The year 1996 was a particularly terrible one for violence against women in Ireland. From the cold days of early January, when the naked body of Marilyn Rynn, a civil servant, was discovered in Tolka Valley Park, in north Dublin, to the brutal and still unsolved murders of two visitors to the country, Sophie Toscan du Plantier and Belinda Pereira, just days apart in December, 19 women died violently in the State.
Twenty-six years later a few of those names are still the subject of speculation and media attention. Others barely merited more than a headline even at the time. But in every case the ripples continue to reverberate down through families.
Shocked by the unprecedented level of violence against women that year, Women’s Aid began keeping a list of the names, manner of death and any criminal proceedings for each woman who died through violence. It would become the organisation’s femicide archive. “We realised that nobody was recording the names under a single umbrella of what we refer to as femicide,” says Sarah Benson, the chief executive of Women’s Aid. “We decided that that was what we were going to do, and we’ve been doing it ever since.”
Today that list runs to well over 200 names; 1996 was the worst year, but every year was horrific to some degree. There has not been a single year since in which no women died as a result of violence in the State. Many woman died at home. Most were killed by someone they knew. They died by strangling, by stabbing, by beating, by gunshot. A number were mothers killed by their own sons, who were later often found not guilty by reason of insanity.
[ Stolen Lives: 239 violent deaths of women in Ireland from 1996 to todayOpens in new window ]
Behind each name is a story of potential crushed, of a woman or girl who loved and was loved. “If you think of any single name on that list, it’s like dropping a stone into a pond. The ripples are just enormous. And they go on for years and years and years,” says Benson.
The first woman who died as a result of violence in 1996 was not in fact Marilyn Rynn. Although her body was discovered in early January, she had been raped and strangled in the last days of 1995, as she made her way home from her work Christmas party. The first victim of 1996 was another woman in her early 40s, Joyce Quinn.
Unless it happens to you, nobody can possibly understand what it means to live with the knowledge that someone you loved was killed by another human being. But to learn the story of Joyce’s lonely, savage death on the plains of the Curragh – and to hear how her still grieving family continues to be haunted by what happened to her, and its enduring legacy – is to catch a fleeting glimpse of the horror.
I meet Ray Quinn, who is a retired colonel, in a hotel in Dungarvan, in Co Waterford, on a late spring day. As you might expect from an Army man, he has come prepared. He is carrying a large map showing the area where Joyce was abducted, where she died and where the family home is. He has a DVD of a documentary that TG4 made about her death, a family photo album and copies of letters written to previous ministers for justice. Even so, he is unprepared for the grief that still overtakes him when he talks about Joyce, forcing him to pause on occasion to steady himself.
Joyce Wickham was the love of Ray Quinn’s life, and he was hers. She first spotted him before he ever noticed her. It was St Stephen’s night, and they had both been to a disco at Castleknock tennis club, in northwest Dublin. She was 14, and waiting at the bus stop to go home. He sped past the crowded bus stop on a borrowed motorbike, and one of his friends reached out and grabbed his arm as a joke. Ray went over the handlebars, right in front of her. The poor thing “was violently sick when she went home”, he says.
A little while later he was collecting his sister from school, “and she asked me if I could give Joyce a lift home”. He found her strikingly beautiful but also quite shy, which he mistook for aloofness. “But every time I looked in the rear-view mirror she was always looking at me.”
It was a few years later before they got together. She was 17, and he was in cadet school and home for a period. They ended up at the same Army dance. Suddenly “she wasn’t in a school uniform and she was all glammed up”. She didn’t look like a kid any more. He found out later that she only went that night because she thought he would be there.
They married in 1973, when she was 21 and he was 23. Three children – Nicole, David and Lisa – came along shortly afterwards. Ray wasn’t particularly given to romantic gestures, but every year, on her birthday or anniversary, he would buy her white roses. It devastated him later when a mix-up meant that the roses on her coffin were red.
Someone told him much later that, at every family event, “my eyes always followed Joyce.” Now, when he thinks about that, he says “I was terribly afraid she would suddenly vanish”.
Joyce always had a great work ethic, taking in Spanish students or doing some part-time teaching, Ray says. So when they returned to Ireland after two years abroad with the Army and a village shop came up for sale in Milltown, in Co Kildare, in 1992, she jumped at the chance to buy it. The three children were a bit older, and they had a few quid in their pockets.
It was through the shop that she would encounter Kenneth O’Reilly.
There was nothing at all that made O’Reilly stand out from the other locals who would be in and out of the shop for their newspapers, penny sweets or the messages. “I just knew him to see from coming into the shop,” Ray says. “He was sort of quiet, but that was all. He played on the school football team. He only lived about 100 metres up the road. He was in and out.” He would buy cigarettes and she would give him credit. That was the extent of their interaction. Their daughter Nicole had encountered him too in the shop, and found him quiet and mannerly.
Tuesday, January 23rd, 1996, was “just a normal day. Joyce said that morning, ‘I’m so tired, remind me to go to bed early tonight.’ And then we just went about our business,” Ray says.
Later that day their daughter Lisa looked after the shop while Joyce popped home to put the oven on for a roast. Ruairí Quinn, who was minister for finance at the time, was delivering the budget speech, and Ray was engrossed in that while he worked on some DIY at home. It was only when he got hungry that he realised the time.
“The children were just sitting there. I said, ‘Where’s your mum?’”
She should have been home before 7.30pm, and it was shortly after 8pm.
This is what is known.
As Joyce went about her life on January 22nd and 23rd, O’Reilly was watching her. He had a carefully formulated plan. He had already carried out reconnaissance of the Curragh plains. There was a newly sharpened knife in his pocket. He opened the school gate so he could drive in to hide a car later. When a community volunteer asked him what he was doing, he said he was looking for some money he had lost.
As the Curragh became enveloped in darkness on the evening of January 23rd, he walked to a bridge near the shop and waited.
Joyce closed the shop just after 7pm and got into her car, a 1991 Citroën AX. She drove in the direction of the Curragh. She saw O’Reilly walking in the same direction, and he put out his thumb. She pulled over. He asked to be dropped on her way to Kildare because he was going to a friend’s house. When she stopped the car to let him out, he turned on her and stabbed her in the chest with the knife. He got into the driving seat and drove the car off the road, in among the furze bushes across the Curragh plains.
What happened next was described in distressingly blunt terms at O’Reilly’s trial in October 1997, 20 months after her murder. The court heard he “left the car and had sexual intercourse with the deceased, who may well have been dead at the time, we don’t know”.
Ray learned later that Joyce’s underwear was ripped off her with such force that her bra tore down the middle, between the cups, and the elastic was ripped from the waistband of her leggings. Yet O’Reilly was not charged with a sexual offence, “as it could not be confirmed whether my wife was dying or dead at the time”.
After he had raped her O’Reilly stabbed Joyce again in the neck and left her body in the bushes. He then dropped her bloodstained car back to the school. After he had done that he called to the house of the community volunteer and calmly reported that he had found his money. He took his girlfriend out for a drink, then took a taxi into Newbridge and had a meal, all paid for with the money he had stolen from Joyce.
At about 10pm on that bitter cold night it was Ray and Joyce’s 15-year-old son, David, who found the car. “I told David to go down one side of the school and I’d go down the other and we’d meet at the bottom. And then I heard him let out a scream. He’d found his mother’s car, the poor little chap. He just wailed and wailed. There was blood on the seats. I hadn’t spotted that, but David did.”
None of this was described in any detail in court, because O’Reilly pleaded guilty at the last minute. After 20 months of agonising waiting the whole thing was over in 20 minutes. Patrick McEntee, the defence counsel, said his client’s plea was unambiguous and “the case was capable of causing deep distress to the families of both the victim and the accused, and no useful purpose would be served by outlining the facts”.
That O’Reilly was not charged with a sexual crime caused and continues to cause Ray enormous distress. “That was the real motivation for the crime.”
Ray began advocating for his wife immediately, and he has not stopped since. He went on the news 10 minutes after he was told Joyce’s body had been found. Struggling to catch his breath, he appealed directly to the then minister for justice, Nora Owen, to “please start moving on the prison system and try to do something credible and sensible. Our family are in a terrible agony here. This is happening to too many families at the moment in this country. It seems to me we’re losing the battle against crime.”
On June 23rd this year Ray and his daughter Nicole were among the first family members to make an oral submission to the Parole Board under the Parole Act 2019, meeting three officers of the board. O’Reilly’s latest parole hearing was due. “The Parole Board gave us a very sympathetic hearing. It was harrowing, in particular for Nicole, but she did her mum proud.”
Ray’s priority is to ensure that if O’Reilly is deemed suitable for release he will not be allowed to return to Co Kildare, and that he will be banned from having any contact with the family. All three children still live in Kildare, within a kilometre of each other. “Everyone is around here. There’s nine grandchildren, the three kids and their spouses.”
He stresses that it is a small, tight community. Lisa’s parents-in-law live next door to the O’Reilly family. If the man who killed her children’s maternal grandmother is allowed back to the area, visits to the paternal grandparents “would have to cease”.
Nicole told the Parole Board that “people say you can’t see love, but you can, and I could practically touch it... Mum glowed with it.”
“I will never be able to put into words the effect that this crime had on my family. I have to start each day knowing what he did to my wife, my childhood sweetheart, the mother of my children,” Ray told the Parole Board.
The World Health Organisation defines femicide as the “intentional murder of women because they are women, but broader definitions include any killings of women or girls”.
Femicide, adds Sarah Benson, is “a phenomenon that is very much connected with gender inequality, and with that broad spectrum of domestic sexual and gender-based violence”.
Using the Women’s Aid comprehensive research on femicide since 1996 as a starting point, The Irish Times has built a digital archive containing the names and stories of each woman – or all of those for whom records can be found – who has died violently in the State over the past 26 years. We have not given names or details of deaths where criminal trials are pending.
One of the things made clear by both the archive and global statistics is that Joyce Quinn’s murder is highly unusual in that the killer was someone she barely knew. In most cases the perpetrator “will be a male who is known to the woman”.
“In 55 per cent of cases that have been resolved through the courts, we know that it was a current or former intimate partner, and only 13 per cent were murdered by a stranger. Men are more likely to be killed in a public place by a man who is perhaps not known to them. For women, the most dangerous place is their own home,” says Benson.
Although the murder rate is dropping globally, “the rates of murders of women do not seem to have dropped proportionately the same way”, she adds.
But there is slightly better news for Ireland. “Since 1996, if we look at it in five-year increments, we have seen a decrease. That hasn’t been the case in other similar jurisdictions. So the rate has been dropping here.”
The archive reveals other insights into the nature of femicide, the deep-rooted misogyny that frequently accompanies it, and the stereotypes that surround our understanding of male killers and their female victims.
One such stereotype is the notion of “the good man who snapped”. Certain phrases recur again and again in court reports and media coverage. “Rachel hit me. I snapped.” “He told his trial he snapped.” “He ‘just snapped’ after a row, stabbed her six times in the neck and set fire to the house.”
As a society we tend to try to categorise both victims and perpetrators, says Benson. “We work very hard to try to explain away things because it makes it easier for us. But, actually, what we’re doing there is failing to look at the structural gender inequality that we are all born into.”
The archive underlines something else we already know: the most dangerous time in the life of a victim of abuse is in the weeks immediately after she leaves. “Molloy told gardaí that he ‘lost it’ and was jealous.” “‘I loved my wife so much but she didn’t love me and I just went mad,’ he told gardaí.”
Benson cites a UK study which shows that “of women who were murdered by an ex-partner, 87 per cent were murdered within a year of making the break from the relationship, with 55 per cent in the first month. Domestic violence is about power and control. A perpetrator works very, very hard, using many different tactics, to maintain that level of power and control.” If their partner moves to separate “they will escalate in order to reassert that power”.
[ The Irish Times view on violence against women: the everyday epidemicOpens in new window ]
One positive development since Women’s Aid began its research is that we now have a much more nuanced understanding of the nature of abuse within relationships, and the criminal offence of coercive control. It “is the beating heart of a domestic abuse relationship”.
“It is about a pattern of behaviours – they can include emotional abuse, psychological, economic abuse, physical, sexual violence, or the threats of it ... What it is about is about a pattern of behaviours that are designed to shrink the target’s world.”
Another thing that becomes clear when you pull back the lens on 26 years of femicide is that there are certain cases that continue to attract attention years later while others are hardly reported. Why does Benson think that is?
“It’s certainly the case that there are killings that seem to capture the public attention more than others. I don’t know whether that is feeding into the trope of ‘stranger danger’ – because quite commonly those might be cases where the perpetrator is not known [to the victim], or where there isn’t an immediate direct line of a relationship between the perpetrator and the victim.”
We should be careful, she says, to resist any attempt to “categorise” or “label” victims, because that tends to lead to victim blaming. The focus should always be on the perpetrator. And when it comes to femicide there is no such thing as the good man who snapped, she says.
“All across the world this idea that is sometimes referred to as a crime of passion has been debunked. Invariably it isn’t that suddenly a fuse has gone off, or somebody who has experienced such acute provocation that they were driven to act in a way that took somebody else’s life. I think that that is a way of blaming the victim.”
Back at the home he shared with Joyce in Kildare, 26 years after his wife’s death Ray Quinn is still dealing with the aftermath. “Happiness died the night Joyce was murdered,” he told the Parole Board.
The thing that brings him moments of joy now are his and Joyce’s grandchildren. For a long time “it wasn’t a home any more. It was just a house. But then I was lying in bed one morning and the little grandchild came, all knees and elbows and a big gummy smile, and ‘Aren’t you delighted to see me?’”
And in that moment “my heart lifted. It felt like a home again.”
To get in touch with the journalist or to add information to the Stolen Lives archive, email jennifer.oconnell@irishtimes.com
If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this article, support is available. The Women’s Aid national freephone helpline, at 1800-341900, operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and provides support and information to callers experiencing abuse from intimate partners. You can also get help through the organisation’s website
This article was amended on July 23rd, 2022, to clarify references to the community volunteer Kenneth O’Reilly spoke to
