Serial killer in bid for freedom
Court hears two men admitted same crime
SERIAL killer Mark Nash has launched an extraordinary appeal against his conviction for the ‘cold case’ murders of two women.
Nash was found guilty in 2015 of murdering Sylvia Sheils, 59, and Mary Callanan, 61, in north Dublin in 1997.
The mutilated bodies of the two victims were found in sheltered accommodation in Grangegorman 20 years ago. The disturbing double killing became known as the ‘Grangegorman murders’.
The 44-year-old, who is originally from England but has last addresses at Prussia Street and Clonliffe Road in Dublin, had pleaded not guilty at the Central Criminal Court to the double murders between March 6 and March 7, 1997.
A jury found Nash unanimously guilty after a 48-day trial and he was accordingly given the mandatory life sentence by Judge Carroll Moran on April 20, 2015.
Nash had already been serving life since October 1998 for murdering two people in Ballintober, Castlerea, Co. Roscommon, and leaving a woman seriously injured in mid-August 1997. The four murders were committed within the space of five months.
Opening an appeal against his conviction for the Grangegorman murders yesterday, his lead senior counsel, Hugh Hartnett SC, told the Court of Appeal that it was an ‘extraordinary and unusual case’ because another man, the now-deceased Dean Lyons, had ‘confessed’ to the murder not only in custody but to his parents and various other people.
A short time later, Mr Hartnett said, Nash – who was in detention on foot of the Roscommon double killing – admitted to having carried out the Grangegorman murders five months earlier. This led to a very difficult situation for the gardaí and Director of Public Prosecutions, Mr Hartnett said.
It sent a ‘tremor’ through Garda Headquarters that two people were confessing to the same murders, the court heard.
Mr Hartnett said Lyons subsequently died in Strangeways Prison in the UK and a prosecution was no longer in a position to proceed.
He said a jacket, which had been seized from Nash’s home during the investigation, was tested and no blood staining or anything of that nature was found.
He said there were two main planks to the prosecution’s case: The admissions made by Nash and forensic evidence.
He said the trial was ‘blighted’ by late disclosures and a lot of evidence only emerged from cross-examination. It emerged during crossexamination that the victims’ bed clothing had been brushed down in the same room the jacket was forensically examined six weeks later.
He said the Forensic Science Laboratory agreed that there was a risk of contamination but that it was low.
He said the trial judge failed to deal with the complexities of the contamination issue without properly addressing the controversies.
He added it was unfair to allow the prosecution to proceed in view of delays, the death and loss of various witnesses, and, in particular, the death of Dean Lyons.
Mr Hartnett said Mr Lyons had been interviewed by two gardaí before his death and was never asked about how he had significant knowledge of the crime, such as details of the scene and how the women had been stabbed.
The appeal case continues in the three-judge Court of Appeal.