Life term for horrific death
Cathal O’Sullivan has been jailed for life for beating his girlfriend to death in a horrific ordeal of violence that left her with 125 wounds including a fatal head injury and a fractured jaw.
The jury of nine men and three women considered the garda photographs of the sickening wounds to Nicola Collins’ face and body. They deliberated for three hours and 58 minutes before reaching a unanimous guilty verdict at the Central Criminal Court in Cork.
Before the mandatory life sentence was imposed on the 45-year-old from Charleville, Co Cork, who claimed her death resulted from a slip in the bath, there was one more piece of evidence to be heard.
Despite the tears of Ms Collins’ family at the verdict, there was absolute silence in Courtroom 6 as Detective Sergeant Kieran O’Sullivan told the judge and the jury — who remained in court — of a chilling previous conviction.
Almost five years ago to the day — on November 27, 2013 — O’Sullivan was convicted of assault causing harm to his then girlfriend at a flat where he lived at the time.
What followed was an account of an assault which echoed the attack on the 38-year-old mother-of-three.
The circumstances of the previous conviction, for which he was given a three-year suspended jail sentence, were that the young woman contacted gardaí on April 18, 2013 to say she had been violently assaulted by her boyfriend on April 14. Her condition was so serious she was rushed to intensive care.
“She had been incapacitated from her injuries in the house for approximately three days until she made her way out of the house,” the detective said.
The catalogue of injuries to that young woman included multiple blows to her face, arms, abdomen, scalp, missing clumps of hair, three liver lacerations, rib fractures on both sides, kidney damage caused by massive bruising, and a fracture to her skull.
She also suffered subdural haematoma, the injury that would later cause the death four years later of the other victim of Cathal O’Sullivan’s violence — Nicola Collins.
Nicola’s sister, Carly, said the terror her sister must have faced in her final hours will forever haunt her family.
“To think of her, a person in need of love and kindness, being met with cold-hearted brutality, is beyond heartbreaking. It has been terribly distressing to hear of the devastating injuries she sustained.
“The thought of the pain she must have suffered, and the unimaginable terror she surely felt in her final hours, will forever haunt us.”
After Ms Justice Eileen Creedon imposed the mandatory period of life imprisonment for murder, Carly Collins said: “It is a relief that this person has been put away for a long time, especially having heard of the previous conviction.”
Nicola’s father, Michael Collins, said it had been a hard ordeal for the family to sit through the evidence and what he described as the vilification of his daughter’s character by O’Sullivan and the fact that he did nothing to help her in the end.
Nicola’s mother, Kay Collins, said she was shocked by O’Sullivan’s previous conviction.
“She was my firstborn daughter. She never got to reach her full potential. She was taken away from us in the prime of her life.
“I am quite shocked at his previous conviction, that it was not addressed.”
O’Sullivan told of first meeting the deceased on a 10-week course called ‘Effective Communication for Better Relationships’.
Several weeks later, they started their on/off relationship, with Nicola Collins coming over to stay in his flat on the Thursday night before her death.
He said he was on medication for anxiety, depression and social phobia and sought out the course on effective communication.
O’Sullivan repeatedly said in his evidence that he struggled with communication and expressing himself. But he spent three days in the witness box, often giving very long and detailed answers where he challenged the forensic minutiae of the pathologist’s evidence.
While he seemed to have some explanation for almost every mark on her body — involving falls, a lot of evidence about the lats under the mattress, and his key claim that she simply slipped in the bath and suffered the fatal head injury — the prosecution case was always that Cathal O’Sullivan beat Nicola Collins to death.
In the end, this is what the nine men and three women of the jury believed.
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