‘This was a house of love’

THE last time Gerard Gibbs spoke to his wife was a few hours before she killed their daughter, when she rang to ask how to make the automated security gates at their home stay open as she was expecting a friend to call.

That was the kind of home they had, the home of people who had done well and had the means to build a house in the countryside on its own grounds.

If reflected a lifestyle which allowed them life’s little luxuries — a foreign exchange trip for Ciara to France during her summer holidays from school followed by a fortnight family vacation in Malta.

But then Lynn Gibbs was an in-demand locum and her husband was a lecturer in aviation engineering, so they had a right to feel proud of themselves and their success.

That pride was multiplied by the accomplishments of their daughter. Gifted academically, musically and artistically, Ciara got 10 As in the Junior Certificate a few months before and was attending a course for students who excelled in maths on the day she died.

Even more important, she was turning out to be a fine person. On the day she died, her last words to her father were in a phonecall to tell him she was looking for a coat she wanted to buy her mother for Christmas.

Lynn Gibbs returned the complement. Devoted to her daughter, she waited three hours outside the lecture hall for Ciara after driving her to Dublin for her maths class that morning. She shrugged off the gesture. “I had a newspaper,” she said.

She was also a good friend. The person she was expecting to call that night was another doctor who was coming to collect some Lego that Lynn had picked up for her in Kilkenny.

“This was a house of love,” Mr Gibbs would later tell a psychiatrist who saw his wife, as he tried to explain the kind of home they kept. How it became a house of horrors, no one will ever know.

Mr Gibbs wiped tears from his eyes continuously as he gave evidence of the morning his life fell apart. He arrived home from his mother’s house and the security gates wouldn’t respond to the zapper he kept in his pocket.

He had to help his 13-year-old son, Gearóid, climb over so he could get into the house and activate the switch manually. What they saw when the got inside was overwhelming.

In court Lynn Gibbs sat with her eyes closed for most of the evidence, as if trying to shut out the terrible details of her daughter’s death and the unhappy times and unhealthy thoughts that refused to leave her in peace.

But no security gates could keep her past out of her happy home nor protect her from the fears she felt for the future. And not even the most tightly shut eyes could block out the horror of what happened the night a mother turned killer and could only offer love as an explanation.