Garda: O’Reilly only a suspect after Late Late

A RETIRED garda who played a leading role in the jailing of wife-killer Joe O’Reilly said he did not initially suspect him.

Martin Donnellan, who reached the rank of assistant commissioner before his retirement, said he did not suspect O’Reilly at the start of the investigation.

Asked if he suspected O’Reilly after his appearance on the Late Late Show, he replied: “I think the whole country did.”

Rachel O’Reilly’s body was found in the bedroom of the couple’s home in The Naul, Co Dublin, by her mother, Rose Callaly, on October 4, 2004.

The mother of two died after several blows to the head from a blunt instrument. Mr Donnellan said he felt there was something amiss when he watched the show, noting that O’Reilly was over-anxious to talk about his wife’s death.

“This idea of bringing people for tours of the house — that didn’t sound logical. That was not the actions of a grieving husband. Definitely not. We were totally stunned by that.”

Mr Donnellan, a guest on RTÉ’s Miriam Meets, said the investigation team was on the case for three weeks when they realised they were not going to solve it by conventional means because O’Reilly had covered his tracks so well.

It was only when mobile phone records were produced that the team knew they had a way of securing the evidence needed for a conviction.

“You would be inclined to say there is a God up there somewhere because, really and truly, that case was the most amazing case I ever worked on,” he said.

He said his biggest disappointment was that he didn’t manage to find out who killed Raonaid Murray, a teenager stabbed to death in September 1999 in Glenageary in Co Dublin.

“That was one of the biggest disappointments of my career because, from the outset, it looked like a very solvable murder,” he said.

Mr Donnellan said he knew that because there was an open space where the 17-year-old was murdered there would not be a lot of evidence available.

He had hoped they would find a witness but despite all the investigation work they never got that valuable piece of information.

Mr Donnellan said he became quite upset when he heard that a garda officer said there would be no repeat of the mistake made in the Raonaid Murray case.

Mr Donnellan said he would like the mistake pointed out to him because, as far as he was concerned, the investigation team was honest and hard working.

“I kept some of the best detectives in the city at that time. We kept them in Dun Laoghaire for 18 months against the wishes of their senior officers,” he said, insisting that any possible lead was followed.

Asked about claims that witnesses were not interviewed and poor communication between gardaí, Mr Donnellan said he did not find any such gaps in the investigation.

“We tried everything in that investigation and, okay, I would be so delighted in the morning if somebody said to me, ‘You missed this. How did you miss this? We have the guy caught now’.”