‘I screamed with joy when I heard he was dead’

“I can’t wait to dance on his grave with a bottle of champagne. I will be doing it to the murdering scum.”

Jean Bailey didn’t pull any punches yesterday when she was told Freddie Flannery had committed suicide. Flannery killed her brother Patrick ‘Patch’ O’Driscoll in 1994, but escaped conviction after his trial for the murder controversially collapsed.

Jean Bailey described Freddie Flannery as an evil monster with no conscience and said she always certain he had murdered her brother because Patrick knew too much.

“On April 18, 1994, Cathal O’Brien and Kevin Ball were brutally murdered in front of my brother (at a flat at Wellington Terrace). He witnessed it and went to the police station a few days later to report what he’d seen.

“They wanted him to make a formal statement but he refused because he was too frightened. They didn’t believe him,” Ms Bailey said.

She said Patrick had confided in his younger brother, Paul, who also thought the story was too far-fetched.

“We didn’t find that out until after Patrick went missing. It was then that all the pieces came together,” she said.

Ms Bailey, a mother of three who lives at Springvale, Old Youghal Road, Cork, said she had been waiting for the day when she could celebrate Freddie Flannery’s death.

“I’ve always known why Patrick was killed but I couldn’t say anything while he (Freddie Flannery) was alive,” she said. Ms Bailey said her brother was murdered by Flannery in the early hours of December 16, 1994.

“Fred Flannery had him held down at the flat at 9 Wellington Terrace as a virtual prisoner. Fred would follow him around everywhere. He wouldn’t let him out of his sight.

“My brother was murdered simply because he knew too much. For a long time Patrick was very quiet and we knew something was wrong with him. I think he was heading for a nervous breakdown,” Ms Bailey said.

She said she was glad she could now come out with the truth. “When I heard he was dead I went out of my house and I was screaming with joy,” Ms Bailey said. She said that since Patrick disappeared eight years ago she hadn’t had a proper night’s sleep.

“Fred Flannery is burning in the fires of hell as we speak. I knew there was a place booked down there for him many years ago,” she said.

A few days after Patrick went missing, Fred Flannery called to her door looking for help to find him. She said at that moment she instinctively knew she was staring into the eyes of her brother’s murderer.

Only tiny parts of Patrick O’Driscoll’s body have been found. A garda dig in woodlands at Lotamore, Mayfield, recovered small pieces of bone, bits of his hair and pieces of fingernail. It is believed he was killed, cut up and then burnt.