Father often beat her mother, daughter tells murder trial

THE DAUGHTER of a woman accused of murdering her husband of 32 years at their Co Laois home has told the trial her earliest memory…

THE DAUGHTER of a woman accused of murdering her husband of 32 years at their Co Laois home has told the trial her earliest memory is of seeing her father point a shotgun at her mother and threaten to “blow her head off”.

Taking the witness stand on day two of the trial, Linda Burke said she agreed with everything her mother had said in her Garda statements, and that it was true her father had beaten her mother throughout the marriage.

Ms Burke told the Central Criminal Court she recalled an evening when she was 13, when her father had hit her mother over the head with a sweeping brush.

“He split her forehead open, but he prevented me from getting an ambulance and I just had to tend to it myself,” she said. She added she herself had been badly beaten by him once when aged six because she made a mistake when learning how to tell the time.

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Ms Burke said she remembered her mother, Anne Burke, described a buzzing in her head she couldn’t get rid of in the hours before she assaulted her husband.

Mrs Burke (56), of Ballybrittas in Co Laois, has admitted hitting her husband Pat Burke (55) over the head with a hammer while he slept, but denies murdering him at their home on August 19th, 2007.

Afterwards she wrote a suicide note to her four children, and cut her wrists. Her youngest son found her and bandaged her arms.

Mrs Burke’s defence claims she was suffering from a mental disorder at the time and that the case is one of diminished responsibility.

Giving evidence for the defence, Dr Harry Kennedy, a psychiatrist attached to the Central Mental Hospital, told the jury Mrs Burke had a severe depressive episode at the time of Pat Burke’s killing.

He said he was satisfied that “at the relevant time, she was suffering from a mental disorder which caused her to have a diminished ability to think clearly or concentrate”. Mrs Burke was clearly suicidal, he told the court, suffering from low self-esteem and a lack of confidence.

During interviews with Mrs Burke, Dr Kennedy said she described her marriage as “rows, beatings, lots of clouts, swelled lips and black eyes”. She told him her husband would try to strangle her, but he would “deny it all in the morning”. She recalled how once when she was pregnant with her son he kicked her in the stomach.

She said he told her if she did anything to him, she would be brought to the Dublin mountains and never heard of again.

A psychiatrist giving evidence for the prosecution, Dr Damien Moran, said he was satisfied Mrs Burke’s disorder was “of such severity to diminish substantially her responsibility for the act”.

When detectives asked whether it was her intent to kill him, she said: “Of course not, it wasn’t like it was me . . . I wish I could turn back the clock.”

Mrs Burke said she recalled hitting him once or twice. When they told her the postmortem showed he had been hit at least 23 times, she said: “I don’t remember that, I don’t know how it’s possible, I just don’t.”

The jury of eight men and four women are expected to retire to consider their verdict today.