Man jailed for killing fiancée’s father

A 47-YEAR-OLD Liverpool man has been jailed for nine years for killing his fiancée’s father in Co Westmeath 23 years ago in the state’s first cold-case homicide prosecution.

Mr Justice John Edwards described the killing of 43-year-old Bernard Brian McGrath by Colin Pinder and the victim’s wife as “callous and vicious”.

Vera McGrath was sentenced to life in prison in July after being found guilty of her husband’s murder.

A Central Criminal Court jury found Pinder not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter to which he had pleaded guilty. The killing took place between March 10 and April 18, 1987, at the victim’s home in Lower Coole, Westmeath.

Mr Justice Edwards described as “savage, depraved and barbaric” the manner in which the victim’s corpse was desecrated after the killing. He was initially buried in a shallow grave in his back garden. His body was exhumed days later and burned on what the judge described as a homemade funeral pyre.

Great effort was made to conceal the body, noted the judge, with the ashes scattered and any remaining bones splintered and put into drains and a septic tank.

The remains lay undiscovered until 1993 when Pinder’s former fiancée, Veronica McGrath, reported what had happened to her father.

The judge said this had caused much distress to the victim’s family, excluding Vera and Veronica McGrath, who the court treated as an accessory after the fact.

Mr Justice Edwards said the distress was felt by Mr McGrath’s three sons, who were children at the time. It’s understood that Brian, Andrew and Edward McGrath were led to believe they had been abandoned by their father, who they remembered as being kind, hardworking and intelligent.

The judge described the victim impact statement they gave last month as poignant. They had been deprived of a father figure in their life, they said.

The judge regarded the effect the crime had on Mr McGrath’s sons as an aggravating factor. However he said there were also considerable mitigating circumstances. These included Pinder’s guilty plea and lack of a serious criminal record.

He said that although there was no indication of remorse for some years, Pinder admitted his involvement as soon as he was confronted in 1993. He co-operated again two years ago when the cold-case review team re-opened the matter.

He also took into consideration Pinder’s relatively young age and the “significant amount of adversity” he had in life, includinglimited education, no skills or training and a number of medical problems.

“You were significantly active in the callous disposal of the body,” he said, not accepting Pinder’s arguments that he was under the duress of Vera and Veronica McGrath, who he married weeks later and separated from within a year.

“The manner in which he was killed was extraordinarily vicious. He was bludgeoned to death,” said the judge. “You weren’t the primary participant. Mrs McGrath rendered most of the blows,” he said. “But when he fell you threw a concrete mould at his head.”

The trial heard various versions of events of the killing, including that Vera McGrath asked Pinder to kill her husband and Pinder flipped when Mr McGrath called him a “nigger”.

Gardaí involved in the case spoke outside court yesterday, saying that they were satisfied that convictions had been secured despite the substantial delay. The result was a success from a cold-case point of view and had to impact on the other cold cases before the DPP, they said.