Corcoran’s killer owed thousands to credit union

Anne Corcoran’s killer was being pursued by his credit union for more than €10,000 of bad debt, his murder trial has heard.

He had also paid nothing off his mortgage in almost two years when he decided to rob the 60-year-old widow.

Oliver Hayes (aged 49) of Clancool Terrace, Bandon entered the witness box at the Central Criminal Court today. He said he was under other financial pressure at the time also.

“Some people were onto me a lot to get paid for things,” he said. “I had a lot of sleepless nights wondering where money was going to come from.”

He said he decided to rob someone.

“I made the wrong decision,” he said.

The painter has pleaded guilty to manslaughter but not guilty to murdering Anne Corcoran between January 19 and 21, 2009, after abducting her from her home at Maulnaskimlehane, Kilbrittain on the January 19.

She had to show him how to open her car’s boot before he locked her inside, her hands tied.

Hayes has also pleaded guilty to falsely imprisoning her in his house and stealing €3,000 from her bank account in the days following her death.

He told Blaise O’Carroll SC, defending, that it was to destroy any evidence from him that he burned Mrs Corcoran’s body on January 24 last year before burying it in woodlands near Ballinspittle.

“Probably watching crime programmes on TV,” he said, explaining where he got the idea. “You cover your tracks. Anything that’s burned is hard to find DNA. Any drop of sweat or an eyebrow can catch you.”

He earlier told gardaí that he read crime magazines.

The killer’s former girlfriend said he had scratches on his ‘deadly white’ face on the morning of January 20 last year.

“I commented that he looked like he had been in a cat fight,” wrote Josephine Collins of Churchview, Ballinspittle in a statement read to the court.

He told her that a car almost hit him when he was out preparing for a walking marathon. He got the scratches when he ended up in the ditch, he said.

She said that Hayes paid her son cash he owed him four days later, before the three of them went skiing in Austria. Hayes owed him for that holiday as well as for a previous football trip.

“He didn’t have much money on holidays,” she wrote of Hayes, whom she met at a dance in Kinsale 10 years earlier. “He never had any money.”

However, she said that he paid for his own trips in Austria and also paid for their train fares, with them paying him back.

“Usually it was the other way around,” she remarked.

She said he didn’t seem interested when they heard that Anne Corcoran was missing. He later told her he had worked with Mrs Corcoran’s husband and ‘sort of knew her’.

“I was shocked as he hadn’t mentioned it before,” she wrote.

At one stage she suggested to him that the widow might have got her car stuck in woods.

He then told her that he had come upon a woman’s car in a ditch one night and had driven it out for her. They agreed that it might be Mrs Corcoran and Ms Collins urged him to report it.

Hayes later told gardaí that he made up this story in case his fingerprints were found in the widow’s car. He had been careful to wear gloves, but took them off as he approached a garda checkpoint the day he left for Austria.

Earlier, there was a smell of smoke in the courtroom while gardaí unsealed evidence bags containing the remains of Mrs Corcoran’s charred clothes. Detective Garda Séamus O’Donnell identified the remnants along with a ligature found around her mouth and a piece of burnt clothes line found around her wrists.

Photographs of her body lying in its shallow grave were also shown to the jury.

The prosecution will cross examine Hayes tomorrow morning before Mr Justice Paul Carney.