LOVE RIVAL: ‘I DIDN’T THINK’ TO MENTION RUN-OFF TANK
During initial search, farmer ‘didn’t tell gardaí of container where he found body two years later’
Mr Quirke told gardaí he noticed a ‘plastic dummy or an inflatable doll’ as he drew water from the tank but then realised it was a body.
During a Garda interview after the discovery of the remains, he was asked why he hadn’t shown them the tank when the farm was searched two years earlier. ‘I didn’t think of it,’ he said. ‘I thought it was laughable to be emptying the slurry tank.’
Gardaí put it to him that this was Gardaí combed the farm Patrick Quirke was renting but failed to find a sign of DJ Bobby Ryan until Mr Quirke’s wife called them two years later to say her husband had found a body in the underground tank on the farm. A TIPPERARY farmer ‘didn’t think’ to tell a Garda search party about an underground tank where the body of the man he’s accused of murdering was found two years later, a court has heard.
because he knew there was a body in the tank, to which he replied: ‘No.’
Mr Quirke, 50, of Breanshamore, Co. Tipperary has pleaded not guilty to the murder of Mr Ryan, a DJ with the stage name Mr Moonlight, on a date between June 3, 2011 and April 2013. Mr Ryan’s body was found in a run-off tank on the farm leased by Mr Quirke from Mary Lowry at Fawnagown, Tipperary, in April 2013.
Prosecutors allege that Mr Quirke murdered Mr Ryan so he could return to his affair with Ms Lowry, 52.
Details from Mr Quirke’s interview were read to jurors yesterday. The Central Criminal Court heard that gardaí were alerted by Mr Quirke’s wife Imelda to the presence of a body in a tank on Ms Lowry’s farm on April 30, 2013. Inspector David Buckley told the court that he met Mr Quirke at the scene of the body’s discovery and asked him to accompany him to Tipperary Garda Station to make a voluntary statement. Mr Quirke agreed to go and did not want to speak to a solicitor.
In the interview, Mr Quirke detailed how he found the body, saying he was trying to empty a slurry tank and needed more water as the slurry was too thick. He knew water had been leaking into an underground tank beside the milking parlour, he said.
He had not opened this tank since 2008, he said, but knew it was there because the previous owner of the farm, Martin Lowry, told him about it. Two concrete slabs covered the tank so he prised one of them open using a shovel and put a suction pipe through the gap to draw whatever water was there.
He said that as the water was being sucked, he noticed what he thought was a plastic dummy or an inflatable doll in the tank. He turned off the pump and pulled off the second slab, which he said was easier to move. He said: ‘I could see clearly it was a body.’ He told gardaí he could see the pelvis and ‘what seemed to be the private area even though it looked to be face down’ – adding: ‘It was confusing.’
He was ‘shocked’, he said, and phoned his wife Imelda, who arrived, confirmed it was a body and phoned her friend, Garda Tom Neville. He said he called his wife rather than gardaí out of ‘instinct’ and because he wanted someone to confirm what he had seen. During the interview, Garda Buckley put it Mr Quirke that he was ‘fairly clean for a man doing a dirty job’.
Mr Quirke replied that he was ‘only getting into the dirty part of it’ when he made the discovery.
During cross examination by Bernard Condon SC, for the defence, Garda Buckley said that from his recollection there was ‘no dirt’ on Mr Quirke, on his hands or his clothing. Garda Buckley said he distinctly remembers looking
Told gardaí there were ‘two tanks’
at him up and down and noticing that there was no dirt.
During the interview on April 30, 2013, Mr Quirke also told gardaí that there were ‘two tanks on the farm’, one open and one closed. The open one usually had a lot of rain in it and if he needed water he usually got it from there, he said. On this occasion it was empty and he knew there would be water in the other tank.
Mr Quirke said that on the day Mr Ryan disappeared, he was on the farm at about 8.40am to let two bulls in with his cows.
He was going away for the weekend with his family and left a short time later, he said. Asked if he had been at the tank that day, Mr Quirke replied that he had not, nor did he see anyone else at the tank that day. ‘I was possibly only there half an hour that morning. We were going away. It was a case of get in and get out,’ he said.
The trial continues in front of Judge Eileen Creedon and a jury of six men and six women.