Meanwhile, a Garda fingerprint expert would soon find the fingermarks on the tape which have never been identified. While there may be some innocent explanation for the marks, such as that they were somehow put on in the manufacturing process, this seems a remote possibility. The fact that the marks are on both the sticky and non-sticky side of the tape indicates the finger impressions were put on as Grace was being bound and gagged with the tape. What is without doubt is that the fingermarks were certainly not Jimmy Livingstone’s.
Another important factor which remains unresolved is that the actual roll of black tape, from which three pieces had been taken to gag and bind Grace, was never found. The tape was strong, similar to ‘gaffer’ tape which might normally be used to cover wires or cables. Logic would dictate the killer had removed three pieces of tape from the roll during the attack, and had then taken the rest of the roll of tape with him as he left the house. That roll has never been found.
In the first few days of the investigation a number of witnesses gave statements about a man seen close to the Livingstone house at around 4.30 p.m., a time when Jimmy and Conor were both still working in Dublin city. Indeed one witness actually saw a young man at the Livingstone front door at 4.30 p.m. To this day this young man has never been identified. He was spotted standing in the porch and bending down to pick up a pot plant, as if he had just knocked it over. A number of witnesses also reported hearing a distinct sound at around 4.30 p.m., and what they most likely heard was the sound of the murder, the sound of the shotgun being fired. From very early in the investigation there was a wealth of evidence to indicate Jimmy Livingstone did not shoot his wife.
Almost two decades after his wife was murdered, Jimmy Livingstone kindly met with me and did an interview for this book. He and his family have been through a great deal. In April 2008, he and his daughter Tara and son Conor settled a High Court action they had taken against the State. Part of the settlement was a declaration on behalf of the Minister for Justice that ‘... notwithstanding the diligent and exhaustive investigations carried out in this matter, An Garda Síochána can confirm that Mr James Livingstone is entitled to the full and unreserved presumption of innocence.’ It had been a long road for the Livingstones to get that declaration. The family had begun preparing court proceedings in the mid-1990s. During our conversation Jimmy often refers to the second Garda investigation involving a different set of detectives which took place a year after Grace’s murder and which effectively cleared him. This investigation involved a fresh team of detectives being despatched from Garda Headquarters to study the case. Led by Detective Superintendent Tom Connolly and Detective Sergeant Todd O’Loughlin, the cold-case investigation surmised that the murder of Grace Livingstone occurred sometime around 4.30 p.m., when Jimmy Livingstone was still at work. “I persisted with my High Court action because unkind reports were being published erratically about the crime, and none of them ever referred to Tom Connolly’s investigation which cleared me. That was always played down and the first investigation by other Gardaí was played up. And I wanted to correct that, to have it corrected publicly, and I also ultimately wanted the culprit to be found. I still believe that can be done.”
It took until 2008 for the High Court case to actually get into court, and it was then scheduled to last up to eight weeks. But on the fourth day the case was settled to the satisfaction of Jimmy and Tara and Conor. “The State was bloody minded in bringing it that far,” Jimmy tells me. “An estimate of my legal fees had been put at €1.3 million if it had gone to an eight-week trial. I assume the State was facing the same. As part of the settlement the State paid my legal fees. If I had lost the case I would have gone to appeal and if I had lost that I was prepared to go to the Court of Human Rights in the EU. I had prepared for giving up everything I had financially. What else would you do?”
On 3 March 1993 Jimmy was arrested under Section 30 of the Offences Against the State Act. It was just less than three months since Grace had been found shot dead. Detectives came to Jimmy’s front door at the same house in which Grace had been found at The Moorings in Malahide. He was arrested and taken to Swords Garda station. By that time Gardaí had established that, while Jimmy owned a number of legally held firearms, he was also in possession of two unlicensed guns. Jimmy was a gun enthusiast, it was in his blood. His father had owned guns, and Jimmy had been going shooting since he was a teenager. “I did have an unlicensed firearm, and it was later dealt with in the District Court as a summary matter,” Jimmy tells me. “I got a fine of £300, it was a rap on the knuckles. I had an unlicensed revolver, it was a Mark VI Webley revolver from the First World War. I was also charged with possession of another gun which had the capacity to fire corks.”
While Gardaí might maintain that they were following the letter of the law in forwarding a file to the DPP in relation to the two unlicensed firearms, the circumstances of his arrest left a sour taste in the mouth of Jimmy Livingstone. In the opening days of the High Court case that Jimmy and his two children took in April 2008, their barrister John Rogers outlined a number of grievances which his clients had with the original investigation which took place in December 1992 and early 1993. Mr Rogers said his client had no motive and insufficient time to murder his wife, and that Gardaí had failed to follow through on other leads, in particular the unidentified man seen at the house at 4.30 p.m. on the day of the murder. The Livingstones argued that Gardaí had failed in their ‘duty of care’ in relation to the case. Because the case was settled on the fourth day without the State outlining its full defence, we don’t know what it would have said to each of the individual allegations made by Jimmy. But sixteen years after Grace’s murder the High Court settlement was vindication for the Livingstones. Standing with his son and daughter outside the court just after the case was settled, Jimmy welcomed the public declaration by the State that he was entitled to the full and unreserved presumption of innocence. “This has been a long, long haul. After fifteen years we have now established that I am not a suspect for the murder of their mother, and my wife. Those who heard the evidence over the past few days will know what the family has suffered.” Asked if his wife would be proud of her family for the action they had taken, Tara and Conor nodded as Jimmy emotionally replied, “I think she would.” Conscious that this was an action that the family should never have had to take in the first place, Jimmy Livingstone emotionally told reporters the authorities should now go and find who killed Grace.
When I met with Jimmy to discuss his family’s ongoing campaign, he showed me some of the boxes of documents he was given by the State prior to his High Court action. Jimmy knows the case inside out. It has consumed his life ever since he found his wife’s body. He has 77 large boxes of documents, containing 17,000 pages of detail about the case. “There are other documents I didn’t get copies of, documents where privilege was claimed. I’d say there are between 5,000 and 10,000 documents I was not given. Maybe they had confidential information from informers and the like. I handled a lot of information myself in my time and a lot was formal and a lot was informal.”
At the time of Grace’s murder, Jimmy was a Senior Inspector of Taxes with the Revenue Commissioners. He worked in the Special Enquiry Branch, tracing people who were evading taxes on a large scale. It would only be in the aftermath of the murder of journalist Veronica Guerin in 1996 that the Garda Criminal Assets Bureau was established. Prior to this, it was people like Jimmy in the Revenue Commissioners who were investigating the wealth of criminals or people with subversive connections.
Jimmy loved his work; he had joined the Civil Service in 1956 aged just 18. He had begun working with the Revenue Commissioners in 1959, and during his career had worked in Dundalk, Castlebar and Dublin. It was in the 60s that Jimmy Livingstone from Co. Monaghan met Grace Vernon from Co. Louth. “I met Grace while I was working in Dundalk, and we got married in October 1968,” he recalls. “We lived in Whitehall in Dublin, then Biscayne in Malahide, then we moved to Castlebar for a time
and finally we moved to The Moorings in Malahide.” The couple’s eldest child Tara was born in 1970 and Conor was born two years later. In 1977 tragedy struck when the couple’s third child, a little girl, Maeve Elaine, died aged just ten weeks old.
By December 1992, Grace and Jimmy had lived at The Moorings for 16 years. They had been one of the first families to move into the estate when it was first built. The area was home to a number of professional people including Gardaí and nurses. Each two-storey house was detached and there was a distance of four or five feet between each. Every home had a spacious back garden. The Coast Road linking Malahide and Portmarnock was just a short walk away and Grace would often walk the family dog along the coast. Grace and Jimmy loved the outdoors, and they often spent time on a boat they had moored on the River Shannon.
Tara Livingstone was now 22 years old and living in Paris where she was working for an accountancy firm. Conor was twenty, and was studying electronics at the Regional Technical College in Dundalk. He was still living at home in Malahide and while he waited to repeat a term at college in January of 1993 he was working at an amusement arcade—Dr Quirky’s—in Dublin city. The family also had two pets, a German pointer gun dog named Shot, and a small black cat called Frisby.
Jimmy and Conor last saw Grace on the morning of 7 December 1992. As they were having breakfast Jimmy and Grace discussed arrangements for travelling to Co. Monaghan that evening. Jimmy’s brother Peter, who had passed away in 1987, had been a priest in Broomfield near Castleblayney. That December night there was going to be an anniversary mass in his former parish, and Jimmy and Grace were planning to join Jimmy’s cousins in Broomfield as they had done for the previous few years. They arranged to leave Malahide at six that evening to make it to the mass for eight o’clock.
It was a normal morning on what was to become the most abnormal and shocking day. Having finished their breakfast Jimmy and Conor said goodbye to Grace and got into Jimmy’s Renault Estate and headed for Chalfont Avenue on the other side of Malahide to pick up Art O’Connor, a work colleague of Jimmy’s. Jimmy and Art and two others had begun the car-pooling arrangement some years before, but now it was just Art and Jimmy who were still working in the one building. Jimmy and Conor picked Art up at 8.30 a.m. and they headed into town. Conor was dropped off for work at O’Connell Street at around 9 a.m. and Jimmy and Art headed to the Revenue Commissioners Offices at Setanta House on Nassau Street. Jimmy parked his car as usual in the car park. Art worked on the first floor and Jimmy was on the third. They arranged to meet at 5 p.m. to head home.
Grace Livingstone was well known in Malahide. While Jimmy drove a Renault, Grace’s car of choice was a Ford Fiesta, registration number XYZ 681. She was a familiar sight at 9 a.m. mass at St Sylvester’s Church in the village. Her particular passion was flower arranging. She was a member of Portmarnock Flower Club and Malahide Horticultural Society. Grace and Jimmy both shared a love of the outdoors. Grace would often join her husband when he was going shooting or fishing, and she would gather wild flowers to cultivate at home, or she would gather leaves and moss to make hanging baskets. On a recent trip, they had gathered holly to make wreaths to be sold at the Christmas fairs of both the Church of Ireland and Catholic churches in Malahide.
At about 11.45 a.m. on 7 December 1992 Grace was in her driveway. Her next door neighbour Bernard Owens was also in his driveway and they had a chat, talking about plans for Christmas. Everything was normal. Bernard and his family later headed out to Dun Laoghaire for the afternoon and then on to Bray. Bernard was a Garda, and the following day it was he who would go to the hospital and identify Grace’s body to State Pathologist John Harbison.
Another neighbour of Grace’s spoke with her at around 1.50 p.m. Anne Watchorne lived across the road and was a good friend. Anne was a nurse and she had helped to care for Grace’s sister when she had passed away in the Livingstone home some years before. Anne walked across to Grace’s house to give back a basket she had borrowed, and the two women spoke at the front door for around 15–20 minutes. Grace was in good form, and they spoke about a sale-of-work they had helped organise the day before. Grace was wearing a check blouse, wool cardigan and trousers and had some rollers at the front of her hair, with the rest tied back in a pony tail. She told Anne that she and Jimmy were heading to the memorial mass in Co. Monaghan that night. Grace offered Anne some green cuttings and she spoke about making arrangements for dinner. It was a normal everyday chat. Anne said goodbye to Grace at around 2.10 p.m. and headed back to her own house. Apart from the killer, Anne would be the last person to see Grace alive. Anne collected her daughter and then went to Malahide village, before calling to another neighbour’s house and heading home again. It would be about 6.10 p.m. when she would see a flashing blue light in the street and a neighbour would tell her that Grace was dead.
Jimmy Livingstone spent the morning working in his office. At about 12.50 p.m. he dialled home but there was no answer. Grace may have been out in the village, or she may have been out the back in the greenhouse and not heard the phone. Just after 1 p.m. Jimmy met a work colleague, Joe Stone, and they travelled from Nassau Street to go swimming at Marion College in Ballsbridge, as they did every Monday lunchtime. Jimmy returned to the office at 2.15 p.m. or so and stayed on the third floor all afternoon. He left the office just before five o’clock and met Art O’Connor in the car park for the journey home.
Four teenage girls were walking near The Moorings at around 4.30 p.m. The girls were heading home from school, and they stopped at a corner near The Moorings cul-de-sac and continued chatting. They saw a young man coming up the hill and he turned into The Moorings. The girls were only about ten feet away from him and none of them recognised him. He seemed to be in his late teens or early twenties and was tall, about six foot. He wore a fawn trenchcoat which went below his knees. His hair was blond and parted in the middle. He was of thin build and average looking. He had what one of the girls thought was a rich look about him.
At 4.40 p.m. a landscape gardener was finishing work for the evening at a house almost directly across the road from the Livingstone home. He started up his Nissan Vanette to head home. He thought of driving straight ahead and turning the van at the end of the cul-de-sac but there were two youths playing football at the end of the road so he decided to do a quick turn into the driveway of a house across the road in order to turn his van the right way around. The gardener turned his van into the driveway of the Livingstone house. As he looked out of his van he could see straight down to the front door. The house was only a short distance from the public footpath, maybe the length of one car, so the gardener had a clear view ahead of him. It all happened in a matter of seconds but what this witness was about to see would turn out to be very significant. He saw a young man standing in the glass-fronted porch. Because the headlights of the van were turned on, the gardener got a clear look at the man. He would later describe him as about 20 years old, or early twenties. He had dark, collar-length hair and was of thin build and average height. The young man reminded the gardener of a student. His hair was dark, but somewhat long and bushy. The witness saw the man bending down and picking up a pot plant as if he had knocked it over. The man glanced around into the focus of the headlights. The gardener saw the outer porch door was closed but the inner door was opened. The hall light might have been on. The witness turned his van and headed out of The Moorings. It would be on that night’s nine o’clock news that he would hear about a murder having occurred in the Malahide cul-de-sac. It would be the next day when he returned to work that he would realise the killing had happened in the house in which he had seen the young man at the door.
Jimmy and Art headed home from Dublin in the evening traffic. They didn’t pick up Conor because he was working late, and was going to get the train home. The two men chatted about work and they arrived in Malahide sometime around 5.45 p.m. Jimmy dropped Art at his house and Art would later recall that after he arrived into his house, he put away a step-ladder and
some other items into his garage before looking at the clock in the house and seeing it was ten to six.
Jimmy drove from Chalfont Avenue along by the Estuary towards Malahide village, passing under the railway bridge and travelling along Strand Street, before turning up James’s Terrace and passing the Garda station. Just over an hour later Jimmy would be back at the Garda station trying to do everything to assist detectives investigating his wife’s murder.
Jimmy turned left to drive along the Coast Road before taking a right turn into the Seapark Estate and then two more right turns bringing him into The Moorings. Jimmy turned his car in the cul-de-sac so that he and Grace would be ready to drive to Monaghan after dinner. His wife’s car was parked as normal in their driveway, reversed into place as Grace always left it. But very quickly other things began to appear out of place. Jimmy noticed the porch light was not on, and the dog was not at the front of the house where he would normally be. Both the porch and inner front door were closed and locked. Jimmy opened the doors with his key. It was now some time around 5.50 p.m.
To this day Jimmy Livingstone relives over and over the discovery of his wife’s body. Having entered the front door Jimmy saw there was no light on in the kitchen. The plan he and Grace had made that morning was to have dinner as soon as he got home and then head for Monaghan. The curtains in one particular room were closed, and that was very unusual. Grace had previously asked that those curtains not be closed at all because she had potted plants in the window which needed light. Jimmy saw that the kitchen table was not set. He looked in every room downstairs but Grace wasn’t there. He checked the back door but it was locked with the key on the inside. The dog would later be found in the back garden.
The Cold Case Files Page 12
