Grief still raw for family of taxi-driver

She was strong, vibrant, witty, independent. She loved music, she loved people. She knew no fear. A year ago today Eileen Costello O'Shaughnessy (47) failed to arrive back home after a day's work as a Galway city taxi driver. Her mother sat up all night ringing her daughter's mobile phone.

There was no reply, and Mrs Nora Costello doesn't remember the hours passing until she saw the sun. Later that morning, her daughter's body was found in a laneway off the Tuam-Galway road.

It is as if it happened yesterday, and there is no escape from the daily torment. The pain is as intense now, even with the temporary relief of tears. Sitting in her bungalow in the village of Corofin, time has not healed the emotional wounds sustained by Mrs Nora Costello, and by Eileen's children and immediate family. It has not because it cannot, until a reason can be found.

"The gardai have been great. The detectives keep in touch. I never move out of the house now, apart from the grave at Kilmoylan cemetery but I am afraid not to answer the door," Mrs Costello says. "There might be some news. But then there rarely is. It seems as if it would take a miracle for whoever was responsible to be found."

The investigation has been very extensive, with the number of people questioned running into hundreds. Some 3,000 statements have been taken. Several leads pursued by the Mill Street station detectives in Galway have come to naught. Taxi-driver colleagues put up a reward of £25,000 for information leading to a charge, which was given a recent £5,000 boost by the Crimestoppers organisation.

The investigating team had been working on the theory that Mrs Costello-O'Shaughnessy may have known her killer, or killers, but it is also believed that the fare she picked up on her last run - out the home road to Claregalway - was off the street. The laneway in which her body was found, Tinker's Lane, would not be familiar to a stranger to the area.

The team led by Supt Tony Finnerty has already cast its net wide. Currently, detectives are waiting to question a man who is being held in Brixton prison in London, and who has already admitted to the murder of one man and the attempted murder of another. He is also being held in connection with the death of his former girlfriend in Scotland; and he was in Galway at the time of Eileen Costello-O'Shaughnessy's death.

Hundreds of fingerprints on the taxi-driver's car have also had to be accounted for by the Garda. The prints would have been those of customers, of colleagues, of all sorts of innocent people. After the missing Toyota Carina was dumped on an industrial estate, several young lads spotted it, and noticed that the door was open. They took the mobile phone, but were unable to use it as they had no pin code. Several workmen from Lydon's bakery nearby also tried to move the vehicle out of the way.

After the taxi-driver split up from her husband, Garda Tom O'Shaughnessy, she moved back in with her mother. She often worked at night, and Mrs Costello was accustomed to the phone ringing at unsocial hours.

In the weeks before her daughter's death, she remembers several anonymous calls in the early hours of the morning. "One time, I decided to wait until I heard a voice before I replied. A couple of minutes passed and then the phone went dead." After the murder, there were several further calls. On one occasion, a woman rang in tears, and kept repeating that she was sorry.

"It could have been someone who was just upset and sympathising with us," Kenny Costello, Eileen's nephew, speculates. The gardai traced it to a call box in west Dublin. "I suppose we'll never know."

Kenny, who runs a minibus service with his father, Martin, and lives close to his granny, had just arrived back from Australia before his aunt's death. "I had been away for a year, and came home two weeks early."

The last time that both he, and Eileen's mother, saw the taxi-driver was when she dashed out from town to catch a glimpse of her nephew on his surprise return "There was great excitement. And then she was back into work, as she was on duty that Sunday. We never saw her alive again." Damien O'Shaughnessy (25), Eileen's son and Kenny's cousin, had been working in Digital at the time and living in Eyre Square. "I used to meet her in Supermac's for a quick coffee when she was on duty, or back home when I was out at soccer training in Corofin. The last time I saw her was the previous Wednesday, when I nipped out to granny's to pick up some stuff and she was sitting there counting her takings."

For Damien, as for all the family, the events of that week are as clear now as if it were last weekend. He had been in Dublin with his father when he received a phone call to say that his mother was missing. "I had just met up with a girl and was due to see her again that Sunday night. We got our venues confused, so we never linked up. Otherwise, I might still have been out in a club when the phone call came.

"As it was, I was in bed. I knew immediately that things weren't good. I left town with a friend, and we drove through the night."

Damien has since left Digital. He and his sister Susan (27) have become very close, and he visited her recently in England. He has moved in with his granny. Each day as he drives into Galway and passes the turn for Knockdoemore, his heart misses a beat.

Recently, the family put up a plaque to Eileen's memory at Knockdoemore.

"It gets worse, more frustrating, as time goes by," Damien says. "If only we knew why. It wouldn't bring my mother back. But maybe we could all get on with our lives." His grandmother agrees. "You know, we can talk about nothing else," she says. "I have experienced death before - I lost a three-month-old baby, and most of my own family have passed away - but your own child, and a murder, and not knowing who or why . . . Only a parent who has a child missing could feel worse."

Chief Supt Tom Monaghan, head of the Galway division, says that an intense investigation is still continuing, and the Garda's thoughts are with the family at this time of year. "We believe that the answer lies where Eileen met her death. No stranger to the area would have taken her out there."