The demons that lived within Anthony Cawley

"He had ripped himself to shreds. His arm from his wrist to his elbow was a mass of scar tissue. He had cuts right across his chest, along his legs and across his throat."

The recollections of a prison guard suggest Anthony Cawley was a man who didn't need anyone to hate him. He could do that just fine for himself.

"Once in hospital after he cut himself badly a radiologist had taken an X-ray of his skull and found he had a razor blade in his mouth. It was tucked in under his lip even though we searched him leaving the prison. I told him to spit it out and he did. When you got to know him you knew there was more danger he would rip himself, not you," added the officer.

To locate a prison officer who has never had dealings with Anthony Cawley is to locate a rare breed. Raised in the care of the State where he was sexually abused and tortured, the Travelling boy, who had 14 siblings and alcoholic parents, was effectively incarcerated for most of his 33 years and amassed up to 15 convictions.

Taken into care at the age of two, he spent time at Trudder House for Traveller children in Co Wicklow, where he was brutally abused and repeatedly raped. The man who ran the home, Duncan MacInness, was never brought to justice for his alleged crimes and has since died in Canada.

Later, in Loughan House, Co Cavan, Cawley told staff of his experiences, but the horrific regime in Trudder House did not reach the public domain until the mid-1980s. There have been recent calls in the Dail for the publication of the details of the Eastern Health Board's investigation into the home.

A fortnight ago, radio adverts using Cawley's nickname - The Beast - publicised that weekend's edition of Ireland On Sunday which was to feature an article billing him as one of Ireland's most dangerous men. But the only person he was a danger to in his single cell in the segregation wing of Wheatfield Prison, Clondalkin, was himself.

Prison staff, who checked him every 15 minutes, found him limp in his cell and raised the alarm at 4.45 p.m. on Friday, April 14th. Cawley was in a seated position, leaning forward with shoe-laces around his neck that were also attached to the window catch. Efforts to revive him failed and he was later pronounced dead in Tallaght Hospital shortly after 6 p.m.

Anthony Cawley had been serving the longest sentence ever handed down in Ireland for sexual crime but was due for release in 2005. In 1987 he was sentenced to 20 years, later reduced to 16 on appeal, for the vicious rape of a young woman in Dublin city centre. She had been left for dead. In 1989 Cawley was also sentenced to a 10-year concurrent term for the attempted murder of a prisoner in Limerick Prison. This man was also left for dead.

He was sentenced to an additional eight years for the "prison rape" of a cell-mate in Arbour Hill in 1996. According to prison sources, the incident, the first such to be prosecuted in Irish courts, was not what surprised staff: it was more the decision to "double up" Cawley, which was regarded as "crazy". Cawley also allegedly threatened a nun in his cell last year although no charges were brought.

No one disputes the fact that Cawley was a dangerous and disturbed man, but those who dealt with him on the inside paint the picture of a complex individual. "The Anthony Cawley you met in the morning was different from the one you met at lunch, and it was a different Anthony Cawley again at tea-time," said one officer. "But you could work around him. You could always work him."

John O'Sullivan, the governor of Wheatfield, who first encountered Cawley in the prison system in 1983, spoke with him an hour before he took his own life. He had expressed concern at the radio ads and how they would affect his family and asked when it was all going to stop, said Mr O'Sullivan.

"Looking back at it now he was the most balanced and relaxed that I have seen him, but hindsight is a great gift."

Cawley had the capacity to be courteous in prison and taught himself to read and write. He had an amazing gift of information retention and composed his own poetry, which he shared with staff. However, he was also considered a cunning individual who craved attention and he was known to scream at the same staff if they failed to deliver something he had asked for.

"Because of his background, he lived in fear all his life. His own method of survival or defending himself was by trying to instil fear in others," said Mr O'Sullivan. "But we had the kind of relationship where he would know there was a line that he couldn't push you past . . . and before I left a conversation he would always say sorry."

The chaplain of Arbour Hill prison, Father Fergal McDonagh, who had frequent dealings with Cawley throughout the 1990s, strongly believes that the media coverage was a major contributor to Cawley's suicide, although it has been reported that he was also upset by the distant relationship he had with his family.

"He was tortured from sunrise to sunset by that radio ad," Father McDonagh told the 60 or so mourners at Cawley's funeral on Tuesday. "Somebody at this stage needs to say sorry to Anthony and to his family." Father McDonagh has lodged a formal complaint with the advertising standards authority and also intends to register Cawley's death for investigation by the UN special rapporteur on torture in Geneva.

"Maybe in a way his death is a lesson to us to stop demonising people in prison. The courts are there to pursue sanction and the prison service implements it. That's the punishment and it's supposed to stop us degenerating into lynch mobs. We don't need two systems of justice," the chaplain said.