Parents face ‘life sentence’ after son wrongly blamed for double murder

THE parents of drug addict Dean Lyons yesterday spoke of the “life sentence” they faced after their son was wrongly blamed for a double murder.

Jackie and Sheila Lyons said the publication of a report last week criticising investigating gardaí only “added salt to their wounds”.

The pair said the new report did not bring finality to the case for them.

Their son was charged in 1997 with the murders, that year, of Mary Callinan, 61, and Sylvia Shiels, 59. They were violently stabbed to death in the sheltered accommodation they shared in the grounds of St Brendan’s Psychiatric Hospital, Grangegorman, Dublin.

Mr Lyons had confessed to the killing during garda interviews which, it was later determined, featured leading questions by gardaí.

Charges against Mr Lyons were dropped several months after another man, Mark Nash, confessed to the murders while in custody for the murder of his girlfriend’s sister and her husband.

Mr Lyons died three years later of a drug overdose. He was 27.

Last week, a Commission of Investigation cleared the gardaí of deliberately framing Mr Lyons, but said he was able to construct a detailed account of the killings from the information they gave him in “leading questions”.

“It just adds salt to the wounds knowing that the truth has been found out and that no one is going to be held responsible,” said Sheila Lyons.

She observed that five months after the murder, when her son was arrested, “all of a sudden, he was able to remember all this and every knife that was in the house yet he did not do it.

“Remember, Dean Lyons did not commit those murders.

“Yet Dean Lyons, by 12am that night, remembered all these things. If he went to the shop for me for a bottle of milk and a sliced pan he would forget one of them and that is only five minutes down the road.”

Jackie Lyons said he was furious about the outcome of the garda investigation.

“My fella was a druggie. He must have been really strung out on that day. I don’t know what time he got his methadone and I don’t know what time it was given to him but he must have been really strung out,” he said.

“Some of the gardaí knew there was something wrong. Why did they put this on me for 10 years. That is a life sentence for me,” said Ms Lyons.

Her husband said the gardaí should not have gone “running to the DPP” when they knew there were some officers who were raising objections. He said they should have done the investigation “right”.

“If they had done that as it says in the report, he would not have been charged at that time,” he said. “They would have found out that he was a liar. He was always telling lies. We explained everything about Dean to the gardaí.”

Ms Lyons said she had nothing to say to the Minister for Justice, because what had happened to her “could not be undone”.