Teenage bride, battered wife and victim? Or cold, calculating killer who cajoled an impressionable child into murdering her husband? Two juries have been asked to decide if Anna Maria Sacco was a murderer.
Yesterday the second jury of nine men and three women decided Anna Maria did not have her husband killed.
The manner in which Franco Sacco met his death was not in dispute. On the morning of March 20th a 15-year-old girl stood in the doorway of the bedroom in the house in Coolamber Park, Templeogue, raised his double-barrelled shotgun, took aim and shot him in the head, as he lay in his vest on the double bed.
His body was found that evening inside the bedroom door. It had been dragged across the mattress and wrapped in eight sheets, five quilted bedspreads, an electric blanket and two hand towels.
It was a grisly scene. The wall was speckled with bone fragments from Franco's skull. There was blood in the toilet bowl along with shotgun pellets. Pints of blood had drained into the bedclothes and mattress.
Hair, blood, flesh and bone was found in the bathroom sink waste-pipe. Skull bone were found in a refuse sack. That evening, gardai at Rathfarnham Garda station were visited by a girl "in a distressed state" who said she had shot Franco Sacco. At 8 p.m. gardai found the body.
The prosecution case was that Anna Maria had given the girl the loaded shotgun and told her to go upstairs and shoot her husband. But giving evidence when she was first tried last year, Anna Maria said she was downstairs when she heard a loud bang. The girl came down and said: "I'm after killing Franco."
"I kept thinking no, everything's okay," Anna Maria said in court. But when she went into the bedroom all she could see was blood and she could not get out fast enough. She did not give evidence in the retrial.
The girl told gardai that Franco used a baseball bat to beat his wife and "everybody knew it was going on". At Christmas she saw Franco hit Anna Maria and she had gone with her to Scotland, where they stayed together until "he convinced her to come home and she did".
It was not the first time she left her husband, but she always returned. The girl idolised Anna Maria. Speculation that it was more than a friendship was "wholly incorrect", Det Insp Martin McLaughlin told the girl's trial.
In June the girl was convicted of the murder and sentenced to seven years. In July that sentence was suspended and the girl was released by the Court of Criminal Appeal on the grounds that there was no suitable place of detention.
It is believed that the girl is on a youth training course, living at home and getting on well with her probation officer. Franco was a cousin of Anna Maria's father. Luigi Sacco had brought him to Ireland from Italy to work in his chip shops when he was 18, and he lived with his cousin's family in Kimmage.
Franco was 21 when he first started going out with Anna Maria. She was just 13 and they kept it from her family for a year. On her 19th birthday she married him. The couple ran the chip shop, which was rented from Luigi for £500 a week.
In her first statement to gardai, Anna Maria said Franco had raped her on the previous Thursday when she had refused to have sex with him.
He had "smacked" her on the arm and hurt her. "He forced himself on me. He kept telling me to shut up and don't be starting a scene." She said she "did everything he asked because he threatened to kill me". Later that day she went to visit her mother in Ranelagh and tried to cover a bruised eye. She blacked out and was taken to St Vincent's Hospital, where she told staff "exactly what happened with the beatings".
When she returned to her home the girl was outside the house "stoned", she said, having smoked two "deals" of heroin.
A year earlier Anna Maria had taken out a protection order against her husband and had filed for a barring order. She was four weeks' pregnant when he was murdered and gave birth to a girl, Francesca. Yesterday, when a reporter asked what she would do with her freedom her father answered: "She has a 13-year-old . . . " Anna Maria interrupted smiling "13-month-old". "She has a baby to look after," he finished.