A Co Westmeath woman has denied implicating her mother in her father’s killing to disguise her own guilt.
Veronica McGrath spent today being cross-examined at the Central Criminal Court by lawyers for her ex-husband and mother, whom she claims she saw beat her father to death 23 years ago.
Vera McGrath (61) has pleaded not guilty to murdering her 43-year-old husband, Bernard Brian McGrath, at their home in Lower Coole, Westmeath, and then burying him beside the house.
Veronica McGrath's former husband, Colin Pinder (47) of Liverpool, England has pleaded not guilty to murder but guilty to the manslaughter on a date unknown between March 10th and April 18th, 1987.
Patrick Gageby SC, defending Mrs McGrath, put it to the 41-year-old that she'd readily portrayed herself as an innocent witness to the horrible events and had an easy run from the gardaí.
"By your failure to act, you might be more involved in your father's death," he said. "I suggest you placed your mother as a prime conspirator and painted yourself as the good guy when perhaps you aren't.
"I suggest you tend to be rather manipulative and you've implicated your mother to disguise your own guilt."
"I suggest you were not the vulnerable witness then or now and that it's not your mother who's dominant, but you," said Mr Gageby.
"That's not correct," she said.
She did not agree that her failure to tell gardaí in 1993 that she witnessed Pinder's first blow to her father was an example of her selective and subjective memory. "Only a calculating person wouldn't have mentioned the first blow in your presence," Mr Gageby said.
The witness denied that her actions might not be consistent with someone who was helpless or haunted by the events. "I am haunted by the events of that evening," she sobbed.
"I suggest you've spun a story which puts you in a good light and your mother in a bad light," said Mr Gageby.
"That's not true," she sobbed.
She denied that her father frequently threatened to kill her mother and put her in the septic tank.
She didn't know if her father threatened to use a new hatchet on her mother's head the night he died. She did not know if she would remember it, even if it was said.
Mr Gageby then suggested that she had a rose-tinted memory of her father and had actually made complaints about him as a teenager. She denied this.
He suggested that it was not her mother who put Colin Pinder up to killing her father. She denied this.
The trial continues.