A killing in Midleton: The twisted lies that followed the tragic murder of Daena Walsh
Adam Corcoran at Mallow District Court on August 4, 2024. Picture: Larry Cummins
There was so much to explain.
A young woman lay dead with stab wounds to her face, her neck, her chest, and her stomach on a Friday afternoon in Midleton — in the centre of the bustling East Cork town.
Her left arm was almost completely severed from her body with a bread knife.
On the cooker were a few deodorant aerosol cans wrapped in a tea-towel to keep them in place.
How could all of this be explained? Within minutes of it happening, gardaí were at the scene trying to establish exactly what had occurred.
But if truth is the first casualty of war, that maxim also applied to this case.
Instead of admitting to the truth of what happened, now convicted murderer Adam Corcoran concocted a myriad of deceptions, misdirection, and plain old lies.
Corcoran was trying to get the gardaí to look at everything except him.
He sent stories off in so many different directions. Suicide. A fireball explosion.
Even a concoction of his victim’s last words that she loved him and it wasn’t his fault.
Anything but an admission.
If investigators bought the idea of suicide, he was home free.
Paramedic Alan Fitzgerald was one of the first to arrive at the crime scene where the apartment was burning.
As he said, there was a lot of talk about the fatal explosion in Creeslough, Co Donegal, around that time.
If the killer could create a replica of that in the centre of Midleton, it was another chance to get off the hook. Anything would do.
Corcoran was embarking on a frantic game of chance.
Like the bloke in the arcade standing over the pinball machine trying to stop the silver ball from finding a centre path straight down to the slot in front of him, he was pressing those flippers, trying to get the silver ball to land anywhere except with him.
And if he hit a target — suicide, fireball tragedy, last breath pardon — he might just avoid all responsibility.
It was a manic exercise in trying to avoid life imprisonment.
If it was a frantic game of chance for the man accused of murder, it was entirely different for the family of Daena Walsh.
As the young woman’s brother Callum said,: “No family should have to endure that. It is cruelty on top of cruelty.”
On the Friday afternoon of August 2, 2024, Corcoran was standing over Daena who had just passed her last dying breath.
There is a carving knife covered in her blood and breadknife likewise dripping with her blood.
The first thing on Corcoran’s mind is how he can get away with murder. The last thing on his mind is telling the truth.
He is about to send stories up and down, left and right making pinging sounds all over the place but none of them with a truthful resonance.
The first step in getting away with murder was to get rid of the evidence.
But when the evidence is a dead body in the middle of your home, that is not a minor matter.
As far as the prosecution in this murder trial was concerned, his first effort was to dismember the body so that it could be disposed of.
The evidence for that was the partially amputated left arm of the deceased woman’s body. l
This abandoned amputation appeared to have been carried out with the bread knife, from the pathologist’s finding of the massive wound being inflicted with a knife with a serrated edge.
The sentencing judge agreed that this certainly appeared to have been what was on the murder’s mind — to get rid of the body.
The next step after that would have been another case from East Cork of a man looking for his ‘missing’ partner to return.
For whatever reason, that lie — that piece of cruelty upon cruelty that the Walsh family found demonic — was abandoned.
But the murderer’s mind and his hands were moving fast.
Step two was to try another way to destroy the evidence in some other fashion.
Daena’s body is on the floor of the living/dining room and there are blood stains all around this scene.
What to do? Set fire to the apartment. So aerosol cans were wrapped in a tea-towel and left on the cooker with the hob turned on.
What direction can the truth be taken next? Corcoran clearly thought as he ran from the apartment and walked out on to the busy main street of Midleton as he waited for the aerosols to explode and his apartment to get engulfed in flames with his dead partner — the mother of their two children — in the middle of it.
But this target for the misdirection of the truth didn’t light up as quickly as imagined.
So then what next? What next? Someone will spot the smoke, someone will call the fire brigade, the murder victim will be found.
So he decides to manoeuvre his way ahead of the unfolding events.
He is the one who rings 999 and creates another misdirection.
“Get here as fast as you can. My partner, she stabbed herself in the stomach. You need to get here as fast as ye can… I got into the house, she was on the floor.”
The call-taker asked: “Is she breathing?” He replied: “No, no, she could be dead, I don’t know… On the floor, bleeding out, like… She is 27.”
To give this lie a chance of checking out as truth he had the presence of mind to make it sound somewhat credible that she would have killed herself.
He tells the first person he has spoken to — the 999 call-taker: “She has gone through a lot. She is going through a lot of stuff.”
In this way, victim-blaming is being taken to absurd lengths.
Added to that, he knows that he has explain trying to create a fireball and an attempted dismemberment.
What follows is an effort to push the concocted suicide narrative and to claim memory loss on everything that doesn’t fit.
Detective Garda Cormac O’Bric said that after coming out of John Barry House he spoke with Corcoran in the back of an ambulance where the murderer said: “I came back from the offie. Saw Deana bleeding. I tried to save her. All she said was, ‘I love you so much. This was not your fault’.”
And not only was he pedalling the fairy story that this ‘suicide’ was a shock to him, he again did a little scene-setting to make this lie bed in.
“Deana was lighting candles before I went out. We were going to have a sexual time if you know what I mean.”
So the guards were getting a lot from him in terms of invented realities and a lot of memory loss/no comment when it came to actual realities.
This gets him to a March 9, his trial at the Central Criminal Court for murder and arson.
But it had to be dawning on him that any 12 people in the land who were given a choice between this being murder or suicide were only ever going to come down one way.
So, for the first time since August 2024, he decided to tell another story.
This time he was going to admit that effectively in a tussle with Daena with a knife he killed her but never intended to kill her, never even intended to injure her, and that it couldn’t be murder and could only be manslaughter because he lacked the intention.
And furthermore he could never have formed an intention when he was out of it on cocaine, vodka, and Four Loco.
The admission to killing was made for the first time when cross-examined by prosecution senior counsel Donal O’Sullivan during the murder trial:
“What happened to her? Did you kill her?”
“I killed her, yes.”
“When you rang 999 you said suicide?”
“That is what I believed at the time. I didn’t know what happened.”
“And then you said to the guards, you did not kill her — that was a lie?”
“At the time that is what I believed.”
“When did you remember all this?”
“Months after, over a period of time, yeah.”
“What you have done here, you have come in and you have lied repeatedly to this jury. Have you lied?”
“No.”
“You lied from the very start — to the 999 operator, to the guards when you spoke to them immediately after, you lied to guards the next day, you are lying now.”
“No.”
“You tried to invent a story to fit with physical facts of the case so that you will be found not guilty, is that what you are trying to do?”
“No.”
He could say, no, all day, but the truthful answer would have been yes.
When describing it in the more supportive atmosphere of his direct evidence to his own senior counsel Brendan Grehan, the murderer struck a tone of being as baffled as everyone else by what happened, sorrowfully admitting that he must have killed her but without the intention to kill or injure her.
“She had the red knife in her hand. She was self-harming. She was cutting her [left] arm. She started shouting at me, saying I was cheating on her. I tried to reassure her I was not. She screamed at me… She was hitting me, head-butting me, lashing out.
"I didn’t know where the knife was. I was lashing out at her. I got on top of her. I hit her twice in the chest. She stopped moving. I was out of breath. I was dizzy. I felt wet on my T-shirt. The red knife was in my hand. I just ran from the house.
"I was running. I was halfway down the stairs. I didn’t know why I was running. I started walking out. I got outside then. I can’t remember what happened. I remember hearing the fire alarm.”
In other words, a terrible blur. But the jury did not buy this blur.
Try as he might to confuse everyone, exonerate himself and turn the truth into a whole host of lies after twisted lies, the jury saw through the lies and misdirection and returned with their unanimous guilty verdicts.
Now it has come down to what it was from the very beginning, on August 2, 2024 — a tragic and pointless loss of life for a young woman.
And the loss for two children of their mother.
It was the jury who ultimately called halt to all the lies.
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