Up until October 14th, 2004, Pádraig Nally had led a simple life. He lived on the same small Mayo farm on which he and his only sibling, Maureen, a teacher, had been born and reared. In the months before John Ward was killed Pádraig Nally had become increasingly agitated and fearful, writes Kathy Sheridan.
Last July a Co Mayo jury of seven women and five men brought in a verdict of manslaughter against Nally after he had been charged with the murder of John Ward, a 43-year-old Traveller and father of 11.
In a Castlebar courtroom packed with supporters of the 61-year-old farmer, Mr Justice Paul Carney had removed the option of acquittal from the jury, ruling that "the amount of force [ used to kill John Ward] cannot be objectively justified".
The forensic evidence was clear and supported by what Nally's counsel called his own "ungarnished, painfully honest" statements.
At about 2pm on October 14th, 2004, in Nally's yard, John Ward was first shot in the buttock. State Pathologist Prof Marie Cassidy said it was "a flesh injury, though it would have affected his mobility". In the ensuing struggle he received a "heavy beating" about the head with a thick stick.
As Ward was "trying to run or limp away", in the words of prosecution counsel Paul O'Higgins, Nally went off to reload before firing the fatal shot.
Prof Cassidy said: "The trajectory [ of the shot] suggested that the gunman was above him . . . and that [ the victim] may have been bent over or was crouching down".
The question before the jury was why a shy bachelor farmer, described by a procession of friends and neighbours as "very kind and honest" and "an outright gentleman", had suddenly become a killer.
Although Pádraig Nally had led a simple life until that day, he was no recluse. He enjoyed the occasional pint and game of cards and was a familiar and popular figure at sheep marts and agricultural shows. Maureen believed he didn't like being on his own since their mother died and that he went to the marts "as much to mix with people as to follow up prices . . ."
John Ward, by contrast, was a man with a troubled psychiatric history, who had racked up 12 separate sets of convictions and was due to face charges of swinging a slash-hook at gardaí investigating the theft of a fireplace. Although his 18-year-old son, Tom, insisted that his father "wasn't a fighting man", the court heard that Ward had been involved in bare-knuckle boxing from a young age and had inflicted "serious injuries on others".
He lived with his wife and family on a halting site near Galway city and was "trying to make a living by selling old cars", according to Tom, who was driving him on the day he died.
Meanwhile, Pádraig Nally and some of his neighbours had been concerned about break-ins in their isolated area. Those around him noticed that Nally was increasingly "agitated and fearful" for his own safety and property.
Four years before, plates and blankets had been taken in a burglary of his house. In February 2004 his door was kicked in and a chainsaw stolen from a back room. His father's old, single-barrelled shotgun, which Nally always kept beside his bed, had been kicked out of place and under the bed and for a time he thought it had been stolen. After that, he moved it outside to the barn. "I was afraid I might be shot in my own bed."
Meanwhile, more farm implements were going missing. "After the chainsaw, they were making a barn of my house," he told detectives.
His insecurity was heightened by incidents such as the dogs starting to bark in the early hours, a door latch being lifted, then the sound of a car driving away. He told the court he was continually fearful "that someone would come in the night and break me up".
He began to throw buckets of water in the dry clay at the gate, to get the footprints of callers in his absence and started to write down the registration numbers of strange cars. "He'd have the numbers ready when you'd pull up. They were written all over the house," said Michael Mellett, a neighbour.
The court exhibits included a pedigree bull catalogue where Nally had written the registration number 99CE499. This car was sighted twice in the area, once by both Nally and Joe Concannon, a friend of his, when it entered and left Nally's yard at speed, and again, a few weeks later, 1½kms away, by Concannon. "When I took up a paper on the Sunday after the accident," said Concannon, "I was able to identify Mr John Ward as one of the men [ in the car]".
There was evidence that those number plates were false and had gone missing from a breakers' yard outside Limerick. A few weeks before the killing, Nally claimed that the "same men" were at his house in a black Ford, asking for directions to the lake. And he claimed that these were the same men - John and Tom Ward - that he saw again in his yard in October. He reckoned that John Ward had "come over and back the road four or five times". Tom Ward agreed that he had driven 10 to 15 different cars in the previous six months but denied that he switched cars around so they could not be traced back to him.
Meanwhile, Pádraig Nally had taken to sitting in the shed, holding his shotgun, for up to five hours at a time. He was afraid to go out, and was sleeping little. The farm was being neglected, the turf wasn't being brought home or the sheep sheared.
The weekend before October 14th, when Maureen - who spent every weekend with him - left for home, he cried. "I felt that something was going to happen . . . If it didn't, I'd have to shoot myself the following weekend. The pressure had got to me."
During that same weekend John Ward was a psychiatric in-patient at University College Hospital Galway. He had been readmitted as an "emergency" on October 1st, with a history of impulsive aggressive outbursts and auditory hallucinations, including a man's voice telling him to kill himself and his wife. He was afraid "that he would attack before he was attacked", said consultant psychiatrist Sheila O'Sullivan.
There was evidence that he was pleasant to deal with and co-operating with medical advice. "When discharged, he was well settled," said Dr O'Sullivan.
Two days later, he turned up at Pádraig Nally's house having ingested a "cocktail of drugs - some legal, some not", in the words of Nally's senior counsel, Brendan Grehan. They included opiates, cannabis and tranquillisers.
Nally had had only an hour's sleep the night before. When he saw Tom Ward parked inside his gate, with the car facing out and the engine running, he asked him where his "mate" was. Told that he had gone "for a look around the back", Nally went after him, saying: "He won't be coming out again." Within minutes, John Ward was dead, his body thrown across a wall.
Summing up for Nally, Brendan Grehan told the jury: "Did he suddenly, after 60 years, become a murderer? . . . They [ John and Tom Ward] stole more than his chainsaw. They stole his peace of mind, they stole his contentment and something we all desire - a sense of security."