How O’Reillys’ relationship slowly disintegrated

AT 5ft 11in Rachel O’Reilly spent a lot of time towering over acquaintances, both male and female.

Not that she was awkward about it — on the contrary she seemed to revel in her own physicality.

Friends spoke of how she would engulf them in “bear hugs” when they met. She would gleefully intimidate approaching opponents as goalie for her hockey team and swing a softball bat like she was aiming for the stars.

Still, when Joe O’Reilly walked into her life, it couldn’t have escaped her notice that whatever he lacked in some areas of the tall, dark and handsome criteria, he came up trumps in the tall department.

Joe topped 6ft, with several inches to spare. It seemed Rachel had met her match.

The pair got together when Rachel was just 18 and Joe two years older. He was working in the stores in Arnotts in Dublin where she had a part-time job.

They were both from the city’s northside, Rachel growing up on Collins Avenue and Joe out in Roddy Doyle territory in Kilbarrack.

Both were athletic, Joe enjoying the gym and martial arts and Rachel adoring team sports like basketball and hockey.

They both had somewhat less than typical family backgrounds. Rachel was adopted as an infant by the Callalys, Rose and Jim, and she grew up in the middle of five children, two brothers, Declan and Paul, older than her and a brother and sister, Anthony and Ann, younger, all of them adopted and extremely close.

Joe’s parents were separated and his father lived in Wales while a sister, Martina, who has Downs Syndrome, lived in residential care. He was close to his mother Ann; his other sister, also Ann, and his brother, Derek.

Rachel and Joe got engaged “in 1994 or 1995”. Joe couldn’t remember which when he spoke to gardaí after her death. But he did know that they married on April 4, 1997, living in the Dublin suburbs of Grange and Santry.

In 2003, they moved to Baldarragh, a townland down a small road near the village of The Naul in north Co Dublin.

By then they had their two young boys, Luke and Adam. Baldarragh was country living and a stone’s throw from the M1 motorway and Rachel loved it.

She integrated well into the new community, making firm friends with the neighbours. She left a key under a pot at the back door for friends and family members who might pop by when she was out and she was well known as an Avon rep and Tupperware party host.

Joe was not so well known, but then he was always working. He was a manager at the Viacom outdoor advertising company in Dublin and his responsibilities seemed to have him on the go from dawn to dusk and sometimes longer. But Joe wasn’t working all the hours he claimed. Sometime in 2003 he began an affair with a woman whose testimony was deemed inadmissible to the trial and was not heard in court.

By 2004, that woman was off the scene and another had taken her place. Her name was Nikki Pelley and the cracks that already ran through the couple’s marriage magnified when she appeared. Those cracks stemmed from stress lines of which we only have Joe’s account. He told gardaí there were problems about the time of their move to Baldarragh.

There was further tension when Joe’s mother, Ann, came to stay while she was waiting for her house in Dunleer to be ready.

He also said that Rachel wanted to try for a baby daughter but he was happy with the two boys.

The children were a major bone of contention. Joe claimed Rachel was rough with them and manhandled them and shouted at them too much. His mother even reported Rachel to social services — anonymously of course — although in emails to his sister, also called Ann, Joe seemed entirely in approval of this rather dramatic form of action.

His anger when social services found no reason for concern over Rachel’s parenting abilities was intense. The vitriol he poured into emails to his sister shocked the courtroom when the contents were read out.

This was four months before Rachel died and by then the couple were in a well-established routine of sleeping in separate rooms, although Joe would say that this was because of his early starts and their youngest, Adam’s, habit of climbing into bed with his mother when he couldn’t sleep.

Maybe Rachel fell for that or maybe she knew the truth. All we know of what she understood of the problems in their relationship is what she told best friend Jackie Connor. “She said she wasn’t happy, that family life was suffering, that he [Joe] was working a lot, that she was on her own a lot.”

She had known Jackie since they were in school uniforms yet she didn’t describe the disintegration of her marriage in any stronger terms than that.

Perhaps she didn’t like to admit how bad things were or perhaps she really didn’t know that while she was wanting more time with Joe, he was doing all in his power to spend as little time as possible with her.

From January 2004 to her death in October, Joe had all the excuse he needed. Ms Pelley was a former work colleague he bumped into at a corporate function and within weeks their emails and text messages had progressed to lunch dates, cinema outings and overnights.

Soon Joe was seeing Ms Pelley three or four times a week and staying over twice a week. All Rachel appears to have known of the affair is the lies her husband told her about faked stays in the office because of late nights working and early starts for softball training.

In July, while Joe was e-mailing his sister calling Rachel a “c**t“, he was also texting Ms Pelley with messages like: “I am completely crazy about you.”

He called her his “bride to be” and spoke of their future together, a future without Rachel. However he thought it might come about, he did get his future without Rachel.

In the letter he wrote to put in her coffin, he spoke to her in a way that suggests he envisaged her in the heavens watching over her loved ones. It seems he felt her looking down on him after all.