Mystery surrounds why Tom Dooley was murdered in Kerry graveyard by six of his relatives

Liam Heylin reported on every day of the 34-day trial at the Central Criminal Court where six men slaughtered one man attending a funeral in Tralee and have all now been convicted of murder. Here, he casts an eye over what went on in the graveyard that day in Kerry, the resulting court case and what on earth gave rise to such brutality

Nobody disputes that Thomas Dooley did not raise a hand to anyone on October 5, 2022, and he did not behave in any kind of provocative way but why did this brutal, fatal attack happen? Picture via Facebook

The medieval violence meted out on a father-of-seven attending a funeral at a cemetery in Tralee was the central image from this murder trial but another altogether different picture is possibly even more disturbing.

The image comes from moments before the murder of Tom Dooley when he ambled across the forecourt of Kelleher’s garage from the Mace store to Rath cemetery. He was a big man. We see him as he walks along with a couple of his children. He stops to tie his shoelace. 

One of the kids — doubtless in his best clothes as the family paid their respects to their friend and neighbour who had died — does what kids will do, he walks straight into a puddle and jumps up and down splashing.

There is nothing extraordinary going on at just after 11.30am that morning. It is just one of the million moments that make up the life of a family. 

But freeze the frame. Zoom in on the top right-hand corner of the CCTV image. There is something that looks like two postage stamps on the corner of an envelope. In fact, they are two parked vans. Two of the three getaway vans, faced towards Cork.

Unfreeze the video and let it play on. What could have been a most ordinary scene is now something infinitely more sinister. A dead man walking. Tom Dooley is ambling to his death. 

It was claimed in court by one of his brothers that Thomas Dooley was fighting with everybody. Picture via Facebook

Those grainy images from the corner — the getaway vans — are some of the seeds of his destruction.

Seconds pass, now a minute, and just a few more seconds. Tom Dooley’s children and his wife Siobhán are running back to the Mace shop in terror. At the top of the screen is the scurrying of figures jumping into getaway vans before spinning to Cork. 

Those postage stamps from the corner of the image, what they now come to signify out of sight of this camera is a 43-year-old father of seven children in a pool of blood, dying or already dead.

What happened in the graveyard was not on any recorded image. Instead, a horrible cluster of pictures of what happened in those seconds in the cemetery were painted by witnesses in words.

A shout goes up — “Come on boys”. A group of men run at Tom Dooley and surround him. 

They were hitting him with everything, they were hitting him with weapons, blood was squirting everywhere.

Another shouts — “Shove over, give me a chance, give me a go.” The father-of-seven is bleeding to death on the ground of the graveyard. His brother Patrick is standing over him. “He was grinning, ‘you’re a big man now’.” 

Siobhán Dooley was doubtless thinking only seconds earlier of the woman who died and to whose memory she was there with her family to pay respects. 

Suddenly she has a ringside view of the barbaric murder of her husband: “They were actually grinning. Tom (Tom Dooley Sr.) had a coat on him. He was taking it off him and he was grinning. I saw something in his hand. I said to my husband to run. He said, ‘No, why should I run? I have nothing to run for.’ 

“I saw Tom with something in his hand. I saw him with two weapons in his hands. One was kind of shiny and looked to be new. The other had a bit of rust on it. I think one had a kind of round top on it, the other was kind of a big chunk of a yoke… Tom (Tom Dooley Sr.) said, ‘You’re a big man now.’ Patrick was grinning. He had another weapon. I don’t know what sort it was.

“(The teenaged accused) had something long in his hands. He had it over his head, like something you’d see in an Indian movie. It was kind of like an axe thing.

"Patrick and (Thomas snr) grabbed him by his two collars… Mike — my husband’s first cousin — had a weapon in his hand. He was standing behind my husband. I knew they were going to do him harm. I saw the weapons. I tried to squeeze in between them. I knew I had no hope… All I could do was start scraping (Thomas snr’s) face and eyes to get him away from my husband.

“I heard one of them saying, ‘Take her out too — get rid of her’. I got another bang. I was pegged to the ground. They were all gathered around. He (her late husband) turned his head and said, ‘Run, just run’.

Siobhan Dooley (beige jacket) with her daughters Noreen and Siobhan, and son-in-law Jamie Harty at Anglesea Street court during the murder trial. Picture: Larry Cummins

“They were actually pushing each other to get in at him. I remember one of them pushing (another) back. ‘Shove over, give me a chance, give me a go’," she said.

If these pictures were like moments from a cowboy movie or indeed a horror film, they were from one that Siobhán and her seven children will never want to see. It is more than enough that she and some of the children saw it playing out live in front of them.

And if the trial itself could be compared to a movie, then it had many of the tropes of contemporary film-making — episodic, time-bending, riddled with competing narrative voices, some of them unreliable narrators and we also got fragmentation and hyperreal pictures, random elements and cross-cultural references. 

The jury might have hoped for the classical structure of beginning, middle and end — and ideally in that order, but that was not what they got. Of course there were days when the focus of the trial was scientific and exact, not least the pathologist’s evidence and the DNA analysis of blood spots found on clothing. 

But there were digressions too when the time it would take to run across the graveyard saw Jamaica’s Olympic champion Usain Bolt being brought into the picture. Hurling legend Diarmuid The Rock O’Sullivan got a mention. 

We were whisked back a century to Michael Collins rallying the troops, and four centuries to René Descartes and his philosophical musings. And there was time in the 34 days of the trial for a mention too of Montreal’s finest, Leonard Cohen.

'Honour killing'

With all of the alternating between focusing and digressing there was some attempt to bring all of the disparate elements together under a single unifying theme — the honour killing. 

But how convincing an explanation was that? What the prosecution called an honour killing, with no honour, but which the defence rejected, one lawyer calling it a racist slur.

From Siobhán Dooley’s evidence there was at the very least among the killers a smug sense of them deciding that this was some kind of comeuppance for her husband, Tom Dooley. 

Taunting him with the words, “You’re a big man now”, as he lay bleeding in the graveyard that morning in front of his wife and family. What emerged was a sense that they had been appointed or were self-appointed to bring about this ‘righteous’ act.

Some people close to the case speculated privately that there may well have been a decision to give the deceased “a good hiding” — or some other like euphemism for a serious assault — but that it might well have fallen short of a plan to murder. 

But of course that is where the legal definitions sternly left the accused nowhere to hide. 

Even if they intended only to cause serious harm, and never meant for him to die, they are still murderers. Of course, none of them came to court saying “I only meant …”.

Everyone of them came to court saying — not from the witness box or even to the investigating gardaí but — through their lawyers, in effect, “I had nothing to do with violence of any kind, I was only there for a funeral. Wrong place, wrong time.” 

One of the convicted, 20-year-old Thomas Dooley, being escorted to Tralee District Court in November 2022.

Patrick, the brother of the deceased, went further, telling gardaí on top of that blanket denial that he jumped in a vain attempt to save his brother from attack by others.

We’ll never know how the jury concluded as they did. 

But if any juror articulated the view, “I’d say they only meant to assault him,” they would have had to consider — against that — the seriousness of that attack. 

We heard a lot about weapons, knives, cleavers, “this round yoke”, “a small circular shaped weapon on a short handle”, and “an axe thing — something you’d see an Indian with in a film”. And we heard about the swinging of blows down on the victim.

And we heard the words coming from the attackers which were more than suggestive of something at the serious end of the spectrum of violence and warped honour.

“Come on boys!” “You are a big man now.” “Shove over, give me a chance, give me a go.” But not just the words. There was the laughing. And more menacingly, the grinning. Siobhán Dooley referred to that several times, like she has no chance of ever getting it out of her head. The grinning.

And if it was all about honour, vengeance for wounded pride, or something like that, what evidence is there? 

Why?

It certainly stretches any known meaning of honour to find anything honourable in it. But what caused it? Nobody disputes that the deceased man did not raise a hand to anyone on October 5, 2022, and he did not behave in any kind of provocative way but why did this brutal, fatal attack happen?

This is one of the places where different narrators are at odds. The dead man’s brother said the deceased did not get on with the family. 

“He (the deceased) was fighting with everybody, not fighting physically. We left him off. He did not talk to the father, he didn’t talk to any of us. We left him do his own thing… Like I said, he had a bit of a mental thing.” 

That was how Patrick Dooley described it when gardaí questioned him. But can he be relied upon on that point? 

Siobhán did not agree that there was even a falling out or any kind of fighting going on over the years.

The late Thomas Dooley (left) with his wife Siobhan who had a ringside view of the barbaric murder of her husband. Picture via Facebook

“We never had a falling out. The trouble only started when my daughter refused to marry Tom Dooley’s son, Thomas. We were not speaking. We never fell out. It was a clean break. We never communicated after. We never spoke," she said.

She said her daughter Rosie left Thomas Jnr in November 2019 on the day one of her other daughters was getting married.

But Thomas Jr did not give Siobhán a clear run at describing it like that. 

Through his lawyer, he said, he had been happily married for six months when the killing occurred. Like the others, he stayed out of the witness box but the suggestion was that his happiness would not tally with any notion of his honour being injured and in need of vengeance.

Whatever was behind it, the murder was as swift as it was brutal. 

Thomas Dooley's brother said the deceased did not get on with the family. Picture via Facebook

Once the “Come on boys” cry went up, the armed men ran at Tom Dooley, surrounded him and flaked into him with deadly weapons. Then they ran, jumped into their getaway vans and drove out of Tralee in convoy. 

The father-of-seven was left dead or as close to it in that moment as would make no difference.

Siobhán Dooley would be a happy woman today if it was all merely some twisted movie. Instead of which it is the brutal reality which now haunts her family. 

Lifelong scars have been left. At least one of them is physical and runs almost the width of Siobhan’s back after she was cleaved while trying to save her husband’s life. 

As for the emotional scars, who beyond Siobhán Dooley and her children could even begin to imagine how deeply they have cut?

We might get some sense of how deeply when we hear victim impact evidence from the family on July 30 ahead of the imposition of the mandatory life sentences to be imposed on the murderers.