TWO RURAL communities were last night trying to come to terms with the violent deaths of seven people, four of them young children, in unrelated incidents in Cork and Limerick.
One man is being questioned by gardaí in relation to the attack in Newcastle West, Co Limerick, where a five-month-old girl, a three-year- old boy, their mother and a family friend were stabbed to death.
The suspect was arrested drinking in a pub in Kilkee, Co Clare, and knew all four victims.
While news of the deaths in Ballycotton emerged first yesterday morning, gardaí believe the four Limerick killings were carried out earlier but went undetected overnight and into yesterday morning.
The Ballycotton incident came to light when John Butler (43), a native of Cobh who lived with his wife and two children at Ballybraher, crashed his car into a tree just outside the village at about 9.45am and died when the vehicle burst into flames.
His wife, Una, had left the family home that morning for her job in Cork city. When she heard a man had been killed in a car crash in Ballycotton, she tried ringing her husband’s mobile and when she got no answer, she rang a relative. The relative and another family member went to the Butlers’ home.
There they saw the bodies of Zoe (6) and her two-year-old sister Ella in a downstairs room and immediately rang gardaí. The two girls were still in their pyjamas and it is expected postmortem results will show they were strangled.
Mr Butler had bought a five-gallon drum of petrol at a garage in Shanagarry at about 9am. The container was found in the charred shell of his crashed vehicle.
Gardaí are carrying out tests to establish if Mr Butler doused the inside of the car in petrol before crashing the car at high speed in an apparent suicide.
He had previously worked in Irish Steel but had worked in construction in recent years, finding only occasional work of late due to the recession.
The bodies of Sarah Hines (25) and her children, Reece (3) and five-month-old baby Amy Hines, were discovered at a house in the Hazelgrove estate Gortboy, in Newcastle West, just before 2pm yesterday.
The body of Ms Hines’s friend, Alicia Brough (20) from Rockchapel, Co Cork, was also found in the house. All four had been stabbed to death.
The two children were found in an upstairs bedroom while the women were found in a room downstairs.
Just over two hours after the four bodies were found, a 31-year-old man was arrested in a pub in the west Clare seaside town of Kilkee on suspicion of all four murders.
The suspect phoned a retired garda yesterday afternoon informing him of what had happened at the house and he immediately contacted gardaí at Newcastle West.
Local gardaí were alerted at 1.35pm and went straight to the scene where the bodies were discovered. It is believed they had been dead for a number of hours.
Gardaí later traced the suspect’s call to a Kilkee public pay phone and after a major search of the town found him drinking in a pub. He was last night being questioned in Limerick about the killings.