ANATOMY OF A RURAL CRIME
The conviction of a family gang of criminals revealed a chilling picture of robbers who target isolated communities, writes Maeve Sheehan
THE sound of smashing glass brings back terrifying memories for the Garvey family. It is the memory of a Sunday evening in April five years ago, as dusk fell and Gerry and Ann Garvey and their two sets of twins, settled in for the night at Sunville House in Pallasgreen, Co Limerick.
It was around 9.30pm. Ann had been having a bath. Gerry was in the kitchen, studying for a course. Three of the kids watched TV in the next room. A fourth was in the bedroom, on his computer with his earphones on. He didn’t hear the sudden smash of glass as the patio doors crashed on to the floor. Or the screaming and roaring from the four men who burst through the living room of the Georgian home, brandishing a gun, sledgehammer and baseball bats.
Gerry Garvey was struck, pushed to the floor, a sawn-off shotgun put to his temple and handcuffed. His daughter was restrained with cable ties, and his son was punched to the ground. Two children managed to run upstairs to their mother’s bathroom. Two intruders ran after them with a baseball bat. Ann Garvey emptied the safe and the gang fled with $3,000 the family had been saving for a trip to Disney World in Florida, and around £5,000. The ordeal lasted four minutes, the gang having already cased the house’s security system.
The Garveys didn’t know it then but the leader of the gang that smashed its way into their home was Patrick Roche, a career criminal from Clondalkin on €219 a week disability benefit, who used his free travel pass to traverse rural Ireland on Irish Rail. He used his contacts to pressure down-ontheir-luck locals or small-town criminals to deliver up potential victims in their communities.
It took five years and a six-week trial estimated to have cost €1m in free legal aid to end the criminal run of Roche (53), his son, Philip (24) . The two men were jailed two weeks ago for two violent break-ins that Judge John Hannan described as “barbaric” and “menacing”.
A third man was jailed along with them, for his part in the robbery of the Garvey family. He cannot be named for legal reasons.
At a time of widespread fears of rural crime, the trial has provided a chilling insight into how a small urban gang targeted a small, isolated population of a vast rural hinterland.
Patrick Roche has little to show for his 139 previous convictions, racked up in Ireland and the UK. He lived in a modest, terrace house in Kilcronan Close, Clondalkin, in West Dublin, which he shared with his wife and his son Philip, a willing accomplice with 37 convictions to his name. Patrick Roche claimed disability allowance a leg injury he got while serving time for grievous bodily harm in a UK prison. In Dublin, he had dabbled in providing “security” for businesses, kept horses on wasteland and lurchers for hunting.
In 2012, Roche was on bail, awaiting trial for a previous burglary. He had stayed below the Garda radar. Travelling around the country by train, he avoided the Garda attention a career criminal like him could attract on the country’s roads. He is suspected of carrying out crimes in several other counties but in 2012 his focus was on the rural expanse of East Limerick, North Cork and West Tipperary. It is a vast area stretched of Garda resources and at the time had just one detective, Kerryman Mike Reidy, in the entire Bruff Garda district.
Roche’s interest was opportunistic. He was originally from Tipperary town and had contacts in the area.
Roche relied on local knowledge about his targets — either business people or vulnerable elderly people and likely to have cash in their homes.
One of his local contacts was John Cahill, from Doon, a village on the Limerick border about 9km from the Garveys’ home in Pallasgreen. Cahill first met Roche when they were both in prison in Cork. He later claimed in court that he owed a debt of €10,000 to the gang and that was how he got roped in.
A more unlikely local contact was William Gammell, the son of a respectable business family in Limerick, and who had fallen on hard times. The family plant hire business had got into difficulties and Gammell’s parents had emigrated to Australia, Sergeant Mike Reidy would later tell Limerick Circuit Court. At that time, Gammell was in his late twenties, with a partner and four children and lived in Monard, Tipperary.
Gardai believe Patrick Roche “groomed” Gammell. He had no criminal convictions, a clean driving licence and wasn’t on the Garda radar, making him an “ideal candidate” for his criminal activities.
In one of his first introductions to the gang, Gammell later told Gardai, he was paid €2,000 for helping to stage a car crash in Tipperary. Gammell later told gardai he drove his van into the back of another car, leaving his insurer with a potential €100,000 compensation bill.
It was that same month, April 2012, that the Roche gang smashed their way into the Garveys’ home. It never emerged during the trial who delivered up the family as targets to Patrick Roche. The Garveys are a well-known respected business family, having operated Sunville House as a guest house for several years. Gerry now works for the community support network, the Paul Partnership in Limerick.
William Gammell was not directly involved in the Garvey robbery but he did collect two of the gang members, Philip Roche and John Cahill, later that night after they abandoned their getaway car in wooded area.
Patrick Roche, who was in a second car, was arrested within an hour of fleeing the Garvey home.
He and a fourth gang member, Christopher Stokes, from Cork, were stopped by a passing Garda patrol car, near Buttevant in north Cork, still in their “housebreaking” clothes and with screwdrivers, cable ties, balaclavas and SIM cards.
Patrick Roche appeared in Mallow District Court the next morning in relation to suspicious equipment found in their car. Gardai whisked him off to Limerick immediately afterwards, to be questioned about the violent attack on the Garvey family. Roche was interviewed 26 times over seven days but replied “no comment” to every question.
Released without charge but with gardai on his scent, Roche might have been expected to steer clear of Pallasgreen for a while. He was already planning his next robbery there.
The Creed family live just three quarters of a mile from the Garveys in Pallasgreen. The three elderly siblings, Willie, and his sisters, Christina, and Nora, all pensioners in their seventies, tend a small farm in the townland of Ballyluddy, where they lived quietly and privately. All three had been saving from their State pensions to pay for works they planned on their farm.
The Creeds came on the radar of Patrick Roche when he learned that the three siblings may have cash in their house.
And even though Patrick Roche was now on the Garda’s radar, he travelled by train from Dublin on a number of occasions to “case” the Creed farm. Gardai believe that Roche figured they would need a jeep for the job.
On May 23, five weeks after the Garvey robbery, Roche was required to make an appearance at Mallow District Court. On the same day, a Volkswagen Touareg was stolen from a local garage.
Roche arranged for the stolen car to be given to William Gammell. After that, Gammell was at Roche’s beck and call, Sgt Reidy later told the court.
“He felt he could not refuse when he was asked to collect them and drop them off. Once you get in there, there is no getting out, there is no saying no to them,” he said.
A few days before the robbery, Nora Creed saw two strange men by the train track at the back of their fields. When she asked what they were doing, she said they told her they were “meeting women”. Gardai believe this was Philip and Patrick Roche.
At 5.23pm on May 31, 2012, Patrick Roche signed on at Clondalkin Garda Station, a condition of being released on bail on other criminal charges. He went from the Garda station to Heuston Station, taking a 6.30pm train to Limerick Junction.
Gammell dropped the Roche father and son in the fields behind the Creeds’ house, where the Roches donned balaclavas, gloves and black clothes.
About 10pm, Nora Creed opened the front door of the house to find two men standing in front of her dressed in black. She told gardai she was “punched backwards” on to a window. The Roches burst in, armed with screwdrivers, a butcher’s knife and iron bars, demanding the couple’s pensions.
Willie Creed told gardai how “one of them rushed at me and knocked me to the ground. He was stabbing me on the head with a screwdriver. There was blood running down along my face”.
Willie, Christina and Nora Creed were thrown to the ground, tied up, and told their throats would be cut if they didn’t give them their cash. Christina, who had been praying, told gardai one of the raiders “laid into me, hitting me. He threw me across the room. I thought they were going to kill us”. The Creeds were terrorised for more than an hour.
Meanwhile, William Gammell was at the petrol station in Pallasgreen, filling up the stolen Volkswagen with fuel for the getaway. He got himself a bag of chips while he waited for the call from Roche. Sgt Reidy would later tell the court that Gammell “knew what they [the gang members] were up to” and that ‘a job was on’ that night”. However, he was unaware of the gang’s “full intentions”.
Gammell drove the raiders away with €5,000 in savings that the Creeds’ had hidden in a sock.
The vicious attack on the elderly Creeds appalled the local community and sparked a massive Garda investigation. Within days, someone tipped off gardai about Gammell’s links with the Roches. He was arrested six days after the attack.
Gardai later testified that Gammell made “full and frank” admissions and was as helpful as he could be. He provided vital evidence. From his mobile phone, gardai were able to trace Patrick Roche’s phone number and from that his movements on the day of the robbery. He led them to a Dunnes Stores’ bag of clothes used in the Creed robbery, which provided crucial forensic evidence.
Gammell pleaded guilty and got a suspended five-year sentence in 2014. John Cahill got five years in jail, while Christopher Stokes got seven, for the robbery of the Garvey family.
Afterwards Gammell offered to testify against the gang, despite threats being made against his family. So did John Cahill.
Patrick and Philip Roche and a third man were convicted of aggravated burglary and false imprisonment. The three men were sentenced two weeks ago, Patrick Roche was jailed for 17 years and his son Philip for 15. The third man was jailed for 14 years. There are further charges pending in relation to the crimes.
The five year investigation has yielded a wealth of knowledge about urban crime gangs such as Roche’s. Sean Lynch, a retired Limerick detective who worked on the case, said the investigation was a credit to solid local policing.
“The big lesson here is it was a huge mistake closing down rural Garda stations,” said Lynch, who is now a Fianna Fail councillor and mayor of Limerick. “Gangs will go to all those lengths because they have all the time in the world to build their crime, groom their men, and source elderly vulnerable people living on their own. Garda on the ground are the key.”
Gardai believe they might never have put the gang away without Gammell’s testimony, and in doing so, say he has repaid a debt to his community. At his sentencing in 2014, Gammell’s barrister said his client had been “poisoned by hardened criminals”. He had sustained a “magnificent fall from grace” and had “no future” in the Pallasgreen area, such was the local outrage.
“He cannot stand the looks he is getting from his neighbours,” the court heard.
Tom Creed, brother of Willie, Nora and Christina, had little sympathy at the time, telling the Limerick Post newspaper he regarded Gammell as just as much of a culprit.
The sense of betrayal lingers. Speaking to the Sunday Independent this weekend, Gerry Garvey said his family has recovered and had moved on, but they would never forget what happened.
“I think it has had a very serious impact because it’s like one of our own has betrayed us and brought this into the community. However, they may never have been convicted without his testimony,” he said.
‘At about 10pm the gang burst in on the pensioners, armed with screwdrivers, a butcher’s knife and iron bars, demanding money...’