Murder accused was victim of abuse, court hears

A man accused of murdering his ex-girlfriend and stabbing her mother could have lost control because of severe paranoia and very poor impulse control caused by "a continuum of abuse" in his childhood, a psychiatrist told a murder jury today.

Declan Burke (29), has pleaded not guilty to the murder of Ms Jennifer Wilkinson (24) at her home in the Rise, Boden Park, Ballyboden, near Rathfarnham, Dublin on December 13 2000.

He has also denied assault causing serious harm to her mother, Ms Mary 'Maura' Wilkinson, (57) by

stabbing her at the house in the Rise, Boden Park, on the same date.

Burke has told the jury he cannot remember stabbing Jennifer or Maura Wilkinson. Consultant psychiatrist, Dr Ronald Draper said the loss of memory was not deliberate denial, but was a coping mechanism he had developed years before to try to forget his childhood abuse.

Burke's father, Noel Burke, was jailed in 1996 on several counts of the sexual abuse of his children.

A psychologist, Grace O'Malley, who provided therapy for Declan Burke at the time his father was being brought before the courts, said he showed the typical symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress

Disorder (PTSD) arising from the "physical, sexual and emotional abuse" he suffered from childhood to adolescence.

The jury heard that Burke attended therapy with Ms O'Malley at the Rape Crisis Centre for six months from September 1995.

He told the jury that he stopped attending counselling because he could not get time off work, and did not want to tell his colleagues at a courier company the real reason for his repeated absence.

Ms O'Malley said that she found Burke "very agitated" and "jumpy" and showing the typical signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The effects of PTSD were firstly intrusion, she said, where thoughts and flashbacks of the abuse interrupted the sufferer uncontrollably.

A second effect was the numbing of emotions, positive as well as negative, which made relationships very difficult. A third was hyper arousal, a feature of which would be

outbursts of irritation and uncontrollable anger.

A question to Ms O'Malley about Burke's condition at the time of the stabbings was disallowed by trial judge Mr Justice Barry White. He said the psychologist could only comment on the accused's condition at the time she saw him, "several years prior to the stabbing incident".

The prosecution has suggested that the motive for the stabbings was that Declan Burke could not tolerate his ex-girlfriend being in a new relationship.

But Burke's defence counsel, Patrick MacEntee SC has called evidence to suggest that the accused had no intention to kill or stab when he went to his ex-girlfriend's house on the evening of the killing and waited outside for five hours until she came home.

The man Jennifer Wilkinson was going out with at the time of her death, Mr Thomas Quinn, has told the trial that they were "more friends than dating".

Consultant psychiatrist Dr Ronald Draper, who examined Declan Burke after he was charged with murder, said there were parts of the incident that were too traumatic for the accused to contemplate, and he had fallen back on the coping mechanism he had learnt to use in relation to his childhood - denial.

Asked his view of Burke's condition on the night of the stabbings, he said, "I think he was anxious, I think he had come to the conviction that Jenny was two-timing him. He was watching her, there was evidence of a great deal of paranoia."

He added that the accused told him he had ran out of money for drink and drugs in the days before the incident, but nevertheless, the effects of the drugs and drink taken a short time before may have heightened his anxiety and paranoia.

Asked to comment on Burke's own evidence, Dr Draper said: "The striking feature to me was how bland his affect was: he showed no real emotion at all. He spoke fairly mechanically, and I think that fits in with what I've been saying - his inability to cope with the turmoil inside him. If all his denial breaks down, he would be in a fairly serious psychiatric condition."

That condition might even be psychotic, Dr Draper agreed. He said Burke's statement to the jury that he had no intention to kill Jennifer or stab her mother may have been "perfectly accurate", but the situation may have evolved "for this anxious young man, this very paranoid young man, with very

poor impulse control".

He noted that Burke waited for Jennifer for five hours. When she arrived home and would not talk to him, "the tension heightened".

Burke burst in after her and it was then the stabbing occurred. "He may have lost control unintentionally", the psychiatrist said, but he added that that was conjecture: he had been unable to discuss it with Mr Burke because Burke was unable to remember it himself.

Mr Justice White interjected to suggest that perhaps the accused did not want to remember it. That was possible, the psychiatrist said.

Asked if everything exploded when Jennifer arrived outside the house, the accused would have been able to control himself, Dr Draper said one would have to hypothesise that he could have quite easily misinterpreted something said or done to him and lost control.

"Given his paranoia and his very poor impulse control, I think it would be very easy for him to fly into a rage and do what he had not planned to do", the doctor said.

He said there were episodes from Burke's past that showed he was quite capable of irrational action, such as when he deliberately drove into a telegraph pole during one of several suicide attempts.

"I think that in his case there was a continuum of abuse starting at a very young age so that he never knew what a normal life was like," the psychiatrist said.

"The people he trusted were Jenny and [her daughter] and apart from those, he felt he could not trust anybody in the world.

He said Burke had a dysfunctional childhood, developed a dysfunctional personality as a result of it, and used dysfunctional ways of coping with it, such as alcohol and drugs.

The court heard that Burke has been on two different types of anti-psychotic drugs since his arrest.

The trial continues before the jury and Mr Justice White on Tuesday.