Graham Dwyer trial: knives, mobile phone and handcuffs among items in reservoir

Knives, bondage masks, handcuffs, leg restraints, a mobile phone and sex toys were among items recovered from Roundwood reservoir in September 2013, the trial of Graham Dwyer has heard.

A set of keys, including a house key, linked to Elaine O’Hara were also recovered.

The murder trial of south Dublin architect Mr Dwyer is now in its sixth day.

He is charged with murdering Ms O’Hara (36), a childcare worker, in Co Dublin on August 22nd, 2012. He has pleaded not guilty.

William Fegan, a member of Wicklow Anglers Club and the Avonmore Game Club told the court on Thursday that he, his brother James and a friend, Mark Quinn, saw items in the water from a bridge over the reservoir at Roundwood on September 10th, 2013.

They pulled a number of items from the water using a tension strap with a hook on the end. These included a blue hoody-type top, a white vest top, rusted chains with handcuffs, an item known as a ball gag and a harness used as a bondage restraint.

All the items were shown to the witness in court and he agreed they were the items he and his brother James had found.

William Fegan said they left the items on a wall. But when he had been driving later that night he had “plenty of time to think” and something was “niggling” at him that there was something “not right”.

“I had a good think about what we found,” he said.

He had returned to the items and put them in a bag and brought them to gardaí.

Cross-examined by Ronan Kennedy for the defence, Mr Fegan agreed he had not been asked to go back to the area to point out to gardaí where he found the items.

William Fegan’s friend Mark Quinn, who had pulled up beside the brothers on the date in question and had stopped to speak to them, gave evidence of fishing the items from the water, including some yellow rope which had been floating there.

James Fegan, also a member of Wicklow Anglers Club and a bailiff who monitors fish poaching in the area, said the bridge from where the items were spotted in the water offered a good vantage point to spot people fishing on the lake and he stopped there perhaps twice a week.

James Fegan said the water level was very low and at a level which was “very rare”. The court heard the normal level of the water was 15 to 20 feet.

Garda James O’Donoghue of Roundwood Garda station gave evidence of receiving the items recovered from William Fegan at the Garda station on the following day, September 11th.

He said they were quite soiled and it appeared they had been submerged for some time.

The garda said he hung the items on a railing in the “drying room” and that once dry he had handed them over to the Garda’s evidence management team.

Garda O’Donoghue gave evidence that he went to the scene where William Fegan had recovered the items on September 12th and had phoned him at that time to confirm the location.

The garda said he returned to the area again on September 14th and September 16th and retrieved other items from the water. These included a set of keys with loyalty cards, a rusted chain, a bondage mask with zips over the holes for the eyes and mouth, a length of rope and a knife. These items were also shown to the court and the garda confirmed they were the items he had recovered.

Garda O’Donoghue said he had seen in the water an item that appeared to be handcuffs and he had gone into the water to retrieve them. The items were “arm deep” in the water and visibility was poor because it was muddy and silty, he said.

As a result of inquiries he subsequently made and a phone call he received from an individual with whom he had been in contact in Dunnes Stores, Garda O’Donoghue made an inquiry of the Garda information unit in Castlebar on September 17th in relation to Ms O’Hara.

He learned that she was a missing person and that this was recorded in the Pulse system.

He returned to the scene where the items had been found at the bridge and sealed it off as a crime scene, he told the court. Other Garda units attended the scene throughout the day, including the Garda water unit.

Garda O’Donoghue said he also handed over the items earlier recovered from the water in evidence bags to Garda James Codd on that date.

The court heard that on the same date, Garda Wayne Farrell took photographs of other items in the water on September 17th and that he later used a spade to recover them.

They included a Nokia mobile phone with the cover and battery missing, a set of handcuffs on a chain and two knives.

He was assisted by the Water Support Unit in recovering other items, including a white vibrator and a black sex toy which prosecution counsel Seán Guerin SC referred to as an “anal plug”.

An item that appeared to be a battery terminal for the vibrator, and some black insulating tape were also recovered. A pair of shorts and a dressing gown also recovered from the water were also among the items shown to the court.

Garda Farrell said these had been “very badly” soiled from the water.

The Water Support Unit also recovered the sawn-off barrels of a double-barreled shotgun and a camera lens.

Members of the Garda Water Unit gave evidence that they conducted a full dive in the area at the bridge on October 7th with specialist equipment, including an underwater metal detector.

Items they recovered during a “fingertip” search included two Nokia mobile phones and a sim card, a Nokia mobile phone battery, two more sex toys, two C-size batteries, a red kidney-shaped item resembling some sort of remote control, a piece of yellow rope with a knot in it, a balaclava or ski mask, a pair of glasses, a pair of sunglasses, a gold bracelet, a Tesco mobile sim card and a metal band.

Under cross examination by Remy Farrell SC, Garda Lorcan Byrne agreed other items had been found in the river in the course of the search.

These included a mattress, a computer desktop, a Dire Straits CD, a small tub, a glass jar with liquid in it, a plaster, a toiletry bag and a DVD.

Eamon Fleming, the plant engineer in charge of Vartry reservoir, gave evidence of the water levels in the reservoir in the summer of 2012, at the point in time when Elaine O’Hara went missing, and also confirmed the readings for 2013, the time when her belongings were found in the reservoir.

He told the court 2012 had been a “very unusual year” because the reservoir levels had “really never dropped at all” during the months from June to October.

This was due to the summer being the wettest on record since the 1860s. The summer of 2013 was a “warm, dry” summer – the driest on record since 1995.

The reservoir levels started to drop quite rapidly and dropped right through to October, Mr Fleming said. This was “unusual” but not unknown.

In a typical dry year they would drop by 2 metres, but they dropped by 5 metres that summer.

The court also heard from Aidan Kelly, group accountant of Dunnes Stores, that the Value Club Card attached to the keyring found in the reservoir belonged to Elaine O’Hara’s account.

Peter Curtis, retail director with Specsavers in Dun Laoghaire, told the court the prescription and frames on the pair of glasses found in the reservoir matched Elaine O’Hara’s.

The court also heard from Jean O’Donnell of Petrogas Group, which trades as Applegreen, that the reward card on the set of keys found in the reservoir was matched to Ms O’Hara’s account.

The first transaction on that account was April 7th, 2012 and the last was August 12th that year, 10 days before she went missing.

Mr Dwyer (42), of Kerrymount Close in Foxrock, Dublin 18, was arrested in October 2013. Last week, the prosecution outlined its case against Mr O’Dwyer, arguing that he brought Ms O’Hara up to the Dublin Mountains for the purposes of stabbing her to death for sexual gratification.

Mr Dwyer’s defence team is led by Remy Farrell SC and the prosecution by Seán Guerin SC. Childcare worker Ms O’Hara from Killiney, in Dublin was last seen at about 5.45pm on August 22nd, 2012, near Shanganagh cemetery in south Dublin, where her mother is buried. Her remains were found in undergrowth by a woman walking her dog at Killakee, Rathfarnham.