Rose Callaly, who has just published a book about the life and death of her daughter, Rachel O’Reilly, gives her thoughts on Joe O’Reilly, the ‘daft’ justice system and reliving terrible events
IT'S SAFE TO say that Rose Callaly's appearances on television advertisements to promote the Daily Mailextracts of her book, Remembering Rachel, did not meet with universal approval. Had she crossed a taste boundary of some kind, the kind that distinguishes, say, the couple prepared to sell their wedding pictures to OK! from the pair who would prefer to die first? In fact, had she crossed a boundary by writing the book in the first place?
A few hours in her big, warm family home in Dublin’s north city renders any such musings tasteless in themselves. In a room teeming with photographs of children and family gatherings, Rose’s passionate need to talk about Rachel, to reclaim her in every sense as Rachel Callaly, beloved daughter and mother of two of her grandchildren, is as striking as her heroic battle to suppress her anger. The anger is legitimate. Rose endures an ongoing burden that would reduce most people to emotional, inarticulate wrecks; the trouble is she is not free to talk about it for myriad reasons.
All she can do is write a mother’s loving, legally careful memoir, attempting to retrieve Rachel’s memory from the disgusting, foul-mouthed, e-mail exchanges between her killer and his sister. These e-mails – aired during Joe O’Reilly’s murder trial – cast savage aspersions on Rachel’s parenting skills and her appearance, and revealed that the person who reported her to the child protection services was her own mother-in-law. But to Rose, the fiercely watchful, devoted matriarch, who lives for her children and grandchildren, they signified something far more distressing: that unbeknown to her, Rachel, the young Disney fan who married her first boyfriend, had spent the final years of her short life trapped in a web of venom, judgment and betrayal. It was a textbook case of psychological abuse.
Rose’s analysis of Joe O’Reilly today is almost detached, her anger displaced by more pressing matters. But insofar as she allows herself to think about him, she has concluded that he is a psychopath.
“He’s just a blank page, a chameleon who can put on any face that the situation requires of him. I don’t believe anybody normal could do what he did or think the way he thinks. I think he knows he did it, but at another level he’s able to move on from that and take no responsibility for it. I think he blamed Rachel for all those feelings he had, and for him moving on, and he put down all his rage as being her fault. The upsetting part for us is that Rachel never had a chance. She could never have done the right thing in the eyes of Joe.” For Rachel, she writes, it was simple; she loved Joe unconditionally. “But the harsh reality was just as simple, and I marvel that we were in such denial that we just couldn’t see what was going on.”
Try as she might, some details are hard to banish from the mind’s eye. A few months after Rachel’s death, they visited what had been her home.
“Every personal thing of Rachel’s was gone. There was one photograph of her in the whole house. The bedroom suite she had picked herself was gone, and there was a mattress on the floor . . . ”
AS FOR NIKKI PELLEY – the mistress who was in so deep that Joe O’Reilly described one of his and Rachel’s children as “our child” in a text to her – Rose tries hard to be dispassionate. “That text was so devastating, so shocking, we could hardly take it in. And if you were to lay blame, you’d say if she had anything in her at all, she wouldn’t participate in something like that. But the way I see it is, if it hadn’t been her, it would have been someone else. When I saw her in court for the first time – I’ll be honest, as Rachel’s mother and a woman – well, I just thought to myself ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ and I didn’t get it. Before she went up [to the stand], I really felt sorry for her – maybe she had been taken in by him and maybe she was going to tell the truth. Then as soon as she started to talk, she didn’t remember anything, she just had amnesia.” Rose’s pity swiftly evaporated.
Her various experiences of the justice system in the past five years – not confined to O’Reilly’s trial – have destroyed her faith in it. Of the murder trial, she says: “The whole system has to change. We’ve gone backwards as far as I’m concerned. You’re lucky if 1 per cent of the evidence [originally gathered] is allowed in court. Then the person who is accused of this horrific crime doesn’t have to open his mouth.
“I know you have to have points of law for things to work, but I believe it’s gone far too far the other way. I feel the whole thing is so daft, the whole legal system.”
For the Callaly family, there has been no respite. Five years on, there is still no headstone on Rachel’s grave. The end of a protracted battle over ultimate custody of the grave and the name on the headstone is only just in sight. The last hurdle depends on legal confirmation from Fingal County Council that the Callalys are within their rights to erect the headstone.
THEY HAVE EXPERIENCED two recent break-ins, one by a youth just out of prison. Far from seeking a public hanging, Jim Callaly wondered sadly what lay behind that young man’s story and what kind of life lay ahead of him, says Rose. “That boy went in to serve a sentence, and after two months he was let out to do the very same again. Why in God’s name, if he has a string of complaints against him, was he let out?” The second attempt – by no fewer than three men, they later discovered – was foiled only by the strength of the interior doors and their arrival home.
For some, their lives would be defined by these incidents, but for the Callalys they are “incidental”, she says. “I have so much else going on.” Not least among these is the illness of Ann, their lovely 31-year-old surviving daughter, Rose’s linchpin, technological mentor, and a constant, dignified presence during the murder trial. In January 2008, a suspected eye infection was diagnosed as a cancerous tumour behind her eye. The long and tortuous battle involving surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatment continues.
Rose remains strong by talking endlessly, cleaving to her Catholic faith and the love of her family. No counselling? “No, but I could talk for Ireland, and that’s all I think counselling is. When I was writing the book, I had to keep going over things, and that nearly killed me absolutely, but in the long run I feel that dealt with it for me.” But sometimes the grief and weariness and the relentless need to be the strong one take their toll. After seeing a determinedly optimistic Ann off to another hospital appointment, she describes how she tries to stop the grief and worry “taking over” her head. “But the way things are, I realise that really I’ve had enough of life,” she says thoughtfully. “I know that sounds very morbid, but I have. I feel if I was to go tomorrow, I wouldn’t have any regrets, and that’s sad in a way but it’s the truth. I feel I’ve had enough – but having said that, I know that’s not the way it works. I was 68 last Monday. I know that’s not old but that’s how I feel.”
This is said almost matter-of-factly. As she sits there in the early morning, neat and groomed in her pretty purple cardigan and camisole, there is no self-pity, only a sense of powerlessness.
SHE DID THE Daily Mailtelevision ads because she was contracted to do them. Certainly, it was not to see her face up there. "I hate photographs of myself. I saw this newspaper with an old lady in it with wrinkles and I said 'who is that old woman?' But it was me. So I couldn't bear to look at those ads. I sort of knew there would be ads, but I didn't think it would be me in them, no way. I would have preferred not to do it, but you sign up for something and that was part of it – I'd just blocked it out. You just get over it as quick as you can."
But she has no regrets about the book. “There were times you’d wonder about it, but we were dealing with brilliant people [in Penguin] and that makes a fierce difference. And I’d say Rachel would be proud of it. I just can’t believe it, and when I read through it I keep saying ‘I can’t believe I wrote that’. And I did write it myself.”
It can’t have been easy to write a book about Rachel, while legally bound to omit all details about her children, even their gender. “Grandparents who’ve been down a path like this know you have very little rights and that you’re very, very helpless. My advice would be: don’t go down the legal route. I really don’t think it gets you anywhere,” she says wearily.
She believes wholeheartedly that Rachel is very near and that she first guided her to look at Joe as her murderer and later to help with her writing.
“I remember one night I was bereft and I just felt I couldn’t go on and I got this beautiful smell of perfume. It wasn’t in my head and I wasn’t thinking of anything – I thought really that something had spilled, but it hadn’t. That has happened a few times now. I feel there’s a veil there and they [the dead] are there on the other side, and I know they’re trying to help us all they can. I have no answers, but I know whatever it is none of us can do anything about it. You just have to try and handle it as best you can.”
Remembering Rachelby Rose Callaly is published by Penguin
