Who killed Grace Livingstone?
Twenty-four years after the Malahide mother was shot dead in her bedroom, gardai have completed a coldcase review. Maeve Sheehan sifts through the evidence.
ON a still day, December 7, 1992, a fog rolled in from the Irish Sea and lingered over Malahide in north Dublin. The Livingstones and their two children lived in number 37, The Moorings, in a small cul-de-sac of about a dozen or so houses. Daughter Tara, then 22, was away in France.
Grace Livingstone saw her husband James off to work at 8.25am. He worked for the Revenue Commissioners at Setanta House in the city centre. They were to drive to Castleblaney at 8pm that night for a Mass for his late brother Peadar, a priest. Their son Conor, then 20, took a lift to O’Connell Street with his father. Livingstone was in a car pool with his colleague, Art O’Connor, and picked him up on the way.
Grace went to Mass at 9am, dropped into the supermarket and came home. She chatted to a neighbour, a garda, in the driveway shortly before noon. Another neighbour, Anne Watchhorn, who lived across the road, spoke to her for 20 minutes on the porch before 2pm. At 2.10pm, Anne Watchhorn went home and Grace went back inside.
That afternoon, neighbours in the quiet enclave went about their business, preparing evening meals and caring for children returning home from school.
Ena Marisa Brennan, then 17, lived a few doors down from the Livingstones in number 32. She walked home from school with friends and stopped to chat before turning into her cul-de-sac. It was around 4.30pm. She noticed a young man walking towards them, who turned into the culde-sac. He wore a beige trench coat, black boots and had mousey, collar-length hair. She thought he was about 20.
Her friend, Hilary Maguire, noticed him, too. She later said he was around 6ft tall, his hair was blond and the long coat was “fawn”.
Ena Marisa turned into the cul-de-sac. She said she overtook the man outside number 39, 40 or 41 and continued on past the Livingstones’ house towards her home. When she looked back, he was gone.
“He obviously went into one of the houses. It was either the Livingstones’ or [the houses on] either side of them,” she would later tell the High Court.
Ena Marisa’s mother, also Ena, was in her kitchen browning meat for a casserole for the evening meal when she heard a loud noise. She wasn’t sure about the time. At first she told gardai she heard it between 3.45pm and 4.15pm, but later said it was 4.20pm because she had looked at the clock on the cooker to time the stew.
At number 36, the Livingstones’ immediate neighbour, Ann Egan, was packing away her Christmas shopping when she heard a “very loud booming noise” that “echoed through the house”. She put the time at around 4.30pm.
Margaret O’Sullivan, who lived on a street parallel to The Moorings, heard the noise inand-around 4.30pm, too. She watched Emmerdale Farm, the afternoon soap. When it finished, she went out to check the washing on the line. She said she thought the noise sounded like a banger.
Across the road from the Livingstones, Philip McGivney, a landscape gardener, finished work felling treetops at number 27. He got into his van but had to turn it, so drove into the driveway across the road. As he drove in, his headlights shone into the porch and he saw a man standing inside, picking up what looked like a yucca plant. He said the man was in his early 20s with dark, collar-length hair and a thin build. He put the time at around 4.40pm.
In the normal course of events, these happenings would have been insignificant but for what followed a short time later when James Livingstone pulled into his driveway and turned the key in his front door at around 5.50pm.
Apart from a swim with colleagues at Marian College at lunchtime, Mr Livingstone had been in the office all day. He left the car park at 5pm with his Revenue colleague, Art O’Connor, and dropped him off first at Charlesfort Avenue. O’Connor later said he got home at around 5.50pm. The Livingstones’ house was minutes away.
When James Livingstone crossed the threshold he found the house in darkness apart from the landing. There was no smell of cooking wafting from the kitchen — which he had expected as they had planned to leave at around 6pm for his brother’s Mass.
A sweeping brush was propped against a wall, a mound of dirt beside it and a dust pan on the floor. Upstairs, he saw his .22 rifle leaning against a door, the bedroom in darkness and his wife lying on the bed. He turned on the light and found her on her stomach, blood all over her head. Thick, black insulating tape bound her hands and feet and gagged her mouth.
Mr Livingstone raised the alarm. He ran to Anne Watchhorn’s house but got no answer so went to another neighbour, Margaret Murphy, who was a nurse. When she got to the house, he was on the phone to the emergency services. The call was logged at 5.58pm. John Hughes, a fireman, later told the High Court that he thought it odd that Livingstone didn’t mention that the injured person was his wife.
Margaret Murphy and Dr Barry Moodley, the doctor who pronounced Grace dead at 6.35pm, separately told gardai they believed Grace had been dead for around two hours. Margaret Murphy said the body was still warm, the bleeding had stopped and the blood was congealing.
Dr Moodley noted “slight warmth” still in the body and that the blood was partially congealed. But Dr John Harbison, the State pathologist, came to a different conclusion. He arrived five hours later at 11.30pm to begin his examination of Grace’s body. He put the time of her death at around 6pm.
Grace was wearing an apron, black trousers, two cardigans and a silk camisole. A dress and shoes had been left out in the bedroom. A hammer lay on the bed in Conor’s room. The rifle case in the landing was open. The shot gun that Mr Livingstone kept in the wardrobe was gone. This was the weapon used to murder Grace. It was found in the garden hedge later that night. It was one of eight guns he kept in his house. No prints were ever found on it.
Four neighbours reported the loud noise on the day of the murder, while the gardener and the schoolgirls reported the sightings of the long-haired young man.
A motorist had also come forward to report a long-
‘Her body was still warm, but the blood had started to congeal’
haired man driving an old red car erratically between 4pm and 5pm.
Gardai never traced the long-haired man. According to sources, they believed the person the gardener saw in the porch was probably Grace Livingstone, while the loud noise could have come from the sea or from workmen in the area using aluminium ladders. The investigation quickly focused on James Livingstone.
Mr Livingstone is the son of a gunsmith and jeweller who had a shop in Castleblaney, Co Monaghan. His hobbies were fishing, shooting wild fowl and the FCA. He met Grace at a dance near Dundalk. She was his opposite. She loved flower arranging and gardening and anything to do with nature. He once said that Grace used to make him put the worms he used for bait back in the garden when they came back from fishing trips because they were good for the soil.
Mr Livingstone was made of tough stuff. He set up the special investigations unit of the Revenue Commissioners to go after tax evaders and ran it for 14 years. His targets included IRA smugglers and diesel launderers, criminals and people who tried to put their money offshore. He kept an unlawfully held .45 Webley revolver in his bedside locker and a licensed .22 rifle in a case on the landing.
On the night of Grace’s murder, he offered up his clothes for forensic examination. He also gave the names of some potential suspects he had been investigating, including members of the IRA.
The suggestion of IRA involvement was regarded as improbable by gardai — the view was that the IRA would have murdered Livingstone, not his wife. Nevertheless, a garda met an alleged IRA chief on the border, who denied any involvement, and a suspected IRA money launderer in Dublin, who did likewise.
Gardai focused on James Livingstone. They had a time of death of 6pm and the murder weapon belonged to the husband. There was no forensic evidence to link him to the crime and his clothes were clear of firearm residue. There was nothing to suggest the marriage was in trouble.
Mr Livingstone had an alibi. Detectives set up several tests to see if he could have arrived home earlier, once making the journey by 5.36pm. Art O’Connor, a precise man whose job was perfecting anti-tax evasion legislation, insisted Mr Livingstone dropped him home shortly before 5.50pm.
There was a fingerprint on the adhesive side of the black tape that bound Grace, but it was not her husband’s. It remains unidentified to this day.
From the start, James Livingstone denied involvement in the murder. He and his