THE LOVE RIVAL TRIAL

Court hears from residents of sleepy rural area at centre of ‘love rival’ trial

An ex-wife, an old f lame and the last sighting of DJ Mr Moonlight

IT was a fine summer morning, unseasonably warm, when a number of Tipperary residents set out as usual from their homes.

One woman was dropping her children to school, another man was going to work as a taxi man, two were going to walk their dogs while one young man was going mountain biking.

Nearly eight years later, this random group of people assembled in court 13 of the Central Criminal Courts this week as possible key witnesses in the trial of Patrick Quirke for the murder of his love rival, Bobby Ryan aka Mr Moonlight.

Their reason for being there was that each one, on the morning of June 3, 2011 when Bobby Ryan disappeared, claims to have seen his van or the victim himself.

Ryan had left the home of his girlfriend, the widow Mary Lowry, at 6.30am that morning and then apparently disappeared.

His remains were found in a run-off tank on her farm almost two years later by Mr Quirke who claims he found them while draining the tank.

Fifty-year-old Quirke had previously been having an affair with Lowry following the

‘I knew something wasn’t right’

death of her husband, Martin, who was his best friend and also his brother-in-law.

On the day he disappeared his silver Citroen van was found abandoned at Bansha Woods.

Michelle Lovelock, an English ex-pat, middle-aged, well-dressed and confident, told the court this week how she had left her home in the nearby village of Golden at 8am that morning as she did every morning.

It was a ten-minute drive to Bansha Woods, also known locally as Kilshane Woods. As soon as she arrived, she noticed, a ‘strange van’ on the right-hand side of the car park at around 8.10am or 8.15am. It was a light coloured, silver van, she said. ‘I’d never seen it there before. ‘But when I came back at about ten to nine, it was gone.’

Eddie Hogg, a tall well-built elderly man, also walked his dogs that morning in Bansha Woods. He told the court how he’d parked his Toyota Landcruiser in the woods as usual at 8.15am when he too noticed the van.

He saw a ‘white or silver van’ parked ‘lengthways rather than nose in’ in the circular car park. The vehicle was on the left-hand side near the barrier, he said.

Courier Joe McLoughlin had left his home at 5am that morning with up to a 150 ‘drops’ on his schedule. His route that morning took him past the car park at Kilshane by Bansha Woods to Bansha and around Golden in Tipperary.

He recalled passing the woods at around 7.45am or 8am, and seeing fleetingly through a gap in the hedge, a van with the word ‘Moonlight’ written on it.

Jim Cully, a hackney driver, took the stand too. Dressed in a heavy wool jacket and thick striped grey scarf, he told the court that he knew Mr Moonlight and his ex-wife Mary because they used to be next door neighbours in Cashel.

Every weekday morning, he had a regular fare from Cashel to a school in Cappawhite about 23km away. On that Friday morning at about 8.40, he turned left out of the village of Dundrum in the direction of Cappawhite when he saw his friend’s van driving towards him. He could clearly make out the words ‘Mr Moonlight’ written on the windscreen.

He saluted him and the driver of the van saluted back.

‘I cannot say for certain who was driving the van,’ he said under cross-examination. ‘But I’m almost certain it was Bobby.’

Back at Cordangan, a townland close to Mary Lowry’s farm and about 20km from Dundrum, Siobhán Kinnane had left her home to bring her children to school in Tipperary town.

It was about 8.50am when she saw a man ‘sweating and red-faced’ walking by the side of the road near her house. He was bald and wearing a navy or dark coloured tracksuit.

He didn’t look up or acknowledge her as she passed. ‘I found that peculiar. I thought he would look up and he didn’t.’

She thought of her house and wondered had she locked the doors and windows. Her husband was away.

‘I took a good look at him as I was concerned. Nicky was away.’

The following week she became aware there was a missing person

in the area. She contacted the Gardai on Tuesday, June 7.

When gardaí showed her a photo of the deceased she said the man she saw was not ‘athletically built’ but also wasn’t ‘extremely fat’ like the man in the photograph.

He said that she was ‘80% sure’ that a photo on the RTÉ website of the missing man Bobby Ryan was the same man she had seen.

Earlier in the week, Bobby Ryan’s son, Robert, who bears a striking resemblance to his father, gave evidence.

Wearing a stud in his eyebrow and peppering his testimony with some colourful language, he told how ‘something wasn’t right’ when he arrived at Mary Lowry’s farm on June 3, looking for his dad.

Ms Lowry wanted him out of her yard ‘as quick as she could get me out,’ he told the court.

Contrary to her own evidence, he said she was visibly shaking and had been crying and he had never seen her like that before.

‘It didn’t feel right. I knew something wasn’t right about the way she was acting,’ he told the court.

Mr Ryan said Ms Lowry, whom he had met previously on several occasions, had said: ‘I don’t know where he is. We didn’t have a row.’

She also told him that his father had mentioned something about a river in the past when his wife had left him.

However, he firmly told the court that this was ‘lies’ and his father had never said that. ‘Daddy never said anything to me about a f***ing river,’ he said.

He told the court that his dad’s girlfriend seemed ‘very jealous’.

His father’s phone would be ‘hopping’ with texts and sometimes he seemed ‘pretty pissed off’ about it.

A week before the disappearance he became aware that he noticed that there was a problem between Ms Lowry and his father following a trip to Bundoran.

Michelle Ryan, Mr Moonlight’s daughter, also gave evidence that her dad asked for her to give him an ‘honest opinion’ about his relationship with Ms Lowry following that weekend in Bundoran at the end of May 2011.

He and his daughter had an open conversation about his relationship with her, she told the court. He told her what had happened in Bundoran and she advised him to ‘P45 her’.

She said she had told her father that he ‘didn’t need that’ in his life and to the best of her knowledge, her father had finished the relationship that Tuesday, three days before he left Ms Lowry’s house for the last time.

Ms Lowry’s 21-year-old son, Tommy also took the stand last Tuesday. Her oldest boy told the court emphatically how he ‘did not like spending time’ with Patrick Quirke.

On the other hand, he and his two younger brothers had been happy when their mam had met Bobby Ryan.

‘We got on well – Bobby was funny, he’d always try and crack a joke,’ he said. ‘There was no problems – we were all happy that Mam was happy and Bobby was happy too.’

The same day in court, Catherine Costello who belongs to an organisation called Searching for the Missing, told how she had contacted the Gardaí and told them to get in touch with Mary Lowry, after meeting the widow weeks after Mr Ryan has gone missing.

Ms Costello said that she’d met Ms Lowry at Bansha Woods after she became involved in the search.

‘She was very pleasant, very polite. She was upset. She had a tissue in her hand and would be dabbing her eyes,’ said Ms Costello, adding Ms Lowry had said ‘please God he’ll be home and was gone away for a few days’.

They exchanged phone numbers and some weeks later, Ms Lowry contacted her and asked to meet. Ms Costello offered to drive to her house but under cross-examination said that Ms Lowry had told her she ‘wanted to get out of the house’.

They arranged to meet at a petrol station in Bansha village.

This time, Ms Lowry was severely distressed, she said.

‘She was so hysterical I’d have been worried about her driving on the road,’ Ms Costello told the court, adding that ‘tears were flowing’.

They had a discussion and Ms Lowry confided in her about the history of her relationship with Mr Quirke. Ms Costello advised her to go urgently to the Gardaí.

Some 24 hours later, Ms Costello contacted Ms Lowry to see if she had done so, and when told she had not, Ms Costello herself contacted gardaí at Tipperary and advised them to ‘speak to Mary Lowry’.

The trial continues.

‘She was pleasant, very polite’