It all rested on Charlie Bowden's wide shoulders. As the judgment of the three-judge Special Criminal Court toppled the other pillars of evidence against Paul Ward the evidence of Bowden had a "strong ring of truth about it", the judges decided.
Mr Justice Barr had been reading from the judgment for more than an hour before he reached the watershed line, and it was clear that it was Bowden who would send his former accomplice to prison for life.
"The court is satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that Bowden's evidence implicating the accused in the crime is correct and ought to be accepted," Mr Justice Barr said.
"He's done now. Yeah, he's gone," a garda in the court's gallery muttered to his colleague.
"Accomplice evidence traditionally has been treated very circumspectly by courts," a legal expert said last night. "The prosecution had a mountain to climb to secure a conviction on the basis of accomplice evidence. One would have thought, given the precedent set in the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal, the chance of overturning such evidence looks good.
"But at the end of the day a court relies on the credibility of evidence. The other interesting thing is that this is another case where a confession has been thrown out as a result of Garda practices."
The judges declared Mr Bowden was not a supergrass in the sense of one of the most notorious supergrasses in Northern Ireland, Harry Kirkpatrick. Neither was he a saint. "Charles Bowden is a selfserving, deeply avaricious and potentially vicious criminal. On his own admission he is a liar, and the court readily accepts that he would lie without hesitation."
Bowden had given information to the police "as a cornered criminal to extricate himself in part at least from a grievous situation in which he found himself".
Paul Ward was offered the same opportunity but rejected it. So Bowden took the witness box and Ward took the dock. In the face of defence counsel Mr Patrick McEntee's often-scathing cross-examination it was easy to see which witness was the more impressive.
During questioning Bowden apologised to the court for being "facetious". He referred to something "pertaining to" something else. Ward had difficulty responding to his own defence counsel at times, not understanding the words "innocuous" or "habitually".
Protected by the Witness Protection Scheme set up by the Minister for Justice, Mr O'Donoghue, last year, Bowden has been given immunity from prosecution for the murder. With standard remission he will be released from Arbour Hill prison in 2001. In the meantime he is to be given six days' temporary release, one of which he enjoyed last month.
Earlier this year he married his girlfriend, Juliette Bacon, while in custody.
Bowden knew enough to have saved Veronica Guerin's life. "If I had guts I would have made a telephone call to somebody and told them what was going on," he said when asked whether he enjoyed his meal the night before the murder.
"I remember thinking that it would not come off, or something would go wrong. But I didn't honestly think that deeply about it. I remember getting up that morning and thinking that something is going to happen to Veronica Guerin that day and I better have an alibi for being somewhere else when it happens."
