‘I found the attitude of Mary Lowry strange’
MURDER accused Patrick Quirke told gardaí that his former lover had a ‘couldn’t-care-less attitude’ about the disappearance of her boyfriend, Bobby Ryan.
He said he found the things Mary Lowry told him after Bobby Ryan went missing were ‘strange’ and ‘intriguing’, the Central Criminal Court heard.
In an interview taken on the day Mr Ryan’s remains were discovered, Mr Quirke also told gardaí that he was not jealous of Mary Lowry’s relationship with the DJ, though he admitted it was ‘probably true’ that he still had feelings for her.
During the interview, carried out at Tipperary Garda station, Mr Quirke was asked if he knew Mr Ryan.
Mr Quirke told gardaí he had met him three times – the first time at Hayes’s hotel in Thurles, the second at a social night in Clonmel when Mr Quirke and his wife, Imelda, went out with Mr Ryan and Mary Lowry and the third time was ‘just a chance meeting’ at the office in Killough Quarry.
Asked if he approved of the relationship between Mr Ryan and Mary Lowry, he said: ‘Well, I’m sure you know I had an affair with Mary Lowry. But I didn’t disapprove of it,’ he said, adding that there was ‘no animosity between me and Bobby Ryan’.
Gardaí asked him if that was the reason she had ended her relationship with Mr Quirke and he replied: ‘Possibly, yes.’ He added: ‘I don’t think we ever spoke about it candidly.’
Questioned as to whether the relationship had ended ‘good or bad’, Mr Quirke said it had been ‘mixed’, explaining that he had wanted to keep it ‘friendly’ as they were ‘family as such’. Mr Quirke was asked if he had been ‘jealous’ but said no.
‘You just took it on the chin,’ gardaí put it to him and Mr Quirke replied: ‘No,’ adding, ‘What else could I do but take it on the chin.’
Put to him that it ‘couldn’t have been easy to see her carrying on with Bobby Ryan’, Mr Quirke replied: ‘No more than it was for her to see me with my wife.’
He had never had a one-to-one conversation with Mr Ryan about Ms Lowry, he said, and they never
exchanged heated words. Asked if he had met Mr Ryan leaving Mary’s house on the morning he disappeared, Mr Quirke said he had not. Asked if he had known Mr Ryan’s body was in the underground tank all along, Mr Quirke replied: ‘No. These are nice questions, now, lads.’
Mr Quirke said that ‘like everyone’ he had ‘hunches’ about what had happened to Mr Ryan. ‘Everyone had notions, “Was he attacked? Did he leave for Spain?” I asked questions but found it strange,’ he said.
Ms Lowry had told him ‘different things’ since the disappearance of Mr Ryan, he said.
He found it ‘strange, then and now’ that she couldn’t tell if Mr Ryan had been ‘ten minutes or two minutes’ in the yard before he left the morning he disappeared. He also thought it was strange ‘how she found [Mr Ryan’s] van so quick, when she had travelled a route she knew he didn’t take. Mr Quirke has asked her how she could see the van from the road but Ms Lowry had told her that she didn’t and ‘just drove in’ to the wooded area.
‘I found it strange,’ he said and later said he found it ‘intriguing’. She had a ‘couldn’t-care-less attitude about it,’ he said.
He told gardaí that Ms Lowry had told him that she had a friend who worked in a shop who had a conversation with a sales rep who had passed the van that morning. Mr Quirke said he saw this information as a ‘breakthrough’. He said he told her to follow up on this line of inquiry but she didn’t do so. He also asked her numerous times about the movement of Mr Ryan’s vehicle at her home on the morning he disappeared.
‘I kept asking her on and off on different occasions and she was certain a car didn’t drive into the yard,’ he said. ‘I found this quite strange,’ he added.
‘These are nice questions, lads’