Richard Satchwell denies controlling wife Tina in interviews played during murder trial

Richard Satchwell told interviewers he wasn’t controlling and accused the media of twisting his words and motives

Richard Satchwell (second right) arriving at the District Court in Cashel, Co Tipperary, after being charged in connection with the murder of his wife Tina Satchwell. Picture: Brian Lawless/PA

Murder accused Richard Satchwell was asked if he was controlling of his wife Tina in a media interview played at his trial in the Central Criminal Court.

Mr Satchwell said that he paid for her mobile phone and the couple's bank account was also in his name, although he said that Tina had access to it.

Tina did not have a driving licence so he would drive her everywhere, he said.

Tina also accompanied him when he went to work as a lorry driver, he said.

Neil Prendeville of Cork’s RedFM asked if he was ‘maybe overcontrolling’ and could this be why Tina could have left to ‘take some space’.

But Mr Satchwell said that although he would drive her everywhere, he also “gave her the space she wanted.” 

"She didn’t want bills in her name," he said, referring to Tina's phone bill being in his name.

“I don’t patrol Tina, I never did,” Mr Satchwell said in the interview.

“I wasn’t Tina’s keeper, I was Tina’s husband.” 

Mr Prendeville also asked Mr Satchwell if he ever felt he was punching above his weight in the relationship as Tina was a good-looking, glamourous woman.

“Some say she’s a trophy wife,” Mr Satchwell said, “to have someone that beautiful on your arm.” 

Mr Prendeville speculated about how he might feel if this beautiful woman then decided she no longer wanted to be in that relationship.

“She did say ‘if I ever go and you come after me, I’ll go to the guards,’” Mr Prendeville said, reminding Mr Satchwell of a comment he previously attributed to his wife.

“There’s something going on there."

Mr Prendeville said that he had booked a lie detector test for Mr Satchwell.

But Mr Satchwell said he felt “too low in myself” at that time to do it.

Lie detector

He also said he was too tired and he had promised another journalist that he would do a lie detector test for them first.

Mr Satchwell had voluntarily offered to take a lie detector test in a media interview before and Mr Prendeville asked why he brought it up.

“I have nothing to hide,” Mr Satchwell replied.

Richard Satchwell did not look up at the court while the videos were played.

Mr Prendeville said he would be "upset" and "bitter" if someone had got him to leave his own home on a ruse and ran off with €26,000, as Mr Satchwell said Tina had done when she disappeared in March 2017.

But Mr Satchwell said that if Tina came back he would not be angry but would put his arms around her, run her a bath, and tell gardaí she was home.

“I spent my life trying to give her everything, being good to her. Trying to give her the life my father gave my mother,” he said.

He referred to the press as “vultures”. He said media had harassed him and only cared about their story – not the truth.

He previously accused the media of being ‘misleading’ and ‘fabricating’ stories about him and ‘twisting’ everything.

Mr Satchwell said that some media had tried to antagonise him so that he would “get nasty” and they could ‘paint him in a bad light.’ 

“Media just want me to look bad, they try to wind me up, to show a nasty side,” he said.

He was now so upset by his wife's absence that "Ruby the Chihuahua is licking tears off my face nightly".

In another interview with Barry Cummins for RTÉ, while woodland was being searched for any traces of Tina, near Castlemartyr in east Cork, he said that Tina was not a trusting person and wouldn’t walk in strange woods with him, her husband, let alone someone else.

Tina Satchwell, aged 45, went missing from her home in Youghal in East Cork on March 20, 2017.

Tina “felt safe” with Mr Satchwell and this was one of the things that first attracted her to him, he said.

“My hands only ever held Tina in a loving manner,” Mr Satchwell said. 

'Someone helped her leave'

Mr Satchwell said he believed “someone had to have helped” Tina get out of the house,” in a radio interview from March 2018 with CRY104FM, a community station in Youghal.

Such people “should be ashamed of themselves” for not putting people’s minds at rest, he said.

And anyone who would help her leave “would have to be someone Tina trusts,” he said, someone she knew for a long time.

Mr Satchwell said he “had full trust in the guards” and believed they ‘would follow it through ‘till the end.’ 

Mr Satchwell has pleaded not guilty to the murder of his wife at the couple's home on Grattan Street in Youghal, east Cork between March 19 and March 20, 2017.

Tina Satchwell, 45, went missing from her home in Youghal in east Cork on March 20, 2017.

More than 6 years later, in October 2023, her remains were found in a shallow grave buried beneath concrete in the sitting room under a stairwell in her home.

The trial will continue on Tuesday in front of Justice Paul McDermott.