Woman tells court she saw mother and fiancé kill her father
A mother-of-one has told a murder trail that she saw her fiancé and mother kill her father with a spanner, slash hook, monkey wrench and lump hammer when she was 18.
Veronica McGrath’s mother cried throughout her daughter’s evidence against her at the Central Criminal Court.
Vera McGrath (aged 61) has pleaded not guilty to murdering her 43-year-old husband, Bernard Brian McGrath, at their home in Lower Coole, Westmeath 23 years ago.
Veronica McGrath’s former husband, Colin Pinder (aged 47) of Liverpool, England has pleaded not guilty to murder but guilty to the manslaughter on a date unknown between March 10 and April 18, 1987.
Ms McGrath said her mother visited her and Mr Pinder in their caravan on a neighbour’s land one evening while her father went into the neighbour’s house.
“(My mother) said that she wished my father was dead and that they had been fighting,” testified a soft-spoken Ms McGrath.
“My mother said to Colin that he wouldn’t be man enough to kill my father,” she continued after a number of pauses. “He said that he had the very thing and produced a spanner. He said that one blow of this would be enough.”
She said that her mother was gesturing to Mr Pinder as all four of them walked back to the McGrath home, where her three younger brothers were sleeping. The house was locked and her mother got in a window to let them in the back door.
“Colin moved his arm and I seen the top of the spanner. He then hit my father. He hit him at the back of the head,” she said. “My father fell to the ground.”
Her mother came out of the house with tools in her hand.
“One was a slash hook and the other was like a long monkey wrench,” she said. “She handed them to Colin Pinder.”
She said that Mr Pinder hit her father several times with the slash hook while her father pleaded with him.
“He was saying: ‘Have mercy on me.’ Several times he asked for mercy,” she said.
She said she was then told to go inside and turn up the radio. When she returned, she said, her father was trying to defend himself with a wooden ladder by throwing it at Mr Pinder.
She said her father ran onto a bótharín where her fiancé hit him on the legs with the slash hook. She recalled seeing her father standing in the ditch and Mr Pinder hitting the ditch with the implement.
“I went into the ditch and my father said to me his eyes were stinging and he couldn’t see,” she said. “I thought his face didn’t look right. I thought one side of his face looked very distorted.”
She said her mother was standing in this laneway as he father asked for his car keys.
“Let me go. I would do anything,” he pleaded, according to his daughter. “Just give me the keys of my car. I’ll go and leave ye the house and everything.”
She said that the next time she saw her father he was on the ground at the top of the lane.
“He appeared very, very still, like he was all curled up,” she said.“The next thing I recollect he was at the back of the garage,” she said, recalling him make a gurgling sound. “I asked my mother what it was and she said it was called the death rattle.”
The witness said she also remembered her mother hit her father that night, with a lump hammer.
“I know that Colin and my mother were laughing the way she hit him,” she said.
Ms McGrath said that her fiancé and mother then carried her father up the garden in a blanket and she did not see him alive again.
“They put him in a shallow grave at the top of the field,” she said, recalling that they covered him with galvanise sheeting.
She said she stayed in the kitchen that night and must have drifted off to sleep.
“I remember my mother shaking me by the arm, saying that there was a big mess or things were bad outside,” she said. Her mother asked her to clean blood and white mucus off the walls but she could not so her mother told her to put tar on it, she added.
Ms McGrath married Mr Pinder on April 18 1987, after which they lived in her parents’ home. Soon afterwards her mother took the three young boys to England for a couple of months before returning to Lower Coole.
“My father was dug up from where he was,” she recalled. “There was a fire. It was a big fire, which went on for a couple of days. For the first day, there was a very bad smell.”
She said she went over to the fire at least once.
“I seen my father’s rib cage,” she explained. “Both Colin and my mother were sifting through the fire and bringing particles of my father down to the house in a biscuit tin,” she testified. “Some went into the range and some went into the septic tank.”
Ms McGrath had a baby boy in 1987, split with Mr Pinder in 1988 and moved to England. She had not seen him again until this trial.
She told her story to a social worker in 1993, and the British police were contacted. She travelled to Ireland that year and gave statements to the Gardaí.
Ms McGrath denied in cross examination that her father used to beat her but agreed he had hit her mother. She said that her mother had taken her and her brothers to refuges and to England, where they moved from place to place.
Mr Justice John Edwards told the witness that she was not obliged to answer any questions that might incriminate her.
Denis Vaughan Buckley, prosecuting, said the DPP had decided not to prosecute her in relation to her father’s death at this time but that she had not been granted immunity.
Ms McGrath continues her evidence today
