Killer was a bit of craic, recalls shocked man who knew Howard only as ‘Bob’

DEPRAVED killer, Robert Howard, used to prowl riverbanks in the dead of night shooting salmon as they leapt upstream.

The jobless drifter became a successful poacher and regularly produced fish and rabbits with which he inveigled his way into the homes of local families.

His peculiar lifestyle was revealed by a caller to the Gerry Ryan radio show who expressed his shock at discovering the odd but seemingly harmless man who made himself at home in the caller’s family house was a rapist and murderer.

The caller, who spoke under an alias and has asked the Irish Examiner not to identify him, said he had photographs of Howard, whom everybody knew only as “Bob”, sitting smiling among family members, including young children.

“He was friendly, very friendly. He was a bit of craic and always had a bit of a joke, always a story to tell,” recalled the caller, who was 16 in the mid-1980s when Howard began worming his way into the family’s home in the west Dublin suburb of Clondalkin.

Poaching was a common way of providing for the dinner table in the area at the time when unemployment was rife and poverty high but Howard stood out for his method of placing netting across the spots where the salmon leapt and shooting them as they cleared the water so that they fell into the net below.

Howard regaled the family with tales of his upbringing in rural Co Laois although the caller said he didn’t know now whether to believe his yarns given that he had managed to avoid revealing the darker side of his life, including his 1974 conviction and 10-year sentence for the vicious rape of a woman in Cork in 1972.

“We knew nothing about that whatsoever,” said the caller who said he felt his family had got off lightly considering how close Howard, who went on to commit murder, had got to them.

“Bob would sit half the day drinking tea with my mother and father,” he said. He added that Howard disappeared without explanation around 1985 and no one had heard of him until his conviction for the murder of schoolgirl Hannah Williams and prosecution for the murder of 15-year-old Arlene Arkinson were revealed this week.

“Bob was gone and people would say Bob’s after moving to England or moved back home.”

The family did not know at the time that Howard was married and was subjecting his wife to a life of cruelty. His sudden disappearance came around the time the marriage broke up and before he went on to be caught for a burglary for which he would serve a further 15 months in jail.