CONTINUING HER cross-examination, prosecuting counsel Mary Ellen Ring questioned Mr Lillis not noticing all the blood until later.
She quoted from the postmortem report that one of the injuries at the back was “full thickness to the bone”.
“That’s right, because most of the time her back was to the ground,” he replied. “She was facing me.”
Ms Ring mentioned his use of the word “crumpled” to describe Ms Cawley’s knees during their fall after the struggle at the window.
“Celine’s knees crumpled and she fell down. She fell backwards,” she said, quoting his testimony from Friday.
She pointed out that Dr Michael Curtis had said knees would crumple if an individual was concussed and the person would fall forward.
“I was trying to explain that she didn’t fall straight backwards,” he said. “My weight was on her and she was leaning backwards but her knees gave way first.”
He had explained on Friday that the jeans he had hidden in the attic were blood-soaked because he rested his injured wife’s head on his lap.
Yesterday he gave the same reason for the jumper he hid being blood-soaked.
“Was her head on your lap or your chest?” she asked.
“On both,” he said.
Ms Ring then put it to him that if he was trying to convince his daughter that there was a burglary in which he and his wife were injured, then why hide his bloodstained clothes.
“Wouldn’t they back up your story?” she asked.
“She didn’t need to seem them,” he said of his daughter. “I was upset.”
He said that he had decided to throw them away after deciding that the blood would probably not wash out.
She asked him why he hid them in the attic then, instead of just binning them.
“I’d have to have gone back downstairs,” he said, explaining that the bin was at the side of the house.
She mentioned that he went downstairs anyway.
“I needed to talk to Celine about what happened, what we said to each other,” he said.
She asked if, during his clean-up upstairs, he did not once shout down to his wife to see how she was.
He said that considering her mood and what she had said to him before he left, he thought he shouldn’t.
Ms Ring put to him each of 18 marks to his wife’s face and lips and asked him to explain each. He said some of them might have occurred when he raised her arm while she was holding the brick, causing it to graze her chin.
He said others might have happened when she was biting his finger as they lay on the ground.
He said she was twisting her head from side to side and he was pushing her head back to try to release her grip.
“I’m not sure how that happened,” he said several times about the remaining injuries.
“I put it to you that the three injuries on Celine Cawley’s head were occasioned by use of a brick held by you,” she said.
“You lied to the firemen, ambulance staff, gardaí, your family including your daughter, and friends, and continued to lie and concealed the reason for the lie, and you hid your clothes,” Ms Ring continued, “all because you had taken up a brick and hit her not once, not twice, but three times, causing three lacerations, two to the back of the head and consistent with a brick and not a window edge.
“These caused the death of Celine Cawley while you were trying to cover up your actions upstairs,” she concluded.
“That’s not true,” replied Mr Lillis.
Mr Justice Barry White and a jury of six women and six men have now heard from all witnesses and the closing stages have been reached in the trial.