MARTA HERDA MURDER TRIAL CONTINUES ‘I SCREAMED HIS NAME BUT I KNEW THERE WAS NO AIR’

‘She asked was I OK, had I got home,’ he said. ‘She was looking for me.’

He said there was loud music where she was and that he figured she was in her car.

‘She seemed a bit upset and confused,’ he said. ‘I just didn’t understand why she was looking for me.’

He said she didn’t answer when he asked why she was in her car or where she was, so he said goodnight and hung up.

He said that he continued to see her after the incident, but that she didn’t like it when he began ignoring her and focussing on his new female flatmate a few months later.

‘She cried a few times on the phone,’ he said. ‘She said she was going to have some feelings that she never said before.’

He agreed with the defence that Mr Orsos had once followed them as far as Wicklow and that he had parked in front of them at Tesco and just looked at them on another occasion.

He confirmed that he had told gardaí that Mr Orsos had been stalking her, but that she had refused his help in sorting it. He didn’t think she wanted men to be aggressive with him. Herda’s garda interviews were read to the Central Criminal Court, where it was revealed that she told gardaí that Csaba Orsos was dead because of his love for her.

Ms Herda and Mr Orsos, who both worked at BrookLodge Hotel in Aughrim, had been in Ms Herda’s car when it went into the water at South Quay in Arklow on the morning of March 26, 2013. Ms Herda escaped at the harbour but Mr Orsos’s body was found on a nearby beach later that day.

Detective Sergeant Fergus O’Brien on Thursday that he arrested Ms Herda at her home on August 2, 2013. He and a colleague then interviewed her at Wicklow Garda Station.

He said they asked her if she had known there were ladders on the harbour wall, but she said she didn’t remember how she got out of the water.

The statement of a man working at the harbour was put to her. He had described the speed of a car he heard as ‘pedal-tothestuff ’.

‘Yes, I was stressed and nervous,’ she said, when asked if the car was going fast.

‘I didn’t want to drive there. It was an accident,’ she said, explaining that they had been arguing in the car.

‘I couldn’t understand what he was saying and then, boom,’ she said, denying that she had driven into the water deliberately.

She was asked if she’d agree that she was driving recklessly.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ she replied. ‘I wouldn’t hurt anyone. I could have killed myself. I didn’t want to die. I have a family.’

She added later that she wanted to have children.

She said it would have been easier if the deceased was there to explain. ‘I wish he was still here,’ she said.

She said his attention was too much for her sometimes and she agreed that she was angry with him when she drove to the harbour that morning.

She was asked if he had shouted at her to stop. She said there was screaming in the car all the way from her house.