MURDERED FOR DRUGS DEBT HE DIDN’T OWE
Dealers were looking for another person
CRIME SCENE: Flats are cordoned off in city centre
debt which had been incurred by someone else.
But detectives are also looking into other theories including a “spur of the moment” row in the apartment or a personal grudge.
A source said: “He may well have been wrongly targeted over a particular drug debt but there is a range of things that gardai are looking into and are narrowing down at the moment.”
At the time of the body discovery, there were people present, while others came in and were interviewed by gardai.
Another source said: “There is a lot of difficulty in these cases as you are dealing with addicts who have serious issues. So there’s a major workload in deciphering between truth and fiction. There were also a number of people coming in and out of this apartment, so it’s about establishing who was there in the time his body lay there and also who was present when he was beaten.”
Dempsey was originally from New Road in Inchicore in Dublin and was not a resident of the flat his body was found in.
Charity Peter McVerry Trust confirmed that it managed the property under the Housing First programme for Dublin City Council.
The tenant was successfully accommodated in the property over eighteen months ago, it said.
But the charity stated that the tenancy began to break down over recent months, as the tenant was “struggling to manage the front door and individuals, who had no interest in the property or in the tenant, were gaining entry to the flat and were using the property.”
Client
Dempsey was not a client of the Peter McVerry Trust, but they knew of him and passed on condolences.
Dempsey had done various stints behind bars and had a long rap sheet of at least 50 convictions including 22 for road traffic offences, and others for theft, drugs, criminal damage and possession of knives and firearms.
As a youth, he was well-known to gardai in the Dublin city area.
In 2014, he was sentenced to two years over a vicious attack in Dublin’s south inner city in the previous year.
On that occasion, he and others beat a man with their fists before knifing him twice in the back.