Hawe ‘couldn’t die and let his family survive’
Psychologist says killer’s viewing of pornography made him feel unworthy
ALAN HAWE’s grandiosity and inferiority complex led him to believe that he and his family were one and the same – completely merged, a respected psychotherapist told the Irish Mail on Sunday this week.
Robi Ludwig, author of Till Death Do Us Part: Love, Marriage And The Mind Of The Killer Spouse, said Hawe seemed to be suffering from a ‘profound impostor syndrome’.
She explained: ‘The impostor syndrome is feeling that you are being perceived or respected in a way that you don’t deserve or are not worthy of. It seems that given his fragile psychiatric state, this created a lot of anxiety for him.
‘Clearly, he thought he was going crazy and sometimes with intense anxiety, it sounds like he had an untreated mood disorder. I don’t have enough information to question a bipolar disorder, but there was a grandiosity there in a bizarre kind of way.’
New York-based Dr Ludwig told the MoS there was ‘no separation’ for Hawe from his family.
‘It was almost like he merged himself with his family, that there was no separation from them. They were not individual people with individual rights. Once he had made the decision to kill himself, it was like a domino effect. It was like he didn’t even consider, “I’ll kill myself and I will let everyone live their lives.”’
Dr Ludwig said it was ‘grandiose’ of Hawe to think his family could not survive without him. She was also intrigued by him saying his family were happy before their brutal deaths. ‘It is presumptuous for him to assume he knew what his family’s emotional state was, but basically what he was saying was that, “you know, I did do a good job before I killed them, so this is part of me being a good parent.”’ Dr Ludwig added that it was also clear Hawe felt that he was ‘nothing’ and ‘undeserving’. ‘And yet on the other hand, he felt like a nothing, undeserving – and when everyone else realised that, he couldn’t tolerate that idea.’ Dr Ludwig said the way in which Hawe killed his family seemed like this was his back-up plan if life for him did not improve.
‘It was thoughtfully carried through, the way he killed them. It was killing the wife first – because she would be most inclined to protect the kids – and then killing the older of the boys because he would be the toughest one.
‘It seemed like it was a thoughtout plan and a back-up plan for if he wasn’t feeling any better in the world. I think this guy could not tolerate feeling like a failure.
‘He was in a lot of pain and might have imagined his family would see him as a failure if they had lived after his suicide.’
Dr Ludwig also said Hawe felt guilty for viewing porn and attacked himself for doing so.
‘I think a lot of men look at porn, most men. But this guy felt guilty about it and attacked himself in his own mind. He felt he was unworthy and punished himself to the point of extinction.’ THE MONSTER WITHIN page 30
ON Monday, August 29, 2016, the outside world opened the door into Alan Hawe’s mausoleum at Oakdene Downs, Barconey, near Ballyjamesduff.
What lay inside, the brutal handiwork of a father’s monstrous deeds, was a scene no person should have to witness. Hawe’s mother-in-law, Mary Coll, had gone to the house after her daughter and grandsons failed to appear, despite arrangements made the night before. When she got to the door and saw a note saying, ‘Don’t come in. Call the gardaí.’ She did just that. For the two gardaí who entered, unspeakable horror awaited.
So horrific, that this week during the inquest into the deaths of the Hawe family, Garda Aisling Walsh broke down when asked to describe what she saw. ‘I’m sorry…’ she said, wiping away tears. Walsh, a garda who looked to be in her thirties, had been the assigned patrol car driver on August 29. When a call came in for her colleague Alan Ratcliffe to go to the Hawe family home, she drove them both to the address. Very quickly the task took a chilling turn. After entering the house and seeing the bloodied body of Clodagh Hawe face-down on the sofa, Garda Walsh made her way upstairs, where she found the bodies of the two eldest boys, 13-year-old Liam and Niall, 11. From there, she walked into six-yearold Ryan’s room. ‘His duvet cover was on him,’ she said. ‘I observed a large knife on the pillow.’
Garda Walsh would not be the last person to break down during this week’s harrowing inquest in Cavan courthouse. But it was the tears of the professional guard, trained and prepared for such eventualities, that truly brought home the horror of that day. The scene inside that house had clearly left an indelible mark.
From the evidence of Garda Walsh and Garda Ratcliffe, the appalling reality of what Alan Hawe did to his family came painfully into focus.
Garda Ratcliffe told the hearing he entered the house at 11.21am. ‘I called out and identified myself but got no reply,’ he said. In the sitting room, he found Clodagh Hawe in pyjamas and a dressing gown lying on her stomach on the couch with injuries to her head. There was a ‘knife and a small axe on the floor.’
In the hallway he found the body of Alan Hawe, who had taken his own life. Garda Ratcliffe then made his way upstairs to a bedroom where he found the bodies of Liam and Niall, each lying in a single bed. Ryan Hawe was in his own bedroom, in a single bed. There was blood on the walls and blood on the duvets. There was blood on the notes that Alan Hawe had left on the kitchen table.
The following day’s evidence, from deputy State pathologist Michael Curtis was graphic and disturbing. He said Mrs Hawe suffered severe ‘penetrating axe and knife’ wounds to her head, throat and neck. Brothers Liam and Niall had been stabbed in the neck, making it impossible for them to cry out. There were also injuries suggesting both boys tried to defend themselves.
In the case of little Ryan, Alan Hawe’s sixyear-old son, the manner in which his father cut his throat would leave any right-minded person lost for words. Clodagh herself suffered defensive injuries, suggesting that she fought desperately to save her own and her children’s lives. Make no mistake, the end, when it came, was brutal. As the appalling details of Hawe’s crimes were finally laid bare, Clodagh’s mother Mary Coll and sister Jacqueline Connolly listened to every painful word. Mary Coll gave an emotional account of the lead-up to events last year. The evening before the bodies were discovered, she had welcomed the Hawe family in for a Sunday evening cup of coffee. The only hint of unhappiness was that Alan Hawe, due to return to his duties as principal of Castlerahan NS in Ballyjamesduff, Co. Cavan, was not looking forward to going back to school. ‘Everything seemed normal,’ Mrs Coll told the inquest. The family left for home at around 8.40pm, she said, noting, ‘Clodagh said she’d see me in the morning when she would drop Niall and Ryan over.’ Mrs Coll even tried to ease the feelings of her son-inlaw, telling the inquest that as she kissed and hugged her daughter and grandsons goodbye, she turned to her son-in-law. ‘I said good luck going back to school.’
Alan Hawe never did get to school the next day. For those who sat in the public gallery for this week’s inquest, the same torturous questions swirled. Why did he do it? How could he do it? Any hope that those questions would be answered by the medical and psychiatric witnesses was short-lived.
Despite the fact that Alan Hawe’s GP of five years’ standing had never detected any signs of depression in her patient, an assessment by psychiatrist Professor Harry Kennedy – who never met Hawe – concluded that there were issues of mental health that pointed to depression. Yet David McConnell, the psychotherapist Alan Hawe had attended for counselling, reported that he had never made any disclosures suggesting suicidal tendencies. He had seen him 10 times, most recently some weeks before the murders.
Yes, Alan Hawe was anxious, Mr McConnell said, he had previously seen a relationship counsellor, he wanted to get his family life back on track, and he was concerned
‘Clodagh said she’d see me in the morning with the boys’
about what he perceived as a likely fall from grace as a ‘pillar of the community’. He was worried about no longer being Mr Perfect in the eyes of local people. He was, in other words, totally focused on himself.
It was the narrative that Alan Hawe had perpetrated his acts because he was a sick man that spurred Mary Coll to challenge the evidence. At the conclusion of Prof. Kennedy’s contribution, she addressed the psychiatrist. ‘When you are doing a summary based on documentary evidence, do you ever consider interviewing the family of those murdered, or the family of the murderer?’ she asked. Her question was greeted with a look of empathy from the witness.
‘I’m entirely constrained to the evidence before the coroner,’ began Prof. Kennedy. Mary Coll wasn’t letting the issue go. As she steeled herself to speak again, daughter Jacqueline gripped her hand. ‘I know that,’ she replied. ‘But my question is, seeing that you never met Alan Hawe, Clodagh or his family, did you ever consider speaking to the family in relation to how he was? I knew him for 20 years. I didn’t know him, but I did know him.’ There had been no real answer to the question but Mary Coll had got her point across. There would be no white-washing of the facts.
Her son-in-law had left behind a fivepage letter, which was shown privately to the jury, with its contents later disclosed in the press. In it, Alan Hawe tried to justify the butchering of his family by saying that he didn’t think his sons could cope if he took his own life and left them behind.
When verdicts of unlawful death were returned for Clodagh and her three boys, there was little or no reaction from the Coll family. But as courtroom No.2 began to empty, a determined-looking Jacqueline Connolly approached her solicitor Liam Keane. Soon, word came through that Jacqueline and her mother would be making a statement. A short time later, on the steps of Cavan courthouse, they stood in the dim evening light and took back the narrative of how Clodagh and the boys died. They rejected claims that Hawe was suffering from a mental illness when he ‘executed’ his wife and children. Alan Hawe’s imminent fall from his position as ‘a pillar of the community’ and the breakdown of his marriage led him to kill his family in a ‘premeditated and calculated manner’, they said. Even after the inquest, they are still searching for answers as to ‘why Alan Hawe committed this savagery’.
Without answers, the questions will keep surfacing. What was going through Alan Hawe’s mind on that evening, as he set about his actions. Did he wait until his wife nodded off on the sofa before he murdered her in cold blood? What, if anything did he say to his sons as they desperately tried to fight back? Did he feel any remorse as his children lay sleeping now for ever under their duvets? If Hawe was mentally ill, then he was ill in a way that was invisible to everyone around him. But some anxiety had grown within him, blotting out all possibility of a future. He saw no means of escape, no way of preventing the tranquil facade of happy family life, from crashing to earth. And the only way, in his disturbed mind, to turn this around was to annihilate the family he loved. Even as he prowled the house in darkness, moving from room to room, killing as he went, Alan Hawe was still thinking of only himself.
Where Aisling Walsh saw two little boys, tucked in under their childhood duvets, Alan Hawe saw two people he needed to silence. Where Garda Ratcliffe saw a defenceless mother in her pyjamas, Alan Hawe saw a woman he needed to control. Where we rightly see murder, brutality and horror, Alan Hawe saw something else: salvation.
Grandmother challenged the narrative that ‘sickness’ drove Hawe