A WOMAN who claims she saw her father beaten to death 23 years ago says she used to have trouble sleeping because she could see his head on the hay fork.
Veronica McGrath (41) was giving evidence for the fifth day in the murder trial of her mother and her own ex-husband for the murder of her father.
Vera McGrath (61) has pleaded not guilty to murdering her husband, Bernard Brian McGrath (43), at their home in Lower Coole, Co Westmeath.
Colin Pinder (47) of Liverpool, England, has pleaded not guilty to murder but guilty to manslaughter between March 10th and April 18th, 1987.
“I was very traumatised, upset, depressed and suicidal,” Ms McGrath told the Central Criminal Court.
Conor Devally SC, defending Mr Pinder, asked the mother of six if this was because she felt guilty about her involvement in her father’s death.
“It wasn’t guilt I was feeling. I couldn’t sleep. I kept seeing my father’s head on the hay fork,” she said, later telling the prosecution that this was during the burning of her father’s body.
“I seen Colin Pinder hold a hay fork in the field beside the fire.
“I seen a very bright, glowing, orange, circular object,” she said, explaining that she took this to be her father’s head.
Ms McGrath agreed with Mr Devally that Mr Pinder had taken an overdose of his epilepsy medication some time after the burning of the body and accepted that this was because he could not live with what he had done.
Two of the victim’s sons also gave evidence yesterday. Brian McGrath was in his early teens when his father died.
“She said she had a hard life with him,” he said of asking his mother about his father.
He recalled rows between his parents but no violence and could not remember what the arguments were about.
He also recalled one occasion when his father struck him and his two brothers.
“He was strict but he wasn’t a bad man,” he said.
Mr McGrath remembered that when Mr Pinder moved to Coole, he used to take the three boys fishing.
“He was more like a buddy than an older man,” he said.
Andrew McGrath said he could remember tension between his parents about his sister and Mr Pinder, among other things.
He recalled going to England with his mother and brothers once, and leaving his sister and Mr Pinder in Coole.
He recalled Mr Pinder running to give him a hug on their return home.
He said that he later used to ask his mother where his father was but she would say that she did not know.
He said that in 1993 she told him that she had called to visit his sister and Mr Pinder in their caravan one night and had said she wished her husband was dead.
“She said that Colin said: ‘I have the very thing to do it’ . . . an implement in a drawer,” he recalled.
Mr McGrath said that up until about a year ago, he had been living in the family home in Coole with his sisters’ two sons, his mother and her partner, but that he had to leave as his sister had got a protection order against him.
The trial also heard from the McGrath family’s next-door neighbour, Michael White.
He recalled seeing a fire in the McGrath garden one evening in late spring or early summer.
He could not say what year this was, but that it was after Mr McGrath disappeared.
The trial will continue today before Mr Justice John Edwards and the jury.