I didn't see a way out of lies, defendant tells prosecution

MARY ELLEN Ring, prosecuting, opened her cross-examination of Mr Lillis by quoting evidence given by his daughter on Thursday: “I was brought up never to lie.”

“Were you present throughout her childhood or is that the work of your wife?” she asked before listing the lies he told following Ms Cawley’s death.

“You gave the name of a person to gardaí. That man had nothing to do with these events,” she said about one of the lies. “At that stage you knew your wife had died.”

“I did not try to implicate him for the death of my wife,” he said.

“I’m truly, truly sorry. I felt trapped. I didn’t see a way out of it,” he said when asked about embracing his daughter in raw grief at the time.

“I was taking Valium and sleeping pills. I was irrational,” he said as to why he continued to lie even after his arrest when it was clear that gardaí didn’t believe his story. He said parts of his statements were true.

“By the 15th of November you were well used to deception weren’t you? You’d been lying for eight weeks at least to your wife,” she said, referring to his affair.

“I was deceiving her by not telling her but didn’t lie to her directly,” he said.

“Can we agree that the only person who hurt Celine Cawley on December 15th, 2008, was you?” she asked.

“I was there,” he replied.

She asked if he had caused none of Ms Cawley’s many injuries.

“They were caused by the struggle between us,” he said.

“Are you saying the harm was the result of her actions?” she asked.

“As a result of the physical tussle. I accept I was a major participant in it,” he said.

Ms Ring said that in this fight his wife was flatlining with serious blood loss from three head wounds while he needed only a bandage on his finger.

He denied attacking his wife when she scratched his face “like a cat”. He said the staging of the robbery and changing of his clothes took about 10 to 12 minutes.

She asked him why he was in such a hurry to hide the clothes when his daughter wouldn’t be home from school for four hours. Would he not find a better hiding place when he went to meet his girlfriend that morning, she asked.

“I just wanted to get it out of the way to get back downstairs to Celine. I’d no intention of leaving the house after that happened,” he said.

Ms Ring will continue cross-examining Mr Lillis on Monday.