If he was intimidated by his surroundings, the accused did not show it, writes KATHY SHERIDAN.
FREDERICK AND Mary Mahon sat in the Central Criminal Court for no more than 40 minutes or so, long enough to hear a garda speak of finding five teeth near a Lough Gill shoreline. Mary crumpled a tissue and suppressed a sob as evidence was given about “pieces of skull”. Her husband took her hand in his. Moments later they left and did not return.
The man accused of murdering their 14-year-old daughter Melissa and dumping her body in a sleeping bag sat across from them in a grey T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, the visible parts of his body heavily tattooed from his temple and inner ears to his forearms.
If he is intimidated by his surroundings, Ronald McManus, a 44-year-old father of five, gives no hint of it, remaining thoroughly engaged, checking statements line by line, keeping senior counsel Brendan Grehan busy with copious handwritten notes and comments.
The court was hearing details about the skeletal remains of the Mahons’ 10th and youngest child found around a remote river bank after the girl had been missing for 15 months; about the nightdress bearing a motif of a princess surrounded by roses; about the pink bra in a size 36B that to Brendan Grehan seemed unlikely to belong to a slightly built 14-year-old no taller than 5ft 2in; about the two clumps of hair. “The sleeping bag appeared to have been ripped open by animals,” Prof Marie Cassidy theorised, “and the clothed body removed from the sleeping bag and scattered over a wide area.”
An anthropologist helped to sort the animal bones before Melissa’s remains came to her, said the pathologist. The area inside the pieces of broken skull was lined with green mildew or moss; the upper jaw was missing; the mandible was intact and contained two teeth and another unerupted.
She listed the separate bones that had come to her in “small packets”: the femur, the tibia, both sides of the pelvis, three ribs, several cervical vertebrae.
“All the long bones had extensive damage to the ends, consistent with animal damage,” she said as Ronald McManus busily took notes.
But there was not a trace of human tissue. More animal damage? “Yes, it could have removed any human tissue that had been attached.”
Brendan Grehan mentioned evidence given by Ronald McManus’s daughters who claimed they had seen him lying in bed behind Melissa in a “spoon” position, with his arm across her throat and wondered about it “as a mechanism for causing death”.
Prof Cassidy said an arm on the neck or armlock can cause sudden collapse or death due to pressure on the sides of the neck.
“Could it happen in a potentially friendly situation?” he asked. “It could happen without a person intending to cause harm,” she agreed.