An “emotionally manipulative” man murdered a woman he had become obsessed with by setting fire to his car while she was inside, the Central Criminal Court has heard.
Michael Leonard (63), of Hillcrest, Glenosheen, Kilmallock, Co Limerick, was on Wednesday sentenced to life imprisonment after pleading guilty to the murder of Mary O’Keeffe (72) at a woodland in Doneraile, Co Cork on February 4th, 2021.
The court heard that Leonard arranged to meet Ms O’Keeffe at the wooded area but within minutes of her arrival he threw two gallons of petrol into the car and set it on fire. A postmortem showed she was still alive when the fire started.
Nicky O’Keeffe, the deceased’s granddaughter, wept as she told the court of Ms O’Keeffe’s love of music and dancing, her generosity and her kindness. “Mary O’Keeffe will be forever in our hearts, she is deeply loved, sadly missed and will never be forgotten. We like to think she is happy, dancing in the sky.”
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Before sentencing Leonard to the mandatory life term for murder, Mr Justice Paul McDermott said it was a “most horrific attack” which had inflicted a “terrible loss” on Ms O’Keeffe’s family. There was loud clapping in the court from people who knew Ms O’Keeffe after the sentence was handed down.
Det Sgt James O’Shea told Anne-Marie Lawlor SC, for the Director of Public Prosecutions, that Ms O’Keeffe lived in Mallow and was a widow at the time of her death. She had three sons, 11 grandchildren and three great grandchildren.
She was in excellent health and worked as a cook, starting at 6am most mornings. The accused, who has no previous convictions, worked for Coillte but was retired at the time of the murder.
Formed a relationship
Det Sgt O’Shea said Ms O’Keeffe came to know Leonard in 2016 as they regularly attended dances. They formed a relationship but in 2019 she made it clear she no longer wished to continue seeing him.
Det Sgt O’Shea said this “greatly upset” Leonard and communications between them discovered during the investigation suggested he was “emotionally manipulative” in making her remain in contact with him. One witness who knew them told gardaí that Leonard was “smothering her and she didn’t know what he was capable of”.
Ms O’Keeffe cut contact with Leonard during the Covid-19 lockdowns but CCTV footage showed that between Christmas 2020 and her death the following February he visited the area around her home 45 times, including 12 times in the 13 days before the murder.
Det Sgt O’Shea said Leonard had an “increasing obsession in relation to her movements and an extreme interest in a person he believed to have been in a relationship with her”.
On the day of the murder, Ms O’Keeffe and Leonard arranged to meet at Doneraile. She arrived at 2.19pm, got into his car and by 2.23pm he had poured two gallons of petrol into the car and on to Ms O’Keeffe and set the vehicle alight.
Burn marks
Leonard suffered burns and left the area on foot before calling his former wife, who arrived there at about 3.22pm. She handed her phone to a fire officer who heard Leonard say: “You won’t find me, I’m far away, I can’t live with what happened.”
His daughter arrived soon after and was able to locate her father using a phone app. He was 2.5km away in the River Awbeg, about 12m from the bank. Gardaí rescued him and he was taken to hospital before being arrested.
Pathologist Dr Margot Bolster concluded that the cause of death was extreme third degree burns associated with inhalation of carbon monoxide by reference to a car fire. Ms O’Keeffe was alive when the fire started, Det Sgt O’Shea confirmed.
Leonard made admissions during his fourth garda interview and said he felt “aggrieved” that Ms O’Keeffe had been lying to him and that “eats away at you”. He said he did not go there with the intention of killing her but Det Sgt O’Shea confirmed that Leonard had brought a bucket containing two gallons of petrol to the meeting.
Nicky O’Keeffe told the court that her grandmother was known to her family as ‘Moll’. She would travel anywhere in Ireland for a dance if one of her favourite singers was playing and at home she always had two radios playing, one in the kitchen and another in her sittingroom.
Recalling when the family heard the “devastating news” on the radio about a body being found at Doneraile, she said: “Little did we know we would be the family receiving the absolutely heart-wrenching news that it was our beautiful, kind, loving, heart of gold Moll who had been killed.”
She said they could not understand why someone would do such a terrible thing. “It was the last thing we thought of at night and the first thing we thought of in the morning.”