Graham Dwyer trial: ‘Pay me in blood, €50 a stab,’ O’Hara told
Among more than 1,000 messages read to the Central Criminal Court yesterday were texts about how the sender would kill Ms O’Hara in woods without her consent.
In several of the messages read out on the 33rd day of the murder trial, the sender of the messages also asked Ms O’Hara to find him someone else to kill.
Mr Dwyer, aged 42, is charged with murdering Ms O’Hara at Killakee, Rathfarnham, Dublin on August 22, 2012, hours after she was discharged from a mental health hospital.
The Cork-born architect and father of three, of Kerrymount Close, Foxrock, Dublin has pleaded not guilty to murdering the 36-year-old childcare worker.
Crime and policing analyst Sarah Skedd had prepared a chart of over 2,600 messages recovered from various devices during the investigation.
She spent yesterday dealing with messages sent between Ms O’Hara’s phone and a phone that the State said the accused purchased in the name of Goroon Caisholm on March 25, 2011.
Ms Skedd confirmed the content of the texts, read out by Seán Guerin SC, prosecuting.
The person using the other phone texted Ms O’Hara to help him get his “knife into some flesh soon”.
“I’ll do my best Sir. If you want you can kill my sister,” she suggested.
She said her sister had just had a baby but said they had never got on and that she was a bitch. She then said that she was joking and it could not happen.
Some of the messages read out from April 2011 concerned Ms O’Hara giving up smoking, with the texter telling her to get her teeth whitened afterwards. When she said she could not afford to, he replied: “I can rob the girls I stab.”
In another text, he suggested: “Maybe do my kill during your holidays? Will take the day off work for it.”
She sent him a picture of marks on her wrists at one stage, blaming “your ties”.
“Nice,” he replied. “May as well have used the knife… Next time nice oval stab wound.”
“Not if I have my way,” she wrote.
“You don’t get your way. I do,” he replied. “What if I did just one? What would happen?”
Ms O’Hara said she was afraid that it would set her recovery back.
“Will have to find me a victim to stab. That’s an order,” he wrote later.
“Sir, how do I do that?” she asked.
“We will go out for remote walks… and strike if conditions are right,” he replied.
“I will prepare hunting bag with things for the murder,” he wrote later.
He said it did not have to be her he would kill.
Ms O’Hara said she knew the texter would not do it.
“Are you saying I couldn’t kill you if I wanted to?” he asked. “I could bring you out in a case, but not if you help me stab someone… It’s your fault I want to kill and you won’t let me stab you.”
She said she never thought her wanting to die would lead to this.
“Seeing you helpless and at my mercy turns me on,” he wrote halfway through the month.
She asked if he could find another way of hurting her besides stabbing and he suggested needles. She said they might try a few.
“Ok, think about where I can leave marks,” he wrote.
He also suggested sticking a scalpel in a particular area that would not be seen.
“Just figure out a way I can hurt you,” he continued. “Thin, black knife in the belly?”
Addressing him as sir, she said that it was not her choice and warned that she would scream.
“I will make it as painless as possible,” he wrote.
“I can’t wait to knife you,” he wrote later. “I hope I can stop once I start.”
He asked how many times he could stab her. She said once and asked him not to leave a big scar.
“I want to give you a satisfying stabbing and can’t if you don’t want marks,” he wrote.
He sent her a text on the evening of April 14, telling her to get naked and strip all sheets off the bed.
“Cuff your hands behind your back. You have 10 minutes. Go,” he wrote.
There were other similar messages before an implied visit to her, but in later months he texted simply: “Assume the position” ahead of his arrival.
Ms O’Hara sent him apologetic text messages a few days later.
“I have to be able to hurt you,” he wrote. “I have to be able to mark you.”
She said she understood if he did not want to see her anymore.
“I thought I could, sir. I really did, but I can’t,” she wrote.
“Sir, I can’t let you cut me. I just can’t. It’s not right.”
“Then you have you help me cut someone,” he replied.
“Use fake knife on you and get to stab some girl to death,” he wrote.
“Yes, sir. As you wish,” she replied.
“We plan a killing,” he wrote.
“When, sir? I am busy this week,” she replied.
He asked Ms O’Hara to suggest locations.
“Hellfire Club… Killiney Hill. There are loads of places,” she wrote.
“What about luring someone and stabbing her in your place?” he asked.
“No. It’s too risky, sir,” she replied. “You really have to be careful with your phone… Cops use satellite in the area.”
He said they could “switch off before we head out”.
He discussed the option of leaving a crime scene.
“If we bury, then we can take mobile on a detour,” he wrote.
He texted her later in the month to say they would meet for “outdoor play and a bit of reconnaissance”.
She asked where they were going.
“Mountains,” he replied.
In later texts, he asked her what kind of things she liked.
“If the master is happy. I love making people happy,” she wrote.
“What if it makes me happy to hurt you?” he asked.
“Don’t even try to stab me, sir,” she wrote later.
He assured her somebody else would be stabbed and asked what ways he could hurt her.
“I’m a sadist and enjoy others’ pain. You should help me inflict pain on you and help me with my fantasies,” he wrote. “Help me rape and stab a young girl… You help me stab a girl and you won’t get knifed.”
He texted her on April 25, 2011, to tell her he had found a dead sheep.
“Might go back after dark and see how it feels to sink a knife into it,” he wrote.
He texted her later that month that they must get her tattooed.
“Possibly the word, slave, somewhere private,” he replied. “I will pay for it.”
He asked if she had enjoyed the previous night.
“It was good talking about your death,” he wrote.
She said she would be a better slave and thanked him for sticking with her.
“It will be all worth it when I kill you ;),” he wrote.
“It will all be worth it when I get to knife someone,” he added later. “Can’t wait.”
She texted him on April 26 to ask when they would be doing it.
“Will you be able to handle all the blood?” he asked.
“I don’t know, sir,” she replied.
“Maybe you should help me (just) plan it,” he suggested.
“Everyone has to die sometime,” he wrote. “Going to hit her across the head with a hammer so she doesn’t feel the knife… Her heart will be pumping during the stabbing so I’ll get the full effect.”
He continued with other suggestions: “I can undress so don’t get blood on my clothes… No point in burying her.”
He said they would need to tidy things up and leave nothing “except the naked, stabbed girl”.
The texter then told Ms O’Hara he had taken the next Friday off work for her tattoo, knife shopping, and their “first recon outing”.
She sent a text in early May 2011 to say she was feeling quite down and had been to the doctor.
“Unfortunately, I’m not suicidal,” she explained.
He replied he was “here to help in any way I can, including painless end”. “I have everything ready if it all becomes too much. Just think, all your worries gone. I can fit you in Thursday.”
She texted him after leaving an exam early, saying she wanted to sleep all the time.
“I can put you to sleep J” he wrote.
“Stop,” she replied.
“I know you want it. 30 seconds to slip into oblivion,” he continued.
He texted her on May 11 to say he could adjust his “kind offer to hang you in your apartment”. This would mean she would be found and buried properly, he said.
“If you want to go, I want to do it right,” he wrote.
“Right now, I’m not that bad,” she said later.
He texted her on May 24 to say he had left his phone off in case a stabbing had been investigated.
“Animals have picked the carcass clean,” he wrote.
She asked how he knew.
“I was up flying… and had a peak,” he wrote. “Rib cage where knife went in… rest of sheep moved.”
“I want to do a woman next,” he wrote. “It was fantastic feeling the knife go in and watch the blood spurt out. So happy.”
“Woman next, stabbed to death,” he continued. “We have to work on it... I wish I had kept the clip of the stabbing, all that blood.”
The texter told her he had a recurring dream that he would go to her apartment, that Ms O’Hara would have a girl there for him and all his knives laid out.
“Not going to happen, sir,” she wrote.
They then discussed her dreams of serving a master.
“Life is short, especially for you, ha, ha,” he wrote.
They discussed her borrowing money from him and he said she could repay him in blood, “€50 per stab”.
“I’m not giving blood, sir,” she said.
“I might just snap and stick you anyway, against your will,” he wrote.
Ms O’Hara told him that that scared her.
He told her to “just say the word and I will end all your problems”. She said she would not give him the satisfaction.
He later told her he would lend her the €600 she owed her counsellor.
“It’s the least I can do. You will be helping me kill,” he wrote.
“Looking forward to getting new bike tomorrow to try to lose weight. Must get fit for the murder,” he wrote another day. “It’s hard work. My hand is sore from the last stabbing.”
He told her he wished he had her chained up at his feet to rape or abuse any time.
“The shit you give me would be beaten or cut out of you,” he wrote.
He then said he was thinking about visiting a prostitute to see how easy it would be to kill her.
“Maybe I can bring one to your place and do it there,” he suggested.
He asked if she would be squeamish.
“It’s a tough choice. Either you let me stab you or you help me do it to someone else,” he wrote.
“I help you do it,” Ms O’Hara replied.
“Was lucky with last victim,” he wrote, saying he would not do it without the perfect plan.
“Yes sir,” she replied. “Don’t you know, sir, there’s no such thing as a perfect plan.”
He said that lots of people had stabbed and got away.
“Why not me?” he asked.
He told her at the end of May that if they did not “do someone soon, I’ll have to do you”.
“I’ll try not to kill you,” he wrote later.
“I don’t want to die,” she wrote.
“Let’s concentrate on getting me to stab some bitch to death,” he said.
She told him she had had a scary dream in which he made her watch him stab a girl to death.
“I’d love that,” he replied.
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