Less than two days after Mr Richie Barron was killed, gardaí in Donegal were asserting that he had been murdered by Mr Frank McBrearty Jnr and his cousin Mr Mark McConnell, the Morris tribunal heard yesterday.
But while the gardaí believed this, they did not have any evidence that the cattle dealer had been murdered, Mr Peter Charleton SC, for the tribunal, said.
He was speaking on his third day reading his opening statement to the inquiry.
Mr Barron's body was discovered on a road in Raphoe in the early hours of Monday, October 14th, 1996. On Tuesday night, Raphoe Garda John O'Dowd telephoned divisional officer Chief Supt Denis Fitzpatrick at his home to say that "he had good information to the effect that Frank McBrearty and Mark McConnell killed Mr Richard Barron and that it was murder and not a hit-and-run accident".
Chief Supt Fitzpatrick said he assumed the source was probably a Garda informant called Mr William Doherty. According to the information, the two men were seen approaching Frankie's Nightclub from the direction of the scene at a time crucial to the death of Mr Barron.
Mr Doherty was "a source of proven reliability in the past" according to Supt Kevin Lennon, who carried out a report into the investigation.
But this information later turned out to be "both false and misleading", the report stated.
However, Mr Charleton pointed out that the reliability of Mr Doherty as an information source was not assessed by Supt Lennon until December, 1996, two months after Mr Barron's death.
Even if the source was reliable, Mr Charleton said, "it is difficult to know how a man coming up his own car park with his own first cousin could be the foundation of any reasonable suspicion that he had murdered somebody".
On Tuesday or Wednesday night, Chief Supt Fitzpatrick met Supt John J FitzGerald, according to a statement given by the latter. "The chief superintendent said to me, 'John, Richie Barron was murdered, Frankie Jnr and Mark McConnell did it'."
The rumour linking Mr McBrearty Jnr with the murder spread and on October 27th, he approached two gardaí and said people in Raphoe were calling him a murderer.
More than one week later, the McBreartys claimed that they received the first of about 23 hoax bomb and abusive calls. "This apparently went on until about the 12th of January, 1998," Mr Charleton said.
Mr Michael Peoples and his wife Charlotte also received phone calls which accused Mr Peoples of having killed Mr Barron and which demanded money.
But if the gardaí really believed that Mr Barron had been murdered, it was difficult to understand why they did not preserve the scene or call in a forensic pathologist, Mr Charleton said.
He said the district officer, Supt FitzGerald, had criticised several aspects of the early handling of the investigation, including the 35-minute delay in responding to an emergency call, the failure to preserve the scene and the delay in notifying him of the incident.
He was only notified of the incident at 7.45 a.m. - about seven hours after it happened. Notwithstanding his reported dismay at the delay, "there was again a considerable delay in anyone arriving at the scene," Mr Charleton said.
"It was 9.20 a.m. when Gardaí Coady and Connolly finally arrived at the scene as the roadway was being washed."
Some neighbours and other people had decided to wash the road as "they thought it was a disgrace that schoolchildren might be going up and down and would have to see the human blood on the roadway," Mr Charleton said.
"It might be reasonable to ask, in the light of all of those criticisms of other people, possibly justified, the question as to why an examination by a forensic pathologist was not identified as being the most appropriate next step to take," Mr Charleton said.
It was to be nearly four years after Mr Barron's death that a forensic pathologist would look at the body.
Mr Charleton also queried Supt FitzGerald's statement in March, 2000 that there was nothing found at the scene to suggest a hit-and-run accident.
"It is difficult to know how this could be said and more particularly how a conclusion of murder could have been arrived at, given that the scene had been driven over all night in its unpreserved state and had been trampled over that morning and washed by people acting, they assert, out of the best of intentions."
