn the rubbish. I'd have seen Joe about five times in the last year. He was absent from the family, definitely from January 2004. She didn't have a family life".
By May 2004, the once glowing, healthy young woman was "very stressed, with psoriasis around her eyes, on her arms, between her fingers," says Connor. "She was practically a lone parent," adds Horan, "with two young kids - one at school and one in the creche, a new house which she had found on her own and was trying to do up herself; selling her Avon and Tupperware and working part-time for a solicitor, and with a husband who was never there . . . and yet, she was always available, always, to her friends."
It wasn't as if she was a perfectionist, they laugh. "Rachel's house looked like it had been burgled. But lazy? Never. The complete opposite." She was a force of nature, who gave 110 per cent in everything she tried; she loved nature, taught her boys to respect spiders and bugs, and how to do cartwheels; she was a "Disney freak" who planned to get a Tinkerbell tattoo, screamed at her team on the hockey pitch, had no fashion sense, was never crude, came on like Madonna at the karaoke after a few glasses of red, and loved her "sneaky" cigarettes.
Stories of Rachel's warmth, kindness, sense of fun and affirmation of her friends are legion. She insisted on Joe's sister Martina being included in family functions, cut her hair, and brought her gifts in her residential home in Ballymun. She never called without a gift of some kind. "Yet she was always astonished if you ever bought her a gift or cooked her a meal," says Keogh.
In June 2004, although none of them could know it, Joe was sending foul-mouth, hate-filled e-mails to his sister, Ann, saying Rachel repulsed him and describing her as a "lazy c*nt".
The long diatribes reveal that his mother was the anonymous complainant to the social services about Rachel's parenting skills and that his greatest fear was of becoming "Mr Weekend Custody" in a separation.
Ann responds that Rachel has organised Joe's mother to babysit the boys the following Friday and booked a meal out for herself and her husband. "Where the hell did you hear I was going out with that c*nt?" he replies. "A meal? I'd rather choke."
Did the meal ever happen? Her friends remember Rachel's intense excitement that Joe, as she put it, "was bringing her out to dinner", probably to Wong's in Clontarf. The outing was to finally mark her 30th birthday, "a really rare, grown-up night out for her and she was making a big effort for her man," Carney recalls. "She said she was going to wear black trousers and a mauve top and her amethyst pendant and earrings and I was going, 'make sure you wear lipstick, have your hair done'."
Carney rang her the following Monday to hear how she got on and found her "terribly upset . . . She said Joe couldn't go for the meal because he got called to the office".
Did she love Joe? "Idolised him," they agree. But she was wilting. During that last summer, Connor witnessed a "huge argument" between them in the house, so explosive that she went outside. Afterwards, Rachel told Connor that she didn't love Joe any more but would try to make things work for the boys.
In the final months, says Connor, there was "definite tension about an affair . . . There were rumours and she was questioning him a lot. She had laughed it off but I think she had a long, hard think. I was in Eddie Rocket's with her and the boys about nine days before October 4th [the day she was murdered], and she told me she did give him an ultimatum. He had gone to England and she'd spoken to him on the phone; there were to be no more late night inspections, he was to spend more time at home . . . " In court, however, Connor was only allowed to say that Rachel had said "she wasn't happy in her marriage. She said family life was suffering because he was working a lot and she was on her own a lot". It could have been a description of almost any Celtic Tiger marriage, not a dangerous spiral of hatred, betrayal and disaster.
On Friday, October 1st, Rachel rang Carney. "She was very upset, very depressed. She said she was putting on weight and that she needed to speak to me, that things weren't great at home."
Clearly, there was a sense of unease among them. On Saturday, October 2nd, Keogh mentioned a programme she had seen about men who murder their wives, which noted that they were often into martial arts and obsessions. They also dehumanise their wives by calling them names. "I asked Brid and Helen, who does that remind you of?" She realised that Joe ticked the boxes: the Kempo black belt; the Star Wars obsession (he also collected knives); openly referring to Rachel as "the Dragon" (they hadn't heard the worst, of course). And still, they now believe that Rachel was hiding much, even from her oldest friends. "Rachel wanted to create a picture of a happy pixie family," says Horan, "the house in the country, the nice lifestyle, the 2.4 children." She was also a very private person, "very dignified, very proper".
This is why the loathsome e-mails between Joe and his sister were such a hammer blow in court for Rachel's friends and family. No one knew they were coming, not even her mother. "Those e-mails are the voice of somebody who's already left," says Horan. "That's why he had no respect for her, because she still had expectations of him as a husband, so they became a burden to him and that's how the hate was breeding."
"Rachel did not have a voice in that court," says Connor. "What was said in the e-mails was upsetting and devastating to us all, though she was living through it.
"The animosity that came through from his family . . . we fear that the boys [Luke and Adam] will never know what their Mom was really like and the warmth she gave them." Far from the sadistic image of Rachel's mothering, painted by Joe and his sister, these women describe Adam as "the Velcro child", always glued to his mother, and Luke as the one "who idolised his Mammy and was the spitting image of her".
Contact now between the Callaly family and Rachel's adored sons is intermittent at best. Nearly three years older, at seven and four, the boys no longer see any of the children or friends that were once their universe.
It is believed that O'Reilly has since become a Jehovah's Witness.
Each of the five women admits that their sense of trust has been almost destroyed. "I must have been the most gullible person," says Helen Reddy, whose husband was one of Joe's closest acquaintances.
O'Reilly's extraordinary behaviour immediately after the killing should have alerted them. He took no part in her funeral arrangements. Rose and Jim Callaly paid for the funeral and the reception. He did not choose the coffin, and told the undertaker that he was not going to pay for a plot, as he was not going to be buried there. Eventually, his mother paid for it. It appears that while the Callalys own the grave in title, O'Reilly is legally next of kin and there remains a stand-off over a tombstone. On "significant days", when the five friends take a bottle of red to share at Rachel's grave (as they did after the verdict), it is before a plain wooden cross marked with her name.
The bizarre behaviour extended to his demeanour - devouring sandwiches and laughing and joking with the media - before his appearance on the Late Late Showwith the Callalys, appealing for help to find Rachel's killer. After the show, he left to spend the night with his lover, Nikki Pelley.
Nonetheless, Reddy managed to block out her suspicions for 10 months, until the day that Rose Callaly told her that she "didn't know which side of Rachel's head she was holding", so mutilating were the injuries. "And I thought oh my God, he [O'Reilly] told me where the cuts were on her head" - a reference to other evidence that never made it before the jury.
Within a week or two of the murder, he persuaded friends and loved ones to come to the house - having assured them that he felt Rachel was there and it was "very peaceful" - while it was still spattered and soaked with her blood and gave them what he called "the tour", during which he very calmly performed physical and graphic re-enactments of how, in his view, she was bludgeoned to death, how many blows were inflicted, how each pool and spatter of blood had landed where it had. The tour would end with him walking out of the bedroom to the bathroom whereupon he - as the killer - would hear her "moaning" or "gurgling" (choking on blood), and return to deliver several more blows to "finish her off".
Rachel's parents were among those forced to watch these performances, as well as her brother and his wife, and more than half a dozen close friends of his and Rachel's. Alan Boyle, a friend of Joe's for nearly 13 years, and who found him surprisingly calm when he made a sympathy call, wondered if she might have been having an affair. O'Reilly replied that he "'couldn't give a f*ck what Rachel got up to'". He said that without a flinch, added Boyle. "That disturbed me."
Defence counsel Patrick Gageby SC argued that Denis Vaughan Buckley SC, for the prosecution, "was doing the Joe Duffy thing - 'How did she feel?' - in an attempt to put into this case popular emotion".
It was a tough case for the prosecution, relying almost entirely on circumstantial evidence. Joe O'Reilly's achievement was to commit a murder in which forensics could play no part to catch the killer, since the killer's DNA and prints were also those of the second adult occupant.
His first act when he arrived back to the house - after Rose Callaly, but before the police - was to fling items around the murder scene and to clasp his wife's body, thus ensuring that any DNA could have got there legitimately. It remains a mystery how he managed to commit such a bloody killing and to leave no marks outside the house. He may have had a shower - the bathroom, says Connor wryly, was "spotless" - changed into another set of clothes and put the bloody clothes through a wash cycle. Asked where his gym clothes were, he said that his mother would have washed them. The kitchen tap was running strongly when Rose Callaly arrived, suggesting a calculated effort to wash away blood out of the system. Another piece of evidence not to make it before the jury was his left boot, on which was found a small bloodstain that, crucially, was "airborne" when it hit the boot. This, however, had not been tested for DNA and dating it would have been impossible.
Nor was the murder weapon ever found. A decking spindle or hockey stick were considered. O'Reilly suggested to the Garda that it was one of his dumb-bells (one of which he reported missing, along with two bathroom towels).
Almost farcically, certain items were left at the scene to suggest a burglary gone wrong - a black glove, a small necklace, as well as the careful placing of a "stolen" camera bag and rucksack, in a culvert clearly visible from the road, with a tag "O'Reilly Santry" on it. His willingness to divert suspicion on to innocents was notable: they included an NTL cable installer, Rachel's biological brother and mother; one worker whom he had sacked, and another who had run at him with a fire extinguisher when he sacked him and who, claimed O'Reilly, threatened to kill him and his family. Otherwise, he maintained his right to silence in hour after hour of questioning.
He outsmarted himself more than once. The Viacom van he claimed to see in Broadstone - the scene of his alibi - around the time of the murder, was in fact clamped that morning outside Pearse Street station.
And surprisingly, for such a calculated deed, he was clearly unaware of how powerful mobile phones are as tracers, although they had featured in several high-profile cases. When he claimed he was at Broadstone, a text from a friend placed O'Reilly's phone indisputably within half a mile of his home in the Naul.
Some mobile companies have systems where texts do not leave a trail; his downfall was that O2 Ireland's system does. He was also unlucky in having such a determined judge on the bench.
For Rachel O'Reilly's family and friends, this is not the end. There are other battles to be fought. But perhaps the grieving can properly begin.