Herda’sappealagainsther murderconvictionrejected
had a ‘mortal fear’ of water and of water getting into his ears.
He said Herda made contact with Mr Orsos on the morning in question. She ‘ lured’ him into her car and minutes later he’s at the bottom of the estuary in Arklow, he said.
‘Anything after that was an attempt to explain away the inexplicable.’
Mr Grehan said there was a very short interval – around 15 minutes – between the last of Herda’s three phone conversations with Mr Orsos that morning and the moment she was seen running, soaking wet, up the harbour ‘shouting rape’. During the trial it was noted by Mr Ó Lideadha that there was no suggestion she had been raped.
Mr Grehan said she was ‘caught out on lies’ in terms of the contact she had with Mr Orsos and how he got into her car. Furthermore, she had a ‘ very convenient loss of memory’ in terms of how the car ended up in the river.
He said there was a low point in the trial when one of the witnesses who had given evidence of hearing a woman shouting rape was recalled ‘expressly on Ms Herda’s instructions’ to ‘put her character on the stand’.
He said Herda did not give evidence herself but the jury saw ‘ hours and hours’ of her garda interviews. The jury could see, he said, what her ‘use and command’ of the English language was. She was very articulate, Mr Grehan said, and it was difficult to write down everything she said because of the ‘manner of her delivery’.
Her first statement to Gardai taken on the day – when the event was perceived to have been a terrible accident where somebody drowned – Herda gave the impression Mr Orsos was some kind of ‘ stalker’ or somebody who was giving her unwanted attention.
In her second statement, she said she knew Mr Orsos to be a ‘Hungarian gypsy’ and that she knew ‘ how they are with women’. They ‘ keep them (women) in one room for a month. I thought he might take me,’ she stated.
The whole import of the statement was to cast Mr Orsos as somebody pursuing her and giving her unwanted attention, Mr Grehan said.