Slight of build, deadly of intent

By Caroline O’Doherty

But it wasn't just Fred Flannery's unimposing physique that helped him dodge suspicion in the early days of the investigation into the disappearances of the men who passed through the house where he was caretaker.

He was also as one senior garda who met, questioned and observed the baffling Corkman throughout the protracted investigation and subsequent prosecution put it measured.

Flannery met the sister, brother and brother-in-law of Patch O'Driscoll face to face when they called to the door expressing concerns about Patch's no-show at a pre-Christmas family dinner, and he was convincing enough to send them away none the wiser he had anything to do with it.

Three days after Christmas he called to the family and suggested they look for Patch. During their search of local haunts, Flannery deliberately stopped outside a hut where they found an empty box used to hold eye patches, just like the type Patch had.

When suspicions began to grow about him, he kept his head. Even when he drank, as he did heavily, he gave little indication of being under pressure. He liked his hash and usually had a joint on him. He had a girlfriend and a pet dog and he tinkered with motorbikes, always having some high-mileage model on the go.

His flat was dingy and he didn't go in much for personal grooming but he was sociable enough if approached He had convictions going back to when he was a juvenile in the 1970s but it was all relatively minor stuff, apart from some heated public order offences and an assault on a garda. He had nothing on his record since 1989.

When he was finally arrested and charged with murder, his took to life on remand with relatively little incident, neither endearing himself to inmates or prison officers nor capitalising on his grisly reputation.

At the start of his trial, he appeared the least frustrated when two juries were discharged for technical reasons before a third was sworn in and the hearing proper began.

When it ended in shocking style, he cooly rose from the benches at the front and sat down in the body of the court. No one else could quite believe he was a free man but he seemed to expect it.

But during the 17 days in between, a very different picture had been painted of a man who could barely contain his paranoia and hate and who ultimately unleashed it in a drunken rage on two men regarded as his friends, following it with a calculated attack on the man who might squeal on him.

He would later, it was claimed, show his teenage nephew bits of the bodies he had stashed away, at the one time shocking the youth and reassuring him that if what he had seen ever bothered him, he could come and talk to his uncle Fred about it.

Calm at the height of horror was the approach he took to life after his acquittal a life many would have found intolerable given that his guilt was still widely believed in his native Cork .

He got into the odd row, largely during his drinking, and had run-ins with the law on motoring offences, serving a month in prison in 1997 for riding a motorbike without insurance.

In a failed appeal against the conviction, he gave an insight into his life at the time, telling the judge he was only living at his mother's house in Mayfield on and off.

"Things were kind of heavy . I was moving around a lot through no fault of my own," he said.

He was convicted in 1999 of drunkeness and abusing a garda but had kept his head down in more recent times, living with his partner and their three children in Carrigaline and, although never in regular employment, filling his time hanging around the house or with his twin brother, John, to whom he was close.

He was not known publicly to be depressive and his suicide at the age of 42 comes as a shock.

Whether he had it all arranged in advance, calm and measured to the end, or whether it was a sudden act of deep-seated desperation, is the last of the many secrets he took with him.