Lillis denies he felt trapped in marriage

EAMONN LILLIS denied that he felt trapped in his marriage to Celine Cawley, whom he is accused of murdering at their home on December 15th, 2008.

The 52-year-old TV advert producer was being cross-examined by the prosecution on the 10th day of his trial for the alleged murder at Rowan Hill, Windgate Road, Howth.

Mr Lillis has pleaded not guilty at the Central Criminal Court to murdering the 46-year-old while their teenage daughter was at school.

Mr Lillis initially blamed an intruder for her three fatal head injuries but now admits that there was no intruder.

On Friday he told the court that he and his wife had a physical fight that morning and afterwards agreed that in order to explain their injuries they would tell their daughter that they’d disturbed a burglar.

He said when his wife fell unconscious he kept up this pretence for the ambulance staff and gardaí, not expecting her injuries to be serious. When she died he felt trapped by the lie, he said.

“Were you feeling trapped on December 15th because of the lies or because of a new opportunity in life with Ms Treacy?” asked Mary Ellen Ring SC yesterday, referring to Jean Treacy with whom he was having an affair at the time.

“It was never a possibility that anything would happen,” he said.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“Yes,” he replied.

Ms Ring reminded him that the jury would have a note found by gardaí in which he wrote: “She will get that wedding dress.

She will marry Keith next June.

She will send out invites in January.

You will never be with her properly.

The only way you’ll be with her is to live here.

Think of the positives in developing a new relationship.

You will never take her to France.

She will never share your bed.

You are running out of time!!!”

He agreed that Ms Treacy was due to get married in June and that her fiance’s name was Keith. He agreed that he was referring to her in the first few lines of the note.

However, when she questioned him about the fifth line: “The only way you’ll be with her is to live here,” he said the entire note did not refer to his affair.

He agreed that he had a house in France but said the line referring to France was not about Ms Treacy.

“It doesn’t refer to our situation,” he said when asked about the final line.

“It was something I was working on with my sister,” he said, adding that he could back this up with notes.

He explained that he had been shooting an ad for Irish Permanent once when some people asked if he was filming a reconstruction for Crimeline.

He said he thought this was funny and considered that criminals could be robbing a bank but, if they had cameras, people could think they were filming a reconstruction.

He thought this would be a good idea for a story. He woke up one night in November, wrote his ideas in a notebook and tore out the pages, he claimed.

“I was going to take them into the office to work off the notes,” he said, explaining that he was writing about characters in the note, not himself.

Ms Ring asked that if this was so, why he didn’t write in the third person: ‘She’ will never share ‘his’ bed.

“It was four o’clock in the morning,” he replied.

He said the final line referred to two characters. She asked why he did not write “they” instead of “you”.

“I wrote you,” he replied.

She asked why he did not write “live there” instead of “live here” if it was a work of fiction.

“I wrote it based on what I was going through,” he said.

“Are you sure you weren’t feeling trapped when you wrote that?” she asked.

“I’d no reason to feel trapped,” he responded.

Mr Lillis had said one of the injuries to the back of his wife’s head must have been caused from her banging her head against a window edge when he pushed her during the fight. However, Ms Ring put it to him that the window edge was vertical and both wounds were horizontal.

“Maybe when she fell then,” he said. “Again I’m not sure if her head struck it or not. Because she screamed I thought she might have (banged her head).”

She asked him how far away from the window Ms Cawley was when he pushed her against it.

“Two paces perhaps,” he said.

She quoted evidence from a forensic scientist, which said that a bloodstain found on that window edge was 5¼ft above the ground.

“Celine Cawley was 5ft 10,” she said.

“She was actually 5ft 8,” he argued.

“Dr Curtis said she was 5ft 10,” she said, referring to the Deputy State Pathologist postmortem evidence.

“I was married to her and she was 5ft 8,” insisted the defendant.