Garda defends confession circumstances

A Drogheda Garda Inspector today defended the circumstances surrounding the alleged confession of a man accused of murder that he had returned to the body of a young German woman days after her disappearance to remove and hide her clothes.

Inspector Gerry O’Brien was cross-examined in the witness box for almost seven hours over two days by defence counsel Mr Patrick MacEntee SC at the Central Criminal court.

He was testifying at the trial of Mr Michael Murphy, aged 42, of Rathmullen Park, Drogheda, Co Louth, who is pleading not guilty to the murder of Ms Bettina Poeschel at Donore, Co Meath, on or between September 25 and October 17 2001.

Insp. O’Brien had been supervising Mr Murphy eating his lunch in an empty office at Drogheda Garda station on November 2, 2001 when Mr Murphy allegedly said: "Look, I went back to the body two or three days later. I took the red shoes and trousers and hid them in the skip at the graveyard in Donore. Have you found them?."

Insp. O’Brien denied Mr MacEntee’s suggestion that he was trying to ingratiate himself with Mr Murphy by asking him moments earlier if there was anything else he could do for him, after he had given him a cigarette and allowed him a phone call to his solicitor.

“No, I was being kind, simply being kind to the man. Nothing more, nothing less” Insp. O’Brien told the court. “I had no ulterior motive” he told the jury.

“I had no conversation with Michael Murphy, good bad or indifferent in relation to the offence for which I charged him the previous week” said Insp. O’Brien.

He said Mr Murphy’s comments were spontaneous and he noted them down in his notebook.

“I merely recorded his unsolicited comments that he said to me. I merely recorded in writing the comments as he made them. At no time did I question him,” he added.

He also said he didn’t know about a skip in the graveyard at Donore until Mr Murphy told him about it that day. “I had no knowledge that there was a skip at Donore,” Insp. O’Brien insisted in court.

He said that immediately after he heard this he directed Garda Thomas Flynn to go to the graveyard at Donore to see if there was a skip where Mr Murphy said there was.

Garda Flynn later testified in court that he found a skip “at the Catholic Church in Donore”.

A pair of black ladies trousers with German writing on them, black socks and red leather shoes were found inside the skip when it was examined by gardaí later that day.

Ms Poeschel was on the last day of a six-day trip to Ireland when she disappeared outside Drogheda on September 25, 2001.

She had set out to walk to Newgrange Interpretative centre but never arrived.

Her badly decomposed remains were found on October 17 after an extensive Garda search operation.

The trial will enter its fourth week next Monday before a jury of seven men and five women.