EVERYONE in and around Oranmore knew Tommy Casey, though he went out of his way to avoid people and rarely spoke to anyone. Since his mother died some 30 years ago, he had been living alone in the family home, a rundown two storey house sheltered among a clump of conifers half a mile out of the village on the Dublin road and beside a busy roundabout.
Inside the house the 68 year old bachelor lived out the most solitary of lives, choosing to keep himself as isolated as possible in cheerless, dingy surroundings. The house was wired for electricity but a long time ago the power had been cut off after Tommy had stopped paying the bills and the only light that glowed in his kitchen at night came from an oil lamp. An old Stanley stove supplied whatever heat could be retained in the draughty house.
On the occasions when someone came knocking on the front door, Tommy wouldn't answer. He wanted nobody to enter his home. Yet earlier this week some person or persons unknown did enter the house unnoticed, by whatever means, possibly pushing in a loose board that covered a broken rear window downstairs. Whoever got in ransacked the house in a painstaking search for any valuables that might be there, though not much could have been found because Tommy Casey was a poor man.
The break in might not have drawn too much attention had it not followed the grotesque pattern of violence that has marked the growing number of raids on homes in rural parts of Ireland in recent times. Tommy Casey was bludgeoned savagely on the back of the head with such force that it drew blood and may have knocked him unconscious immediately.
Then he was tied up with a strong rope that was wrapped tightly around his shins, run between his thighs and wound around his wrists, pinioning them behind his back. When a neighbour, Tom Sheridan, and a local Garda, Charlie Loughlin, found him, he was pitched on his face in front of the kitchen range, dead. Tom Sheridan, who knew Tommy for most of his life, will always remember the eeriness of the scene when he and Garda Loughlin forced their way through the back door into the kitchen. The stillness of death was in the room and the only sound was the mewing of a pet cat that was the only other occupant of the house.
Tom Sheridan recalls that while she lived, Tommy Casey's mother over protected her only child. Originally they had a good farm of some 40 acres of land and the mother ran it more or less on her own. "She almost kept Tommy under lock and key and he never did any work on the farm, " says Mr Sheridan. "After she died a relative came over from America and disposed of most of the land.
"Tommy had only the house and a field beside it. He was the shyest man you could imagine and would take the long way into the village trying to avoid meeting people. He never went into the local pubs and even when he went shopping he would hardly talk to anybody."
He used a wheel barrow to carry home his shopping from the village. When neighbours would call to drop off some food, he wouldn't answer the door and they would leave it outside for him to collect. It was a plastic bag containing a piece of bacon, left hanging on the front doorknob by a neighbour, that drew attention to the awful, undeserved death that overtook this most inoffensive of men.
A farmer's wife who lives only two miles away, and who does not want to be named, said "If a man as harmless as Tommy Casey, who hardly spoke a word to anybody in his life and who obviously had nothing worth robbing, can be killed in his own home, how can any of us feel safe again?"