In her first statement to gardai, on the night her husband's body was found, Ms Anna Maria Sacco said he had forced himself on her and assaulted her a week before, a murder trial jury has been told.
Garda John Schley of Rathfarn ham Garda station said he interviewed Ms Sacco in a neighbour's house on the night the body was found. In an interview which developed into a full statement signed by Ms Sacco, she told Garda Schley of her movements that day but also told of an incident a week before. The previous Thursday night she had thrush and would not have sex with Mr Sacco.
He had "smacked" her on the arm and hurt her. "He forced himself on me," she said. "He kept telling me to shut up and don't be starting a scene." He kept hurting her and had taken out a belt and then "came full force on my arm". "He really hurt me this time," she said. "I couldn't breathe. I did everything he asked because he threatened to kill me."
When she got up and went to the bathroom to have a cigarette he told her: "Don't put a foot outside the door and, by the way, if you go to the police, I'll kill you."
He told her he did not care about the law here. The most one got in the Republic was seven years. She told him, no, it was life. Her statement said that her husband then said: "You know what your problem is. You're Irish and have no Italian blood in you."
She cried herself to sleep that night. When she woke at 1 p.m. the next day, the 15-year-old girl whom she had described as her best friend came into her room upset and said: "Anna Maria, if you only knew the half of it."
Later that day she went to her mother in Ranelagh and tried to put her hair down to cover a bruised eye. Her mother asked her what had happened to her eye, and she blacked out. An ambulance took her to St Vincent's Hospital and she told the staff "exactly what happened with the beatings".
In the statement, she said that when she returned from hospital she spoke to the teenage girl outside the house. The jury has heard that this girl fired the shot which killed Mr Sacco. The girl was hysterical and "stoned" and told her she had smoked "two cues of gear".
The girl said: "I can't stand what he has done," Ms Sacco's statement added. When she rang her husband, he said he would kick the girl out of the house, but she had pleaded with him to let her stay. The day he died, before she left the house he asked her: "What about that other thing?" When she asked what, he replied, "That putana in there," an Italian term for whore.
A year previously Ms Sacco had got a protection order against her husband and had filed for a barring order.
Garda Schley told Mr White that on the night he took the statement, Ms Sacco was not a suspect. The following day he got the clothing she had been wearing on the day of the shooting. He said Ms Sacco's underwear as well as her outer clothing was taken for examination. Nothing of evidential value was gleaned from that clothing, nor were there blood stains or any trace fibres on it.
Earlier, a ballistics expert told the Central Criminal Court that Franco Sacco had been shot from a distance of about 9 ft as he lay in a sleeping position on his bedroom mattress. Ms Sacco (22), with an address at Ravensdale Park, Kim mage, denies murdering Franco Sacco (29) at their home in Coolamber Park, Templeogue, on March 20th, 1997.
Prof John Harbison said Mr Sacco died from a single shotgun wound in the region of his right temple. The cause of death was laceration of the brain with fracture to the skull due to the shotgun blast. The head wound was 8 in. long and gaped to less than 2 in..
The time of death was "a minimum of six hours and probably 12" before his examination after midnight on the night the body was found. Rigor mortis had set in, consistent with the shooting happening just before midday.
Prof Harbison also told the court he identified three pieces of bone found in a black refuse sack in the bedroom where the body lay as pieces of human skull.
Det Garda William Brennan, a member of the Garda Technical Bureau, said the top barrel of a sporting shotgun found in a linen cupboard under the stairs in the Saccos' house had been recently fired when he examined it.
There was a pungent odour from the barrel indicative of recent discharge, he said. He was completely satisfied that a shotgun cartridge found behind the top of walk-in fridges and the rear wall of the chip shop run by Mr and Ms Sacco in Rathfarnham was discharged from the top barrel of that gun.
He said shotgun pellets found in Mr Sacco's head, on the floor of the bedroom where his body lay and in the toilet bowl of the bathroom, were all of similar shot size and were consistent with having come from the cartridge recovered from the chip shop.
Tests he carried out on the double-barrelled shotgun showed the extensive wound to Mr Sacco's head could have been caused if the shotgun had been fired from a distance of between 71/2 ft and 9 ft from his head. The gun had an automatic safety catch which engaged immediately it loaded.
Det Garda Brennan said Mr Sacco's body was found just inside the bedroom door, wrapped in eight sheets, five padded bed spreads, an electric blanket and two hand towels. It looked like it had been dragged across the mattress.
Bone fragments were adhering to the wall above the mattress, over a pattern caused by shotgun pellet markings. Blood had been cleaned off a bedroom radiator.
He recovered hair, blood, flesh and bone from the S-pipe in the bathroom sink. Gardai found spray bleach and a plastic bag containing blood-stained items on the landing. A toothpick, a string stop and a piece of bone were found close to the top of the stairs, and a blood-stained coal shovel was found in the kitchen. Det Garda Brennan said a blood pattern on the bedroom wardrobe had not been caused by the fatal shot but had occurred subsequently.
Under cross-examination from Ms Aileen Donnelly, defending, he agreed that although it was not connected to the shotgun blast, the blood pattern could have occurred at any time, not just subsequently, as he had said in his direct evidence.
The court heard that at 6 p.m. on March 20th, a delivery worker for Luigi's takeaway in Rathfarnham found a note on the shop window which said the shop was closed due to gas problems. A Bord Gais fitter, Mr James Farrelly, said that when he examined the chip shop on March 21st at the invitation of gardai, there was a slight drop in gas pressure on the internal connections, but this drop fell well within safety limits.
Det Garda David Sheridan said he had no doubt that finger marks on one of the plastic bags recovered from the main bedroom matched the left thumb impression of Ms Sacco's hand. The finger-mark was not on the plastic bag which contained the three skull pieces. He agreed with Mr Barry White SC, defending, that the fingerprint could have been left at any time on the refuse sack.
Mr Justice Smith told the jury that the defence counsel had raised certain newspaper articles with him and that the prosecution counsel had also expressed concern about them. Some reports were not impartial and not factually correct.
He advised the jurors to ignore all media coverage of the trial. He also told them that legal matters had arisen which he would have to resolve in their absence, and he sent the jurors away until next Monday.