Prosecution, defence and expert witnesses united to effect a swift and gentle closure, writes Kathy Sheridan
The spirit of Ciara Gibbs, a fiercely bright, talented, sensitive 16-year-old, 5 feet 8 inches tall with blue-gray eyes, pervaded the court as her father, Gerard, fought for composure on the witness stand.
The defendant, his 47-year-old wife and Ciara's mother, sat a few feet away, small and slim in her professional black suit, expressionless, as a family nightmare unfolded, seizing the heart of the court and plunging it into a numbed silence.
In her first statement to detectives, Dr Lynn Gibbs, a consultant psychiatrist, had admitted to killing her daughter: "I recall pushing her into the bath. . . I believed there was no hope for Ciara or myself. I planned that we would both die."
This was not the usual partisan audience of a murder trial: no one here was baying or praying for a conviction or acquittal. Instead, the prosecution, defence and expert witnesses seemed united in a mission to effect a swift and gentle closure.
"Your daughter and her mother had an excellent relationship?", asked Brendan Grehan SC, for the prosecution. "Excellent," said Gerard Gibbs, before gathering all his emotional and physical strength to add in a voice broken with grief: "She loved Ciara".
He wept freely as witnesses described how Ciara had achieved 10 As in her Junior Cert that year and how she had been surreptitiously looking for a coat for her mother as a Christmas gift from herself and Gearóid, her 13-year-old brother, during the mother and daughter trip to Dublin on the day she died, where she attended a UCD lecture for gifted maths students.
He wept as they described her miserable two-week summer student exchange to France, which sparked the beginning of serious weight loss, compounded by a "deportment" course which, said her GP, Dr Gobnait Kearney, placed "a lot of emphasis on diet and calorie counting".
By the time she died, Ciara weighed just over 50 kilos, a stone below the healthy body weight of a girl her size.
Seated between two female companions, as friends and eminent colleagues from her own psychiatric profession tried to explain her catastrophic actions, Lynn Gibbs's engagement with proceedings seemed minimal.
Prof Thomas Fahy, a UK-based psychiatrist, described her as "quite self-contained and reserved, but I don't doubt that underneath, she is quite an emotional person".
All her life, we would hear, her coping mechanism was to compartmentalise her feelings.
The "shy, introverted, self-contained" Lynn was a fragile 22-year-old when her 49-year-old mother, Iris Hutchinson, took her own life, taking three days to die from an overdose of the weedkiller, Gramoxone, after years of overdoses and hospital treatment for severe depressive illness.
The risk to offspring of inheriting such an illness is one in five, possibly higher, said Prof Fahy.
When Lynn was 12, she had needed sleep medication to help her through a difficult transition to boarding school. At 17, she had a "brush with an eating disorder" and at 20, while a medical student at Trinity, a serious depressive episode involving a suicide attempt forced her to take a year out. The bouts came at time of change and crisis, said Prof Fahy.
"But she made a very good recovery and completed her studies. . . not even interrupted by her mother's death".
Marriage to Gerard, her childhood sweetheart, led to years of stability, said Dr Cleo Van Velsen, a London-based psychiatrist.
But her coping mechanism meant that her mother's suicide was never discussed; Gerard didn't know the details of Iris's death until recently. Lynn's sister never knew about her overdose at 20.
"This was a house of love but we all know that families are the location of conflict. . . and there was not very much experience in this family of dealing with conflict and anger. . . So when Ciara shouted 'I hate you' at her mother, that was very, very shocking for Dr Gibbs. . .
"This crisis [ Ciara's weight loss] precipitated an arousal of her own feelings about herself, to her it was a statement about herself. . . that she had doomed her daughter, that there was something unfixable about her. . . The enmeshment and confusion with her daughter had reached a level that was psychotic."
Dr Lynn Gibbs remained impassive. Her life now is in the Central Mental Hospital, lived in a locked room, marked out by medication, occupational therapy, a treadmill, visits from her husband and "occasionally" from her son, Gearóid, aged 13 when his mother killed his only sibling.