A Joe Dolan hit show, an extra-marital affair and the killing of Mr Moonlight
As a Tipperary farmer stands trial for murder, a crowded court hears of ‘sleazy’ trysts, a ‘stolen’ passport and letters to agony aunts
‘Some of it I’m ashamed of but I’ve bared my soul’
IT was the third day of a gruelling cross-examination in the so-called ‘Mr Moonlight murder trial’, and Mary Lowry, largely composed and assured until now, was evidently feeling the pressure.
A key witness in the trial of Patrick Quirke, her former lover, for the murder of her subsequent partner, Bobby Ryan, otherwise known as DJ Mr Moonlight, she sighed before answering some of the questions put to her by the defence counsel.
Most notably when Bernard Condon SC, for Mr Quirke, asked had she ever been to the ‘swanky’ Cliff House Hotel in Ardmore, Co. Waterford?
‘No I don’t know it,’ the 52-year-old said. ‘I can’t remember it.’
There followed a prolonged silence, before a receipt with her email address on it, flashed up on screens around the courtroom.
The receipt, which had been provided by the hotel, showed a charge of €347 for a ‘gourmet package’ at the five-star venue in September 2011, under the name of Mr Quirke.
The date on the receipt was three months after the disappearance of Mr Ryan, whose remains were discovered almost two years later, on April 30, 2013, in a slurry or run-off tank at Ms Lowry’s farm at Fawnagown, Co. Tipperary. Mr Quirke has pleaded not guilty to the murder of Mr Ryan, 52, on a date between June 3, 2011, and April 2013.
Still Ms Lowry said she didn’t know ‘how that had happened’.
She said she did not remember ever being in the hotel or in the village of Ardmore.
‘You don’t remember this plush hotel with a beautiful view out over the sea? he asked.
She replied that she didn’t, and that the seaside resort she usually went to was Tramore.
The courtroom screens went momentarily blank before a statement from Ms Lowry’s current account flashed up. It showed that she had appeared to pay the bill for the overnight stay at the hotel, a total of €416.20.
‘I have no recollection of that,’ she told the jury after peering at the screen. ‘Then how did it happen? asked Mr Condon. ‘I am trying to think,’ she answered. ‘I suppose Mr Quirke did have a key to my house and he did have access to my computer… I don’t know… stranger things have happened.’
‘The jury can draw their own conclusions about you,’ replied Mr Condon.
For most of the week, it had been standing room only in Court 13 of Dublin’s Criminal Courts, where Judge Eileen Creedon on one occasion had to remind spectators to stop chattering among themselves.
Retired people, schoolchildren in their uniforms, neighbours and friends of the deceased and two women laden with shopping bags from one of Dublin’s bigger department stores jostled three deep at times to hear Ms Lowry – in her own words – ‘bare her soul’.
‘SORDID’ RELATIONSHIP
Over three days on the stand, most of it under intense cross-examination, she revealed the story of how she began an affair with Patrick Quirke, of Breanshamore, Co. Tipperary, in 2008 after the death of her husband, Martin, from cancer, having been left a widow with three young children.
Mr Quirke had been Martin Lowry’s good friend and was married to Mr Lowry’s sister, Imelda, who accompanied her husband to court every day this week.
After Ms Lowry’s husband’s death, Mr Quirke had offered the widow advice and support, and she leased him 63 acres of the farm she had been left at Fawnagown, near Tipperary town.
Eventually they started to meet for sex twice a week, but she claimed she had never enjoyed it and the affair made her feel ‘sleazy and sordid’.
She ended the affair, and soon afterwards she met lorry driver Bobby Ryan, aka part-time DJ ‘Mr Moonlight’. She told the court she felt her ‘luck had finally changed’.
That was until his disappearance just prior to the June Bank Holiday weekend of 2011 when he left her house to go to work and never arrived. Details of their relationship – small, intimate and the kind nobody else was ever supposed to hear – were laid before the court.
They included the sex they had on the morning that he left her house for the last time, the time he danced with another woman, leaving Ms Lowry ‘raging’, and causing the couple to row and him to end their relationship briefly.
And there was the time that he confided to her that he was so distraught over his separation from his wife that he had considered taking his life. Rejecting repeated accusations from Mr Condon that she was twisting facts or even lying, Ms Lowry repeatedly stated, ‘I’m telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’ At one point, she reminded the jury that it was not she who was on trial. She added: ‘I have bared my soul in my statement, my absolute soul. I have told everything in my whole life. Some of it, I am ashamed of, but I have put everything in to try solve this case.’ She painted a picture of Mr Quirke as a ‘controlling’ man who had turned on her after she ended their relationship. On one occasion, she said, he had ‘appeared out of nowhere’ in her garden and shouted at her.
THE WASHING LINE
In September 2012, she was preparing to take her family to Spain for a wedding when her passport, which had been on the kitchen table, went missing. She had to rearrange the trip and confronted Mr Quirke about the missing passport. She said he told her he had sold it and made money from it. She described how she had reported him to the gardaí after he was caught on a CCTV system she had installed, apparently prowling around the outside of her house.
Despite the crowds packed into the courtroom, there was absolute silence as CCTV footage aired in court showed Mr Quirke drive into Ms Lowry’s yard in his pick-up in December 2012. It even showed the Lowrys’ dog running to greet him, wagging his tail.
The footage showed Mr Quirke in wellington boots and a boiler suit peering in the windows of the house and also approaching Ms Lowry’s washing line, before appearing to handle an item of clothing there.
She told the court she gave Mr Quirke notice to quit his lease on the land, and he arranged to lease land from neighbours John and Mary Dillon.
The next time Ms Lowry met him after the CCTV incident she told him: ‘You are some c**t and I can’t wait to see the back of you. I hope you won’t be stealing Mary Dillon’s knickers off her line.’
THE LETTER TO A NEWSPAPER
Throughout most of the evidence heard this week, Mr Quirke sat impassive in the dock dressed in the same grey suit with a mauve or grey shirt and a dark tie.
The only time he appeared to betray emotion was when a letter he had allegedly written to Sunday Independent agony aunt Patricia Redlich was read to the court.
As the prosecution counsel Michael Bowman read the text, Mr Quirke’s eyes watered, while Ms Lowry stared straight ahead with her back to him.
Mr Quirke’s wife, Imelda, who was sitting on a bench at the back of the courtroom, could only stare at the floor as the letter was read out as it was published in February 2011.
‘I’ve made a right mess of my life and I need help on how to go forward,’ the letter began.
‘It all started four years ago, when my best friend died. This man was also my wife’s cousin and a close family friend. He left a wife and a young family after him. I coped by throwing myself into doing all I could for my friend’s wife and children. There was much sorting out to do in relation to his business. Unfortunately, this led to an affair with his wife, and I fell deeply in love with her.’
The letter went on: ‘Unfortunately, while I love [my wife], I am not in love with her. I’m still in love with my ex-lover even though I accept that the affair is over. I wish I wasn’t, and wish I could transfer the feelings I have for her back to my wife. ‘How do I begin to rebuild my life?’ The newspaper agony aunt’s response to the letter was not relayed to the court.
As her evidence drew to a close on Friday, Ms Lowry, dressed in a smart, sleeveless black and white patterned top and black trousers, told the court that Mr Quirke had ‘crawled back into her life and pretended to be her friend’ after Mr Ryan’s disappearance in June 2011.
THE NIGHT AT THE THEATRE
Reluctantly, she admitted that she had travelled to Dublin for a night in a hotel with Mr Quirke in the months following Bobby Ryan’s disappearance because she felt under pressure.
However, she said she remembered little of the evening in Fitzpatrick’s Hotel in Killiney, Co. Dublin, because she got drunk as she ‘felt scared’.
However, she was sure that they had not had sex that night.
‘I woke up with very bad pain in my head,’ she said.
She said she couldn’t remember whether she attended a show, The Night Joe Dolan’s Car Broke Down, in the Olympia the night before.
‘It mustn’t have been very good, I don’t remember it,’ she said.
Mr Condon conceded, ‘It’s not something I’ve seen myself.’
THE MISSING POSTERS
She admitted that she asked gardaí to take down ‘Missing Persons’ posters featuring Mr Ryan, which had been placed outside her house on the first anniversary of the DJ’s disappearance, as her boys felt intimidated by them.
Defence counsel Mr Condon asked her if that was not ‘astonishingly insensitive to Mr Ryan’s family who had placed them there?
‘No, my boys were upset,’ Ms Lowry said. ‘I had to protect them. We had spent days putting up posters in other places.
‘It was like they (Mr Ryan’s family) were trying to say that I had something to do with the man being missing.’
Concluding his cross-examination, Mr Condon said the reason Ms Lowry said she could not remember going to the Ardmore Hotel was because she was refusing to accept that she had gone back to Mr Quirke after Mr Ryan’s disappearance.
Ms Lowry replied: ‘I did no such thing. I spent every waking day trying to think what happened to Bobby Ryan.’
The trial continues and is expected to conclude in the second week of March.