A jury will return to the Central Criminal Court on Wednesday to consider its verdicts for a fifth day in the trial of Ruth Lawrence – who is accused of shooting a drug dealer and working “as a unit” with her boyfriend to murder him and another man.
The panel of four men and eight women began considering their verdicts last Thursday and had deliberated for six hours and 50 minutes when the trial judge on Monday gave them the option of reaching a majority verdict on one or both counts, provided at least 10 of them agreed.
The five-week trial has heard Ms Lawrence was extradited from South Africa in 2023 to face trial, nearly a decade after the bodies of Anthony Keegan (33) and Eoin O’Connor (32) were found on a lake island in the midlands.
Ms Lawrence (46), who is originally from Clontarf in Dublin but with an address at Patricks Cottage, Ross, Mountnugent in Co Meath, has pleaded not guilty to murdering Mr Keegan and Mr O’Connor at an unknown location within the State on a date between April 22nd, 2014, and May 26th, 2014, both dates inclusive.
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There are three verdicts the jury can return in relation to each of the two murder charges against Ms Lawrence, namely; guilty of murder, not guilty of murder but guilty of assisting an offender or not guilty.
In his charge, Mr Justice Tony Hunt said the panel could return verdicts of assisting an offender if they found the prosecution had not made out their case beyond a reasonable doubt that Ms Lawrence was part of a joint enterprise to murder the two men.
Addressing the jury at 4pm on Tuesday, after 12 hours of deliberations, Mr Justice Hunt said he gathered they would like to go home for the evening. “Do I take it you are happy enough to return tomorrow?” asked the judge, to which the forewoman of the panel replied: “Yes.”
“That’s a very positive response,” remarked Mr Justice Hunt.
The 12 jurors will return to the Central Criminal Court on Wednesday morning at 11am to continue considering their verdicts.
The trial has heard that two protected witnesses – father and daughter Jason and Stacey Symes – came forward to An Garda Síochána in 2014 and gave voluntary statements about the alleged involvement of Ms Lawrence and her boyfriend, South African national Neville van der Westhuizen, in the murders of the two men.
Ms Symes gave evidence to the trial that Ms Lawrence told her that she had shot Mr O’Connor “but it went wrong”, so her boyfriend “took over”. The witness also said that she and her father were asked to help move the bodies of the two men.
Michael O’Higgins SC, with Jane Horgan-Jones BL, prosecuting, told the jury in his closing address Ms Lawrence and her boyfriend had acted as “a unit and a tag team” to “lure” drug dealer Eoin O’Connor to their home to murder him in a “highly calculated” crime.
The State contends that Mr van der Westhuizen also shot Mr Keegan while “acting as a team” with Ms Lawrence, making both guilty of murder.
In his closing speech, Patrick Gageby SC, alongside Sarah Connolly BL, for the defence, said the Symes – the two key witnesses in the case – painted themselves as “innocents abroad” and had downplayed their own roles. He said they could not be trusted to convict Ms Lawrence of murdering the two men, telling the jury that: “they played the system and they tried to play you”.
In his opening address, Mr O’Higgins said the evidence will be that Mr O’Connor sold drugs to Mr van der Westhuizen, who owed the deceased man in the region of €70,000.
