Murder does not add up, say parents

THERE’S something about the murder that just doesn’t make sense.

That’s the gut instinct of both the husband and mother of Rachel O’Reilly.

They simply don’t believe the 30-year-old was brutally murdered just because she disturbed a burglar in her house in Naul, north Dublin, two weeks ago.

Instead they suspect she knew the murderer.

“The attack happened in the bedroom and if it was a random burglary it’s someone she wouldn’t know,” said her husband Joe.

“After a few blows to the head, she probably would recognise him, but why kill her? We feel it’s because she could identify that person.

“It’s quite possible that this is someone she knew, this is someone we knew and someone out there who knows us.”

Joe said the level of violence perpetrated against his wife and mother of their two children does not point to a burglary.

A post-mortem examination showed she was repeatedly beaten around the head with a blunt instrument. The murder weapon has not been found.

“Even what we can gather that has been taken so far doesn’t justify, not that anything can justify, the violence and the excess of what happened. It doesn’t fit,” said Joe.

When Rachel’s body was found by her mother Rose Callaly, the house showed signs of being ransacked.

But Rose felt there was something staged about it.

“I don’t think it was a burglary. I don’t know why I was so positive. But from the word go I felt it was sort of staged. I can’t tell you why.” Joe said Rachel would have fled if she knew there was a burglar in the house.

“She would have walked straight back out of the house and called someone. She wasn’t stupid.”

Rose said her daughter’s death had been a major blow to all the family.

“It’s just unbelievable how devastated everyone is. We just want to try and make some sense of it. I know it won’t bring her back, but I feel if they get whoever done it, it might in some way stop some other family the pain that we are feeling at the moment.”

Joe said he had to try and raise their two sons, Luke and Adam.

“Our youngest is two, our oldest is four. How are they going to get through their life without their mother?”

Gardaí in nearby Balbriggan are conducting an intensive murder investigation into Rachel’s death.

About 35 gardaí have been deployed, including detectives from the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation and officers from Dundalk and Ashbourne garda stations.

Detectives have appealed for information.

In particular they are asking taxi drivers, hackney’s and delivery drivers who were in the Beldaragh area of Naul that Monday, October 4, to contact them.

They have also asked people who may have been out walking or working on farms in that general area to come forward.

They can contact Balbriggan on 01-802-0519 or the Garda Confidential Line on 1-800-666-111.

Rose said: “I would appeal to anybody that knows anything at all, although they might think it’s unimportant, around that time, anytime from 9.50am onwards that Monday morning, to report it.”

Joe said someone, somewhere out there had to have seen something.

“It’s impossible, absolutely impossible, for that person to have left not gone into the car and put bloodstains on the car, not walk through a field and let bloodstains behind him, because it was just a brutal, brutal attack. Senseless.”