A man who abducted and murdered a pensioner on her way home to Co Tyrone from Mass in Co Donegal was yesterday told by a judge he could spend the rest of his life in jail.
Trevor Hamilton (23) attacked retired librarian Attracta Harron just months after he was freed from prison for a sex assault on another woman whom he also lured into his car.
The murder of Mrs Harron (65), whose naked body was found buried in a shallow grave yards from Hamilton's family home in Sion Mills, Co Tyrone, was one of the most shocking in Northern Ireland. After a jury convicted him at Dungannon Crown Court, Mr Justice Richard McLaughlin told Hamilton he might never be allowed back on the streets.
The farm labourer will be sentenced later following psychiatric reports, and he faces one of the toughest punishments ever imposed by Northern Ireland's judicial system.
At the end of a seven-week trial, the judge said the evidence which had condemned him was the strongest he had encountered in his 35-year career.
"You have demonstrated in my opinion a total lack of emotion," Mr Justice McLaughlin told Hamilton. "It's clear you present a grave danger to any woman in this community - that's any woman that might cross your path. You demonstrated appalling cruelty when you killed Mrs Harron.
"I intend to pass a sentence on you which will be one of the longest and possibly the longest ever passed on anyone in these courts.
"There's a very real possibility you will never be released in your own lifetime. You can be sure it will be a long day before you see freedom again."
The bespectacled Hamilton, wearing denim jeans and a white shirt, showed no emotion as the jury found him guilty after nearly 4½ hours of deliberations. His father James, who had attended throughout the trial, left the courtroom without making any comment.
In the public gallery Mrs Harron's widowed husband Michael, a retired grammar school teacher, and other family members, kept silent, only nodding in agreement at the outcome.
Mrs Harron had been bludgeoned around the head, possibly with a hatchet or axe, and buried by a riverbank to the rear of Hamilton's Concess Road home. Her body had been wrapped in a meal sack for a shroud. The mother-of-five vanished in December 2003 as she walked home to Strabane from her daily trip across the Border to attend Mass at Murlogh Chapel in Lifford.
After the verdict Mrs Harron's daughter, Elis Harron-Ponsenby, flanked by her father, her two brothers and one of her sisters, talked about the family's relief at Hamilton's conviction.
However, she questioned how the self-confessed rapist could have been freed to murder.
Describing her mother as "a wonderful person who loved life and lived it to the full, a kind generous and loving woman", Ms Harron-Ponsenby contrasted her life with that of Hamilton.
Hamilton, she said, had "never shown any remorse for any of his actions", was a "complete stranger to my mother and the rest of our family, and so it is hard to comprehend how he chose to abduct her".
"We believe that Trevor Hamilton is a very dangerous man who will always be a threat to women," she said. "It is hard to understand how he could serve only 3½ years for a violent rape and associated offences and then whilst on probation be able to carry out this terrible deed."