Defence accuses daughter of spinning story to implicate mother
Veronica McGrath has denied implicating her mother in her father’s killing to disguise her own guilt at the Central Criminal Court.
The mother-of-six spent today being cross-examined by lawyers for her ex-husband and mother, whom she claims she saw beat her father to death 23 years ago.
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, and then burying him beside the house.
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.
Patrick Gageby SC, defending Mrs McGrath, put it to the 41-year-old that she’d readily portrayed herself as an innocent witness to the horrible events and had an easy run from the gardaí.
“By your failure to act, you might be more involved in your father’s death,” he said.
“I suggest you placed your mother as a prime conspirator and painted yourself as the good guy when perhaps you aren’t,” he continued. “I suggest you tend to be rather manipulative and you’ve implicated your mother to disguise your own guilt.”
“I suggest you were not the vulnerable witness then or now and that it’s not your mother who’s dominant, but you,” said the lawyer.
“That’s not correct,” she said.
She did not agree that her failure to tell gardaí in 1993 that she witnessed Colin Pinder’s first blow to her father was an example of her selective and subjective memory.
“Only a calculating person wouldn’t have mentioned the first blow in your presence,” he said.
Mr Gageby brought her through her several moves in Ireland and England with the fathers of her six children.
She agreed that she had put her eldest three children into care when she married the father of her youngest three children, a marriage that she denied was arranged for money.
She agreed that she had since divorced this Lebanese man and that she had made a serious allegation about him, but had not given evidence against him when called. She agreed he now cared for their eldest two daughters in the UK, while she lived in the old family home in Coole with their youngest.
Ms McGrath also agreed that she has now taken out orders preventing her two sons and one of her brothers from entering that house in Coole, the crime scene to which she frequently returned over the years when her relationships were going badly.
“Nobody, if your version is correct, would do that,” suggested Mr Gageby, also mentioning her marriage to Colin Pinder weeks after she saw him kill her father.
“It’s inconceivable you’d marry someone who did that to your father and that you’d persistently go back to Coole, particularly between 87 and 93,” said Gageby.
“Coole is where I grew up. I have no problem going back,”
She denied that her actions might not be consistent with someone who was helpless or haunted by the events.
“I am haunted by the events of that evening,” she sobbed.
“I suggest you’ve spun a story which puts you in a good light and your mother in a bad light,” said Mr Gageby.
“That’s not true,” she sobbed.
“I suggest you’re a person who does try to suit yourself and never let anything get in the way of what you want,” he said.
“I don’t agree,” she responded.
She denied that her father frequently threatened to kill her mother and put her in the septic tank.
She didn’t know if her father threatened to use a new hatchet on her mother’s head the night he died. She did not know if she would remember it, even if it was said.
“Because it was so long ago?” she was asked.
“Also that it was very traumatic and somehow it is not in my memory,” she said.
Mr Gageby then suggested that she had a rose-tinted memory of her father and had actually made complaints about him as a teenager. She denied this.
He suggested that it was not her mother who put Colin Pinder up to killing her father.
“It may well be you had something to do with that,” he said.
“Not true,” she said.
Conor Devally SC, defending Mr Pinder, asked Ms McGrath about her father being committed to a psychiatric hospital for a week in 1985.
She recalled two doctors being in the house before he was taken to St Loman’s in Mullingar but could not remember one of them examining bruises on her, which had been inflicted by her father.
Mr Devally suggested that her not being able to remember this and other details about the incident was because she was party to having him committed.
“No,” she responded.
Ms McGrath explained that she had left school at 12 or 13 but insisted her parents supported her decision. She also answered questions about her father’s school days.
Mr McGrath attended Artane industrial school where he was treated cruelly, she said. However he had never mentioned being beaten.
She said her father disciplined her by sending her to her room or getting her to clean the floor if she did something wrong but didn’t beat her.
“He was through a tough industrial school and was enlightened about punishment at home. But he wouldn’t have learned that from the (Christian) brothers,” commented Mr Devally.
She remembered both her parents being suspicious of each other’s relationships with other men and women but couldn’t remember either of them striking each other.
She recalled her various trips to women’s refuges as a teenager with her mother and brothers.
“There’d be arguments at home and we’d leave,” she said.
She recalled that she had once run away from a refuge in England because she was tired of being constantly back and forth. She went to Liverpool with an older man, but split with him and worked there for almost a year before contacting her parents. It was there she met Colin Pinder.
Mr Devally will conclude his cross-examination of Ms McGrath’s tomorrow.
