It was a dreadful sequence of events which led to the arrest of Wayne O'Donoghue just under a year ago, writes Barry Roche, Southern Correspondent, in Cork.Background
It was the moment which crystalised all the pain of the previous 11 days. Midleton priest Fr Billy O'Donovan was saying the funeral Mass for Robert Holohan three days after the 11-year-old's body was found in a boggy, briary glen at Inch some 12 miles from his home.
The whole country had learned through the heartfelt appeals by Robert's parents, Mark and Majella, that their son feared the dark and, aware of that, a garda charged with preserving the scene asked Fr O'Donovan to pass on a message to the family if he thought it appropriate.
Fr O'Donovan recalled: "He said, 'I was one of two gardaí who kept watch with Robert last night . . . I would like the parents to know that Robert wasn't alone last night - I spoke to him all the time'; and then he concluded, 'I just wish I had a blanket to wrap around him'."
The stark silence was broken by a wave of rustling sweeping through the church as adults and children alike wept at the sheer poignancy of the thought - Robert, the boy who was afraid of the dark, wasn't alone that last night that he lay in the cold, damp ditch.
It was a moment which had an eerie echo in the gloomy elegance of courtroom No 2 at Cork Courthouse in Washington Street two weeks ago when a jury of five men and seven women heard how Robert's killer had similarly spoken to the dead boy's body.
In the course of a statement made to gardaí just a day after the funeral, Wayne O'Donoghue told how he had returned to Inch on the night of January 4th, 2005, just hours after killing Robert, in order to remove his body and place it on the beach so it would be found.
"I started talking to the body, saying 'Rob', as if he were alive," said O'Donoghue, adding that he had decided to go back to Inch to remove Robert's body after he began thinking "how disrespectful it was where I had put the body and what I'd done to a friend".
Just how friendly the then 20- year-old engineering student was with Robert the court heard from a succession of witnesses - O'Donoghue's girlfriend Rebecca Dennehy, Robert's grandfather William Murray, neighbour Rose Harte and, of course, Robert's parents, Mark and Majella.
Majella told how Robert "adored Wayne - he looked up to him as if an older brother".
Mark said that their son "idolised" him, while the court also heard how O'Donoghue built a tree house for him, played soccer with him and used to drive him to Midleton for ice creams and DVDs.
How unfathomable, then, must have been the shock that the Holohans felt when they learned from Supt Liam Hayes that their son died at the hands of his friend and next-door neighbour, who repeatedly reassured them he would be found safe and well.
Much of the State's case against O'Donoghue focused on his behaviour after killing Robert, and the jury at the Central Criminal Court sitting in Cork heard many of the 60 or so witnesses tell how they spoke to O'Donoghue when searching for Robert with thousands of other volunteers.
Just hours after failing to remove Robert's body from the glen so it could be found, O'Donoghue was asking Áine Dorgan, a volunteer with Irish Rescue Dogs, about whether bloodhounds could pick up a scent if a body had been in a car or if it had been in a river.
Within days he was checking maps at the search headquarters as to what areas had been searched and what areas were due to be searched - a curiosity which saw him follow the search to Inch on January 12th when he was still questioning volunteers about the operation.
Searcher Tim Leahy told how O'Donoghue - whom he later recognised upon his arrest - spoke to him at Guileen Cross near Inch and spent half an hour asking him to point out on a map what areas had been searched.
"It made me a bit uneasy, a bit uncomfortable," said Mr Leahy.
The discovery of Robert's body at Inch just an hour later by searchers Tom Deely and Martin Sloane not only ended Mark and Majella's waiting, it also prompted gardaí to reclassify their investigation of Robert's disappearance from a missing person case to a murder case.
The discovery of the body also provided them with some valuable clues, in particular two fingerprints on a white refuse sack found near the body - fingerprints which they quickly matched with a set of prints taken earlier from O'Donoghue for the purpose of elimination.
That match by Det Garda Patrick O'Brien was made on January 15th, the day of Robert's funeral. Bishop of Cloyne Dr John Magee may have appealed at the funeral Mass for Robert's killer to give himself up, but the net was already closing in.
O'Donoghue himself sensed as much when he read the Star on Sunday the next morning and he decided to tell his parents what he had done.
His harrowing description of how he broke the news first to his father and then to his mother left few in the packed court unmoved.
Although his first admission to Det Sgt Peter Kenny and Det Garda Mick O'Sullivan was made before consulting solicitor Frank Buttimer, his detailed statement of admission was made after an hour-long private briefing with Mr Buttimer, who sat in on the seven-hour interview.
In it, O'Donoghue told how he had killed Robert some time after 3.30pm on January 4th. He had become angry when the youngster began popping pebbles at his car after he refused for a second time to bring him to McDonald's in Midleton for a milkshake.
He told how he nudged Robert away from his Fiat Punto, but as he was returning to the house Robert threw some more pebbles, which hit him on the back of the head and hit the car again. He shouted: "Robert, will you ever grow up?"
Admitting that he was annoyed, O'Donoghue told the two interviewing gardaí that he went over and put his right arm around Robert's neck and, catching him in an armlock, jerked him away from the car.
"I released the grip with my right hand but I was still holding him by the scruff of the neck with my left hand - nothing was said between us at this stage. I then moved my left hand up to his Adam's apple and said: 'Will you stop with the f**king stones?'
"I can't describe how tight I held him. I don't know how long I held him but it seemed very short. I didn't intend to cause him any harm or injure him.
"When I removed my left hand from his throat, he just fell to the ground. I did not realise at that time he had been hurt."
He told how he brought Robert into the bathroom of the house and when he didn't hear any breathing, he panicked, went and got a kitchen knife and put it to own his throat, intending to kill himself. But he didn't go through with it and instead decided to remove Robert's body.
Insisting that he was in a state of panic throughout, O'Donoghue told how he put the body into two black plastic bags and put him in the boot of his car before picking up Robert's BMX bike in the driveway and dropping it off at Carrigogna some 500 yards away.
He told how he didn't know what he was doing as he drove around Midleton with Robert's body in the boot until he thought of Inch Strand and how quiet it would be there. He decided to drive there so he could leave the body on the beach, where it could be found.
But there was a car by the strand so he couldn't leave it on the beach. Instead he drove back up the lonely country road and on the way, decided to dump the body over the ditch. "I just wanted to remove the body - I threw the body into the ditch."
He told how he later began to think how disrespectful it was to leave Robert's body there so he returned later to remove it and put it on the beach. He brought some petrol and a lighter with him to burn the black plastic after he removed the body.
Questioned later by Det Sgt Brian Goulding and Det Garda SeáO'Brien in an interview which was videotaped and shown to the jury, O'Donoghue insisted it was never his intention to put Robert's body on Inch Strand so that it would be washed out to sea.
He was equally vehement in his denial whenDet Garda O'Brien put it to him that he believed he had gone back to Inch with a Coke bottle of petrol and a lighter that night not to burn the plastic but to burn Robert's body.
"That's your opinion and you're entitled to it - I'm saying I didn't," he said, adding that he had "poured a dabble of petrol" on the black plastic bag because he assumed Robert's body had fallen out of it into the glen and he lit the bag so as to burn it away to clear his view.
O'Donoghue - who told gardaí that he had planned to hang himself later that night - said he got involved in the search when he went home and after that he found it more and more difficult to come forward to tell people what he had done.
"I was just really ashamed of myself, I have every right to be. I was ashamed of myself but the hole was getting bigger and bigger and when I saw all the people out, all my friends and all my neighbours and everyone, it just got on top of me - I couldn't.
"I am deeply sorry for what happened," he told gardaí. "Robert was a good friend, he was like a brother to me. If I could switch roles, I would. There was never any intention to harm him, - what happened him was a fluke of an accident. I'm sorry I didn't come forward earlier."
Although O'Donoghue's story to Det Sgt Goulding and Det Garda O'Brien remained consistent with his earlier statement to Det Sgt Kenny and Det Garda O'Sullivan, few watching the tape could have failed to notice the casual manner in which he described killing Robert. Standing up to show exactly how he had caught the boy and swung him around before grabbing him by the throat, he could quite easily have been describing scoring a goal in a football match, so relaxed was he. There was never any intent to harm Robert, he stressed repeatedly.
Seated in the dock, O'Donoghue sat through the showing of the videotapes - as he did for almost all the trial - with his head bowed, staring downwards with a thick mop of brown hair flopping down over his forehead. For his parents, Ray and Therese, the three-week trial was clearly hugely distressing, with Mrs O'Donoghue frequently turning her face into her husband's shoulders as if unable to listen any more to the sequence of events which led to their eldest son being charged with murder.
For the Holohans it was even more upsetting, Mark stoically trying to comfort Majella who cried as they heard about their son's last moments, saw the clothes he was wearing produced as exhibits and, most distressingly of all, heard how his face was eaten by animals.
Robert had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) but, according to his mother, "he thought everyone was beautiful and everything was wonderful - he was full of the joys of life, no worries or anything like that . . . he was a normal 11-year-old and I loved him dearly."
State Pathologist Prof Marie Cassidy said that Robert had died from asphyxia due to neck compression and that this was a complex process, but she believed he had been first caught in an armlock and then grabbed around the throat with a hand and manually strangled.
When defence counsel Blaise O'Carroll SC put it to her that her findings corroborated O'Donoghue's version of what happened, she agreed, though she did point out that Robert had other injuries not explained by O'Donoghue, such as a mouth injury and bruises to his back and buttocks. Defence pathologist Prof Jack Crane also conceded to prosecution counsel Shane Murphy SC that the bruises to Robert's back and buttocks were not consistent with O'Donoghue's account of how he had slumped to the ground after he released his grip from his neck.
If both the injury to Robert's mouth and the injuries to his back and buttocks are at odds with O'Donoghue's account of what happened, then other puzzling questions also remain.
How, for example, did Robert's clothing get burned if O'Donoghue lit only the plastic bags? He said that the plastic lit for just 10 seconds, yet forensic expert Det Garda Thomas Carey told how he found charred twigs under Robert's buttocks some 10 feet from the burnt plastic, while there were burn marks on the hem of his T-shirt and the waist of his pants.
Telecommunications expert Ivor O'Flynn told the court that he had tracked O'Donoghue's route to the beach by the signal from his mobile phone, and said he didn't go directly to Inch as he had said but by an alternative route via Whitegate and Upper Aghada.
Puzzling, too, was the revelation that gardaí found a picture on Robert's mobile phone of a poster in O'Donoghue's bedroom which the phone showed was taken at 7.32am on December 28th, though the defence later adduced testimony that the phone was bought later that day.
Asked if he considered his friendship with Robert "unusual", given the nine-year age difference between them, O'Donoghue said he didn't think such friendships were unusual in rural areas where children and teenagers of different ages often palled around and played together.
Mr O'Carroll described the relationship between O'Donoghue and Robert as "special" when cross-examining Robert's mother, Majella, and she broadly agreed, though she didn't accept that O'Donoghue was so close as to be almost one of the Holohan family.
Yet there can be no denying that O'Donoghue was a close friend of Robert and he remained a trusted friend to the unsuspecting Holohans in the days after Robert's disappearance - so much so that he was lined up to participate in Robert's funeral Mass.
They had planned to ask him to read a prayer of the faithful, but when Robert's hurling hero, Seán Óg Ó hAilpín, who had already helped with an appeal to Robert, offered to help again, the family opted instead to have him read one of the prayers prepared by Fr O'Donovan.
And so it was Seán Óg Ó hAilpín, and not Wayne O'Donoghue, who asked mourners to "work for a society where children will enjoy the freedom and safety to be children". In an already sorry tale, that was one bitter irony which, thankfully, the Holohans were spared.