The Devil in the Red Dress

by Abigail Rieley

  But Ní Raifeartaigh insisted that it was relevant. This was a conspiracy to murder trial and for that you needed a motive. It was far easier to order the killing of someone you hated and that’s what the emails would seem to suggest, argued Ní Raifeartaigh.

  Collins was shaking her head again, a concerned frown pitting her brow.

  ‘I know you need a motive to kill somebody but that sort of thing is a motive to leave somebody. It isn’t a motive to kill somebody. I most certainly didn’t hate P.J.,’ said Collins.

  The barrister shook her head; that wasn’t the only motive. Ní Raifeartaigh put it to her that money was the major motive to hire someone to kill the Howards.

  Collins leaned forward as she shook her head. That was ridiculous. P.J. had always promised to look after her if the relationship ended one day.

  ‘P.J. had always told me that if the relationship didn’t work out he would look after me very well. If I said to P.J. it has run its course and I’m leaving he would look after me very well. He always made it absolutely clear to me and I believed him.’

  She told the court she wouldn’t have needed to kill P.J. Howard to be sure of a home and an income.

  But the barrister wasn’t letting it go. If P.J. Howard had been so intent on looking after her, then why hadn’t he said anything to his solicitor, Ní Raifeartaigh asked. He had everything else in writing.

  This was indeed a problem. Collins tried her best to explain the situation. She said that P.J. had been in the process of setting something up but he hadn’t got round to it. It was just one of those things but it didn’t mean that he wouldn’t have done it.

  The barrister then said that P.J. Howard wouldn’t marry Collins.

  But he had wanted to, Collins responded. She said he made that very clear.

  Ní Raifeartaigh put it to her that it must have been humiliating, him refusing to get married.

  ‘I never made a secret of the fact I wanted to get married,’ said Collins.

  And there was a wedding reception where 39 people didn’t know that the bride and groom had not actually got married. Not to mention the proxy marriage itself, added Ní Raifeartaigh, who had done an excellent cross examination.

  Collins was on the stand for two days of cross examination. As everyone gathered for her second day of evidence she looked tense. Her face was drawn with the tiredness showing under her eyes. She suddenly looked markedly older than her legal opponent as she once again took the stand and Ní Raifeartaigh stood up to continue the questioning. The drill on this second day was to be a detailed re-examination of the computer evidence. Once again the barrister pointed out that it would have taken someone extremely devious to set her up.

  ‘Either it’s you or it’s someone setting you up by immediately doing the kind of searches and interests that you have, then going into Lying Eyes.’

  ‘It’s not me anyway,’ Collins told her.

  Ní Raifeartaigh pointed out how the person had known her so well. There was the order for Reductil, the searches for weight loss tips. ‘Tesco Diets is an odd place to go to if you are a mystery man setting you up for conspiracy for murder,’ the barrister said.

  She pointed out that Collins was known for her get rich quick schemes. This latest scheme to murder the Howards was simply more of the same. Ní Raifeartaigh started reading out the Lying Eyes emails. She asked Collins if she thought the language sounded like the kind of thing Collins would have written herself. Collins was adamant she had not written those terrible emails.

  ‘I will never get over the shock of this but I certainly did not write that. It’s terrible!’

  So was she suggesting that Niall or Robert Howard wrote the emails instead? They would be the only ones in a position to use all the laptops, stated the barrister.

  ‘I didn’t suggest that. The only thing I am suggesting here is that I didn’t do this. I would never do this,’ Collins responded.

  Collins’s calm veneer was wearing decidedly thin. Ní Raifeartaigh pushed on. She asked where the emails were that would back up her story of blackmail?

  Collins was quick with her reply. She had written those from an internet café in Spain and then her email inbox had been wiped. She added that she had assumed the gardaí would be able to get the emails from Eircom. She said that she was telling the truth, that she would never do anything to harm Howard and his sons.

  ‘I had a really, really good relationship with P.J.’s sons. They were like sons to me. I tried to be like a mother to them,’ she said for good measure.

  Collins insisted that she had not written those emails with all the horrible things in them. She continued with the line that she must have been set up. She said she hadn’t even known where the laptop in Ballybeg House was, that it had disappeared after a party the boys had had.

  Each answer that Collins gave was a lie. She could not answer any questions because she could not tell the truth. The details were causing her problems.

  She kept on saying that the Iridium laptop was not in the house, even though it had been located at Ballybeg House, and the dial-ups from the house exactly matched the timing of the emails sent from the Lying Eyes account.

  In spite of the weight of the evidence stacked against her, Collins continued to deny the truth.

  ‘The Iridium wasn’t there.’

  But the barrister wasn’t letting it go.

  The barrister said that there had been contact between Lying Eyes and ‘Luciano’ on the night of 15 August, and then again the following morning at about 8am.

  ‘Did you notice a blackmailer walking around your house at 8.10 a.m. that morning?’ Ní Raifeartaigh asked.

  The user had also accessed FedEx with a tracking number that only Collins had. There were also the phone calls, phone calls that had even followed her to Spain when she had travelled there, Ní Raifeartaigh reminded her.

  Collins was quickly losing her composure. She was the victim of blackmail, she claimed; not a would-be murderer.

  ‘What happened to me was a terrifying, frightening thing and what you are talking about is a terrifying, alarming thing.’

  By now she was getting visibly upset. Her opponent pressed her further and asked if she knew who set her up.

  ‘The mystery person could be Robert Howard,’ Ní Raifeartaigh suggested.

  Collins was indignant.

  ‘I never said that. I was mad about those boys.’

  Finally Collins broke down, the tears streaming down her cheeks as she dabbed at them with a handkerchief proffered by the stenographer. She knew what had happened to her, or so she said. She had explained it so many times, but she could not say who set her up.

  ‘I am sitting down here accused of the most horrendous crimes. Accused of trying to hurt people that I care about, that I had relationships with, things that I did not do!’

  By now the tears were coming unchecked.

  ‘I did foolish things, I did stupid things. I shouldn’t have written that letter about P.J. but I certainly didn’t plot to kill anybody,’ she said crying.

  Ní Raifeartaigh appeared unimpressed by the tears.

  ‘You got in here to try and do what you always do, and you sit there, trying to manipulate the jury, smiling at the jury.’

  ‘I’m not smiling at the jury,’ Collins replied.

  Ní Raifeartaigh reminded her that she had been the day before.

  ‘Sometimes when I’m nervous I smile. I’m not trying to manipulate, I’m telling the truth. I have always, always told the truth on this. I am not here to manipulate anybody,’ said Collins.

  The barrister listened attentively and said that Collins had repeatedly tried to manipulate, why else would she have written those three pleading letters to the Director of Public Prosecutions?

  Collins sat in the witness box looking broken, the tears still falling, her eyes red with crying. She tried one last time to state her case.

  ‘I was out of my home, my family in bits. I was absolutely shattered. I wasn’t try
ing to manipulate, I was trying to explain the damage this case is having to my family.’

  Finally her cross-examination was over. She stepped out of the witness box and returned to her sons. Gary put a protective arm around his mother’s shoulders and she turned her face into him for a moment. Her defence case was almost over and her evidence had not been the triumphant opportunity to put her story across one final time that she had hoped for. The prosecution had seen to that.

  Attention now turned to Eid, who had been sitting watching his co-accused’s cross examination with interest. He had wanted to take the stand himself but decided against doing so.

  All that was left was the closing speeches. Robert and Niall Howard reappeared to see the case come to a close, their appearance causing a small ripple of interest among the public benches as Ní Raifeartaigh once again took to her feet to close the prosecution case.

  This had been an ‘extraordinary and bizarre trial’ she told the jury. She warned that the case had been too easily dismissed by the media as trivial, simply because no-one had died.

  ‘From a distance this may look like a cheap thriller that Sharon Collins herself may have written but this is a tragedy for everyone involved,’ the barrister said.

  She warned that it would be wrong to dismiss this case as trivial; the finding of ricin in Eid’s cell lifted the matter out of ‘fantasy and speculation’.

  She urged the jury to look beneath the farcical elements to the darker truth beneath because, ‘treachery lies in honeyed words’. She warned that while the jury may feel they were dealing with fools, they were dangerous fools. The case against the two defendants was strong but the smoking gun, where Sharon Collins was concerned, was the fact that someone had checked the tracking number of the parcel sent to Essam Eid’s address at 8.10 a.m. on the morning of 16 August from Ballybeg House. It was the one thing that Collins could not talk her way out of, though she might ‘talk and talk and talk’.

  The defence counsel, Michael Bowman made the final speech in Collins’s defence. He pointed out to the jury that they could not discount John Keating’s evidence, which gave Collins a partial alibi on 16 August, a day the prosecution put so much emphasis on. He pointed out the discrepancies in the notes of the interviews Collins had given to the gardaí compared with the video evidence. He impressed upon them the possibility that someone else had written the emails; that Collins’s story of Maria Marconi was the truth and she herself had been a victim of blackmail. He also drew their attention to the ricin evidence. The fact that the lens case had not been listed in Eid’s personal belongings at his arrest and the failure of tests at both stages of analysis, both a field test and at the veterinary lab in the UK, was something they should definitely bear in mind.

  He warned the jury against slavishly following computer generated evidence. He sat down, to allow Eid’s team to argue their case.

  Of the three arguments, Eid’s was the only one delivered by his senior counsel. David Sutton took to his feet and spoke to the jury. His client was the ‘patsy’ in all of this. The jury should be under no illusions that it was Sharon Collins who was the ‘great white defendant’ while Eid was simply the ‘patsy being dragged along in the wake’.

  The case against Eid, he said was not Dial M for Murder, it was clearly a case of Dial M for Money.

  ‘It was a clownish operation by clowns in the hope of hooking fools.’

  He dismissed the ricin evidence out of hand. The only evidence before the jury was that Eid was in possession of an empty contact lens case in Limerick Prison. Despite what the State may have suggested the jury was not to assume that Eid had any contact with ricin before he left the States.

  ‘There is no such evidence before you and the State reporting that Mr Eid was making it does not make it so,’ he said.

  The same was true of the computer evidence, he told the jury. Eid was by no means the only person who had access to the phones and computers seized from Camden Cove Street. He reminded them that the only person who had come before them with a criminal record was Teresa Engle, someone who had a vested interest to give damning evidence against Eid and someone whose word should not be trusted but he reminded them that the charges Engle had faced in the States had been over a case of extortion, not conspiracy to murder. The scheme was clumsy and foolish with an ‘asinine plot worthy of the Cohen brothers.’ He implored the jury to treat Eid with justice and discretion and not be swayed by the grand accusations of the Prosecution.

  As Sutton sat back down, all that was left was for the jury to be charged to begin their deliberations. On 7 July 2008 the eight men and four women began their deliberations. It would be another two days before Sharon Collins and Essam Eid learned their fate and even longer before they would discover what price they would pay.

  CHAPTER 15:

  THE HOUSE ALWAYS WINS

  After the verdict was read out the court emptied in quick fashion. The press hurried round to the front of the building to wait for the statements that would inevitably follow. P.J. Howard’s statement had already arrived, emailed to the waiting press within minutes of the jury’s decision, the Howard family now showing a united front and pleading for a privacy that was unlikely to follow until P.J. Howard had dropped his torch for the ‘devil in the red dress’. Short and succinct it intended to draw a line under the whole sorry mess.

  ‘We are relieved that this long trial has come to a conclusion and we would like to express our appreciation to the members of the jury for their patience and attention. It is also appropriate to record our gratitude to the many people who have assisted us during this difficult period. We now look forward to getting on with our lives and we request the privacy that’s necessary to assist us in this respect. It is not our intention to make any further statement.’

  But the media still hung around. Word soon went round that Collins’s solicitor Eugene O’Kelly planned to make a statement to the press. A few minutes later, after a large crowd had assembled, microphones and flashguns at the ready, O’Kelly took his place, flanked by Gary and David, their father Noel a reassuring presence at their shoulder. The crowd surged forward but the statement, when it came, was little more than a holding pattern.

  ‘Sharon Collins has maintained her innocence in this trial. The jury have found her guilty. The judge has adjourned sentencing for the preparation of reports. Accordingly, in relation to the comment, it would be inappropriate to comment any further on the verdict at this stage,’ he said.

  The outstretched arms of the media remained thrust forward as he turned his attention to the rest of the Collins family.

  ‘The two persons most affected other than Sharon as a result of this verdict are her two sons. These are two fine young men who have displayed loyalty, devotion and love to there mother. They have stood by her in this trial and their lives have now been shattered as a result of the outcome.’

  The journalists were asked to steer clear of the boys for the time being and give them time to adjust to the ‘changed circumstances’.

  ‘These circumstances are entirely not of their making and they now have to move on,’ the solicitor added.

  O’Kelly refused to be drawn on the matter of an appeal. The sentences hadn’t been handed down yet, he reminded the assembled journalists. There would be time enough for that at the sentence in the autumn.

  And that was it. The Collins family hurried off to grieve their loss while Sharon was led away in handcuffs, her face red with shock as the cold metal of the cuffs brought home the reality of her situation. She had lost the case, and she would have to wait three months to discover what the punishment would be. All she could do now was try to make the most of her situation. She was to wait for her sentence in the Dochas Centre, the women’s wing of Mountjoy Prison, home to some of Ireland’s most notorious female criminals.

  In prison she was visited by her sons, and P.J. Howard also visited at the jail.

  Despite everything that had been said in court, and the final conclusio
n made by the jury, P.J. Howard was determined to show his continuing support to the woman who had betrayed him so bitterly. He still refused to accept a word that had been said against Collins in court and worked feverishly behind the scenes trying to help her in any way he could.

  The press interest in Collins’s failed plot didn’t diminish. She had become one of the elite group of detainees that continue to make the headlines even when they’re doing nothing. As soon as she arrived in the Dochas Centre the stories started. ‘Prison services insiders’ provided stories of the tears that greeted the beginning of her incarceration. Then came the stories that she was picky when it came to prison food. Collins, famous for her purchase of Reductil on the internet, was reluctant to eat the stodgy prison fare, it was claimed. She had insisted on a list of dietary requirements, which it was reported with some glee, were refused. Every suggestion that the millionaire’s ex was getting no special treatment was seized on and treated to a front page splash in the tabloids. The public were treated to a dissection of the menus she would be served with and the company she would now be keeping, a world away from Ennis’s ladies who lunch.

  The CVs of her fellow inmates were trotted out again and again. There were the Mulhall sisters, passed into Dublin history as the Scissor Sisters after they chopped up the body of their mother’s boyfriend to dispose of it. But most illustrious among the inhabitants of Mountjoy’s women’s prison was the Black Widow herself, Catherine Nevin, who had been convicted of murdering her husband, a natural ally given the circumstances. No one was particularly surprised when the stories started being circulated that Collins and the Black Widow had forged a bond. It was logical, after all Nevin had gone through everything Collins was now facing, and there was talk of her mounting an appeal. Who better to offer hope to the broken Lying Eyes?