The 79-year-old widow Nancy Smyth was strangled in her home in 1987.

“THREE of the brightest lights in our family went out on Christmas morning,” said the brother of Sharon Whelan yesterday, the woman who was found dead with her two daughters after a house fire.

GARDAÍ will this morning begin a fifth day of forensic examination of the farmhouse where a fire claimed the lives of a young mother and her two children on Christmas morning.