A once golden couple who lived Celtic Tiger dream

IN June 2003 in an interview with a Sunday newspaper, Siobhán Kearney spoke movingly of her love of her new life on the Spanish holiday island of Majorca where she and her husband, Brian, had bought a hotel just six months earlier.

The prosperous, hard-working couple had got the keys to a smart, three-storey townhouse in the town of Soller just before Christmas the previous year, which they subsequently converted into a six-bedroom boutique hotel.

To the casual observer, they were the high-achieving couple who were living the Celtic Tiger dream. Life seemed good for the Kearneys as they settled into living abroad, having finally got around to realising their long-held ambition to emigrate from Ireland. Although they both had independently started their own businesses back home which enjoyed considerable success, they still longed for a more relaxed type of lifestyle which their €2.2m purchase of the Hotel Salvia appeared to offer.

Siobhán, who had trained as a chef in the Shelbourne Hotel, observed during her first working summer in Majorca: “I have a young baby, Daniel and I didn’t want to bring him up in Dublin. The weather, the traffic, the hectic pace of life and lack of real community made my mind up. We had been holidaying in Italy for years and always dreamt of living in the Mediterranean and saw no reason to leave it until retirement age when we would be too old to enjoy it.”

Brian, who ran a number of family businesses including an electrical contracting firm, also had plans to be able to effectively get out of the day-to-day running of such companies by the time he had reached 50.

Sadly, however, just over two years later, Siobhán’s idyllic Mediterranean lifestyle had turned into something of a nightmare. By the summer of 2005, Hotel Salvia had been placed on the market and has to date still failed to attract any buyers.

Beneath the facade of familial bliss, Siobhán’s marriage had also begun to fall apart as she was left alone in Majorca to run the hotel and rear Daniel on her own, while Brian spent most of his time back in Ireland.

It marked a sad end to a romance that had begun back in 1989 when Brian first met Siobhán when they both worked at the Yamanouchi pharmaceutical plant in Mulhuddart, Co Dublin.

The pretty young chef who worked in the canteen eventually gave in to Brian’s repeated invitations to go on a date, even though he didn’t realise at the time he was over 10 years her senior.

“I thought she was older, she looked so in command,” he recalled later.

However, the couple split up in 1995 just a few months after they had become engaged. But they remained friends and reunited again five years later. Siobhán suffered a miscarriage shortly after they got back together. The pair finally married in January 2002 and six months later, their son, Daniel, was born. But the happiness was to be short-lived.

In the weeks before her death, Siobhán, 38, (or Seánie as she was known to her family) had begun to take active steps to formally separate from her husband and had engaged a family law solicitor to act for her.

She had confided in him that it was her desire to return to Ireland on a permanent basis and suggested that she could stay in the house they had bought adjacent to their own home in south Dublin. However, letters sent by her solicitor to Kearney seeking a trial separation went unanswered.

During the murder trial, it emerged that Siobhán’s suggestion about moving into the house that Kearney had wanted to let to paying tenants threatened his financial arrangements as he was overstretched on his borrowings, despite having a strong asset base.

Such actions were to have unforeseen tragic consequences a short time later when Siobhán was murdered in the upstairs bedroom of the family home at Carnroe, Knocknashee, Goatstown, in Dublin on February 28, 2006 — the day of her husband’s 49th birthday.

It would take another two years until the evidence emerged at the trial of Brian Kearney, for his wife’s murder at the Central Criminal Court, to discover exactly what happened to this once golden couple and how Brian had tried to disguise Siobhán’s death to look like a suicide.

The botched attempt aroused suspicion almost immediately among the senior gardaí investigating Siobhán’s death and led them to order a rare news blackout on the details of the murder for the first 48 hours as they sought to gain vital forensic material from the scene of the crime.

Gardaí were also anxious to gather as much information from potential witnesses before the first news reports were published which would link Brian Kearney to his wife’s death.

No doubt they were also concerned that the case shared a few similarities with another infamous murder in October 2004 when advertising executive Joe O’Reilly planned the murder of his wife, Rachel, at their home in north Dublin.

Even Mr Justice Barry White, who coincidentally presided over both murder trials, inadvertently referred to Siobhán as Rachel on two occasions earlier this week, while the prosecution and defence legal teams were also the same in both trials.

Chances of a successful prosecution in the O’Reilly case had almost been undermined by a series of leaks to the media in the period before the case came to trial and the Kearney investigation team were determined not to run the same risk.

Members of the McLaughlin family, who immediately suspected Kearney of having a role in Siobhán’s death and who maintained a dignified silence during the two years before his trial came before the Central Criminal Court, were kept regularly briefed by gardaí about developments in the case.

Aisling McLaughlin, Siobhán’s sister, admitted that she had told her brother-in-law to get out of his own home after he returned on the morning of February 28, 2006, after being informed of his wife’s death.

As Aisling and another sister, Brighid, a former Sunday Independent journalist, drove to the house in Goatstown that morning, they instinctively discounted any possibility that their sister had taken her own life and made known their concerns about Kearney to gardaí.

Other close friends of the dead woman would also corroborate the view that Siobhán had shown no suicidal tendencies in the days and weeks before her death. Instead, they recalled how she was busy and content making plans for Dan’s schooling, booking an appointment with her hairdresser and seeking advice on legal separation from her local Citizens Information Centre.

Although Siobhán was unhappy in her marriage and had stopped wearing her wedding ring, she remained upbeat, according to her friends, about the future.

In the end, one can only speculate as to the exact circumstances which led Brian Kearney to kill his wife and hurriedly try and make her death appear like suicide by draping a flex from a vacuum cleaner around her body.

It was a crude attempt to fool the authorities, yet one that could have succeeded if the flex had been capable of bearing Siobhán’s weight.

As he today faces into the first full day of a life sentence in prison, Kearney has left behind two respectable, middle-class families whose lives he altered irreversibly by his action back in February 2006.

Most poignantly, he leaves behind a little boy to grow up without either parent and who one day is likely to learn the hurtful truth that his mother was murdered by his father.