A witness in a murder trial told a jury in the Central Criminal Court yesterday that she was frightened for her life as a friend screamed in pain in a nearby room hours before he was found shot dead.
Ms Adrienne McGuinness told the court that she was terrified. "I still hear the screaming. He physically tortured Mark but he mentally tortured me," she said.
"I was afraid to move, I was glued to the seat. I can still hear the screams. They were horrible, you can't imagine it. Painful screams, screaming in pain."
Mr Joseph Delaney (54), formerly of La Rochelle, Naas, Co Kildare, has pleaded not guilty to the murder of Mr Mark Dwyer (23) on or about December 14th, 1996. He has also pleaded not guilty to falsely imprisoning Mr Dwyer at Foster Terrace, Ballybough, Dublin. The prosecution alleges that Mr Delaney murdered Mr Dwyer over the theft of 30-40,000 ecstasy tablets.
Mr Dwyer was found shot dead in a field in Scribblestown, Co Dublin, early on Saturday 14th December 1996. Ms McGuinness said she had been asked to visit Mr Delaney's house the morning Mr Dwyer was murdered to deliver a gram of cocaine.
"I had a cup of tea and Joe got a phone call on his mobile and he walked into the kitchen. He was agitated and jumpy and said Scott (his son) was on his way down," she said.
Ms McGuinness said that shortly after she arrived at the house, near Naas, Scott Delaney and three masked men arrived with Mr Dwyer. "His da came into the sitting-room, snorted a line of coke and said Mark was in the bedroom and was down to be questioned about the missing Es."
After Mr Dwyer was beaten for about an hour, one of the masked men came into the living-room and said, "you wouldn't get anything out of Mark," Ms McGuinnness said. The defendant stood up, took a baton in his hand and said he would "get it out of him if it's the last thing he does". After that she heard Mr Dwyer "roaring and crying, screaming in pain. You wouldn't do it to an animal, what he done." Ms McGuinness said she felt "helpless and afraid for Mark in the other room getting the shit beat out of him". She recognised Mr Dwyer's voice and Mr Delaney's voice. Asked by Mr Denis Vaughan Buckley SC, prosecuting, why she was frightened for her life, Ms McGuinness said because she had travelled to Paris to meet Mark after he had collected the drugs and delivered them to a contact.
At one point, Mr Joseph Delaney took a short break, she said. He "had a line of coke, rolled up his sleeves and went back in". He appeared "fuming and sweating and grinding his teeth". The beatings continued for three hours, during which time Mr Delaney had put on an M People CD and turned the volume up loud to "drown out Mark's crying", Ms McGuinness said. After the beatings stopped the masked men took Mr Dwyer out the back door and she was left alone in the house. After about half an hour, Mr Joseph Delaney returned and told her there was a piece of carpet in the boot of her car and he wanted her to drive down a country road so that it might be dumped.
Ms McGuinness said she later heard Mr Delaney say on his mobile phone that the "hardest thing he ever had to do was to leave Scott in the field and the little bastard is dead. It's all over."
"That's when I knew Mark was dead," she said. Mr Delaney later "made up a story to do an alibi", she said. "He asked me to say when I called down to the house we was in there on our own and we'd had an affair and had sex. I agreed to do this because I was afraid."
Ms McGuinness said she stuck to the story until she got fed up with constant Garda harassment. Prosecution counsel said earlier that the State Pathologist would give evidence that Mr Dwyer died from a brain laceration due to a single gunshot wound to the back of the head, fired at "virtual contact range".
Stab wounds to the forearms and multiple wounds possibly caused by a nail-bar were found on the body, including imprints of a gun nozzle to the chest where a shotgun was pressed into the flesh. The case before Mr Justice Quirke and the jury continues today.