The night before she disappeared, Elaine O'Hara told a nurse she was "pissed off" about a man with children who was "constantly" calling to her apartment and had a key, a jury in the trial of Graham Dwyer has been told.
Rosetta Callan, a nurse at St Edmundsbury Hospital, Lucan, a psychiatric hospital where Ms O’Hara was a patient, said she was on night duty and spoke to Ms O’Hara on August 21st, 2012 in her bedroom.
Ms Callan said Ms O’Hara, who was due to be discharged the following day, told her about a man who was interested in bondage. He lived nearby and she “passed the house every day”.
“She said he had a key to her apartment and I said to her why didn’t she go to the guards if he was harassing her,” Ms Callan said. “She said she wouldn’t go because he had young children . . . she loved kids so she wouldn’t like to harm them by going to the guards.”
Ms O’Hara said the man was “constantly coming to her apartment”.
Mr Dwyer (42), an architect from Kerrymount Close in Foxrock, is charged with murdering childcare worker Ms O’Hara (36), from Belarmine, Stepaside, on August 22nd, 2012. He has pleaded not guilty. Ms O’Hara’s remains were found in forestry on Killakee Mountain, Rathfarnham, on September 13th, 2013.
Edna Lillis, a friend of Ms O’Hara, who met her when they were both patients at St Edmundsbury’s, said the last time they met, at the end of 2011, Ms O’Hara showed her cuts on her stomach. They were recent, three to four inches long, fresh and “right across her stomach”.
Dangerous game
“She told me she met somebody on the internet and he liked to cut her . . . I told her she was playing a dangerous game.”
Ms Lillis said Ms O’Hara told her he was “someone to pay attention to her”.
“Elaine just wanted to be loved; she wanted some attention,” Ms Lillis said.
She advised her friend to keep notes of her meetings in case anything happened and Ms O’Hara told her she was keeping notes.
Ms Lillis also agreed she told gardaí Ms O’Hara wasn’t afraid of the man, but said she was wary. She also said she did not know whether Ms O’Hara had told her the name of the person she was seeing, but she knew he was an architect.
“For some reason I had ‘Peter’ in my head,” she said.
The court was also told Ms O’Hara talked about suicide to a patient at St Edmundsbury’s on August 21st, 2012. Maria Hynes said Ms O’Hara told her she missed her mother, who died in March 2002, and asked her how she would commit suicide.
“I told her to mind her own business,” Ms Hynes said. “She said she would do it with a rope she had at home.”
Stuart Colquhoun, a cognitive behavioural therapist at St Edmundsbury’s, said he had treated Ms O’Hara for more than four years. He saw her for the last time on August 21st, 2012 and said she was cheerful and smiling, and excited about her volunteer work on the Tall Ships.
Brighter
“She was brighter generally in 2012, but probably better even that day,” he said.
He said he knew she had marks on her arms and stomach and she admitted she had harmed herself and someone else had harmed her. When he first met Ms O’Hara in 2008, she mentioned she had asked someone to kill her.
Dr Matthew Corcoran, Ms O’Hara’s GP in Foxrock Village, said he was not aware of Ms O’Hara ever being pregnant and she had never presented with self-harm injuries or scars on her abdomen.
Remy Farrell SC, for Mr Dwyer, took the GP through discharge documents sent to him after Ms O’Hara’s 14 stays in psychiatric hospital.
One document, after a stay from May 14th to July 12th 2003, included a note on past psychiatric history that said she first presented to services aged 16, “but her problems began much earlier”. It said she had low self-esteem and a “negative self-image of herself in the world”. She had also said: “I wasn’t born for life; no one likes me. I’m a bad person.”
The case continues.
