SHE was wearing a pink sweatshirt over floral leggings, trainers and a pink and black bum bag. Underneath the sweatshirt she wore a green T-shirt with her name in red letters. When they found her she was face down in a field, with the right side of her head pressed into the earth by the force of the two heavy stones that smashed her skull and fractured her jaw.
Yesterday a second jury of nine men and three women took just 100 minutes to decide that Patrick Granaghan was guilty of her murder and not "guilty but insane". After four days of evidence in February six men and six women had failed to agree on a verdict.
For the girl's family simple murder was the only verdict they wanted. Her father said yesterday that Granaghan had "gone to a place he didn't want to go to. May the mushrooms grow over him".
Her mother said. "Life will never be the same again."
The murder happened on a sunny April Sunday in Bundoran, Co Donegal. At 2.15 p.m. the girl had her dinner and at 2.45 p.m. she got ready to leave the small house.
Her mother asked her if she needed money. She said she didn't and strapped the bum bag around her tiny waist, 21/2 inches, measured less than 12 hours later with the pathologist's tape measure.
"I told her before she left don't talk to strangers," her mother told gardai. "Don't take lifts in cars or take any tablets from anybody. I always told her that before she left the house."
The girl didn't really break any of those rules. The man who led her into the scrubby, lonely field, even though she wanted to go "up town", didn't drive a car or offer her tablets. He wasn't even a stranger.
When her parents went searching for her seven hours later they passed him on the road where he stood outside the graveyard. Her mother said, when her father asked who he was, he was "that young buck" Patrick Granaghan who had moved into Drumacrin Road.
According to Granaghan, the girl came knocking on a neighbour's door about 3 p.m. He asked her to go for a walk and he says she went home to get permission. She did not.
He said she returned five minutes later and they walked out the road together. She wanted to go up town but he persuaded her to go out the road to the town land of Ardfarna because he said he wanted to pick mushrooms. "You and your mushrooms," she laughed, he said.
"When I first started out on the walk with [her] I did not think of doing anything to her," Granaghan told gardai. "But when we came to the bridge and started talking I said to myself, "Now is the time to have sex with her. I do not know why I killed her."
They sat on the damp grass and the girl kept looking at her watch. Granaghan told gardai that he told her not to worry, he would get her home safely.
About 3.40 p.m., according to Granaghan, he took her by the arms and forced her on to the ground. He pulled down her leggings and tried to rape her. She started to scream and struggle. Then he took a square silky floral print head scarf out of his pocket.
He told gardai he always carried the scarf. It was a present from a fellow patient in St Columba's Hospital in Sligo where Granaghan had been treated for mental illness. The scarf had a "sentimental value", he said, because he had a platonic relationship with the woman who gave it to him.
Granaghan tried to strangle her with the scarf. Realising she was still alive he took two stones out of the wall beside him and aimed them at her head. When he was sure she was dead he went to his sister's house and had tea. After wards he went to another man's house, had some more tea and chopped wood for him.
Then he went back to the small council house given to him after his release from St Columba's and packed his bag, with some food and a flask of tea. He had a notion to go to Donegal town.
He was standing in the dark beside the cooker in the kitchen drinking tea and smoking when the gardai came to the door. Without saying a word he walked out to the Garda car. Then he showed them the field where the girl's body was.
Patrick Granaghan and his twin sister were born in Bundoran in September 1960. He was one of 11 children in the family. At the local national school he was classed as a "slow learner". But his teachers noted that he "had a fair degree of talent" for painting and sketching. He left school at 15 able to write his name, but not much else.
Granaghan told doctors there was no history of abuse and his childhood was "happy and contented". His family is described by local gardai as "decent people".
His teens and early 20s followed a well trodden path for young, under educated men. He worked for his brother for a year and then in a pub. He spent three years in England working in a factory and then as a labourer in London for a year. He returned home and signed on the dole.
But there were other signs that Granaghan's life was going off the rails. In 1980 one of his brothers died. Six years later in December 1986 he was first admitted to St Columba's for paranoid psychosis and drug addiction. He had been taking cannabis, amphetamines, LSD and magic mushrooms. He spent 10 days in the hospital. He spoke of voices telling him to obey them. Later he said he was afraid his brother in law was hypnotising him.
In 1988 his mother died and Granaghan moved back with his father. In June 1995 he broke into the home of an elderly woman in Bundoran. But he had broken into a locked room. He was arrested and charged.
According to his medical notes he was readmitted to St Columba's in July 1995. The main diagnosis was a "personality disorder" and in August that year he was assessed as being of "dull to normal" intelligence. Two days later he was released.
Granaghan was admitted again in December 1995 and released to sheltered housing in Drumacrin Drive on January 23rd, 1996, almost four months before he would kill the girl.
At his first trial his brother said Patrick talked about getting warnings and had become "increasingly strange" in the time leading up to the killing.
Granaghan told gardai about what he had done to the schoolgirl in a deadpan voice, breaking into laughter when he talked about the stones he used to kill her. His defence barrister, Mr Patrick Gageby, said he was not asking the jury to pity Granaghan, as the girl's family deserved the pity. And the flat delivery and inappropriate laughter were merely symptoms of his illness.
Mr Gageby argued it was Granaghan's illness which was "in the driving seat" when he killed the child. Granaghan had no disposition to violence and was not known as a danger to children, he argued.
Granaghan's explanation for the murder was as bizarre as the killing. In his statement to gardai he said he didn't know why he killed her.
After cutting his wrist in Arbour Hill Prison, where he was on remand for the murder, Granaghan was transferred to the Central Mental Hospital on April 24th, 10 days after the murder.
