A FATHER of two has been sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of his 20-year-old girlfriend and given a 15-year sentence for a frenzied knife attack which almost claimed the life of her older brother.
Kevin Prendergast (31), Knockeen, Grange, Clonmel, Co Tipperary, pleaded guilty on Wednesday at the Central Criminal Court sitting in Cork to the murder of Joanne Mangan and to assault causing serious harm to Edmund Mangan on October 16th, 2007.
Yesterday Sgt Padraic Walsh told Mr Justice Paul Carney that Prendergast and Ms Mangan had been in a relationship for about a year and were living together at a rented house at Ballynamuddagh outside Clonmel. They had returned from a holiday in Spain the week before.
They were with a number of others including Ms Mangan’s sister, Geraldine; her brother, Edmund; and another man, Graham Johnson at a party at the house late on October 15th. Some of the partygoers were consuming beer, cannabis and the prescription drug, Diazepam.
Joanne Mangan went to bed about 11.30pm and Prendergast followed her upstairs while Edmund Mangan fell asleep downstairs in a chair. Prendergast and Joanne had an argument and they came back downstairs. She went out of the house and he went into the kitchen and took two knives from a drawer and followed her out. He confronted her on the roadway and began attacking her with the knives, stabbing her 14 times. Geraldine Mangan and Graham Johnson had left just a few minutes earlier but they had forgotten some DVDs and drove back to find Joanne lying covered in blood on the roadway and Prendergast holding the knives.
They picked up Joanne and rushed her to St Joseph’s Hospital in Clonmel but she was pronounced dead on arrival. A postmortem revealed her wounds would have proved rapidly fatal.
Sgt Walsh said Edmund Mangan was also attacked, suffering nine wounds. He was discovered when Prendergast went to a neighbour’s house covered in blood.
The neighbour, Mr O’Loughlin, came over to Prendergast’s house and found Edmund Mangan with severe wounds. He contacted the emergency services and gardaí, who were first at the scene and rushed Mr Mangan to St Joseph’s Hospital in Clonmel.
Prosecution counsel Tom Creed SC said that there was medical evidence that Mr Mangan suffered nine stab wounds including some to his neck and down his left side which would have killed him without medical intervention.
Sgt Walsh agreed with defence counsel Brendan Nix SC that Prendergast had expressed remorse when being interviewed by gardaí.
The court heard that Prendergast said he had no control over himself on the night and that he had thoughts of killing himself and expressed regret he had not done so.
Mr Nix said that Prendergast had been binge drinking “a vicious cocktail” which included vodka, rum, cider, beer and absinthe, which he had brought back from Spain. He also took cannabis and Diazepam.
He said Prendergast felt that he was in a nightmare from which he would never awake and he was deeply remorseful as he loved Joanne and had hoped one day to marry her. Now, Prendergast felt that he could only hope that her family would one day forgive him.
Joanne’s sister Christina read a victim impact statement on behalf of her family in which she said that, since Joanne’s murder, their “lives will never be the same again, there is a pain and an emptiness that will never go away”.
