A YOUNG Cavan man accused of murdering his father told gardaí: “I always had it in my head growing up to kill somebody”, the Central Criminal Court has heard.
Séamus Fitzgerald (21) has pleaded not guilty to murdering his father James Fitzgerald in Lisgar, Bailieborough, Co Cavan on January 8th, 2006.
Garda Peter O’Sullivan, Bailieborough Garda station, told the jury that Séamus Fitzgerald told him during an interview subsequent to his arrest that he killed his father.
He said Séamus told him that his father was in the kitchen, asleep in a chair, that he “put a telephone flex around his neck and pulled him to the floor” and that, when the flex broke, he “put his hands to his father’s throat and pushed”.
Garda O’Sullivan said the accused told him that he then “dragged” his father from the kitchen to a hallway at the back of the house and that he “stabbed him in the chest with a kitchen knife and broke his finger”.
He also told the garda: “I always had it in my head growing up to kill somebody.
“I had awful pains in my head as a child, dreams about pains in the head, things like that.”
The accused’s sister, Mary Fitz-gerald, said she received a phonecall from her brother, two days before the alleged murder.
“He asked me about money. He said he’d seen a car in Autotrader and asked me for the loan of €4,000 to buy the car.”
She told him that she did not have that kind of money.
“In the end he said he might ask my father for it,” she said.
It is the prosecution’s case that the motive for the alleged murder was that Séamus wanted to take money from his father to buy the car.
The jury also heard evidence from Séamus’s family in relation to his background.
Mr Justice Kevin O’Higgins told the jury that such evidence could relate to the “misconduct or bad actions of the accused”.
He said that the jury would “not normally hear this type of evidence because they are to try a case of murder and cannot convict on the basis of bad character”.
“But, in this case, there’s a high degree of probability that there may be an issue concerning diminished responsibility.”
This issue would be based on the expert evidence of psychiatrists, he said, adding that, in coming to their opinion, the psychiatrists will have “replied upon history of past actions”.
Mr Fitzgerald’s wife, Susan, and mother of the accused, told the jury that, when he was four years old, Séamus fell off his bike, fracturing his skull.
She said that Séamus was a “very loving child” but that at about the time of his Junior Cert, his attitude “changed completely”.
“He started to damage cars in town, insult people. He was in the habit of breaking things.”
Mrs Fitzgerald said that her husband thought it was “ordinary teenage behaviour”. “But it was something different,” she said.
“Séamus once destroyed his bedroom with black spraypaint.”
She told Patrick Gageby SC, defending, that the years before her husband’s death, when Séamus was at home, were “hell on earth”.
Mrs Fitzgerald said that she wrote to Minister for Health Mary Harney in 2004, asking for help, and that she was sent back a letter, telling her to go to the health board.
“The same people we were at before,” she said.
The trial will continue today in front of the jury of seven women and four men.