Man was plotting wife’s murder on wedding day

ON the day Colin Whelan publicly pledged his undying love for his wife Mary, he was plotting how to get away with murder and a half million insurance windfall.

The most calculated and callous killing he has ever encountered was how Mr Justice Paul Carney, the country’s most senior criminal judge, described the murder of Ms Whelan.

He was speaking before sentencing Whelan to a mandatory life sentence before a packed Central Criminal Court yesterday.

When he married his wife in September 2000, Whelan had begun to collect internet information on how to strangle someone and not be discovered.

This was just weeks after the couple had agreed to double their insurance policy to £400,000, or over €500,000, if either partner died.

The 33-year-old computer analyst, who sat impassively in the dock as one of his wife’s four brothers branded him a brutal coward, strangled Mary at their home in north Co Dublin, six months after they were married.

He then carried the body to the bottom of the stairs and claimed she fell.

Despite his IT expertise, his callous plan unravelled within days - computer experts were able to track his internet use at home and at his workplace and the post mortem concluded Mary had been strangled.

He was charged with murder in April that year.

Mary, a 27-year-old legal secretary, and her widowed mother Marie’s only daughter, was strangled with a dressing gown cord in the bedroom of her home.

Doctors discovered scratch marks on her husband’s chest.

Whelan pleaded guilty on Monday, after prolonging the family’s suffering by faking his own death, fleeing the country and blocking attempts for an early trial when he was returned to Ireland.

He was extradited from Spain last July, 16 months after fleeing to Majorca. He was spotted working in a bar by an Irish tourist.

Mary’s brother Gerard told the Central Criminal Court: “Mary was the heart of our family, especially since our father died in 1989. She lifted our spirits at that time. And for my mother, this is a double loss, she has lost her friend, sister and daughter.

“Our family is living a life sentence since her murder and we’ll always have to live with it. We won’t get off for good behaviour. Mary is gone forever and we can’t run away, Mary won’t be coming back.”