Postmortem results are expected today on the bodies of two young girls and their father who died yesterday in Ballycotton in east Cork.
John Butler (43), a native of Cobh who lived with his wife and two children at Ballybraher, crashed his car into a tree just outside the village at about 9.45am and died when the vehicle burst into flames.
His wife, Una, had left the family home that morning for her job in Cork city. When she heard a man had been killed in a car crash in Ballycotton, she tried ringing her husband’s mobile and when she got no answer, she rang a relative. The relative and another family member went to the Butlers’ home.
There they saw the bodies of Zoe (6) and her two-year-old sister Ella in a downstairs room and immediately rang gardaí. The two girls were still in their pyjamas and it is expected postmortem results will show they were strangled.
Mr Butler had bought a five-gallon drum of petrol at a garage in Shanagarry at about 9am. The container was found in the charred shell of his crashed vehicle.
Gardaí have appealed to the public for information as they try to trace the route of a red Toyota Yaris (registration 02C1526) between 9.00am and 9.40am when the car crashed in Ballycotton.
Gardaí are carrying out tests to establish if Mr Butler doused the inside of the car in petrol before crashing the car at high speed in an apparent suicide.
He had previously worked in Irish Steel but had worked in construction in recent years, finding only occasional work of late due to the recession.