CLOSING speeches are under way in Belfast Crown Court in the six week trial of an RUC constable, Mr John Torney, who is accused of murdering his family because of his infatuation with a woman constable.
The 40 year old constable denies murdering his wife Linda (33), his 10 year old daughter, Emma, and his 13 year old son John, at their Lomond Height's home in Cookstown, Co Tyrone in September 1994.
The prosecution claims he killed his family to escape his failing marriage after he had become infatuated with a fellow officer, Ms Ailsa Millar.
Mr Torney alleges his schoolboy son ran amok with his police issue Ruger pistol and shot his mother and sister before turning the gun on himself.
The Crown lawyer, Mr John Orr, alleges that the crucial evidence is to be found in the glove covered left hand of John Jr. When the boy's body was discovered, he said, his left hand had been bunched up in the glove like a fist, the fingers and thumb of the glove empty. Mr Orr claimed the empty fingers pointed "clearly and unequivocally to the guilt not of this 13 year old boy, but to the accused".
He told the jury that its task was an easy one in the sense that either Mr Torney or his son was the killer. "But it's not easy because, if you look at either of the two competing versions, both are a puzzle. You see, people would say that, even if Mr Torney detested his wife, even if he hated his wife, why would he kill his two children, his own flesh and blood?
"But why would a boy murder the mother he loved and his sister? You have to decide who was the author of this carnage."
Mr Torney's marriage had been falling apart, and within days of a posting to a new RUC station in Magherafelt, Co Derry, he had sought a transfer, only to later cancel this request and seek to remain at the station. Clearly something happened in that period. We say that what happened in that interval was Ailsa Millar," Mr Orr declared.
Mr Torney's lawyer, Mr Andrew Donaldson QC, rejected the Crown's version of events, dismissing it as little more than "evidential cherry picking".
Mr Donaldson said the remarkable thing about the case was that it was all based on circumstantial evidence. There were no witnesses and the two suicide notes were a "darned inconvenience" to the Crown case because it had been shown that they were indeed written by the schoolboy.
Attacking prosecution assertions that the schoolboy bad been wearing only the right glove while the left was bunched up, Mr Donaldson claimed that even here there was a conflict. While some prosecution witnesses claimed to have described the left glove as being only partly on the hand, others had said that they saw the glove fully on young John Torney's hand. "If John Torney is the evil scheming man that the Crown say he is, would he have made a silly mistake like that?"
He also asked how a man who had bought Christmas presents for his family could then turn around and kill them. "There are features to this case that one will never understand. Why would a man kill his own flesh and blood? It just doesn't bear thinking about."
Mr Donaldson said he was sure the members of the jury were filled with "revulsion, pain and pity" for the Torney family after seeing the photographs and having watched the "eerie film in the house of horror". But the question was not, as the Crown had suggested, one of whether the father or the son had carried out the killings? Rather, it was a matter of whether the jury could be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt, on the basis of the evidence, that Mr Torney was the killer.
The trial continues today.