The one certainty to emerge from the short life of Paiche Onyemaechi is that she was loved, writes Kathy Sheridan
Last weekend, to the general public, it was just a "body", albeit one crammed into black bin bags, a mass of decomposing flesh whose distinguishing characteristic was that the head was missing. To the first of the investigating garda, the nail polish on the toes indicated that she was female; the skin tone suggested that she was black.
To the people of Piltown, Co Kilkenny, a village that has borne more than its share of grief and young death in recent times with a number of suicides, it was another incomprehensible horror, this time laced with physical fear. What manner of evil had visited their sleepy village on a summer night, taken the sharply winding by-road towards the hills, stopped at a picturesque little stone-built bridge across the River Pil, and climbed down the slope to prop a profoundly mutilated body against a tree ?
"People around here were frightened," says Father Paschal Moore, the parish priest. "I was a bit wary myself for a few nights. You find yourself thinking: 'Who was on these roads? What is going on while we are asleep?'"
At Sunday Mass, when it was feared the victim might never be identified, he spoke to his parishioners of "this outrage against God and the community that a person would be dumped over a ditch like a dog. This was somebody's daughter, maybe a mother . . . Somebody somewhere is going to be traumatised". They would "adopt" her, he said, "as one of our own. She will be included every day in our community prayers. She is now one of ours".
And so she became. This week, birds sang around the rusting old gate on the pretty stone bridge adorned now with tributes of flowers - hydrangeas in a plastic carton, a spray of wild flowers in a can, potted yellow roses, bunches of colourful chrysanthemums, several great bursts of sunflowers.
"Poor poor Pache , may you now rest in a peace," read a message.
By then the story had moved on. The mutilated body had become a person. Identified by her fingerprints, obtained when she arrived in Ireland as an asylum-seeker in 2000, she was named as Paiche "Gina" Onyemaechi, a 25-year-old, Malawi-born mother of two little boys, aged one and three, who had shared a rented house in Waterford city's St Herblain Park with her Nigerian-born husband, Chika, known locally as "Teddy". She had been gone two days when he had reported her missing two weeks before.
WHILE RUMOUR swirled about tribal rituals involving body parts - it was said that among certain African tribes, parts of the body are removed and kept for a period in the belief that they impart powers to the holder - and speculation about Onyemaechi's possible links to the "sex industry" made the lead in the local press, the one certainty to emerge from the short life of Paiche Onyemaechi was that she was loved.
"She never had a problem with anybody. She was full of smiles and everyone liked her," says Nigeria-born Michael Mokwunye, chairman of the Waterford Refugee and Asylum-Seeker Council. "That's why we have a belief that something that is good doesn't last too long. She was lively and easy-going and loved life."
She was a generous friend. "She was very, very good," adds Mokwunye. "She was always ready to visit people when they were in hospital, bringing flowers and food that she had cooked."
The words most used to describe her are "vivacious" and "bubbly", and the picture that emerges is of a glamorous party girl who whizzed around in her five-year-old blue Fiat Punto and liked a beer.
"She believed that you should live and be happy. Everybody has a life to live and the right to choose that life," says Mokwunye.
Like everyone in the area, Mokwunye has heard the speculation about Onyemaechi's possible links to lap dancing - involving travel to Limerick and Dublin - and prostitution.
"I think people have jumped to conclusions," he says. "That should not have appeared so quickly in the paper. I do not believe that she was in prostitution. She had her own social life but she was not into prostitution. The lap dancing? There is speculation about that, yes."
As for the ritual-removal-of-body-parts theory, he dismisses it with a laugh. "That doesn't exist in Ireland," he says. "There is no way they would keep the head for a ritual act. That was done to destroy identity."
It's not clear how or why Onyemaechi chose Ireland as a home. Her background as one of four daughters in the educated, highly regarded family of the Malawian chief justice, Leonard Unyolo, hardly fits the profile of a typical asylum-seeker.
The family remained close and she is said to have returned to Malawi recently for a sibling's wedding. Her sister, who lives in Belgium, arrived in Ireland on Tuesday, and her father two days later.
It is believed that Onyemaechi's long journey began in the late 1990s when she left Malawi, in east Africa, to do a business administration course in London, where she developed her excellent spoken English. After dropping out of college, she came to Ireland with her first husband, also a Nigerian (who still lives here), before meeting Chika and marrying him in Waterford city's registry office three years ago. The couple obtained Irish residency with the birth of their first child.
THE REFUGEE COMMUNITY is reluctant to talk about 31-year-old Chika (or "Teddy") beyond suggestions that the couple disagreed about Paiche's lifestyle. He is said to have worked briefly in construction and is described variously as a man of few words, a "big man" or "a lamb" in the community. He has not been sighted locally since Tuesday. The couple's children were being cared for by a friend.
"Gina's father will be here for them now," said Mokwunye, declining to offer further comment.
Yesterday, as gardaí continued their investigation, involving numerous interviews with friends and associates as well as a technical examination of at least one house in Waterford city, Paiche Onyemaechi's committal service was taking place at St Patrick's Presbyterian Church. It would not be a memorial service, said the Rev Jim Parkin beforehand, and he would therefore be saying nothing about her life. Instead, he regarded it as "an opportunity to remember that a terrible thing has befallen a precious human being and to try to create an atmosphere of comfort and support for her family . . . What a heartbreak it must be for a family to have to travel thousands of miles to come and bury a daughter".
Like many others, Parkin regarded this week's reports as "distressingly speculative". He knew Onyemaechi only "marginally", he said, but as to so many others, "she came across as a warm, vivacious human being" to him too.