Will the full truth of grandmother’s brutal death ever be uncovered?
Patricia O’Connor’s brutal end still leaves many questions, writes Andrew Phelan
AYEAR after their mother Patricia’s brutal murder, Louise O’Connor was being secretly recorded on the phone by her brother when she said the truth of what happened would “shock the life out of ” him.
At that point, Louise’s partner Kieran Greene had been charged with the killing and she was under Garda suspicion for her part in trying to conceal it.
The murder and cover-up have since been exposed in grisly detail over the course of a harrowing seven-week trial and today everyone involved is behind bars.
The jury never heard that phone recording and it never emerged during the trial what, if anything, was behind Louise O’Connor’s suggestion of some shocking hidden “truth”.
Yet despite all the evidence and the unanimous guilty verdicts, questions still hang over exactly what happened that night in 2017, and why.
It began as a missing person case, when Patricia’s husband Gus O’Connor went to gardaí on June 1 and told them she had disappeared from the family home at Mountainview Park, Rathfarnham on the night of May 29.
They could not have guessed he was lying and he knew she was already dead.
On June 10, picnickers in the Wicklow mountains made the first grim discovery of Patricia’s remains in a ditch, the other 14 body parts were found over a 30km-wide area over the next four days.
Gardaí at first thought the victim was a man, so when Greene handed himself in on June 12, blurting out an emotional confession to killing Patricia, they didn’t believe him. The body was soon identified and he was arrested.
In interview, Greene said he had killed Patricia in self-defence after she attacked him with a child’s hurley in the bathroom at around midnight on May 29.
Greene drove the body to Co Wexford, buried it in a shallow grave in a cornfield, then on June 9, panicked and returned and dug it up. He vividly described how he “spewed” as he dismembered the body with a hacksaw, then dumped the pieces in the mountains.
He acted alone at all times, he said; the others were asleep in bed and knew nothing.
When interviewed, his partner Louise and her daughter Stephanie said Patricia had stormed out that night after an argument, and they never saw her again.
The first they knew she was dead was when Greene confessed to them just before handing himself in to gardaí. But as gardaí watched a next door neighbour’s CCTV, Louise and Stephanie’s web of lies began to unravel.
A hooded woman was seen leaving the house with a suitcase at 9.34pm. “Me ma,” Louise said.
But who was the woman entering the back door half an hour later at 10.05pm, carrying a case?
Ruse
Louise claimed she had “no idea”, but it was really Stephanie, who had not been seen leaving the house as herself at any stage.
Stephanie, after hatching a plan with her mother, had dressed up as Patricia in a “ruse” for the benefit of the neighbour’s camera, to record Patricia’s supposed disappearance when she was in fact dead in the house.
Meanwhile, Gus O’Connor cracked under Garda questioning and admitted the others had called him down from bed that night and showed him his dead wife’s wrapped-up body.
He said he wanted to call gardaí, but they begged him not to.
Trawling video from DIY stores, detectives saw Louise’s ex-boyfriend, handyman Keith Johnston, helping his “good buddy” Greene on a shopping spree for the dismemberment tools. Johnston denied any knowledge at the time that Patricia was dead, or what the tools were for.
Greene, on remand in jail, watched bitterly as Louise came to visit with her old flame in tow – Johnston.
In an extraordinary development that December, Greene retracted his confession and changed his story.
It was really Gus who killed Patricia, he now claimed, hitting her with a metal bar in the bathroom row.
Greene said he had agreed to take the blame.
He had gone to Johnston for help after and when he returned to the shallow grave, the handyman went with him, cut up the body and dumped the parts, he said. But prosecutors said this new version of events was unreliable, motivated by jealousy.
A killer is often the only witness to the killing and their account the only one a jury has to work with. But, unusually here, they had a confession, which the prosecution asked them to accept as the truth, followed by a retraction that they were urged to reject as lies.
The defence argued it was the other way around.
Ultimately, the jury agreed with the prosecution. It’s not possible to look behind a jury’s verdict, so unanswered questions remain.
As Greene’s defence argued, if the June account was true, why was so much of it clearly wrong? And why did some of
the “unreliable” December statement turn out to be true?
Greene claimed in December Johnston went with him on the return journey to the grave in Wexford and helped him dispose of the remains and tools.
The prosecution said it was “curious” that pairs of tools were bought “like some DIY version of Noah’s Ark”.
Gardaí carried out follow-up searches that led to two hacksaws and an axe being found at the Dodder Valley Park in Tallaght, where Greene said Johnston had put them on the way back. But the prosecution never alleged Johnston was involved in disposing of the body, and phone records showed he didn’t go to Wexford that night.
Any major investigation can throw up contradictions or inconsistencies, but some are not as easy to explain away as others.
Pathologist Dr Michael Curtis said Patricia’s remains were most likely cut up with a power saw, in contrast to Greene’s assertion a hacksaw was used.
It appeared only the hands were removed with a non-powered saw. Nothing was put forward to resolve this apparent conflict.
At no point in Greene’s accounts of the dismemberment was it suggested a power saw was used, either by him or Johnston.
In both versions, the body was cut up in the open air, in a cornfield on a farm in the dead of night. Would it even have been possible to use a power saw in these circumstances?
It was notable Greene had managed to scrub the bathroom at the house at Mountainview Park so forensically clean it bore no trace of the murder. Likewise, nothing was found in the car he used to transport the body.
Remains
Yet the dumping of the remains in the mountains was so slapdash they were left on the roadside for anyone to find.
The murder itself, the prosecution said, was a “sustained attack” carried out in anger with a background of “ill-will” between Greene and Patricia.
There is little doubt the “pressure cooker” of a cramped house where three generations of one family lived caused bad blood.
Louise had hung on in her parents’ home with her growing family for 20 years, dreaming of getting a “free house” from somewhere despite her brother Richard’s constant advice to get out and rent her own place.
Eventually, the atmosphere turned toxic and nobody was getting on with newly retired Patricia. But does that explain what happened next?
Patricia had just been murdered when an elaborate plan to conceal her killing swung swiftly into action, seemingly figured out on the spot, down to the angle of the neighbour’s camera.
Louise insisted to gardaí there was “no big plot” and if she had known her mother was dead she would have “called the gardaí and punched Kieran’s lights out”.
But she did know her mother was dead, and nobody called 999.
Both mother and daughter finally accepted responsibility for their part in the cover-up at their sentence hearing, with Stephanie insisting she had no “inkling” that anything was going to happen to her grandmother that night.
So why did they rally to protect Greene in the aftermath of the murder?
This was a man who Louise would later tell gardaí was a “f**king nut” who “destroyed our family”. By the time of the trial, his co-accused would not even sit next to him.
Some of Patricia’s siblings have since said they believe a dispute over the future of the house in Mountainview Park was behind what happened to their “beautiful sister” that night in May 2017.
Today, that once-crowded house is now empty, five people are in jail and the final chapter in this dark tale of a family’s secrets and lies has closed, though the full story may never be told.