One year on, grief and questions over why father killed his family
The relatives of Clodagh Hawe continue a vital conversation about murder-suicide, writes Maeve Sheehan
ALAN Hawe, an apparently upright schoolteacher, killed his wife, Clodagh, and their three boys in a murder-suicide a year ago on Tuesday.
The incomprehensibly brutal act generated saturation media coverage but little understanding of why he did it. Weeks after their deaths, the media moved on to other tragedies.
But Sharon O’Halloran, who runs the domestic violence organisation, SAFE Ireland, says we still do not know enough. “We may think everything that needs to be said has been said. But it hasn’t,’’ she wrote. ‘‘We have to keep the conversation going and we have to have it in a way that includes everyone in this country.”
Yesterday, Clodagh’s mother, Mary Coll, and her sister, Jacqueline Connolly, sought to continue that conversation.
In a harrowing interview to mark the anniversary of the deaths, Mary and Jacqueline said they believe the murders were premeditated, a series of cold-blooded killings planned to cover up Alan Hawe’s impending “fall from grace”.
Silence won’t explain what happened, they told the interviewer, Conor Feehan, and they are fundraising for Cavan Lighthouse, the refuge for victims of domestic violence planned in memory of Clodagh and the boys, Liam (14), Niall (11) and six-yearold Ryan.
An inquest into their deaths will be held in October.
On the face of things, Alan Hawe seemed to fit the cliche of the pillar of the community; his family life in Castlerahan, near Ballyjamesduff in Cavan, his attendance at Mass, his job as deputy principal of the local national school.
He had been out collecting for the Castlerahan GAA club hours before he murdered his family.
Mary Coll and Jacqueline Connolly cast him in a different light: a man who controlled his public life and family life was — for reasons that have yet to be revealed — about to lose that control.
On Sunday, August 29 last year, the Hawe family visited Mary Coll at her home in Virginia, Cavan. She watched her youngest grandson, Ryan, tucking into a bag of Hunky Dorys salt and vinegar crisps, marvelling at how he made them last all evening. She later rescued the crisp packet from the bin, and keeps the packet in a drawer in her kitchen. “I can’t throw it away,” she said.
Mary had planned to pick blackberries with the boys the next day, a Monday morning. When they did not arrive, she rang and texted Clodagh, and then Alan.
“It was so out of character I knew there was something wrong,” said Mary. “Coming up on 10am I decided to go over to the house, about a 10-minute drive away. I had a key for the back door. I was afraid I would meet them on the road after having a car crash. All sorts of things went through my mind. I thought maybe there had been a carbon monoxide accident at the house.
‘‘Then when I arrived and saw the curtains drawn and the cars in the driveway, I knew there was something wrong. I ran from the car to the back door and I was just about to put the key in the lock when I saw the note.
“I knew something terrible had happened and I went to a neighbour’s house, a neighbour I knew, and I said to her that I thought something terrible had happened.
‘‘I brought her to the house and she saw the note, and we rang the gardai. We sat out the front and around 20 minutes later two gardai arrived, a man and a woman.”
The gardai emerged minutes later from the Hawe family home. “They told us there were five bodies in the house, no survivors.”
The full horror of what happened in that house, the terror that must have been experienced by Clodagh, and her boys, will probably never be known.
Mary Coll and Jacqueline have pieced together enough to believe that what Alan Hawe did that night had been a long time in the planning.
They know that Clodagh had browsed the internet for holidays and at some time, had changed into her pyjamas. The boys had all gone to bed, Liam and Niall in their shared bedroom and Ryan in a room on his own.
They know that Alan Hawe had a hatchet and a knife, ready in the house, and that he used the weapons to murder Clodagh, as she lay on the couch. Then he went upstairs to the boys’ rooms.
“Liam put up a struggle. We know that. Niall must have seen Liam being killed, and we don’t know if they heard Clodagh being killed. Ryan was on his own, though. He was a sound sleeper. We don’t know what he saw or heard,” said Jacqueline.
“He laid out all the folders of all their financial affairs, and neatly arranged all of Clodagh’s jewellery on the bed, and one of the last acts before he died was to use the computer to transfer money from their joint account to his own account.
‘‘Then he stuck the note on the back door and went back into the house and killed himself.
“He must have known leav- ing here on the Sunday night what he was about to do. The financial papers, the notes, the hatchet in the house. It all points to him planning it all,” said Jacqueline.
“And the way he could sit down at a computer and transfer money from one account to another, and remember passcodes and passwords, after killing his wife and three sons? It’s our view that he planned it all.”
Alan Hawe never raised a hand to Clodagh or the children, said Mary Coll, but “he could be as controlling by his silence as could be with his words”. Clodagh would have to “run it by” her husband if she wanted to go to Dublin to go shopping with her mother.
Nevertheless, she always felt safe, said Mary. “If Clodagh felt she or the boys were in any danger, they would’ve walked out. They wouldn’t be there.”
Mary hinted that there was something in his life that may have pushed him over the edge but declined to disclose what that was.
“Alan had been going to counselling, and was having difficulty at work. He started the counselling for one thing, but as the work issues came to light, the counselling shifted to encompass that,” said Mary Coll.
Hawe left a three-page letter in an envelope in which he attempted to explain why he had murdered Clodagh and the boys, and a second bloodstained letter, that was written after the killings.
“He was about to experience a fall from grace, and lose the air of respectability he felt he had in the community. He said in the letter that Clodagh didn’t know anything about this, and they were happy together,” said Mary.
“He also wrote ‘How could I pretend to be so normal for so long?’”
Hawe’s “secret” may well turn out to have been catalyst for his murder spree but understanding of such awful actions is still elusive.
The National Suicide Research Foundation reviewed international literature to identify the risk factors associated with murder-suicide.
It found that the perpetrators were commonly men and their average age was between 40 and 50. Most had a history of mental health issues, and one third of men in murder-suicides had recently experienced a decrease in status at work, or had lost their job.
Alan Hawe ticked some of those boxes; he was 40, in counselling and he had been having difficulties in his job, the same as thousands of other Irish men.
“Considering that murder-suicide is a relatively rare event, it would be important to conduct independent in-depth investigations of each case in order to improve our knowledge of risk factors and patterns, which will contribute to enhanced risk assessment and prevention of similar cases in the future,” the National Suicide Research Foundation has recommended.
One year from the Castlerahan atrocity, there is little further understanding of what drove a school teacher in a rural village to murder his wife and his three boys. There have been other murder-suicides since.
Alan Hawe’s remains were exhumed from the family grave in Castlerahan Church earlier this year. Clodagh’s family no longer wanted him buried with his wife and sons. His remains were cremated and returned to his family in Kilkenny.
‘I thought something terrible had happened’ ‘He wrote in the letter: How could I pretend to be so normal for so long?’