A WOMAN gave a detailed account to gardaí in 1993 of how she helped beat her husband six years earlier, and burning, breaking and burying his dead body in their garden, her trial for murder has heard.
The Central Criminal Court heard the Garda statements of Vera McGrath (61), who pleads not guilty to murdering 43-year-old Bernard Brian McGrath at their home in Lower Coole, Westmeath.
Her former son-in-law, Colin Pinder (47), of Liverpool, England, has pleaded not guilty to murder but guilty to manslaughter on a date between March 10th and April 18th, 1987.
Supt Aidan Glacken said he interviewed Ms McGrath in November 1993 after receiving a statement implicating her.
“I said to Colin and Veronica he was still fighting with me. I passed the comment I wished he was dead,” she recalled. “Colin said: ‘Well I’ve the very thing to do it.’ He took this thing out of the wardrobe, a sort of silver bar . . . about a foot long. Colin then said that we’d all have to agree on it before he’d do it,” she continued. “We all shook hands on it.”
She said she saw her husband lying on the ground and knew that Mr Pinder had hit him. She claimed that he told her that she would have to hit him too.
“I was terrified out of my mind. Colin offered me something to hit Brian with. I hit Brian lying on the ground with what Colin had. Colin was shouting at Brian: ‘Why did you hit Ronnie all those years?’ I heard Brian saying sorry,” she said.
Her husband then burst out of the shed, she said. “We all went after Brian. Colin caught up with him. Colin was hitting him with a slash hook. Colin called to me and said it was all over,” she said.
“I heard a rattling, gurgling noise. I associated this with a dying gasp. At this stage I knew my husband was dead,” she said. She then returned to the kitchen.
The trial continues.