Rachel O'Reilly's sister Ann, brother Anthony and aunt Susan Woods joined hands as witnesses described the scenes around Rachel's violent death and Joe O'Reilly's behaviour in the following days and weeks.
It was often the small details from the 19 witnesses that threatened the family's composure; the "top and combats" that Ann and her sister-in-law, Louise, went into Dublin to buy for Rachel when her body had been released; the white jewellery box that slipped out of the name-tagged rucksack taken from the O'Reilly home, and that - in the words of Garda Nicola Sheeran - had been "placed" in a culvert half a mile away. Later it would emerge that €1,310 in cash (€450 in Rachel's handbag and €860 in a plastic container on the utility room worktop) remained untouched.
It was just 10 minutes to lunchtime when Ann was led weeping from the courtroom by her aunt, with Anthony's arm around her. As is the norm with civilian witnesses due to give evidence or be recalled, their parents, Jim and Rose, remained outside.
Jim, a plumber from the north city suburb of Whitehall, was the first to give evidence, in a tremulous voice that gathered strength as he continued. He recalled Rose's "very distressed state" at the scene when she rang to say she thought Rachel was dead, and his own sense of "claustrophobia" when he arrived there. "I was upset, I was shaking and the ambulance man asked me to come and sit in the ambulance."
Gardaí and emergency services personnel described the bloody, disorderly scenes confronting them as they made their way through the house: kitchen chairs tossed around, table mats scattered across the floor, cupboards around the sink pulled out and contents strewn around. Witnesses talked of walls along the hall, the doorways and bedroom floor "spattered" or "covered in blood". Anthony buried his head in his hands as they described Rachel's body, lying face down, with a "massive head wound" in an "enormous" pool of blood, her "upper torso twisted", her body contorted at an unnatural angle, with bruises to her arms "that were probably due to efforts to protect herself".
Later a Garda fingerprint expert told how he took a "decking spindle" to the postmortem, regarding it as a possible weapon. In his evidence, he noted that in his tests for prints around the O'Reilly home, he had found "no match at all" for Derek Quaerney and Nicky Pelley. Ms Pelley's name was also evoked in evidence from Michelle Slattery, a work colleague of Joe O'Reilly. "Nicky worked in a company called Maiden Outdoor," she said, "the same business as we did."
As always, Joe O'Reilly jotted down occasional notes to pass to his solicitor while his mother watched from her usual seat at the back of the public gallery.
Several witnesses recalled exchanges with Mr O'Reilly from the earliest stages. One garda testified that Mr O'Reilly told him to get the search team "to check the room at the front of the house, [ he said] that he had weights in this room and one of those weights could have been the murder weapon". Another said that Mr O'Reilly had told him that while moving a box of books beside Rachel's body, he had made contact with the body and said to the garda: "I'm really sorry, I'm probably after ruining it on you." Defence counsel Patrick Gageby suggested that this happened in the context that Mr O'Reilly had wanted to go in and retrieve a jacket, but was told the scene had been sealed, and it was this that prompted him to say, "I may have ruined it on you".
The garda said he had no recollection of Mr O'Reilly stating that he wanted to go inside the house.
