Man found guilty of Cork murder
The jury in the murder trial going on for the past seven weeks in Cork has returned a verdict of guilty today after deliberating for three hours and 44 minutes.
John Walsh, aged 45, originally from Ballinlough, Cork, and more recently of Cork Street, Mitchelstown, had denied the charge of murdering John McManus on a date unknown between October 28 and November 7 2008 at flat 1, 3 Verdon Place, Wellington Road, Cork.
Mr Justice Paul Carney adjourned sentencing until tomorrow at the Central Criminal Court sitting in Cork when victim impact statements will be presented by the McManus family.
One of the jurors was discharged due to employment commitments mid-way through the trial. The unanimous guilty verdict against Walsh was given by the six women and five men of the jury.
The trial commenced on October 19 and today was day 28 of the case. The investigation into John McManus’s disappearance commenced in October 2008 and gardaí believed that something must have happened to him.
Gardaí went to his flat on Wellington Road to find the rooms stained and spattered with blood. An investigation was put in place.
The breakthrough in the investigation came on November 6, 2008, when a garda in Kerry became suspicious about a car parked on a remote country road.
He seized the car because the NCT was out of date. He even jokingly asked the driver - John Walsh - if the shovel found in the car was for the purpose of burying a body.
Garda Daniel O’Connor did not realise until he returned to the same scene hours later that the victim’s body was on marshy ground over the ditch near a few black bags of rubbish.
On a cursory examination from the road initially, the garda believed the body was a bundle of dumped clothing.
Walsh was arrested that evening in Tralee when it became clear that gardaí in Cork were looking for him.
His girlfriend, Gillian Purcell, aged 34, of Cork Simon and originally from Hollyville, Hollyhill Cork, was also put on trial for murder but she walked free last week when the judge directed them to return a verdict of not guilty.
Walsh gave a number of accounts of what happened. He spoke to Garda O’Connor on the side of the road in Ballyduff, and the following day in a garda car on the way to Kenmare garda station.
He spoke at length during interviews with detectives in Cork and he spent over a day in the witness box during the trial.
He said nothing about the body at the side of the road and said he only went into the field to “have a piss”.
The next day he said to gardaí: “I’m not a bad guy. I’m glad ye caught me. In the flat there was a couple of lads, some lads he knew from jail. He asked me to give him a hand. He was in trouble with some guy. They were bad news. I didn’t want to be in there. They were talking wild, silly stuff, wild stuff. I wouldn’t ever have got involved, I was a friend. I never killed him. … I dumped – I lifted – him on my own to get him out of the way.”
In subsequent interviews with detectives and in the witness box, he said he and the deceased fought and that Mr McManus had a knife and he only acted to defend himself.
The deceased had over 100 injuries, 56 of which were to his head and neck.
