Garda questions after Celine Cawley's murder focused on her superior earnings, writes KATHY SHERIDAN
THE LIFTS that trundle to the sixth floor of the new Criminal Courts of Justice complex trundled even more slowly yesterday as the early birds for the spectacle in Court 19 formed a queue soon after 9am.
When the court door opened an hour later, they swooped, leaving many standing. One wry old-timer peering in the smallish entrance and through the heaving crowd suggested they should start selling tickets.
The arrival of the bereaved relatives restored perspective. Shortly before 11am, Celine Cawley’s father, sister, brother and other family members took their seats in the reserved back row, braced for another day of painful evidence. A bloodstain analyst would interpret the five-feet high bloodstains found outside the sittingroom window of Ms Cawley’s home, in terms of “blood spatter”, “swipe pattern”, “cast-off” and “morphological” staining.
There was also some further reading of the interviews between detectives and Eamonn Lillis, and – for listeners – a reminder that gender stereotyping is alive and well. Questions focused on Ms Cawley’s superior earnings and her husband’s position in the marital pecking order. “Celine was the breadwinner, wasn’t she?” “Wasn’t she on a far greater salary?”
“She’d say jump and you’d say ‘how high?’” “Weren’t you more of a gofer?” .
A Garda mobile phone expert delivered further insights into the escalating affair between Lillis and the woman who gave him massages at the Howth Haven Beauty Clinic, Jean Treacy.
It also served as a reminder that deletion of texts doesn’t necessarily banish them forever.
“The data could be just stored in a place where the phone doesn’t go looking for it”, said Det Patrick Connell. And though texts can be over-written, portions can be recovered.
For the month of November 2008, the traffic between Ms Treacy’s phone and a prepaid, unregistered phone found in a search of Mr Lillis’s Howth home, was said to total 104 texts and calls. In the first half of December, a similar analysis between the latter phone and a second pre-paid one used by Jean Treacy, added up to nearly 300 texts and calls. Texts opened to the court focused on the dates around Ms Cawley’s death and revealed loving exchanges between the pair who had begun an affair 10 weeks before.
On December 14th around noon, a message from the phone found in Mr Lillis’s home read : “Hi my love . . . Really miss you my baby. Call or text asap. Love you x”.
Later that night, after suggesting a possible meeting next day, she signed off: “Night my angel. Love you infinitely. Sleep well x”.
On the morning of December 15th , the day of Ms Cawley’s death, she texted at 10.26: “Everything ok?” And again, at 11.14 : “Getting a bit worried now babe x”.
By then, Celine Cawley had been pronounced dead in Beaumont Hospital.
The following day, December 16th , she sent a couple of texts designed to reassure him – “Don’t want you to think I’m abandoning you” – but also to create a distance between them, “till things have calmed down (for both our sakes)”.
It hadn’t been an easy decision to make, she wrote. “You know that I miss you and will be thinking of you every step of the way”.
In another text, she told him she still felt “the exact same” and would see him at the funeral.
She made both phones “available” to investigators within a few days, the court was told.
It wasn’t the only piece of technology to come into evidence yesterday.
Eamonn Lillis twirled his pen and gave only the briefest upward glance as video footage of him buying a newspaper at the Summit Stores in Howth at 8.31am on December 15th was played to the court.
Det Sgt John Finan focused particularly on the clothes Mr Lillis was wearing at that time, and in particular on his light-coloured jeans and the white rim on his shoes.
Part of the picture, the detective explained, was obscured by the Christmas decorations around the shop counter. Above it a big banner spelled out “Merry Christmas”.