A Co Galway man wore different clothes later on a night on which he is accused of raping and murdering a schoolgirl than those he was seen wearing earlier, his trial heard yesterday.
The jury also heard a friend and neighbour of the accused give evidence that he saw an oval-shaped scrape on the accused's arm "like the top set of teeth" the afternoon after the killing.
In the Central Criminal Court, the accused man - a 26year-old who cannot be identified for legal reasons - has denied the murder of the 17year-old schoolgirl in the county on December 6th, 1998. He also denies two counts of rape from the same occasion. The case is being heard in camera.
The jury has already heard that the accused was involved in a fight outside a hotel nightclub with his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend shortly before midnight. Witnesses - including Garda witnesses - to that incident and its aftermath have said the accused was wearing a white-ribbed V-necked jumper.
The trial heard yesterday from the last person to see the schoolgirl before she disappeared. A part-time waitress at the local hotel said she met the deceased girl on the roadway at around 12:45 or 12:50 a.m. The schoolgirl greeted her and continued walking away from the hotel.
Another waitress said she was sitting on a wall when she saw a car coming from the hotel direction. It stopped nearby, close to the entrance to a roadway. She heard a car door open and close but did not see anyone. The car moved off. When it was stopped, its lights were off, she said, and she noticed its left indicator was on, which she thought strange because it turned right down the road.
A male witness, who had worked with the accused for "a couple of weeks" before the killing, told Mr Denis Vaughan Buckley SC, prosecuting, that he and the accused spent the day of December 5th in Galway city, drinking in a number of pubs. At around 9 p.m. when he met him in a pub in the local village, the accused was wearing "a white top, woolish top, with the sleeves rolled up".
A young woman who was in the same school year as the deceased said she met the accused while with her boyfriend in a hotel in Eyre Square, Galway. The young woman said he was wearing a white V-neck wool top with the sleeves pulled up to his elbows.
The witness said later that night when she saw the accused in a local pub at around 10 p.m., he was wearing "the exact same top".
Later again, at around 2:30 a.m., she saw the accused on the path outside a local junior dancing venue, across the road from a chip shop. "It was about half two, 20 to three. He was wearing black clothes - a black T-shirt and I'm nearly sure, black jeans."
A friend and neighbour of the accused said he went into a local pub at around 2:30 p.m. the day after the killing, and saw the accused standing at the bar counter and noticed "marks on his arm, a scrape on his arm."
"I said in Irish, `Was somebody hungry last night?'," the witness said. The reason he said that was "because of the shape of it - it was of the top set of teeth, like that, oval-shaped".
The accused told him it must have happened the night before "up at the chippie" where he said "some guy had started at him and he had to give him a couple of clouts". The trial continues today.