‘He was pure evil... there’s evil in him’
Parents of murdered Rachel O’Reilly speak out about her killer husband
THE parents of murdered Rachel O’Reilly have spoken of her brutal killing at the hands of her husband, describing Joe O’Reilly as the personification of pure evil.
In an RTÉ documentary airing tonight, Rachel’s father Jim Callaly says of O’Reilly: ‘I think there was evil in him and I think certain things bring out the evil, greed, jealousy, hatred.
‘There’s something amiss in the brain or he may be possessed by someone.’
In the Would You Believe? programme, Mr Callaly relives the moment in 2004 that he realised his daughter was battered to death by her husband in the home in the Naul he shared with Rachel and their two children. ‘He was pure evil,’ Mr Callaly says. ‘He brought us up to the bedroom and he said she was lying there and whoever done it was battering her on the back of the head like this.
‘And then he even got down on his knees and started doing... and then he [said] he must have done it like this. There was blood spatters all around the wall and the ceiling. It was like being in an abattoir,’ recalls Mr Callaly with a pained expression.
He adds: ‘When he saw we were so disturbed his eyes started dancing in his head. His eyes were bouncing. I said to myself, “Jesus [we’re with] a madman”.’
It was the moment Rose Callaly knew her daughter had been killed by her husband. O’Reilly had gone through extraordinary detailed descriptions of her murder on a series of TV interviews before he was arrested.
She said: ‘That day I came out of that house and I knew without a shadow of a doubt that he had done it. When I realised who done it, a person she had trusted with her life, and that we had trusted with her life, and the mother of his two children, and then to know then afterwards that it was planned, well I don’t think you could do anything like that and have a conscience, I don’t honestly think he has a conscience.
‘When you’d look into his eyes there is nothing there. That had to be evil. I sort of feel he is evil.’
Sitting in her kitchen, the Dublin mother said she still can’t explain the horror she went through after finding her daughter lying dead in her home. She said: ‘I just feel we were touched by evil when Rachel died and you couldn’t put into words what I witnessed. That had to be evil. I sort of feel he is evil.’
‘We were so disturbed... his eyes were dancing’
Evil – A Would You Believe? special will be shown on RTÉ One tonight at 10.35pm.