‘I am sorry I hurt your mam. I did not mean to. She was lashing out at me with a hurl’
Daughter of murder victim told gardaí her partner admitted to violent altercation
PATRICIA O’Connor’s daughter told gardaí that her partner had admitted hurting her mother after Ms O’Connor lashed out at him with a hurley, the Central Criminal Court has heard.
Louise O’Connor said Kieran Greene wept as he admitted fighting with her mother, and said he had to hand himself in as he ‘could not live’ with what he had done.
She also told how her mother was ‘extremely hard to live with’ and how she was ‘constantly screaming and arguing’.
Kieran Greene is alleged to have murdered 61-year-old retired hospital worker Patricia O’Connor, and to have scattered her dismembered body parts across the Wicklow Mountains. Mr Greene, 34, formerly of Mountainview Park, Rathfarnham, Dublin, has pleaded not guilty to the crime, which was said to have taken place at that same address on May 29, 2017.
Louise O’Connor and her daughter, Stephanie, as well as Louise’s former partner Keith Johnston, have pleaded not guilty to impeding the prosecution of Mr Greene.
In her voluntary witness statement, made on June 12, 2017, Louise O’Connor said Kieran had recently become increasingly stressed, before he finally ‘lost it’.
In the statement, which was read to the jury by prosecuting counsel Róisín Lacey, she said: ‘He was crying, hugging the kids and saying, “If you do anything wrong, you have to face up to it.”’
She continued: ‘He said, “I am sorry I hurt your mam. I did not mean to. She was lashing out at me with the hurl. I took the hurl off her. The next thing we were on the floor. I don’t know what happened. I panicked. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”’
Louise O’Connor continued: ‘I did not know what to think. I thought it was a sick joke. He said he had to hand himself in, that he could not live with this.’
She said she was stunned, and asked where it happened. He said the row happened in the bathroom of the house they all shared in Mountainview Park, after Patricia O’Connor had returned after earlier storming out, Louise said. She said Mr Greene had called his parents, and then gone to the Garda station, where he told gardaí he had killed and dismembered his ‘mother-in-law’.
Earlier in her statement, Louise had told gardaí about her family life. She said she had lived at Mountainview Park all her life. She said her mother had left when Louise was just five or six, when the relationship with Louise’s father, Gus O’Connor, ended.
Patricia O’Connor moved back in around 16 years ago, and lived there ever since, she said. Also in the house were Louise’s five children, her partner of ten years, Kieran Greene, and her father.
Louise said her mother had retired the previous year from her job at Beaumont Hospital, and that she had since been ‘extremely hard to live with’. She continued: ‘On the day she left the house [May 29], she had been really bad. She was always angry. She was constantly screaming, and arguing about stupid things.’
Louise said she had asked her for a receipt for her pension, so she could apply for a medical card for her father, but that Patricia O’Connor had refused. She said there was another row after an insurance assessor called about an accident Mr Greene had had in her mother’s car the week before.
‘She went mad. She tried to hit me with a teapot,’ she recalled. ‘This abuse was a regular thing.’
Louise told gardaí that her mother had smoked cannabis, and had run out of the drug, as had her regular supplier.
‘I refused to get her some, and that annoyed her too,’ she said.
Louise said that at 7pm that day, she took her children to the park for two hours. She said her father
‘He said she had got worse’
joined them there. When she and the children returned home – her father remaining at the park – she said Mr Greene opened the door, shaking and looking stressed.
‘He said she had got worse, that she had been like a raving lunatic,’ she told gardaí.
She recalled how Mr Greene said he had been having a shower, and had not locked the door properly. He said Patricia O’Connor had started screaming at him.
Patricia had then stormed downstairs, screaming that she couldn’t go to the toilet in her own house, and that the men in the house were a ‘pathetic excuse for men’, Louise said.
She said she heard her mother banging around downstairs, and then the front door slamming. She said she looked out, and saw her mother ‘well up the road’.
She said the last thing her mother had shouted was: ‘I’ll be back when that ba ***** pops his clogs and I get what’s mine.’
That night, Louise said, she slept in an upstairs bedroom with two of her children, while Mr Greene slept on the couch. She said she did not wake all night.
In the morning, she said Mr Greene was already painting the bathroom. He explained that he wanted to get a few jobs done before her mother got back, and she accepted this, she said.
She said her former partner, and father of two of her children, Keith Johnston, was helping. They got on well, she said. She said the family had reported her mother missing on June 1, as they had become worried about her.
The trial continues today before Judge Paul McDermott and a jury.