Sometimes he felt like screaming from the back of the courtroom. A court was being told that it was not necessary to go into the circumstances of the rape and murder of his wife. Comdt Ray Quinn had to bite his tongue. Kenneth O'Reilly pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life this week for the murder of Joyce Quinn. He was arrested and charged within a week of her murder on January 23rd, 1995. The book of evidence was ready three months later. His fingerprints were on her car. Her blood was on his clothes. The DNA evidence proved he had raped her.

O'Reilly first appeared for trial in December 1996 and a date was set for last June. Despite Government commitments to speeding up the judicial process the trial was delayed again.

At each hearing his defence argued that it was unnecessary to go into the circumstances of the murder but Comdt Quinn had prepared his three children to hear what happened that night. He badly wanted a jury to hear it too.

"I wanted them to hear how this seemed to have been premeditated." O'Reilly had been seen in the vicinity of the schoolyard hours before he would kill Joyce Quinn, he said. Her car was found abandoned there that night by her son David, then 15, as they searched by torchlight for her after she failed to return home.

"O'Reilly must have been checking out his escape route over a ditch and through fields to his home. He told someone who saw him at the school that he'd lost a tenner and then went to their house to tell them he'd found it to allay their suspicions."

One of the most difficult things he had to tell his children was that their mother was probably dead when O'Reilly raped her. "I was insisting that the charge should be rape and murder and I was told that it was probable that my wife was dead or dying at the time."

The system seemed to protect O'Reilly's rights as the accused, he said, without giving him a voice. "The State is this impersonal entity supposed to represent its citizens. But my wife was a citizen of the State. And I've served the State in uniform for 30 years. But at all those different hearings we had no one to speak for us."

It was not just the system, but the courtrooms themselves that caused difficulty. At the first hearing he put down his coat on the bench to his left and found O'Reilly standing next to him. His wife's brother had to squeeze past O'Reilly to get to the stand.

"The minute a person is accused of a crime the system seems to move to protect his rights. I'm not saying a person shouldn't have the right to defend himself, but they took us right to the wire on this. There was no indication of remorse or regret from the murderer."

Comdt Quinn describes the 20-month wait between Joyce's murder and the conviction of her killer this week as "a form of psychological warfare". He was "frantic" last weekend, he said, afraid that there would be some flaw in the case against O'Reilly.

On Monday his youngest daughter, Lisa, celebrated her 16th birthday. In between preparing for the trial his eldest daughter, Nicole, brought in the birthday cake. The family wanted to plant a tree on the spot in the Curragh where Joyce's body was found. The young oak had been grown by the children from an acorn a few years earlier. However, gardai advised them not to plant the tree until the case was over, in case anything might be seen to be drawing attention to the murder and prejudice the trial.

Comdt Quinn has kept a folder of the letters between himself and the State Solicitor's office. In one he lists dates starting: "January 23rd: my wife raped and murdered. May 21st: book of evidence signed for by your office . . ." He received replies to his complaints about the delay. In one the office got the date of Joyce's murder wrong.

"The kids kept asking, `When is this going to be over, dad?' When O'Reilly was refused bail it was on the grounds that there was such overwhelming evidence."

The speedy arrest was a relief, he says, "although I was hoping it would be a stranger, rather than someone from the village". They found Joyce's mobile phone in the toilets of a local pub. O'Reilly had apparently stolen it after the murder.

The family has lived through a Christmas, birthdays and anniversaries without her. Comdt Quinn found himself digging up the bulbs she had planted because it was too difficult to see them coming up. "She was the gardener. I've let the garden go."

There were other family landmarks when she should have been there. "David had his first dress dance. That was difficult. His mother would have been fussing over him."

Instead Comdt Quinn had to get David up early the next morning when gardai called with a knife that they thought might have been used to kill Joyce.

Both David and Lisa had to be shown any knife gardai believed to be the murder weapon and sign statements to the effect that their mother did not have it in the car with her. Both children were in the car with her the last time she drove to the sweet shop she ran in Milltown. Their statements would be used to counter any defence plea that O'Reilly had killed Joyce in self-defence.

Gardai who handled the case were always "very good, very sensitive, and they would always have a ban garda present when they were talking to Lisa".

There was a last-minute search for the murder weapon last weekend when gardai were told that it may have been thrown into a well. They organised a warrant and a sub-aqua team and found nothing, Comdt Quinn said. The papers were in order by Monday morning. Otherwise the trial might have been delayed again.

Now there is some peace, although Comdt Quinn believes that a life sentence usually means only nine to 11 years. Next month the family will plant the tree, its leaves already turned red for the second autumn since Joyce Quinn's body was found.