Cork publican tells of kidnap ordeal
Gary O’Donovan yesterday described a moment during his family’s kidnap ordeal which he could not believe as he sat hooded and tied up and heard the sound of his captor snoring loudly.
That was the beginning of the end of the false imprisonment of Katie and Gary O’Donovan at their home in Rochestown last May.
“I had a cushion cover over my head. At that stage everything went pretty quiet. I was left to ponder how the next couple of hours were going to turn out. Katie was upstairs with the taller raider keeping guard. Everything went really really quiet,” he testified today.
Mr O’Donovan asked the raider if he would adjust the cushion cover as it was resting very close to his nose and mouth and the raider obliged.
“I sat in silence contemplating my fate and the fate of my family with the hood over my head. I felt my hearing accentuating. I could hear a pin drop outside. The raider sitting on the (other) couch was flicking through a paper.
“In the depths of my consciousness I became aware of something I could not believe. I was monitoring the breathing pattern of the raider. I noticed it was starting to go into a snooze. I could not quite believe it was happening “I waited a number of minutes as I heard the snores get deeper and deeper. I thought this must be a joke or something.
I said: ‘Excuse me,’ as I had done previously. When I got no reply I realised this might be my only chance. I sat upright and struggled as hard as I could at the binds on my hands. I felt I was very audible. I eventually got the binds untied. There were ten or twenty knots.
“The next thing I did I had to pull up the hood. I did that with a heavy heart. My nightmare was that the raider would say, nice try, and make sure it did not happen again,” he testified.
Instead, what he saw in front of him was the raider with the stun gun cradled in his arms, sleeping soundly.
Mr O’Donovan thought that the raider upstairs was probably looking out the front window so he slipped out a side door in his bare feet and climbed over the back garden walls of two neighbours’ houses and made his way to the home of his friends Jenny and Mark O’Driscoll, several houses away.
Mrs O’Driscoll testified yesterday that she heard the doorbell at 2.47 a.m. and thought it was the family au pair coming home very late and she went down to let her in. At first she did not recognise her neighbour and friend, Gary O’Donovan.
“He was covered in blood, I didn’t know what he was saying. He was trying to push his way in. I was trying to push him back out. I started screaming. He said: ‘Jenny, it’s Gary’. We (with her husband Mark) brought him into the kitchen,” she said. There, they phoned the gardaí.
Sgt. Gary McPolin, who is married to Katie O’Donovan’s sister, arrived at the scene and a surveillance operation was put in place. He said two men left the O’Donovan home and they were arrested nearby.
He ran to 7 Dewbury as he believed that a third raider was inside but this was not so.
Katie O’Donovan’s four children slept through the whole thing. She was six months pregnant at the time and has since had a baby boy. Gerard Clarke, 38, of 2 St. John’s Terrace, Upper John Street, Cork, will be back at Cork Circuit Criminal Court on Tuesday where his trial continues.
He denies two charges of possessing firearms, two of falsely imprisoning the couple and one of making a threat to kill or cause serious harm to Gary O’Donovan at 7 Dewberry, Mount Oval Village, Rochestown, Cork, on May 2 and 3.
