Closing speeches in murder trial
THE prosecution barrister in the trial of a man who shot his friend and dismembered his remains has told the jury the deceased was not just murdered but executed ‘in an act of premeditation’.
Seán Gillane SC was giving his closing speech yesterday in the trial of Paul Wells Sr at the Central Criminal Court.
Mr Wells, 50, of Finglas, Dublin, has admitted shooting dead 33-year-old Dubliner Kenneth O’Brien and dismembering his body but denies murder.
He claims Mr O’Brien had wanted him to murder Mr O’Brien’s partner.
Mr Gillane reminded the jury of the pathologist’s finding of a contact entry wound where the gun had been pressed up against the back of Mr O’Brien’s head.
‘That, I suggest, is overwhelming evidence even on its own of an intention to kill or cause serious injury,’ he said.
He addressed Mr Wells’s admissions to gardaí three days after his arrest. The jury had seen DVD recordings of the interview where he had accepted ‘physical responsibility for what he’d done’.
Mr Gillane said this ‘was not the product of conscience’ but as a result of ‘the crushing weight of evidence’.
He said: ‘Those tears are not tears of sorrow. We can also cry because we’re caught.
‘What you see in that interview thereafter is Mr Wells doing what he’s being doing since the moment he pulled the trigger on Kenneth O’Brien: exercising control, control and manipulation from the very word go.’
He said that from the moment Mr Wells had engaged with gardaí, he had sought to demonise Mr O’Brien.
The barrister said: ‘I’m not going to try to suggest he was a saint. Like all of us, we’re somewhere on that spectrum, a combination of good and bad.’ He accepted Mr O’Brien was someone who could hurt people be it through affairs or meanness.
Mr Gillane said: ‘Just because you’re having affairs or whatever you’re up to doesn’t dilute your essential humanity. Nor does it mean what’s suggested to you, a plan to murder the mother of your child.’
But Michael O’Higgins SC, defending, questioned whether a prepared killer would have carried out the crime and the cover-up as Mr Wells had.
He drew the jury’s attention to what Mr Wells had told gardaí when he said he had wondered how he would get the body through the family home without destroying the house and he had worried that someone could walk in at any minute. ‘If you were going to kill somebody in the backyard of your own house..., you wouldn’t wait until you were sitting on the beer crate to pose all these questions,’ said Mr O’Higgins.
The trial continues.