A 45-YEAR-OLD man was yesterday sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of a man in a flat in Cork city.
John Walsh was unanimously found guilty by the 11-member jury of the murder of John McManus (25) at Verdon Place, Wellington Road, Cork, on a date unknown between October 28th and November 6th, 2008.
Yesterday at the Central Criminal Court in Cork, Mr Justice Paul Carney imposed a mandatory life sentence on Walsh for the murder. Prosecution counsel Tom Creed applied to have the life sentence made consecutive to the eight years he is currently serving for a drugs offence and the judge granted his request.
Mr McManus’s body was found on November 6th, 2008, dumped on waste ground outside Ballyduff in Kerry after a garda saw Walsh acting suspiciously. A postmortem revealed he had died from blunt-force trauma to the head.
Walsh told the court he hid Mr McManus’s body under the bed in the flat for two days before putting his remains into the boot of a car and driving to Kerry with the intention of placing the body on Banna Strand so it would be found.
Walsh’s girlfriend, Gillian Purcell (34), originally from Hollyville, Hollyhill, in Cork but with an address c/o the Simon Community, Cork, was also charged with Mr McManus’s murder but was acquitted last week by the direction of the trial judge for lack of evidence.
During the trial, Walsh admitted assaulting Mr McManus with the leg or arm of a chair during a drunken row in his flat but claimed he only hit him because he feared Mr McManus was going to attack him with a knife and that afterwards, Mr McManus was alive and well.
“He went to sleep on the bed. I slept on the couch. I went in to call him in the morning. He didn’t wake up. I couldn’t believe it. I checked his pulse and I checked his breathing. I just got a fright of my life. He was grand and I going to sleep. He was perfect before that.
“I am heartbroken over my friend, I cannot understand how he died, I wasn’t hitting him that hard . . . when I look in the mirror I can see John as well, it’s not just myself anymore. I’m going to have to live with this for the rest of my life. I still can’t believe it,” he said.
Det Sgt Vincent O’Sullivan told the court Walsh had 12 previous convictions including one from June 2009 where he was jailed for three years for assault causing harm to a woman when he pricked her face three times with a knife and stabbed her in the back.
Walsh also had a conviction for possessing €210,000-worth of cocaine for sale or supply at Fermoy and Mitchelstown on April 4th, 2008, for which he received a 10-year sentence in February 2009, reduced to eight years on appeal. Det Sgt O’Sullivan confirmed Walsh had obtained High Court bail in June 2008 for that offence after having been charged on April 4th, 2008, and he was out on bail when he killed Mr McManus at his flat.
Walsh, a native of Carrigmore Park in Ballinlough, Cork city, but with an address at Cork Street, Mitchelstown, sat alone in the dock with head bowed and showed no emotion as Mr Justice Carney imposed sentence.