Zero hard evidence
Both prosecution and defence agree on the lack of forensics but one looks for a guilty verdict and the other asserts Pat Quirke’s innocence
PAT QUIRKE’S defence counsel jumped to his feet within seconds of his prosecution counterpart sitting down.
Finally, after 13 weeks, Bernard Condon was giving his closing address to the jury in the trial of Patrick Quirke for the murder of his love rival, Bobby Ryan.
And the first thing he told them was that this was a case based only on theory.
Wearing the black robes of a senior counsel, he stood square facing them, speaking mostly without the help of notes.
Slowly and deliberately, he told them: ‘There is no hard evidence.’
He warned them that they could not come back in six months or six years and say: ‘You know when we convicted that fella Quirke, I’m just not sure about that.’ ‘There is no second chance.’ Fifty-two-year-old Mr Quirke is accused of killing Mr Ryan who was a part-time DJ known as Mr Moonlight at a time and place unknown between June 3, 2011, and April 30, 2013. Mr Quirke is pleading not guilty to murder.
The prosecution say the Tipperary dairy farmer staged the discovery of Mr Ryan’s badly decomposed remains in a run-off tank on the farm of Mary Lowry, their shared love interest.
However, according to Mr Condon, the jurors were about to ‘take a journey in something forensically equivalent to a train.’
He told them they would start the journey at a station called Innocence and prosecution counsel Michael Bowman should bring them to the last station on the train, called ‘Guilty’.
Mr Bowman’s fuel for the train journey was evidence and he didn’t had enough of it, he contended.
Mr Quirke was parked in a station marked ‘Innocence’ and it was up to the prosecution to move him out of it. You can not get out at ‘Probability station’, he continued.
‘What is the evidence, the actual evidence… not the speculation, the nod and the wink, not the “give a dog a bad name”?’
He asked when had the clothes been taken off Mr Ryan’s body which was found naked? When had they been taken, where and by whom? Where was the murdered man’s mobile phone? Who turned it off, how was it disposed of? Who was in the van that left Fawnagown? How many people? Where was the body? Was it hidden? Mr Condon said none of these questions had been answered. ‘Through the central area of this case, you have nothing.’
The extent which the case had been run on the bad relationship between Mary Lowry and Pat Quirke had cloaked the paucity of evidence, he said.
Behind him, Mr Quirke sat in the dock staring straight towards the jury. Occasionally he took a note.
Opening his closing argument the previous day, prosecution counsel Mr Bowman himself had spoken about the lack of forensic evidence. ‘This was a forensically barren case,’ he said dramatically. There was no weapon, location or time of death.’ He said he was going to lead them through the evidence of the case but he warned: ‘In truth, I don’t believe there’s a huge amount of it.’ However he said that a combination of circumstantial evidence pointed to the ‘inevitable conclusion’ that Mr Quirke had murdered the man who replaced him in the affections of his sister-in-law, the widow Mary Lowry. ‘Maybe it’s the case that whoever did this planned it,’ he said. ‘Maybe the person or persons responsible took the opportunity to plan and execute this in a way that would afford them the comfort and belief they had evaded justice and gotten away with murder. ‘Someone took the time to make sure no forensic trace was left behind.’ Murder was not the first port of call in this case, Mr Bowman told the jury. When he discovered the relationship between Ms Lowry and Mr Ryan, Mr Quirke had made attempts to scupper it. The phone call to social services reporting Ms Lowry for allegedly neglecting her children was another. ‘He knew Bobby stands no chance if the HSE gets involved and she has to choose and Mr Quirke knows it.’
Mr Bowman pointed to the various searches for human body decomposition timelines made after Mr Ryan’s disappearance, on a computer taken from Mr Quirke’s office.
‘There’s a limit to how much coincidence human affairs will tolerate.
‘Is that a breaking point, ladies and gentleman?
‘I make no bones about it: it’s Pat Quirke on that computer. Logic screams it.’
Ms Lowry, he said, ‘is a significant witness but she’s not the prosecution case by any means: let’s be clear about that’. Mr Bowman admitted it was one of the ‘remarkable curiosities of the case’ that Ms Lowry had been happy to bare her soul about many things but could not remember going to the 5-star Cliff House hotel in Waterford with Mr Quirke three months after Mr Ryan went missing. This was despite the fact that the court was shown evidence her credit card had been used to pay for the stay. ‘It struck me as an extraordinary lie to tell because in truth she had bared her soul before the court. She had admitted to the court going to Fitzpatrick’s Hotel in Killiney with Pat Quirke [after Bobby Ryan’s disappearance] so why lie about Ardmore? ‘Why on earth would you turn around and say: “I didn’t go to Ardmore”? When every other element of her private life and her most intimate details were exposed?’ He admitted the jury ‘would have to acknowledge’ that ‘Mary Lowry did engage again with Pat Quirke’ after Mr Moonlight disappeared for good on June 3, 2013. Whether she had ever been to the Cliff House Hotel, it was for them to decide. He also urged them not to lose sight of the fact of why they were all in the courtroom. ‘I want to recalibrate the
‘Through the central area of the case... nothing’ ‘A man who very dearly loved his children’
case,’ he said with his foot on the bench beside him, his reading glasses in one hand. ‘It may well be we have lost somebody in this trial. It may be we have lost focus in terms of what we are doing here.’
Fundamentally, he said, this case was about a man who was ‘living a quiet and peaceful and content life in a small village, a man who loved his job, a man who loved music, a man who loved to dance, who loved his girlfriend and who very dearly loved his two children’.
‘It is about a man who loved life, about a man who was universally loved and liked,’ Mr Bowman said of Mr Ryan. ‘This case is about the fact that Bobby Ryan’s life was taken. Who would want to take the life of such a man?
‘To strip him naked of his worldly possessions and his dignity and leave his body to decompose in a sealed chamber on a farm in Fawnagown?’
He ended by telling the jury that Pat Quirke was guilty of murdering Bobby Ryan on June 3, 2011. He said there was no ‘other rational hypothesis consistent with the evidence that has been laid painstakingly for the last 12 or 13 weeks’.
‘There is no doubt that the only verdict that is available is one of guilty of murder.’
The case continues on Monday.