THE PROSECUTION in a Dublin murder trial has told the jury that the accused woman used her car as a weapon to kill a man in his son’s driveway. Patrick Gageby SC was opening the trial of a Dublin woman who has admitted killing the taxi driver in Blanchardstown almost four years ago.
Claire Nolan (25), Sheephill Green, Blanchardstown, has pleaded not guilty to murdering Michael Duffy (66) on January 26th, 2008, when she was 21. She has pleaded guilty to his manslaughter, at Wellview Grove in Blanchardstown.
The State has not accepted this plea and she is now on trial before Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy and a jury at the Central Criminal Court.
Mr Gageby told the jury that Ms Nolan was perhaps using her car against the victim’s son, Francis “Fran” Duffy, but succeeded in killing Mr Duffy snr.
Mr Gageby added that she drove her car into Mr Duffy, crushing him and causing him to collapse immediately. He died before he arrived at hospital.
“Claire Nolan extracted her little car, zoomed off and that car was found burnt out later,” Mr Gageby concluded.
Fran Duffy’s next-door neighbour, Josephine Cunningham, said Ms Nolan was visiting her daughter, Maria Cunningham, on the evening of January 25th.
Ms Nolan’s small car was parked in her driveway.
Ms Cunningham said she was upstairs in her bedroom when she heard a bang outside. She looked out but saw nothing.
“As I was closing my window, I heard Maria saying to Claire that there was something wrong with her car because she had seen Fran getting over the railings,” she testified, referring to her next-door neighbour and his son.
She said she went downstairs and Ms Nolan was outside. She said her daughter tried to push her back, telling her the matter was not her argument.
She said Ms Nolan and Fran Duffy were “having a verbal” in his garden, with Ms Nolan asking him where her radio was and him denying taking anything.
“She was very annoyed,” she said. “She hit him then with a baseball bat. She hit Fran on the head with it . . . a few times . . . There was blood coming out of his head.”
Ms Cunningham said she ran upstairs and called an ambulance, while Mr Duffy rang his father.
She then went into her kitchen and cleaned up “blood from the bat” and was upstairs again when she saw Ms Nolan drive her car out of her drive. “Then it drove into Fran’s house. It broke the gate. I think the gates were closed. It revved back out and back in again.”
She said Mr Duffy was standing near his son’s door. “Then the car came for him, the car went forward to him. I think it either crashed into him or what. I came back down and saw Mr Duffy [snr] on the ground and his head bleeding.”
However she later agreed with Brendan Grehan SC, defending, that she had not seen Mr Duffy before she came downstairs and saw him lying on the ground. She also agreed that the blood in her kitchen had actually come from Ms Nolan and another of her daughter’s guests, who were bleeding after the earlier incident. “I’m sorry for telling lies,” she said.
The trial continues.