My brother, The Devil Killer He couldn’t cope with mum’s death at all, he used to go and sleep on her grave
The murders committed by Brendan O’Donnell shocked Ireland in 1994. His sister, Ann Marie, reveals why she stood by him to Donal Lynch
Can you still love someone who has committed a terrible crime? That is the stark question posed by Ann Marie O’Donnell in a new film, Property of the State, which dramatises the life and crimes of her brother, Brendan.
It is a story of horror begetting horror; of the grief, beatings, abuse and mental illness that finally brought Brendan to the fateful day in 1994 when he killed three people: artist Imelda Riney and her little son Liam and a priest, Fr Joe Walsh. The crimes shocked the nation and cast a pall of infamy over Ann Marie and her family.
The film, which is based on her diaries, humanises a man whom the headlines called ‘The Devil Killer’ and explains in powerful terms why she stood by him throughout his life, even when he attacked her and threatened her child.
“There was so, so long in my life when people couldn’t understand why I wanted to help my brother,” she tells me. “We never escaped it. People turned away from me on the street. People shouted abuse at me and my grandmother. Some of my own family wanted nothing to do with him. I wanted, somehow, to tell his story. I felt if people saw it they might understand.”
There were only four years between herself and Brendan. They grew up in east Clare. “As a child, he was a lovely little boy, lovely head of curls, he was a lovely little boy,” she recalls. “People would be disgusted to hear me say that, but he was a child the same as any child.”
From early on, Brendan suffered from psychiatric problems, however, and was taking powerful sedatives which were likely highly harmful to him.
“We knew he took tablets because he was having really bad nightmares and thinking he was seeing things in the room,” Ann Marie recalls. “He also thought that there were worms in his food. He would have fits and see things nobody else did. My mother was the only one who probably knew the tablets he was taking were actually Valium.”
Their mother died after suffering a fall in 1984. Brendan took the news very badly and initially went into powerful denial. She recalls watching him standing in the morgue and repeatedly saying “no, that’s not my mam”. In his mind, he first thought that she had taken a deliberate overdose and then around the time of her funeral, he thought she was being buried alive. He really couldn’t cope with her death at all. He used to go and sleep on her grave.”
Ann Marie had gone to live with her grandmother when she was nine years old but after the death of her mother, when she was 14, she moved back home to care for her younger brothers.
“Brendan was only 10 when she died. After that, he began getting into trouble for stealing things and breaking into houses. He took a gun and that was his first serious offence, I suppose. He got sent into a young offenders place.”
This was where the nightmare of Brendan’s childhood grew darker still. He would later say he was violently raped by a warder at the young offenders institution, but felt too ashamed to tell his family. “He would get off at the train in Limerick and try to run away,” Ann Marie recalls.
“Another time we dropped him by car, but he hitched a lift back home and was nearly back home before we were. That was how much he hated it.”
During this period, Brendan lived rough, having somehow slipped through the net of social services. At one point, he was taken in by a local farmer, Tony Muggivan, and his family. “He had been sleeping rough and he had been taken in by a family, the Muggivans, and it was Tony he told and that was how we came to hear about it.
“Brendan used to always say, ‘I am being abused’ and I didn’t know what to do because his father didn’t want him at home. He’d say ‘Brendan has my heart broke’.”
One of the most poignant moments in the film depicts the efforts of Tony Muggivan to get real psychiatric help for Brendan.
“He was refused in two hospitals but he would have been accepted in Galway, but the forms were not signed. My father didn’t want to sign them. Muggivan tried everything. He sold some of his livestock and offered them cash in the hospital if they would take Brendan in,” says Ann Marie.
But there would be no psychiatric help for the young Brendan and he moved into adulthood carrying the scars of his childhood. He was now having auditory and visual hallucinations.
To begin with it was just one voice, and then there were several, shouting in his brain, giving him orders. At one point in his late
teens, he attacked Ann Marie while she was alone with her infant son.
“My son was only seven months old on the day he went for me and Brendan went for him too. He seemed confused but a couple of hours later he came back to the f lat and I had the landlady in there with me and I said ‘what?’ and he said, ‘Can I have some washing up liquid?’ and the landlady said ‘You can’t really be here after what you’ve done!’ and he replied, ‘Sure, I would never hurt you. I’ve done nothing’. That was even more scary in a way to hear him say that than what he had actually done to me. Because it was like he was moving out of reality. He was looking at me as much as to say, ‘I really didn’t do it’. We had to get the guards back then to have him removed, for his own good really.”
Later, a community nurse visited Ann Marie. “She told me Brendan wouldn’t be bothering me any more. And then, just seven months later, he done what he done.”
The following spring of 1994, Brendan was again living moreor-less
rough. Cregg Woods, which had been his childhood bolt hole, had altogether different associations for Imelda Riney, a young artist who specialised in glassware and mosaic.
The 29-year-old had moved from England with her two boys to Clare, where she hoped to be inspired by the peace and simplicity of nature.
At his trial, Brendan O’Donnell would later claim that he and Imelda had struck up a relationship of sorts but this was dismissed by her family. We only know that some time after her ex-partner, Val Ballance, picked up their older son, seven-year-old Oisin, for school, Brendan arrived at Imelda’s door brandishing a shotgun. He demanded that she and threeyear-old Liam accompany him to the local post office which he intended to rob.
She tried to “settle him down” he would later say, but he insisted, reasoning with her that she could later say he forced her to drive, which he did. At the ragged edge of her terror, Imelda began gesticu-
lating at passing cars and Brendan, panicked himself by now, ordered her and the child out of the car. She carried little Liam into the woods, continually trying to reason with O’Donnell.
When she lunged at him to try and grab the gun, he shot her in the face. As the child leaned towards his mother, O’Donnell shot him too, watching his small body fall on top of Imelda. He later said he did it because he didn’t want Liam to grow up without a mother, as O’Donnell himself had done.
Imelda’s ex-partner reported her missing, but it would take days — and the release of the photo of Imelda, with her long red hair cascading from under a straw hat — for the media to take notice.
In the meantime, Brendan had travelled to Galway with a view to confessing what he had done to Fr Joe Walsh. O’Donnell forced the 37-year-old priest to drive to Cregg Wood in Clare, made him kneel and shot him twice in the head.
He later told the court during his trial a voice had instructed him: “Kill Fr Joe, he’s trying to christen the devil’s baby son.”
As gardai launched a huge manhunt, Brendan put a pair of tights over his face and burst into a home in east Clare, abducting a teenage girl, Fiona Sampson, at gunpoint. She said O’Donnell told her he did not intend to kill or rape her, and said she would be free to go when he got out of the area. But later he said if he had to shoot her, he would, and it would be quick.
Fiona Sampson would soon be set free. They would meet a farmer, Eddie Cleary, on the road and O’Donnell attempted to force him to drive them away. With gardai and reporters surrounding the car, Cleary managed to pull O’Donnell out of it and a garda carried Sampson to safety.”
O’Donnell’s murder trial lasted 53 days — the longest in the history of the Republic. The terrible details of Brendan’s troubled life were heard in public for the first time — his defence barrister called his childhood “a living hell”.
Brendan had tried to hang himself during the trial but his death in 1997 at the Central Mental Hospital remains somewhat mysterious. “I can’t really answer as to what happened,” Ann Marie says. “We were told that it was in, or above, the therapeutic range of an overdose. He had been very unmanageable in the days before he died.
“In another way, it was an ease to him, the running was over at last. There was so long when people couldn’t understand why I wanted to help my brother. It was said he was bad, that he was evil.
“But you have to understand, as hard as it was sometimes, I loved him so much, too.”
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