Murder Court hears statement made by accused
A man accused of murder went voluntarily to his local garda station to explain his recollections the evening after a killing in Dublin’s south inner city, a murder court heard today.
Mary Ellen Ring, SC, for the prosecution was reading a statement made two and a half years ago by Anthony Burke, aged 35, of Clancarty Road, Donnycarney in Dublin.
Mr Burke has pleaded not guilty to the murder of Joseph Sutcliffe, aged 32, in Fatima Mansions, Rialto, on October 13, 2002.
The Central Criminal Court had already heard Mr Sutcliffe, a former All-Ireland boxing champion, was staying with friends in the Fatima Mansions flat complex at the time of his death.
Yesterday, Detective Sergeant Colette Wheeler was in the witness box, while the statement she took from the accused was being read out.
She agreed when she met Mr Burke at Clontarf garda station on Sunday, October 13, 2002, he told her that he and his brother’s partner, May Cahill, and Ms Cahill’s son, Anthony Cahill, had been in Fatima Mansions the night before.
He said they decided to go over to the city's southside after drinking in Coolock, because they had "great craic there before".
That Saturday night, he, Ms Cahill and Mr Cahill met a number of May Cahill’s sisters in a pub in the south-inner city. After drinking there for a while, they went back to the flat of one of these sisters, Ellen Cahill.
They were having a "great old night" Mr Burke told detectives. "Me, May and Anthony were standing in May’s garden drinking and yakin'. All of a sudden, Anthony was gone," he recalled.
Mr Burke said he heard shouting coming from a ground floor flat further down the block and followed the noise inside. "Anthony was fighting with a fella I didn’t know. I automatically jumped in because it was Anthony," he explained.
He said he gave the man against whom his friend was fighting "two digs on the chin with my right fist".
Mr Burke and Mr Cahill returned to Ellen Cahill’s garden, where Ms Cahill had arrived with cans of beer. They resumed drinking until Mr Burke heard more "roaring and shouting", he said.
This time the noise led him to an open area in the complex, where "a good few people were standing around", he explained.
Mr Burke said when he got closer he saw that Anthony Cahill was again "fighting with the same fella", so he broke them up once more.
"It was then I saw this fella had a blade in his hand. He pushed it towards me and I pushed it away," he said, adding that "this fella just ran away".
Mr Burke told the detectives he thought that was the end of it, and after they finished drinking in Ms Cahill’s garden, they called into another house for five minutes before getting a taxi back to Coolock.
He informed the investigators that the next morning, his brother’s son called to his door and asked him if he was in any trouble the night before, because a man had been stabbed to death. "I felt sick," commented Mr Burke; "I didn’t see anyone stabbed".
"We didn’t mention the row in the taxi, because as far as I was concerned, it was over," he said.
However, a taxi driver, who brought two men and a woman on a similar journey that night, also gave evidence today.
Kevin O’Shea told the court: "The fella in the front mentioned something about a stabbing or murder in Fatima Mansions. The fella in the back told him to shut up in front of me. He had to tell him twice."
The trial before Mr Justice Paul Carney and a jury of five men and seven women will continue on Monday.
