Daughter backs claims of woman accused of murdering husband

The daughter of a woman accused of murdering her husband of 32 years at their Co Laois home, has told the trial that her earliest memory is seeing her father point a shotgun at her mother and threaten to “blow her head off”.

Taking the witness stand on day two of the trial, Linda Burke said she agreed with everything her mother had said in her Garda statements, and that it was true her father had beat her mother throughout the marriage.

Ms Burke, who is now a childcare worker, told the Central Criminal Court that she remembered another evening when she was 13, how her father had hit her mother over the head with a sweeping brush.

“He split her forehead open, but he prevented me from getting an ambulance and I just had to tend to it myself,” she said.

She said her father beat her once badly when she was six years old, because she made a mistake when she was learning how to tell the time.

“I was crying, he kept telling me to stop, but I couldn't,” she said. “I was picked up and thrown across the room.”

Ms Burke said she remembered how her mother, Anne Burke, described a buzzing in her head that she could not get rid of in the hours before she assaulted her husband.

She said she had tried talking to her over that weekend, but her mother had just been “sitting and staring”.

Anne Burke (aged 56), of Ballybrittas in Co Laois has admitted hitting her husband, Pat Burke (aged 55), over the head with a hammer while he slept, but she has denied murdering him at the family home on August 19, 2007.

Afterwards she washed his face and covered him with a duvet, wrote a suicide note to her four children and cut her wrists.

Her youngest son found her in the hallway of their home and brought her into the downstairs bedroom to bandage her arms, where he discovered his father's body on the floor by the bed.

Mrs Burke's defence team claims she was suffering from a mental disorder at the time and that the case is one of diminished responsibility.

Giving evidence for the defence, Dr Harry Kennedy, a psychiatrist attached to the Central Mental Hospital, told the jury that Anne Burke had a severe depressive episode at the time of Pat Burke's killing.

He said he was satisfied that “at the relevant time, she was suffering from a mental disorder which caused her to have a diminished ability to think clearly or concentrate”.

Mrs Burke was clearly suicidal he told the court, and suffering from low self-esteem and a lack of confidence.

Dr Kennedy told the jury that she believed her children would be “better off if she was dead because there would be fewer rows”.

He said these characteristics were typical elements of a severe depressive illness.

During his interviews with Mrs Burke, Dr Kennedy said she described her marriage as “rows, beatings, lots of clouts, swelled lips and black eyes”.

Mrs Burke told him her husband would try to strangle her but he would “deny it all in the morning”.

She recalled how once when she was pregnant with her son, he kicked her in the stomach.

She said he told her if she did anything to him, she would be brought to the Dublin mountains and never heard of again.

When Dr Kennedy asked her if she could remember any happy times with her husband, she replied: “I suppose so. Not really. He always had something to say, some remark, criticising always.”

A psychiatrist giving evidence on behalf of the prosecuting team, Dr Damien Moran, said he was also satisfied Mrs Burke's disorder was “of such severity to diminish substantially her responsibility for the act”.

The accused told gardaí that she began drinking at 10am on the morning in question, following her husband's return from a nightclub and a prolonged row.

She said he had called her at about 3am to tell her he had been receiving calls from a woman who was in the club with him, and that he returned home some time around 5am when they started arguing.

She said after he went to bed, she had some wine and some alcohol that had been in the fridge, and that it was about 4pm when she picked up a hammer, and hit him over the head.

Mrs Burke told gardaí: “it was a haze...it was like someone else was doing it”.

She said she remembered hitting him once or twice.

Mrs Burke denied that she had gone out to the shed to get the hammer, and said it had been in the bedroom for a few days because she had used it to nail up a curtain.

When investigating detectives asked if it was her intent to kill her husband, she replied: “Of course not, it wasn't like it was me (doing it)...I wish I could turn back the clock.”

When they told her that the post mortem exam showed she had hit her husband at least 23 times, she said: “I don't remember that, I don't know how it's possible, I just don't.”

The jury of eight men and four women are expected to retire to consider their verdict tomorrow.