A Dublin girl who cannot be named was sentenced yesterday to seven years' detention for the murder of chip shop owner Franco Sacco. In the Central Criminal Court Mr Justice Carney said the sentence would allow the girl to "rebuild her life in her early 20s". The officer in charge of the murder investigation said she had the maturity of a child.
The girl, now aged 16 1/2, cannot be named because she is still a minor. She pleaded guilty to the murder of Mr Sacco (29), at the house she lived in with him and his wife, Ms Anna Maria Sacco, in Coolamber Park, Templeogue, on March 20th, 1997.
The shooting blew off the top of Mr Sacco's head, prosecuting barrister Mr Peter Charleton SC told the court.
In statements to gardai, the girl confessed to pulling the trigger but detailed repeated requests from another person for her to carry out the shooting.
Det Insp Martin McLaughlin, of Tallaght Garda station, told Mr Charleton that on the night of March 20th last year the girl entered Rathfarnham Garda station and confessed to shooting Mr Sacco.
At first she told gardai she had killed him because he had abused her, but in later interviews she said that was not correct and that it had not happened. "We didn't accept her first story. We had to re-interview her," he said.
In her statement of confession, the girl said Mr Sacco had used a baseball bat to hit his wife.
She also said she had witnessed him hitting his wife at Christmas 1996. "Everybody knew it was going on," her statement read.
After this incident, she and Ms Sacco had gone to Scotland, where they stayed until "he convinced her to come home and she did".
Her statement went on to detail requests from another person on the night before March 20th, 1997, for her to kill Mr Sacco. She said to the other person: "If you love me you won't ask me to do that because I will get put away for the rest of my life."
The other person had continued talking of shooting him and commented that the carpet would be ruined. "I said my life will be ruined," the girl told gardai. Later, the other person had urged her: "Why don't you go up and do something to him now?"
The following morning, March 20th, she was awoken by the person, who had Mr Sacco's shotgun case. The person told her to take the gun out of the case and said: "Just point it at him."
While the person stood halfway down the stairs on the landing outside the bedroom, the girl went to the bedroom door. "I couldn't do it," she said. But the other person had said to her: "Please, just point it at him."
She went back in and pointed the gun at Mr Sacco. She heard the click as the trigger was pulled. Afterwards, she went from the room, telling the other person: "His head, I got his head."
The statement described an attempted clean-up of the scene of the killing involving the girl and other people. The other person had "just kept telling us to clean up", when they returned to the house later in the day.
That person then left the house, saying: "Make sure everything is perfect before I get back."
The teenager told gardai she did not know the gun was loaded when she was handed it on the morning of the murder. "I didn't know how to put the bullets in," she said.
In a further statement she said she was shown how to take the safety catch off the gun on the night before the shooting and there was a test shot fired.
She also said the rape allegation against Mr Sacco was someone else's idea, and that others had told her if she was caught she would not be "put away, because she was only a child".
Insp McLaughlin agreed with defence counsel that the girl had come under the influence of another, who became what "appears like a big sister figure" to her.
There had been a close friendship between the girl and that person, whom she appeared to "idolise", but speculation that it was more than a friendship was wholly incorrect.
Asked to describe the maturity of the girl at the time of her arrest, Insp McLaughlin said: "Physically she looked like a young woman", but intellectually, "in her mind, she was more towards a child".
Sentencing the girl, Mr Justice Carney said life imprisonment was mandatory for murder, but because of her age the girl fell into a separate statutory code.
In a High Court decision last March, Mr Justice O'Donovan had ruled that the mandatory life sentence would not apply because of her age. Mr Charleton told Mr Justice Carney yesterday that in his opinion he had complete discretion in sentencing.
He proposed to impose a determinate sentence, "otherwise it could be argued that the teenager could not give evidence at any future trial".
A serious crime had been committed and its brutal details were difficult to listen to, he said.
"It must be made clear that this cannot happen again. Her sentence must mark the loss of the Sacco family."
However, he was obliged to balance the issues in sentencing. In her favour, the girl had intolerable influences placed upon her. Her age had to be considered, as well as the full co-operation given by her and her parents to the Garda, and the fact that she had opted for a custodial sentence after she pleaded guilty to the murder.
"I accept that there is remorse on her part," Mr Justice Carney said. "I direct her detention for the period of seven years and if she earns full statutory remission, which I have no doubt she will, she will be able to rebuild her life in her early 20s."
Earlier, Mr Justice Carney had heard a plea from the girl's stepfather, who told the court: "I think there's been evidence of remorse from the girl since March 20th."
Her stepfather said the problems for himself and the girl's mother began when she was in her second year at secondary school. She became involved with a boyfriend "and he created some problems" for her, after which she began playing truant.
They had transferred her to another school but this "didn't work out". She began hanging around Rathfarnham village and got to know the Sacco couple, who ran a chip shop there. Later she started working for them.
After a couple of months, he said, "we weren't happy with the situation at all". He approached the Saccos, and Mr Sacco had "agreed that she shouldn't be hanging around the shop".
But her friendship with Mr Sacco's wife continued, and she began to get presents of clothes and jewellery.
She was always "quite outgoing, very sociable, very likeable", he told Mr Michael McDowell SC, defending. But when she became a teenager "we began to have less and less influence, which most people do, but they don't have someone else."
Mr McDowell suggested it was someone else "with a hold on her life". The witness agreed.
His stepdaughter had run away from home, he said, and later began living in the Sacco home. "We weren't happy at all with the situation but at least we knew where she was."
He agreed she had been aware at an early age of the "turmoil" in the Sacco household. "She was hearing things she shouldn't have heard for a 14-year-old," he said.
The court was told that in her interviews with gardai the girl spoke of Mr Sacco beating his wife with a baseball bat and, at Christmas 1996, hitting her in the presence of the girl.
Her stepfather said that since the killing her personality had changed. "She still doesn't know why she did what she did. She still has nightmares."
Mr McDowell, with Ms Mary Ellen Ring, said the girl was an "impressionable and vulnerable teenager" and a child who had succumbed to "unusual pressure from a third party".
A "terrible burden" had been placed on her head, he said, when she was asked to shoot Mr Sacco and then asked to take all the blame for it.
For a child, he said, the emphasis should be on correction, education and rehabilitation rather than on a heavy punishment.
She was not a "tearaway truant", but a "casual victim" of the breakdown in her education cycle. "She was sucked into this situation", Mr McDowell told the judge.