Family puts pressure on DPP to reopen murder case

THE Director for Public Prosecution was under new pressure last night to re-open the case of a grandmother believed to have been strangled in her sleep five years ago.

With an inquest finding Joan McCarthy, 47, was unlawfully killed, relatives demanded the authorities reverse their decision to scrap a murder charge.

Her daughter, Aisling McCarthy, said: “My family has been torn apart by what has happened to us and by what the gardaí and Director of Public Prosecutions have done to us.”

The dead woman’s body was discovered by Ms McCarthy after she had been babysitting at her home in Raheny, south Dublin, in April 1998.

Bruising around her neck could have either been the result of strangulation or an accident, the postmortem found. But gardaí launched a murder inquiry and later arrested and accused a man of the killing.

He was due to stand trial at the Central Criminal Court, but last July charges were dropped against him without explanation.

After the inquest jury’s verdict, however, the mother-of-three’s family have instructed their solicitor, Michael Finucane, to urge the DPP to reconsider his decision to stop the prosecution.

“The more we consider what has happened to us, the angrier and more upset we become,” Ms McCarthy said.

“We were informed by gardaí from Coolock station on the night of April 11, 1998, that my mother was murdered.

“We were told nothing different until a decision was made four years later that a charge of murder was to be dropped.

“The system has failed us and left my family hanging on for justice that has never come,” she said.