Ashling’s murder makes us stare pure evil in face
ASHLING Murphy’s murder shocked and terrified the country. No sooner had the bare facts of her brutal end unfolded than the pretty schoolteacher came to symbolise the entire spectrum of violence against women – from the fear that can paralyse us if we hear a sudden footfall in an underground car park at night to the depressing catalogue of domestic abuse experienced by women at home.
Ashling’s murder triggered a national outpouring of grief with vigils around the country and also a wave of anger at how despite equality and social progress, women are still vulnerable to male violence.
Murders in broad daylight in frenzied attacks by strangers are rare occurrences – most women are killed by their partners or family members. Yet the random nature of Ashling’s attack occurring after school on a harmless towpath outside Tullamore when lots of people are out and about seemed to strike people at a primal level.
It prompted bouts of soul searching about how society might address toxic masculinity and if ‘good’ men should take a more active role in keeping the streets safe.
The swift arrest of Jozef Puska and the unanimous verdict reassures us that the wheels of justice are fine tuned to deal with dangerous predators. Yet the facts of the case are scarcely a cause for consolation.
For while we know that Ashling was mercilessly stabbed repeatedly and all about Puska’s attempted escape and confession, we don’t know why he killed her.
There is no motive for his heinous crime. It was not a sex crime, although he seems to have been prowling around women solely on that awful day.
It was not a crime of vengeance. Pushka was well set up in his adopted country with a nice house for his five children and welfare supports to tide him over when a back injury put him out of work.
He’s not a loner and his family supported him during his trial.
Local gossip has him down as a nasty piece of work but not a potentially vicious killer. It’s as if he was going about his business and something flipped a switch in him. Inexplicable.
Mr Justice Tony Hunt said ‘we have evil in this room’. Evil is a vanishingly rare concept today when criminality usually seems kindled by a life of disadvantage or a scarred childhood and diluted by mitigating circumstances like trauma or mental illness.
We don’t usually think of criminals, even murderers as intrinsically evil. We hunt for clues in their background to explain but not excuse their crimes. Meanwhile, the concept of evil remains elusive, a throwback to biblical times or weaponised by evangelical Christians like the Burke family for their own ends.
The vicious murder of Imelda Riney and her little son Liam in Co. Clare in 1994 seemed disquietingly random until it emerged that Brendan O’Donnell had psychiatric problems, a wretched childhood and lived rough close to where Imelda lived.
Like Ashling Murphy, nurse Bridie Gargan was in the wrong place at the wrong time when she was bludgeoned to death by Malcolm MacArthur in the Phoenix Park inn 1982. But MacArthur wanted Bridie to give him her car so he could rob a bank. He had motive, even if he was an unhinged psychopath.
Both O’Donnell and MacArthur also murdered men, O’Donnell shot Fr Joe Walsh and MacArthur killed farmer Donal Dunne.
The presence of motives, madness or personal mayhem in the narratives of blood curdling murders lessens their impact on us and allows us ignore the possibility of pure evil.
The terrifying and disturbing power of Ashling’s tragic end is that it forces us to stare it right in the face, and to wonder when it might strike again.