Gardaí are continuing to question a 25-year-old man about the killing of a woman and a knife attack on her husband near their Co Cork home on Monday night.
Stella Gallagher (59) was fatally injured and her husband, Brian (63), seriously injured when they were attacked by a man armed with a knife at their detached two-storey home in Shrewsbury Downs in Ballinlough at about 9pm.
It is understood the couple fled their home, Ms Gallagher going in to a neighbour’s house to escape the attacker while Mr Gallagher tried to distract the man, who picked up a flowerpot and smashed a window in the neighbour’s house to try to gain entry.
Ms Gallagher fled the neighbour’s house and Mr Gallagher again tried to divert the attacker away from his wife. However, he was attacked by the man and suffered a number of knife wounds to the upper body, including a very serious slash wound to his neck.
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It is understood the attacker then pursued Ms Gallagher to a green area about 45m (50 yards) from their home where he caught up with her and stabbed her a number of times, resulting in her suffering a number of catastrophic injuries.
Neighbours had raised the alarm and members of the Garda Armed Support Unit (ASU) were first on the scene. Some of the ASU officers detained the man, who had discarded the knife, as other officers began performing CPR on the injured couple.
HSE advanced paramedics quickly arrived and took over the care of the couple before they rushed them by ambulance to Cork University Hospital (CUH) where both underwent surgery. However, Ms Gallagher succumbed to her injuries and died some time before midnight.
Mr Gallagher was described on Tuesday as being in a stable but serious condition. Gardaí hope to be given permission by CUH doctors to speak to him over the coming days as they try to piece together the sequence of events leading up to the attack.
Both the Gallaghers were chemical engineers who had retired in recent years. Mr Gallagher had retired from PM Group, where he was a company director, and Ms Gallagher from pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, where she worked under her maiden name, Stella Griffin.
It is understood that Ms Gallagher had taken a five-year career break from Eli Lilly some years back for family reasons and then returned to work for around two years before her retirement from the company two years ago.
The couple have one daughter and three sons in their 20s. The eldest, Ciara, is a doctor in Australia and she and the youngest, Matthew, a student in Amsterdam, are on their way home while their middle sons, David and Conor, were both in Cork when the tragedy happened.
Mr Gallagher is a native of Blackrock in Co Louth and Ms Gallagher is from Ballinspittle in west Cork. In the 1980s she attended what was then the Cork Institute of Technology (now the Munster Technological University) where she obtained a BSc in chemical engineering.
Gardaí arrested a 25-year-old suspect, who was known to the Gallaghers, at the scene and he was conveyed to the Bridewell Garda station for questioning. He was detained under Section 4 of the Criminal Justice Act which allows gardaí to detain suspects for up to 24 hours.
Assistant State Pathologist Dr Margot Bolster carried out a postmortem on the body of Ms Gallagher at CUH and while the Garda has not released the results for operational reasons, it confirmed she had been the victim of a violent knife attack.
Garda technical experts spent much of the day examining the Gallaghers’ home, the home of their neighbour and the green area where Ms Gallagher was attacked. They also recovered a kitchen knife which they believe was used in the fatal assault.
