NINE year old Samantha knows exactly what has happened to her mother. Children in the school playground spared no detail in retelling the newspaper stories about Mary Cummins's life and death.
Every night the child says a prayer for Mary. "She misses her," says her father, Luke Dowling. "It has hit us badly. But the worst will be over once Bambrick has been sentenced. We can start having a life again."
Two months ago, Samantha made her First Holy Communion. She was older than the other children her life had been put on hold as friends and family hoped that Mary would return safely.
"We knew she would never leave her child. She thought more of that kid than anyone else. But no one could have believed she could have died like that."
Mary Cummins's life was marked by adversity. Her first four years were spent in an orphanage on Dublin's Navan Road. Her teenage Welsh mother, unable to cope with an unwanted pregnancy, gave her up for adoption in 1956. Mary never knew her father.
In 1960, she was adopted by a Dublin couple Bob and Brigid Cummins and she grew up on the South Circular Road with another child the couple had adopted named Josephine. There was just four months between the children. They dressed alike, and were known as the Cummins twins.
"She had a hard life," says her sister, Josephine. Their adoptive mother died when they were 15. Her husband died five years later from a massive heart attack. Mary never tried to contact her natural mother. "She never wanted to accept that she was adopted," says Josephine.
When she was 21, Mary Cummins began a six year relationship with a separated man. She had three children, who were taken into care by the Eastern Health Board. Her partner, who worked for CIE, later died from cancer.
Four years later, she met Luke, a neighbour from the Liberties. "They were happy together," he says of Mary and her daughter. On July 24th, 1992, Mary collected her lone parent's allowance and went shopping with her daughter on Meath Street.
At around 5.30 p.m., she went for a drink with friends in Carr's pub on Francis Street. Michael Bambrick was there. It was the first time they had met. While she was drinking, Samantha played outside with another youngster Patricia McGauley's young daughter Adrienne.
Two of Mary's friends later called to the pub and took Samantha home.
Bambrick invited Mary Cummins for a drink in Ballyfermot. They dropped the shopping in her home and went on to his home at St Ronan's Park, Clondalkin, where he asked a young local girl to babysit his two children.
Bambrick normally drank in the Seventy Nine pub in Ballyfermot, or in Finches Pub at Neilstown Shopping Centre. He later told gardai that they had drinks in several pubs.
They returned to his house in the early hours of the morning. The babysitter went home. Only Bambrick knows what happened next.
He told gardai that, like Patricia McGauley, Mary Cummins had suffocated during a sexual act. Just as he had done ten months earlier he took her body to the box room and dismembered it. Later, he brought the body parts by wheelbarrow to a dump a mile away.
When Luke visited the flat on Nicholas Street the following day the eggs Mary had bought in Meath Street were still on the kitchen table the shopping was untouched.
He left the flat as it was, hoping she would return. The corporation later gave it to another tenant. A handful of photographs and memories are all that Luke and his daughter, Samantha, took with them.
