THE TRIAL of Sharon Collins and Essam Eid, a Las Vegas poker dealer she is accused of hiring to kill her partner and his two sons, has entered its closing stages.
The jury yesterday heard the closing speech of the prosecution and of Ms Collins’s defence lawyer.
The trial will continue today before Mr Justice Roderick Murphy when the jury will hear the closing statements of Mr Eid’s defence team.
Ms Collins of Ballybeg House, Kildysart Road, Ennis, and Mr Eid (52), an Egyptian with a Las Vegas address, have pleaded not guilty to conspiring to kill PJ, Robert and Niall Howard between August 1st and September 26th, 2006.
Ms Collins also denies hiring Mr Eid to kill the three men.
Mr Eid denies demanding €100,000 from Robert Howard to cancel the contracts. He also denies breaking into the Howard family business at Westgate Business Park and stealing two computers, some computer cables, a digital clock and a poster of old Irish money and then handling the stolen items.
Closing the case for the prosecution Úna Ní Raifeartaigh told the jury of eight men and four women that it had been “an extraordinary and bizarre trial”.
She urged the jurors to look behind appearances to the truth underneath – “treachery lies in honeyed words” – and warned them against underestimating the case before them.
“There might be a feeling abroad that at times there is a triviality about this case or a bewilderment because no one was actually killed. Ricin was found in the prison cell of Mr Eid and that takes this case out of fantasy and speculation. We are dealing with fools but we are dealing with dangerous fools.”
She told them that the case against Mr Eid was “overwhelming. It is open and shut.”
She said there were 14 points that proved that Ms Collins was lyingeyes (an internet log-in) but the “smoking gun” was the fact that the person logging on to the Iridium laptop in Ballybeg House at 8.10am on August 16th, 2006, as lyingeyes had checked the tracking number of a FedEx parcel Ms Collins admits sending to the home of Mr Eid.
Ms Collins said in her evidence yesterday that she had given the tracking number to no one else in Ireland.
Ms Ní Raifeartaigh told the jury “from a distance this may look like a cheap thriller that Sharon Collins herself may have written but this is a tragedy to everybody involved.”
She was asking the jury to do no more or no less than to bring in a verdict according to the evidence.
Closing the defence for Ms Collins, Michael Bowman warned the jury against slavishly following computer evidence. He told them that the treatment of witness John Keating was a microcosm of the case as a whole.
Mr Keating originally gave evidence for the prosecution on June 5th but was subsequently recalled at the end of the prosecution case after he told Mr Bowman under cross-examination that he had spent the morning of August 16th, 2006, with Ms Collins, the day when the prosecution alleges she closed the deal with Mr Eid.
Mr Keating was also called as a defence witness for Ms Collins earlier yesterday when he proved that he had been in Britain between July 28th and August 14th. Mr Bowman told the jury that the appalling way Mr Keating had been treated mirrored the way Ms Collins had been treated by gardaí. Mr Keating was questioned by gardaí for 3¾ hours, his diary was taken and forensically analysed and his phone was taken and analysed.
He told the jury that the defence was a “straw against the powerful hurricane of the prosecution”, but he urged the jury not to blindly follow computer-generated material”.