TWO FACES OF THE BLACK WIDOW
Catherine Nevin’s life was a complex web of contradictions: Callous, yet kind, prudish, yet vampish, she took IRA lovers but coveted the affection of gardaí. Read this gripping account from the author of the award-winning book on one of Ireland’s most not
‘POOR Catherine, whatever happened to her at all? She was so good for our girls,’ lamented the elderly nun from the Presentation Convent Kildare where the young Catherine Scully was remembered with fondness.
The Catherine they knew – a good, diligent student from a rural backwater – was a world away from Catherine Nevin, Ireland’s first known female contract killer, the woman who hired a gunman to execute her husband Tom. Since her conviction in April 2000, millions of words have been written about her but no one, apart from Catherine Nevin herself, knew what happened to turn her into a cold-blooded killer. Or what made this woman tick.
Women who kill usually do so in selfdefence or as a result of cumulative provocation by an abusive partner. This type of female killer, the kind society can just about comprehend, is rare enough. Women who trawl for hired killers are not even on the scale, which partly explains why Catherine Nevin has become something of an enigma, even in death, and why her name has become synonymous with the word ‘evil’. But what was it about Catherine Nevin that not only caused her to self-destruct but, by doing so, destroyed so many lives in the process?
Nothing in her early life or upbringing in a townland outside the village of Nurney hinted at the type of sociopathic behaviour that would later mark her out as a woman apart. The daughter of hard-working parents, her mother was a seamstress and her father a small farmer, she always worked for anything she wanted and never asked her parents, a close relative recalled.
But even then, Catherine had ambitions that would take her far beyond the confined world of a small village. She craved money and status; she liked men and she liked to be noticed.
Her first step along that road was to find a job in Dublin. She found one in the Castle Hotel where she was to meet former IRA chief of staff Cathal Goulding and some of the other republicans whose names would later feature in the murder trial. She began a relationship with Goulding – whom she frequently referred to as ‘my good friend’ – which spanned 16 years.
She was 21 when she met Tom Nevin, a 31-year-old barman from Galway, when he stayed at the hotel. He was married but in the process of getting an annulment. He also owned property, a house set in flats off South Circular Road in the heart of Dublin’s flatland. He had just bought another house and wanted his own pub and more property.
Catherine became the second Mrs Nevin at a ceremony in Rome in 1977. She set up the Catherine Scully Model Agency and Beauty Grooming School from Tom’s second house in Mayfield Road. She then began acquiring property in her own right. But the marriage was starting to unravel. A few years after she married, she began an affair with Willie McClean. A Northern Ireland man from the Unionist community, he was one of the men she would later ask to kill Tom. The affair lasted 18 months.
Financially, the Nevins were doing well but their marriage was a hellish one, marred by drink, her infidelities and violent incidents which ended with Tom being hospitalised on occasion and his stints in rehab.
Yet, throughout, Catherine Nevin acted like Queen Bee as the property buying spree continued.
From the time she met Tom she would arrive in Galway all glamour, the Nevin family recalled. Tom wanted to buy a pub in the west but Catherine was having none of it. Their first pub, the Barry House, was in a rough area of Finglas. It was there she met ex-Provo Gerry Heapes, the second man she would later ask to kill Tom.
For all of her adult life, Catherine was in awe of the hard men of the IRA. The fact some of her lovers were IRA men – yet she actively courted gardai and had a relationship with Wicklow garda inspector Tom Kennedy – is another clue to her contradictory and complex personality. ‘You could tell by the way men responded to Catherine that they were flattered. She made them feel she was interested in them as people. And they lapped it up,’ a former friend recalled.
When the couple bought Jack White’s pub in Wicklow, Catherine was in her element. But the affairs, the constant rows and lurid goings on continued. The ‘crib’ [snug] area of the pub was like something out of a French farce. On frequent occasions, staff would arrive in the morning and find Catherine’s underwear and men’s boxer shorts on the floor. On one occasion, Tom Nevin walked in to find his wife in bed with Willie McClean. McClean was mortified; Catherine just told Tom to close the door behind him.
Why Tom put up with this type of behaviour has never been explained. He was a retiring, slightly dour type; his wife the total opposite. Staff and customers recalled her sitting up at the bar with thigh-high slits in her skirt.
But Catherine Nevin made sure there was only one exhibitionist in Jack White’s – herself. Her rules on dress code for the female staff was positively prissy. She pinned the rules on a notice pinned to the wall in case they missed the point: ‘Skirts no more than one and a half inches above the knee.’
This mixture of outward exhibitionism versus old maid-ish, almost puritanical, regulations is another clue to the complex personality that was Catherine Nevin.
‘She reprimanded me shortly after my arrival about my dress,’ Ciara Tallon recalled. She was 19 at the time she began waitressing at the pub and, according to Catherine, her dress was too short. ‘I stayed clear of her. She was difficult to work for.’
The staff at Jack White’s had divided loyalties towards their former employer. Liz Hudson was a long-time staff member who enjoyed a good relationship with her. Liz knew Catherine more than most but even she couldn’t figure her out. ‘You can’t explain what kind of a person she was, she wasn’t affectionate but you could have a laugh with her sometimes.’ Others described how generous she was.
Janice Breen, who worked at the hair salon at Jack White’s, recalled
She craved money, status, men, and to be noticed
the kindness Catherine Nevin showed to her during a family bereavement. ‘She organised all the food, she wouldn’t take any money for it’. Breen said the Catherine Nevin the country knew from the trial was not the woman she knew. She questioned some reporters who said they had spoken to hundreds of people and found not one with a good word to say about Nevin. ‘Well I had. I would have, had I been asked.’ FROM 1989 to 1991, Catherine Nevin set about trying to find someone to kill her husband. Apart from McClean and Heapes, she approached another republican, John Jones. All three sent her packing but they never told Tom Nevin his wife was trawling for a hitman. Apart from the gardaí, this was one man who might gainfully have used this little nugget of information.
The motive for the murder appeared to be a mix of money and power. With Tom out of the way, she would have complete control of the pub and property and would be the beneficiary of two insurance policies on Tom’s life. By having her husband murdered, Catherine stood to become a millionaire.
Furthermore, a sudden dispatch would bring into effect the legal principle of accelerated inheritance; Tom had made no will and without one his wife would get everything. Meanwhile, back at Jack White’s, it was business as usual. Into this toxic mix stepped the judge from Arklow Donnchadh O’Buachalla. He quickly became a VIP, he had his own menu, his own seat in the conservatory. On some occasions, he would rest upstairs. At this stage, Wicklow was awash with rumours about an affair between the judge and the landlady of Jack White’s but they didn’t seem to take a feather out of Catherine.
Judge O’Buachalla’s role in transferring the pub licence into Catherine Nevin’s sole name in chambers – after Tom’s murder – led to the setting up of a tribunal of inquiry when this writer broke the story in Magill magazine. The judge would also take centre stage in the murder trial when he was asked if he had an ‘irregular sexual affair’ with Mrs Nevin after it emerged he had a set of keys
From the start, the People v Catherine Nevin was different. This was no ordinary domestic murder trial. This was a case of an assassin hired by a wife hell bent on control; a whodunit where nobody knew who pulled the trigger. It was a middle class murder in a nice area with the added whiff of corrupt goings-on.
Catherine Nevin turned up in court with a different hairstyle and outfit each day. She was like a visiting dramatist sitting side stage watching the main players come and go knowing she would soon take
‘She had a different hairstyle every day’
centre stage. She was subjected to intense scrutiny throughout the trial, leading to several orders by the trial judge preventing all ‘colour writing’ and comment for the duration of the trial,
But Catherine herself never seemed to care. The Press and Mrs Nevin was a two-faced theme. While her lawyers were fiercely defending her rights inside the court, unbeknownst to them, their client’s by now regular chats with Press photographer Brain Barron had led to the promise of pictures of herself and Tom on their last foreign holiday together.
‘Any time – just ask,’ she said when he thanked her for allowing him to take a snap.
Throughout the trial, Catherine spun a ‘happy marriage story’ and claimed the IRA killed Tom Nevin.
The jury sat through 42 days and 182 witnesses comprising over nine million spoken words. They deliberated
Catherine Nevin was clearly a fantasist
for a record five days. When the knock came from the jury room at 6.25pm, the registrar read out the verdict – guilty of three counts of soliciting to murder and one of murder. It was moments later when Catherine Nevin blinked. But for those seconds, there was not a stir. Then a tight, slightly cynical smile gathered around her mouth.
Afterwards, a prayer book lay discarded at the foot of the chair she had occupied. ‘I talk to God. He talks to Me,’ proclaimed the title. The book was new.
Her behaviour was so detached from the norm: lack of guilt, lack of conscience, pathological lying – traits that run down the spine of behavioural or personality disorders. She displayed all the signs of a ruthless sociopath and was undoubtedly a manipulator and an exhibitionist. She was described as evil in a plethora of publications but psychologists and others involved in human psychology argue that very few people are inherently evil. Speaking in a general context, Max Taylor, Professor of Applied Psychology at UCC said: ‘I’m reluctant to use words like “evil”, but people behave in a particularly bad way. She very coldly and calculatingly set about planning this terrible deed.’ Her exhibitionism and infamous capacity to have several lovers on the go at once can also be linked to the control factor. Catherine Nevin was clearly a fantasist but not all of what she said could be dismissed as a flight of fancy. Names of senior republicans, which were not in the public domain, were mentioned as acquaintances. After the trial, but before she was sentenced, her defence team presented the court with a letter from the DPP revealing Jack White’s had been on a list of pubs under investigation by the Garda Anti-Racketeering Unit in 1991 for suspected links with the IRA or IRA suspects, although it was later excluded. With her death last week, all hope of finding who killed Tom Nevin is now extinguished.
One of the suspects was thought to be Dutchy Holland, the man who shot Veronica Guerin.
Apart from the fact that he lived in Wicklow and was a known gun for hire, there is no evidence that it was Holland. When he was shot, Tom Nevin was sitting on the stool in the kitchen of the pub counting the takings. It was after midnight and the killer had to come 23 feet in the room before pulling the gun.
There was a range of kitchen knives at arm’s length yet Tom Nevin never moved off the stool, which suggested he knew the person coming towards him.
In the weeks and months following the trial, I was often asked if I believed Catherine Nevin was guilty. My response then was the same as it is now: Catherine Nevin received a scrupulously fair trial, the jury considered the verdict in great detail and at great length.
And they returned a verdict in accordance with the evidence.
She had a scrupulously fair trial
THIS article contains interiews carried out by Liz Walsh and Rita O’Reilly for the book The People Vs Catherine Nevin