'Tina Satchwell never left home alive': Why forensic expert requested invasive search
Tina Satchwell went missing in 2017.
A forensic archaeologist concluded that missing Cork woman Tina Satchwell had most likely been killed in her home and her body concealed within it after reviewing the case in 2022.
Niamh McCullagh advised gardaí to conduct an invasive search at the property — including the stairwell area where the body would be found during that subsequent search in October 2023.
Superintendent Anne Marie Twomey had asked Ms McCullagh to review the case in 2022, with the specific goal of looking for where human remains could be clandestinely concealed.
Superintendent Twomey, then a detective inspector, had been appointed in 2021 to lead the Satchwell investigation.
Tina Satchwell, 45, had been missing since March, 2017.
Her husband, murder accused Richard Satchwell, 58, had reported her missing to gardaí. He has denied his wife’s murder at their east Cork home and is on trial at the Central Criminal Court sitting in Dublin.
Ms McCullagh reviewed the case files and concluded that Ms Satchwell “never left her home alive”.
She was most probably killed at home and her body was either concealed there or was removed and disposed of elsewhere, she said.
She recommended to gardaí that an invasive search be conducted.
Although there had been a search of the property in 2017, it had not been invasive.
Photos from the scene of structural changes to the property had been “red flags” for her, the court heard. She also noticed a bucket containing rubble and a wheelie bin full of stones from documentation of the original search.
Concealing remains was a detection avoidance strategy for killers, she said.
And domestic homicides had the highest level of ‘crime scene staging’, studies had found.
Domestic homicide perpetrators often create verbal narratives and file missing person’s reports, she said.
Her own research into homicide cases involving concealed victims in Ireland had found that female victims were concealed closer to their home address than their male counterparts.
Ms McCullagh recommended a blood evidence search, the use of a cadaver dog and geophysical searches with technology be used in the earlier stages of a new invasive search.
Ground penetration radar and metal detection equipment used over ground could pick up underground anomalies which could then be investigated further.
The four-day search began on October 10, 2023.
On October 11, Detective Garda Brian Barry noted “an anomaly” in a concrete surface below the staircase.
When Ms McCullagh and her colleague investigated, they found pieces of thin white plastic beneath the soil and then thick black plastic approximately 64cm deep.
They also found a piece of yellow plastic with a best before date of March, 3, 2017.
An articulated human bone was found directly below the black plastic.
Ms McCullagh said the site would then require full forensic examination, the remains were appropriately covered and the scene sealed.
A red brick wall by the staircase was removed to allow the forensic archaeologists full access the following day. Decomposed human remains with some surviving soft tissue were discovered in the grave.
The body was in a supine position, Ms McCullagh said. Loose skeletal parts were also found in the grave.
A long sheet of plastic was running under the body and folded over on top of it.
A large stone was placed lengthways over the body.
The grave was larger than necessary to hold the body and varied in width, Ms McCullagh said.
The body was placed in a body bag and removed from the scene.
Silky sand with occasional black and yellow specks, non-modern animal bone and shell was found in the surrounding soil deposits.
Contemporaneous items like torn white plastic were also found.
The depth of the floor surface to the base of the grave ranged from 84cm to 1.01cm, Ms McCullagh said.
Detective Sergeant Shane Curran from the Garda Technical Bureau, was the crime scene manager during the search in October 2023.
Det Sgt Curran said that the body was buried unusually deep for a clandestine burial, with 84cm to the bottom of the burial and 64cm to the top.
Average depths of 53cm — less than 2ft — are more usually found in clandestine burials, he said.
However, the soil under the staircase had been so sandy it would have been easy to dig, he said.
Although ground-penetrating radar had been used to search for anomalies under the ground, this had not picked up Ms Satchwell’s hidden body.
The house was “chock-a-block with stuff’ defence barrister Brendan Grehan SC said, referring to photographs from the scene.
A concrete mixer and tools were in the 9ft x 11ft siting room where Ms Satchwell’s body was found, along with tools and furniture.
The house was hugely cluttered with dog faeces all over the floors.
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