Strangler had choked his partner in previous attack before murder
MURDERER Danny Keena, who was convicted yesterday of strangling his partner Brigid Maguire to death, had choked her until she stopped breathing in an earlier attack.
It emerged during his trial that Keena (55) had throttled Ms Maguire (43) previously. She confided in one of his sisters, telling her: “I was in heaven for a few minutes.”
Keena and Ms Maguire both described the incident to his sister Mary Wallace Snr, who gave an account of the conversation to gardaí in a statement.
However, she did not repeat the details in her evidence in court. Although the statement was read out during legal argument mid-trial, the jury never saw it and never knew the full extent of this earlier assault.
Keena, from Empor, Ballynacargy, Co Westmeath, faces life imprisonment after being found guilty yesterday of murdering Ms Maguire at her home at Main Street, Ballynacargy, on November 14, 2015.
His defence had claimed provocation, that Keena had “lost his mind” when Ms Maguire called him a bad father during a row in her bedroom.
Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy adjourned sentencing to Friday for the preparation of victim-impact statements.
Keena stared straight ahead and did not react when the verdict was delivered.
During the trial, the jury heard that Ms Maguire had moved out of the family home weeks before she was killed, to a rented house with her now 14-year-old son and daughter Jade.
It was Jade who found her mother’s body on arriving home. “I was shouting, ‘mammy,’ but I didn’t get no response,” she said.
Keena, she said, was “always very violent towards my mother, very abusive, literally the whole time” and once waved a hammer in his mother’s face, “saying he was going to kill her”.
Keena went missing after the discovery of the body and turned up at a neighbour’s house 24 hours later after “running wild”, through woods and sleeping in a barn.
He told gardaí he had argued with Ms Maguire after going to her house to talk about their son having missed school.
“She said, ‘You are no good to them children,’” he told gardaí. “I said you are some mother to them, whoring in and around Mullingar.”
He had suspected her of cheating on him.
“She jumped up off the bed and came at me real violently,” hesaid.
He put his hands onto her shoulders to block her.
“That is when I flipped,” he said. “I moved them onto her neck.”
He “had her up against the wardrobe, choking her for 60 seconds” before she fell down, he said.
“Her tongue was all blue, she was fighting for her life at this stage.”
Keena claimed that he tried unsuccessfully to revive her. He denied he had meant to kill her.
“I didn’t know what I was at, I lost control of myself,” Keena told gardaí.
A post-mortem showed Ms Maguire had died by hypoxia caused by “excessive pressure applied externally to the neck”.
Keena’s son gave evidence via video link, describing his father as a “bully” and telling the jury Keena would “always take everything out on mammy”.
In her statement, Mary Wallace Snr said Keena told her in a phone call earlier in 2015 “he choked her, she wasn’t breathing”.
He told her he had choked her in a moment of madness and he thought she was dead, Ms Wallace said.
“I said, ‘Leave her alone or you’ll end up in jail,’” she told him.