Murder on Ireland’s Eye – or just a tragic accident?
Now, the subject of a riveting new book, Mary Carr revisits the mystery that shocked a nation
On September 6, 1852, a mysterious death occurred on Ireland’s Eye – the tiny uninhabited island off Howth harbour – that scandalised the country, triggered moral outrage not to mention an all-out newspaper war between Ireland and England that played into anti-Irish stereotypes and prejudices about our flawed national character.
Sarah Maria Louisa Kirwan, or Maria as she was called, died while on a day trip to Ireland’s Eye. Maria, a good-looking woman, had been boarding in the village of Howth, a favourite holiday spot for the Dublin gentry, along with her husband, painter William Burke Kirwan.
A hastily arranged inquest where James Alexander Hamilton, a medical student with no pathological experience, gave evidence ruled the death an accidental drowning while bathing – but it was not long before the revelation of William’s double life forced Maria’s exhumation and his arrest for murder.
A sensational court case followed that brought the country to a standstill and delivered a verdict whose damning words are etched in Maria’s gravestone in Glasnevin Cemetery: ‘murdered by her husband on Ireland’s Eye’.
LIVED PART OF THE WEEK WITH HIS MISTRESS AND THEIR CHILDREN
In this contemporary and meticulous reappraisal of the events and evidence surrounding the gripping tragedy, journalist Dean Ruxton examines the Crown’s case to see if it stands the test of time, ultimately casting doubt over the verdict that saw Burke Kirwan face the gallows for murder before his sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life.
Ruxton shows how from the very beginning the cards were stacked against the devious and high-handed Burke Kirwan who, it later emerged, had a mistress called Teresa Kenny and a large brood of children with whom he lived part of the week in a house on Sandymount Avenue.
To Victorian sensibilities this shocking violation of the era’s strict social and sexual code was enough to convict him.
It gave Burke Kirwan an unshakeable motive for doing away with his genteel wife, despite Teresa’s testimony that she and Maria were always aware of the other’s place in the prisoner’s affections.
But even as poor Maria’s body was wrapped in the sheet that was to become a key piece of evidence during the trial – the Crown relying on it for its contention that William used it to strangle his wife in the water – and her body brought ashore from the island, gossip was beginning to swirl.
Fisherman John Barrett who lived beside the east pier – and was the first person summoned to assist the bedraggled return party of Burke Kirwan and the boatmen originally hired to bring the couple home from their outing – was adamant that he had heard shouting and screams from the island that evening.
Other locals reported similar acoustics coming from the island and concluded that Maria, who was found lying on her back, her bathing costume pulled up around her waist, at a part of the island known as Long Hole, had had a violent end.
Suspicions were also heightened by whisperings about the Kirwan marriage. The washerwoman who did Maria’s laundry while she was on holiday; locals who spoke to investigators, and indeed Mrs Campbell, their landlady in Howth who gave conflicting evidence about the state of the couple’s 12year marriage, claimed that Maria lived in fear of her husband because she could not give him children and had bruises and a limp to show for his brutal tyranny.
But before second-hand rumours about the Kirwan marriage became common currency, Maria’s body was carried from the harbour on a dray up to her lodgings in the village whereupon her husband took charge.
Heedless to advice that Maria’s battered body should not be tampered with before the inquest, he insisted that she was cleaned up. The women who tended to the remains in the fading light noted that Maria’s eyelids and face were scratched, while blood poured from a cut on her breast and her ear. They were sorry for the young women who had endeared herself to the community on her regular rambles over Howth Head and was an accomplished and fearless swimmer. They had noticed how she spent days on end alone, her husband doing business in the city and coming back to Howth on the late train.
But while William returned to his residence on Upper Merrion Street the day after the inquest, he was not to be at liberty for long. The local constable had suspicions which he shared with coroner Henry Davis, who also had a visit from a Maria Byrne, the Kirwans’ neighbour with an address on Merrion Street Lower.
Maria Byrne claimed that Maria had told her that her cruel husband had tried to poison her and that he had another family in Dublin. Burke Kirwan was subsequently arrested while Teresa Kenny and a sick child, which the lady identified as his, were discovered in his home.
The trial, which took place in Green Street courthouse in December 1852, was such a huge sensation that crowds blocked the streets.
The packed courtroom fixed its attention on Burke Kirwan, an elegantly dressed gentlemen who remained cool and composed in the dock until the final words of his death sentence when he suddenly dropped his head into his hands and emitted a low anguished moan.
His defence team was headed by the formidable Isaac Butt who argued that all the evidence was consistent with accidental drowning. Indeed, Butt used the divisive case when forming his Court of Appeal Bill.
The cuts and marks on Maria’s corpse could have been made by the green crab found in Howth waters. There were no traces of violence on her body consistent with her having fought for her life against a strangler.
Butt argued forcefully that the investigation was botched; that evidence from key witnesses was withheld, and that other witnesses, such as Dr George Hatchell who examined the body when it was exhumed 31 days after the death, were practically coached to find the defendant guilty.
He built a powerful defence for Burke Kirwan showing flaws in the prosecution’s case, particularly their failure to ask the pathologist Dr Hatchell if he would be able to identify the cause of death from the body’s appearance alone. The pathologist originally said that the state of Maria’s body was compatible with either drowning or strangulation but he coloured his interpretation later to support the cause of murder.
As Butt put it, the prosecution wanted, ‘an opinion, combined with the officious zeal and suggestions of the constabulary officers and the agents of the Crown solicitors who brought him down Ireland’s Eye to tutor and instruct him’.
The jury was asked to consider if the screams reported as coming from Ireland’s Eye after 7pm on September 6, 1852, were the cries of a drowning person requiring help or of a person suffering from violence.
The jury was also asked if Maria, an experienced swimmer, fell on the rock after an epileptic fit (it was mentioned at trial that her father Lieutenant James Crowe died from that affliction and that she may have also suffered from seizures) or whether the tide
threw her on the rock. They were reminded how Maria’s own mother testified that her son-in-law was an exemplary husband.
Dean Ruxton paints a vivid picture of Victorian Dublin society with its rigid hierarchy of figures drawn into the tragedy from humble fishermen and cleaners to the illustrious former Lord Eglinton, the then lord lieutenant, who, years after the trial, told the House of Lords that he felt compelled to grant Burke Kirwan’s commutation to penal servitude after the judges who tried him were swayed by trial evidence.
The decision Ruxton argues is one of the compelling questions that, more than 170 years later, still hang over the case. If there was a reasonable doubt over the conviction, then Burke Kirwan should by rights have walked free, not received the compromise sentence of 27 years spent between Spike Island and Bermuda.
Ruxton’s painstaking recreation of the court case, the lacunae in various testimonies, conflicting accounts from witnesses who changed their minds about what they saw from inquest to courtroom and convoluted points of evidence may demand more attention than the average reader expects to give.
But as a real-life murder mystery recovered from the mists of time and perhaps now deserving the title of a miscarriage of justice, the book stands as a gripping whodunnit, based on an extraordinary episode in Irish criminal history.
Ruxton concludes that while the Crown ‘likely’ got it wrong and that the prosecution did not prove its case, no one can say with certitude that Burke Kirwan had no hand or part in his wife’s death. On his release he sailed to America via Queenstown, where it was thought he joined his children and their mother who he hoped to marry.
Nothing was ever heard of Bloody Billy
Burke Kirwan again.
WERE CUTS ON MARIA’S CORPSE MADE BY THE LOCAL GREEN CRAB?