A witness told a jury that a woman accused of her husband's murder had asked him to get someone to kill him.
Ms Anna Maria Sacco (21) has pleaded not guilty to the murder of her husband, Franco (29), at their home at Coolamber Park, Templeogue, on March 20th, 1997.
The State Pathologist, Prof John Harbison, told the court Mr Sacco died from a single gunshot wound near his right temple and was shot as he lay on his stomach in bed from a distance of no more than 6 ft.
Mr Peter Gifford, a barman, agreed he had told gardai in a statement on March 24th, 1996: "Some time last year after Anna Maria got the beating with the baseball bat she asked me to get someone to kill Franco."
Mr Gifford testified he had met Ms Sacco at Club 2000 in the Spawell in October or November 1995. They exchanged "hellos" when his friend was chatting to three girls, one of whom worked in Luigi's chip shop in Rathfarnham.
He then began going to the chip shop every Wednesday with his friend, who did deliveries from there. He started clubbing with three of the staff there, including Ms Sacco, "nearly every Tuesday for a few months".
Later Mr Gifford agreed he had an affair with Ms Sacco and had gone out with her for about four months, "somewhere around March 1996".
It was "in or around the summer of 1996" she first asked him to get someone to kill her husband. "It was probably when she was beaten up, which goes back a few months before that," he told Mr Peter Charleton SC, prosecuting.
"She said she was fed up with it and she'd love to get him killed. I didn't think it was serious," he said. "I just thought it was a spur-of-the-moment thing." He said he would ask someone.
Ms Sacco brought the subject up a second time in September or October 1996, he believed. She said she had been beaten up again and asked if he had found anyone "to do it".
There was another conversation "around October/November or thereabouts". This took place in the house Ms Sacco and her husband then lived in, in Boden Park, Rathfarnham. The last time the topic came up, as far as Mr Gifford could recall, "was the Wednesday night before" Mr Sacco's death.
At Christmas Ms Sacco had left a pair of gloves in his father's house in Tallaght, where he lived, and he had dropped them back to her at the chip shop on March 19th, he said.
That night, "she said she had got beaten three weeks prior and had her arm in a sling". She again asked him if he had got in touch with "the fellow" and he said no, he "was on the run".
"I never took it seriously," he told the court. He knew Ms Sacco had taken out a protection order and a barring order against her husband "so I didn't think it would go further than that".
But as they talked in the chip shop's staff kitchen, the teenage girl who the jury was told eventually pulled the trigger in Mr Sacco's killing said "she would do it herself". He told her not to be stupid.
The following morning he was asleep in bed at his father's house when there was a knock on the door. He answered it and Ms Sacco was there, "nervous" and "jumpy". She told him the girl "was after shooting Franco". Then the girl, who had been waiting in Ms Sacco's car, came up the driveway crying and saying: "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to do it."
He agreed to help them. By help, he meant help get rid of the body, he explained. He promised he would try to get someone else to help, too.
He phoned Ms Sacco at around 4 p.m., he said. His father had told him there had been two or three phone-calls from her during the day.
Mr Barry White SC, for Ms Sacco, opened his cross-examination by suggesting to Mr Gifford that he was the type of man who cheated on another man.
Mr Gifford replied: "I don't cheat on a man." He only knew Franco Sacco to see, he said.
"I didn't carry on an affair, I didn't start an affair," he said. He accepted Mr White's words that it took two to tango, "but I didn't go chasing her", he said.
Mr White suggested he did, and that he knew Ms Sacco was vulnerable. "What, because she took beatings, so she said? I didn't know that at the time," he replied.
He agreed he knew it within a relatively short time, and Ms Sacco had come to stay in his house for around a week after one beating.
His father's girlfriend had told Ms Sacco "there were ways out of this" and had taken her down to Dolphin House, where she got a barring order and protection order against her husband.
He denied the end of his relationship with Ms Sacco was "far from mutual" or that he wanted it to continue.
Asked if he associated with known villains, Mr Gifford replied: "No." To laughter in court, including his own, he said he was not a member of the IRA, or any paramilitary group. He told Mr White: "The only thing I'm a member of is Mandate - that's my union."
He had led Ms Sacco along with the promise of getting "the right man" to do the killing because he never thought she was serious and the only time the requests arose "was when she was after receiving a beating".
But as time went on and "she kept asking, I found it was getting serious". But he continued "stringing her along, probably because I was stupid at the time", he said, "or maybe if I hadn't said that, she probably would have found somebody who would have done it".
Legal argument will be heard in the jury's absence today and tomorrow.