State witness Charles Bowden told the Special Criminal Court yesterday that one of the men who murdered Veronica Guerin told him "it was a good job" less than an hour after she had been shot dead.
Bowden said he met the man, who cannot be identified by order of the court, and another gang member in Moore Street, Dublin, between 1.00 and 1.30 p.m. on June 26th, 1996, the day the journalist was killed. Bowden said the man made the statement but defence counsel Mr Patrick McEntee SC immediately objected, saying this was hearsay evidence.
Bowden, who is in Arbour Hill prison under the Witness Protection Programme, was in the witness box for the fourth day yesterday on the 22nd day of the trial of Mr Paul "Hippo" Ward, who has denied murdering Ms Guerin. Bowden (34) from Finglas in Dublin, a former soldier, is serving a six-year jail sentence for drugs and firearms offences, and has been granted immunity from prosecution for the Guerin murder by the DPP.
He has identified Mr Ward (34) as a member of a gang which distributed hundreds of kilos of cannabis in Dublin, and said that Ms Guerin had been killed because she "pissed off" the gang's leader.
Ward, from Crumlin, Dublin, with an address at Walkinstown Road, has pleaded not guilty to the murder of Ms Guerin, a 36-year-old mother of one, at the Naas Road, Clondalkin, Co Dublin, on June 26th, 1996. The prosecution claims Ward was a member of the gang that planned and carried out the killing and he disposed of the murder weapon and the motorcycle afterwards.
Bowden told Mr McEntee yesterday he could not recall when exactly gardai had shown photos of the murdered woman to him but it was on the first day of his detention following his arrest on October 5th, 1996.
"I was sent back to the cell shortly after that," he said. "It was when I got back to the cell these images came to me. The next time I started talking to the guards, drip-feeding them information. I was terrified. I was scared. I was all over the place.
"I was terrified to tell them what I knew. I just couldn't seem to stop myself from telling them what I knew. For the first few hours I was fine, then I was shown the photos. The images upset me. I was still trying not to tell them everything. When I was put back in the cell these images came across my mind. All the time my wife and children were in danger from what I told the guards. I was just in a state basically," he said.
Bowden said he began to tell the gardai the truth from then on but said he was "in a state of confusion and terrified. I couldn't keep up the pretence. I told the guards some things, I didn't tell them others." Asked by Mr McEntee how he had continued to tell the gardai lies after his "road to Damascus" conversion, Bowden replied: "I still lied. I lied over and over the two days."
Asked how he squared the lies with the "conversion", he replied: "Fear. Fear of the repercussions for telling the truth and implicating these people. I can't defend the lies I told over those two days," he added.
When it was suggested that he had told a "nasty calculating lie" by initially telling the gardai that the accused was present in a pub on the night of the murder, Bowden replied: "All of the lies were nasty and calculating."
Bowden said that there was no time during his interviews with the gardai that he told the full truth. He said he had "drip-fed" them information and had shown them where the guns brought in by the drugs gang were stored, in the Jewish cemetery in Tallaght. "It was fear, pure fear, between admitting everything and trying to save myself," he said.
Bowden said that once he started telling gardai the truth he had a mental picture of being surrounded by lots of gardai who would protect him and, instead, found himself in Mountjoy surrounded by hundreds of criminals who were friends of his former associates. "I wanted to tell the gardai everything I knew about everything but I was also trying to protect myself from telling them too much and I was afraid, confused, scared."
He denied a suggestion that he had collected the murder weapon from the killer and had taken it to the hairdresser's shop he had bought as a cover for his drugs money. Bowden said the two gang members he met in Moore Street were there to give themselves an alibi.
Questioned about his movements on the night before Ms Guerin was murdered, and after he had loaded the murder weapon with six bullets, Bowden said he could not recall if he had gone out for dinner. Asked by Mr McEntee if he had been sitting in a restaurant thinking what a "low creature" he was, Bowden replied: "If I had guts I would have made a telephone call to somebody and told them what was going on. I remember thinking that it would not come off or something would go wrong. But I didn't honestly think that deeply about it," he added.
Asked about how he felt on the morning of the murder, Bowden replied: "I remember getting up that morning and thinking that something is going to happen to Veronica Guerin that day and I better have an alibi for being somewhere else when it happens." The trial continues today.
