A man accused of murdering his wife said she backed into a knife he was holding. Mr James (Jimmy) McDonagh (28), of Slieve Foy Park, Muirhevnamore, Dundalk, Co Louth, has pleaded not guilty to murdering his wife, Sheila McDonagh (26), with a nine-inch bread knife on September 12th, 1997.
Giving evidence yesterday in the Central Criminal Court, Mr McDonagh said he took the knife from his wife following an argument. Mr McDonagh said that when he arrived at his sister's house, "Sheila was fighting" with another woman. The two women were "pulling the hair of one another, roaring and shouting," he said. "I got in between the two of them and I separated them. I then got Sheila and I'm laying her over the wall to keep her calm.
"The next minute she had a knife in her hand. As soon as I got off her and let her go, I let her loose then and she came back up into the knife.
"As soon as the knife went into her back I pulled it out and pegged it into the garden. I put my hand up against the cut to stop the bleeding. I had her sitting up in my lap in the hall. I was saying `sorry, I didn't mean it'. Then the guards came in and put me in the sitting room. I was in shock. I couldn't believe it happened." When asked by defence counsel Mr John MacMenamin SC if he ever meant to seriously injure his wife, Mr McDonagh replied: "No".
"I'll always regret what happened," he said. Claiming he had considered committing suicide, Mr McDonagh said: "I still feel the same way as the day it happened. My son, he never should have lost his mother. She loved her little boy." In his final address, Mr MacMenamin asked the jury to consider Mr McDonagh struggling against his wife as he takes the knife from her while she is bent forward and then her rising "up against" him and then the knife entering her body. "Ask yourself `is that possible?' Put yourself in the mind of a murderer. If you wanted to kill someone or cause serious injury wouldn't you drive [the knife] right in to the hilt, more than once?" Counsel said Mr McDonagh had made no attempt to hide the knife, to run away or to change his clothes and that the incident occurred in "full view of the neighbours".
Mr MacMenamin said that although none of the witnesses had seen Mrs McDonagh with a knife, "nobody saw Jimmy with the knife either".
In his closing speech prosecution counsel Mr Ralph Sutton SC said that "the most remarkable feature of the case is that five witnesses from different walks of life saw the accused go up to his wife and stab her".
Mr Sutton said the accused alleged that his wife "sat up suddenly . . . against the knife". "How did that happen?" he asked.
He pressed the knife into his own hand and said the knife would "not penetrate anything unless it was driven".
Mr Sutton said Mr McDonagh had allegedly told gardai three different stories immediately after his arrest. He dismissed his evidence as "very dubious".
Mr Justice O'Donovan will give his review of the evidence today before sending out the jury of eight men and four women to consider their verdict.