DEFENCE COUNSEL Brendan Grehan asked Eamonn Lillis what happened after his row with Celine Cawley .
He replied: “I’m looking around thinking about what happened. I presume she was as well,” he said, confirming that she was conscious.
“She didn’t speak until after she sat up, after she rested her head on my lap,” he said. “She pulled off her rubber gloves and threw them on the ground.” He said he asked her what they were going to tell their daughter and asked if she was okay.
“She said yeah and told me to go away,” he said.
“Will we tell her we surprised a robber?” he said he suggested, explaining that their house had been burgled before. “She said ‘yeah, yeah’ and waved her hand at me.” “I went back into the kitchen and brought out some wet kitchen paper and a towel,” he recalled. He said he gave these to his wife to hold against the back of her head for a few minutes. He said he asked her again if she was okay.
“Yeah, yeah. F-off and leave me alone. Go away. Go away,” he claimed she said.
He said he thought they needed some space at that stage, so he picked up the gloves and paper towels and went into the kitchen. “I didn’t see a huge amount of blood on her head. Her hair was thick and black. Her reaction didn’t give me the impression that she was seriously hurt,” he said.
He said he wrapped his finger in tissue and threw the gloves and paper towels into a plastic bag before going into the living room to stage the robbery for their daughter’s benefit.
“I copied what had been robbed from our house before,” he said. “I grabbed camera gear.” He said he then went upstairs, cleaned his finger in the bathroom and took off his watch in the bedroom. “I noticed blood on my jeans,” he said. He took them off along with his shoes and socks, threw them on the floor and changed.
He said he returned to the bathroom to put another tissue on his blood-soaked finger.
“I sat on the edge of the bath trying to gather myself,” he said. “I didn’t know what to think. I was incredibly upset and my finger was in incredible pain too.” Back in the bedroom he put on another watch and saw the bloody tissue and clothes on the floor.
“I figured they were never going to wash out and shoved them into the plastic bag,” he said. He put them into a suitcase that was outside his door, noticed that the attic door across the landing was opened and put the case in there.
“I knew when I came downstairs Celine would say: ‘Well, if we’re going to make it look like a robbery, what have you done about it?’ That’s the last thing I needed,” he said.
He said he went back downstairs to the kitchen.
“I looked out the door and saw Celine lying on the ground. I went out to her and called her name,” he said, explaining that his wife was mostly on her back with her legs and arms facing sideways.
“She didn’t answer me. I knelt down beside her. I shook her chin and she didn’t wake up,” he said, adding that he kept calling her name. “I didn’t know whether she was breathing.” He said he tried to check her pulse but couldn’t work it out and dialled 999.
He said he told the operator that there had been a robbery as that’s what they had just agreed.
“Even then I thought surely she’d be okay. There was no reason that I could think of that she’d go from being okay to seriously injured.” He said he carried out CPR as instructed until gardaí arrived.
Mr Lillis said he told the paramedics who arrived that there had been a burglar because he had already told the operator this and also because he didn’t want people to know that their injuries were from a row they’d had.
“I saw them picking her up and bringing her to the ambulance. I presumed she was okay. I presumed that if someone was dead they were not moved,” he said, when asked why he continued this story to gardaí. “I presumed Celine would say the same thing as well so I kept with the story.” He said that when he found out his wife had died, he went into shock and didn’t know what to do.
“I was trying to deny what had happened myself. I didn’t want people to know we’d had a fight,” he said in explanation of a lengthy statement he gave gardaí about a burglar. “I just got paralysed. I’m sorry.” He was asked why he’d kept the story of the burglar even when arrested.
“Having said it before, I’d boxed myself into a corner,” he said. “All that week I’d been surrounded by all of Celine’s family and friends. I felt trapped. I didn’t see any way out.” “I’d never been in a fight in my life even, especially in a situation like this,” he said when asked why it took him until January to tell anyone the truth. “My wife had died. I didn’t want to accept it. I couldn’t find any way of explaining to people what happened.”
However, he said he felt he had to tell his daughter. He was asked about a note found in his bedroom, which listed a number of “statements”. “They were some notes I’d taken several weeks before, nothing to do with these events,” he said. “It was based on things going on in my life.”