Sarah Jane Doyle owes her life to the powerful mood swings that affected Mark Nash. He clearly intended to kill her during the frenzied moments when he stabbed to death her sister, Catherine, and Catherine's husband, Carl, at their home in Roscommon on the night of August 15th last year.
After an evening's drinking and cannabis smoking, Nash left the company and spent almost 45 minutes in the toilet during which, he said a desire to murder which felt like a "cloud" descended on him.
He went to the kitchen and armed himself with any implement which could be used for murder. He chose the heavy iron lever for opening the stove lid and knives from drawers.
He battered Sarah Jane with the lever, stunning her. He left her on the landing and then pursued and stabbed her sister 16 times and her husband four times in the chest as he sat sleeping in an armchair.
Nash is very strong and the stab wounds were deep and tearing. After killing the couple he had apparently intended to return and kill his girlfriend, Sarah Jane. She had been stunned by the blows to her head but had recovered and made her way downstairs. She was not, however, out of trouble.
The Doyles' four children, Jessie (8), Frank (6), Heather (4) and Hollie (2) and Sarah Jane's sixyear-old daughter and Nash's infant daughter from another relationship were also in jeopardy.
Sarah Jane made her way into the garden hoping to escape the house. She was not out of harm's way and Nash was aware she had made her way into the garden and it would have been easy for him to pursue and kill her. But, he told gardai, at that instant, the "cloud" lifted and he no longer wanted to kill but to be away from the scene.
He set off across country but his dark skin made escape impossible in the farmlands of the west of Ireland. He was caught and admitted killing Catherine and Carl. He also admitted to gardai the killings of Sylvia Shields and Mary Callinan, the two elderly psychiatric patients who were battered and stabbed to death at their home in Grangegorman, Dublin, the previous March.
Nash was an only child, born in Mayo in 1973. His mother returned to England after a year and settled in the Bradley area of Huddersfield where she still lives. Her son attended a local primary school and went to All Saints High School, the Catholic high school in Huddersfield. He left home at 18, moving into a succession of flats and bedsits, staying longest in a flat two miles outside the town centre. He was exposed to soft drugs from a young age and after leaving home he mixed with local petty criminals and drug dealers. In 1990 he received a light sentence for assaulting a young woman in Huddersfield. Nash's arrest in Ireland for the murder of Catherine and Carl Doyle led to the re-investigation of a murder case in Huddersfield dating from 1996, at a time when he was still in the West Midlands area.
The murder is that of Mrs Dorothy Wood, an elderly woman who lived alone in the Fartown area of Huddersfield in the spring of 1996. A local petty criminal, Mark Dallagher, had been charged with the murder.
Dallagher, who denies murdering Ms Wood, is a former associate of Mark Nash and, it is understood, says he murdered Mrs Woods. This led the Crown Prosecution Service in Leeds to send two detectives to Mountjoy Prison to speak to Nash in September. The outcome of their work is not clear and Dallagher is due to stand trial in December.
In 1995 Nash disappeared from Huddersfield, apparently as a result of threats from a local criminal, Trevor Peter Wells, who is now serving a 10-year sentence for robbery and causing grievous bodily harm. Nash moved to Leeds but again fell foul of criminals and moved to Dublin in 1996. He had been to Ireland previously to visit grandparents in Mayo.
He was quickly in a relationship with a young Dublin woman which led to the birth of the infant daughter, Emma, to whom he appeared to have regular access at the time of the Roscommon killings in August 1997.
He and Ms Sarah Jane Doyle, who was also a single parent of an infant boy, moved into a flat in Stoneybatter and then into another flat in Clonliffe Road on the north side of Dublin.
Within a year of moving to Dublin, Nash had drug connections and was known to dealers in the Stoneybatter and adjoining Grangegorman areas. There were also emerging signs Nash was a danger to women. Last Friday the jury at the Central Criminal Court heard that he had attacked his previous girlfriend, battering her about the head and threatening her with a steam iron. This led to the ending of that relationship. By early 1997 Nash, despite his relationship with Sarah Jane Doyle, was becoming increasingly detached and dangerous. He was, in fact, the most dangerous man at large in the State.