BOBBY’S,DEATH WAS ‘A CALLOUS CALCULATED & CONTROLLED MURDER’
BOBBY Ryan’s death was “callous, calculated, controlled murder” and the only verdict available is to find Patrick Quirke guilty, State lawyers said yesterday.
The defence, however, maintains the prosecution evidence is thin and warned the jury of the dangers of accepting the words of Mary Lowry.
Quirke, of Breanshamore, Co Tipperary, has pleaded not guilty to the murder of 52-year-old Mr Ryan.
The part-time DJ, known as Mr Moonlight, went missing on June 3, 2011, after leaving his girlfriend Ms Lowry’s home at around 6.30am.
His body was found in an underground run-off tank on a farm owned by the 52-year-old widow at Fawnagown, Co Tipperary, in April 2013.
The prosecution claims Quirke, 50, who leased land from Ms Lowry, murdered Mr Ryan so he could rekindle an affair with her.
Delivering his closing speech at Dublin’s Central Criminal Court, Michael Bowman said for a guilty verdict, he must rule out any rational theory that would be consistent with Quirke’s innocence.
Dismissing suicide, he said Mr Ryan met with a “violent and brutal death”. He claimed it wasn’t an accident as that would not have the “hallmarks of concealment of a criminal act”.
The body, he noted, had been stripped naked for forensic reasons and the death was a “callous, calculated, controlled murder”.
Mr Bowman said while the prosecution cannot identify a specific weapon or time of death, it is clear Mr Ryan died after leaving Ms Lowry’s home. His van was seen at Kilshane Woods at 8.30am the same day but, according to his daughter, the seat was in the wrong position and it was parked in gear so he was not the last person to have driven it.
Taking the jury through the “strands” of evidence, Mr Bowman said each one would amount to nothing more than suspicion or something uncannily coincidental but that the importance was in their combined effect.
The evidence, he claimed, clearly communicated motive.
The recovery of the body, he added, was “planned and designed”. The lawyer asked was it coincidence that Quirke was in love with and financially dependent upon Ms Lowry and was experiencing financial pressure.
He was demanding money with increasing frequency at a time when Ms Lowry wanted to finish with him. Was it coincidence, he asked, he was the same man who sent texts to Mr Ryan pretending to be Ms Lowry and later called the DJ to say he had been seeing her for three years, almost breaking up their relationship. The same man who reported Ms Lowry Michael Bowman for child neglect. The same man, Mr Bowman went on, who claimed Ms Lowry wanted to forgive him a €20,000 debt while she insisted that was not true.
RECORDINGS
In March 2012, Quirke claimed to have accepted Ms Lowry’s relationship with Flor Cantillon, but, Mr Bowman said, there is the “coincidence” that an external hard drive in his home had recordings of the pair.
And the lawyer asked was it bad luck that, after being seen on CCTV at Ms Lowry’s home on December 3, 2012, somebody in the Quirke household was on the internet at 3.36pm that afternoon looking for “human body decomposition timeline”.
Mr Bowman wondered was it also coincidence that as the clock was ticking down to his lease terminating at Fawnagown, Quirke decided to draw water from a tank he hadn’t looked into since 2008.
The defendant, he said, was one of only four people who knew of the existence of the tank – in which the body was found – and he had exclusive access to it.
He added: “Bobby Ryan was murdered by somebody possessed of information and knowledge possessed only by Patrick Quirke.
“Patrick Quirke is guilty of the murder of Bobby Ryan on June 3, 2011. There is no room left to doubt and the only verdict available to you is one of guilty of murder.”
Defence counsel Bernard Condon told the jury the prosecution’s case was based on theory and circumstantial evidence but no hard evidence.
He asked them to apply their “greatest skill – skepticism”, adding the trial was about people’s lives, and principally that of Quirke.
He said the evidence presented was “grasping” and that the prosecution had adopted the approach of “so what” to issues such as the absence of former Deputy State Pathologist Dr Khalid when the body was removed from the tank.
He pointed out photographs had been lost by gardai, a pathologist had described the evidence as “sub optimal”, officers had made fresh statements during the court case and fingerprints found in Mr Ryan’s van were not tested until week 10.
He said the trial was “forensically barren” on what happened to the “unfortunate Bobby Ryan. His last movements, interactions, events, we know nothing about”.
The pathologist, he noted, said there would have been a lot of blood but there was no evidence of it and no evidence of a clean-up.
He added many of the allegations made by Ms Lowry “wouldn’t last five minutes in a court”.
He warned the jury to be careful of her evidence, claiming there was an element of “revisionism” and that she did not want to accept things that made her look bad.
At the heart of much of what went on between her and Quirke was a broken relationship, Mr Condon said, adding: “Attached to that can be bitterness, anger and unhappiness.”
He said there was a “pettiness” to the arguments between the pair and described their relationship as “dysfunctional”. They had an affair, he added, but “this is not a court of morality”.
Addressing Quirke being seen on CCTV taking underwear from Ms Lowry’s line, he said none of us was “whiter than white”. And he told the jury: “It doesn’t look great but what does it really establish?”
Mr Condon will continue his closing speech on Monday in front of Justice Eileen Creedon.