‘I told Mary to tell gardaí about affair’
Mary Lowry ‘hysterical’ when she told witness about her relationship with accused, court told
A WOMAN involved in the missing person search for Bobby Ryan has told a court that Mary Lowry was ‘hysterical’ when she revealed that she had an affair with Patrick Quirke – who is now on trial for Mr Ryan’s murder.
Catherine Costello, who worked for missing person’s support group Searching for the Missing, said Mary Lowry had told her about the relationship several weeks after Bobby Ryan went missing.
She said she told Ms Lowry to go to the gardaí ‘urgently’.
Ms Lowry delayed doing so because she didn’t want to speak to a male garda when she first walked into a Garda station, Ms Costello recalled.
Patrick Quirke, 50, of Breanshamore, Co. Tipperary, has pleaded not guilty to the murder of Bobby Ryan, 52, a DJ known as Mr Moonlight, on a date between June 3, 2011 and April 2013.
Ms Costello told the trial that she helped in the search for Bobby Ryan after he went missing in June 2011. She had been told that Mr Ryan’s daughter was ‘desperately seeking help’; that there was a van abandoned in the woods and that it was a ‘potential suicide’.
She said she spoke to Mary Lowry who was pleasant and polite and also upset, ‘dabbing her eyes with a tissue’.
The women exchanged telephone numbers. Ms Lowry later called Ms Costello and they arranged to meet again.
Ms Lowry was ‘desperate to get out of the house’, so they arranged to meet at a petrol station near the wood where Bobby’s DJ van was found, the court heard.
On this, their second meeting since Bobby had disappeared, Ms Costello got into Ms Lowry’s car so that they could talk.
Ms Lowry was ‘severely distressed,’ and ‘tears were flowing,’ Ms Costello told the court.
‘She was so hysterical that I would have been worried about her driving on the road,’ she added. During the conversation, Ms Lowry told Ms Costello about her affair with the married Mr Quirke.
Ms Costello said she told her to go to gardaí but there was a delay in her doing so because didn’t want to walk into the front counter of the Garda station and encounter a male garda.
The witness said she contacted gardaí the next day and advised them to speak to Mary Lowry.
Earlier, the court heard that local woman Siobhán Kinnane had told gardaí she was ‘eighty per cent sure’ that a man she saw walking along a country road ‘sweating and red-faced’ on the morning Bobby Ryan went missing matched a photo she later saw of the deceased DJ. Ms Kinnane, who lives in Cordangan, a townland close to where Bobby Ryan’s body was found, told the court that on the morning of June 3, 2011, she was doing the school run when she saw a man walking by the side of the road near her home.
‘It was about 8.50am and the man was bald and wearing a navy or dark-coloured tracksuit. I was looking at him waiting for him to look up but he didn’t,’ she said.
She thought his tracksuit may have had a white stripe on it and he may have been carrying a bag over his shoulder.
Under cross-examination, she agreed with defence counsel Lorcan Staines SC that in a statement she made to gardaí in June 2011 she described the man as ‘sweating and red-faced’ and when gardaí showed her a photo of the deceased she said the man she saw didn’t look ‘athletically built’ but also wasn’t ‘extremely fat’ like the man in the photograph.
However, she was ‘eighty per cent sure’ that a different photo she saw of the missing man Bobby Ryan on the RTÉ website was the same person she saw that morning.
Earlier, various witnesses described seeing a van matching the description of Bobby Ryan’s in Bansha Woods carpark on the morning of his disappearance.
One witness told how he noticed a van with the word ‘Moonlight’ on it parked in a wooded area on the morning of DJ Bobby Ryan’s disappearance.
Joe McLoughlin, who worked as a courier for Fastway Couriers, was among a number of witnesses who told the murder trial at the Central Criminal Court of sightings of a van on June 3, 2011.
Mr McLoughlin told the trial that in the early morning of Friday, June 3, 2011, his work as a courier had taken him to Bansha and around Golden in Co. Tipperary, with a route past the car park at Kilshane or Bansha Woods. He recalled passing the woods at around 7.45am or 8am, having left his home in Wexford at around 5am.
When passing the woods, he saw a maroon-coloured car with the back end facing out over to the right and also spotted a van parked parallel to the road.
The following Friday, Mr McLoughlin was in the area working again. He told gardaí in a statement that he had seen a ‘young lad in a yellow top and jeans’ looking in a bag. He added that the youngster looked ‘uneasy and anxious’.
A number of dog walkers also told the trial that they had spotted a van in the car park of Bansha Woods that morning.
Meanwhile, Jim Cully, a self-employed hackney driver and former next door neighbour of Bobby Ryan, told the trial that he had driven a regular school run from Cashel to Cappawhite village, collecting a number of youths in the morning, leaving at 8.25am.
He had got to know Bobby Ryan well as he liked music and Bobby was a DJ, he said.
On Friday morning, June 3, 2011, he had left Cashel, carrying five or six youths on an eight-seat transporter bus and had driven out the Dundrum road into Dundrum village and then driven the Annacarty road.
At around 8.40am, he said he was ‘almost certain’ he saw Bobby Ryan’s van travelling back towards Dundrum village.
He noted ‘Mr Moonlight’ written on the front windscreen of the van, with black designs on the side.
The trial continues.
‘She didn’t want to tell a male garda’ ‘Worried about her driving’