Una Lynskey case to feature on ground-breaking 'Crimes and Confessions' series on Monday night

The murder near Ratoath of Una Lynskey just over 50 years ago is to feature in a new RTE series on miscarriages of justice which begins tomorrow night (Monday 10th January).

‘Crimes & Confessions’ is a ground-breaking true crime series that looks at three of the most notorious miscarriages of justice cases from the 1970s and 1980s and draws links between them.

Tuesday 12th October last marked 50 years to the day that Una Lynskey disappeared while walking home from the bus stop on Porterstown Lane, Ratoath, close to Rathbeggan.

Within a couple of months, the previously close-knit community would be mourning two deaths, 19 year-old Una, and her neighbour, Martin Kerrigan, also 19, killed in a fit of rage by those seeking to avenge Una’s death, but who had denied any involvement, as did his two other co-accused, Dick Donnelly and Martin Conmey.

Dick Donnelly had his manslaughter conviction overturned, and Martin Conmey was to spend three years in jail, only five years ago receiving an apology from the State in the High Court after his conviction for manslaughter was declared a miscarriage of justice.

It was a shocking and harrowing case which even through the mists of time still brings great pain to all involved, with three local men convicted of manslaughter of Martin Kerrigan and nobody ever brought to justice for the death of Una Lynskey.

Witnesses’ claims that a strange car was seen in the area that evening, that screams were heard close to Porterstown Bridge, and that a woman was seen struggling in a dark car, were never followed up properly by the investigation, and it was claimed that gardai ill-treated the three suspects in the Lynskey murder case and beat them into making confessions over a two-day period of incarceration at Trim Garda Station, which was denied by gardai.

Sarah McInerney, currently presenter of RTE Radio’s Drivetime, and Prime Time on television, featured the case in her book, ‘Where No One Can Hear You Scream’, in 2008, and said that, taken in its entirety, the case raises more questions than answers, the most pertinent of which is simply, what really happened to Una Lynskey on the night she disappeared? And is it possible that the truth has never been revealed?

“Among the stack of court transcripts, contradictory statements, and halting confessions, there is no clarity, only a muddy, potholed confusion,” she wrote.

The Lynskeys were left with no answers, and the Kerrigans with a cloud over the memory of their beloved son and brother.

They were two of a group of families who had relocated to the Porterstown Lane area of Ratoath parish from Co Mayo through the Land Commission in the late 1930s. The lane is a link road between the Dublin-Navan Road and the Fairyhouse Road, opposite the Rathbeggan Lakes complex.

Una had attended Ratoath National School, then the newly-built Rathbeggan National School (opposite the County Club on the Dublin Road), before boarding at the Convent of Mercy in Navan. After secondary school and her Leaving Certificate in 1970, she gained employment at the same Land Commission on Merrion Street in Dublin.

She travelled to and from Dublin on the bus, usually in the company of her cousin and neighbour, Ann Gaughan, the last known person to see her alive on that Tuesday evening.

When they parted company to go their separate ways on the lane, and Una didn’t arrive home to her own house within a short time, the alarm was raised immediately, particularly as Ann Gaughan’s father, Patrick, was among those who had heard screams in a nearby field.

A substantial number of witnesses also recall seeing a stranger driving a large dark Ford Zephyr in the area that evening, pulled up on the side of the road, and driving erratically. The driver was described as between 45 and 50 years, with a heavy set build and a reddish complexion, his hair going light at the front and grey at the sides and back.

One witness in particular recalled seeing what he thought was a woman struggling in the car.

However, the gardai never focused on those sightings, and instead they turned their attention on a local lad who drove a similar car, albeit a different, much brighter, colour - local man Dick Donnelly, and his friends, Marty Kerrigan and Martin Conmey.

Dick (23) worked for Kilbrew, Curraha farmer, Charlie Coyle, father of current Tayto Park owner, Raymond, who was working alongside Martin Conmey (20) that day pulling sprouts in his father’s fields. Dick picked up Martin from the field on his way home, and they headed for Kerrigans at The Bush. The lads were planning to go meet their girlfriends in Ratoath that evening, and did, arriving back to the scenes of distress and alarm in Porterstown later, and a crowd standing where they too had seen the mysterious Ford Zephyr parked up near a pylon earlier, although Dick thought it was a Ford Zodiac, similar but for different headlamps.

Una Lynskey would remain missing for two months, until on 10th December, farmer James Williams, clearing a drain on a road at the Wicklow mountains, noticed bushes where they shouldn’t be, and discovered a body underneath it. Una’s body was identified through jewellery given to her by her boyfriend, Patrick Kelly, who had last seen her the night before her disappearance.

About two weeks after her disappearance, the Garda ‘Murder Squad’ descended simultaneously on Donnelly, Conmey and Kerrigan, bringing them to Trim Garda Station for questioning. Within an hour, all three were in separate rooms at the station, being questioned closely. They were brought in at 10pm on Monday evening and not released until Wednesday night.

By the time they left the station with little or no sleep, both Martin Conmey and Marty Kerrigan had made some sort of confession to killing Una Lynskey. Dick Donnelly had not signed anything. What happened in those intervening 48 hours has been the source of much contention ever since.

All three men say they were physically and mentally abused by the gardai, a claim denied by every garda who was present at the time. It was Tuesday before the young men’s families realised they were being questioned at Trim. They visited them and later said they were shocked at their physical and mental condition. Mary Conmey, Martin’s sister, couldn’t believe the state of Martin and Dick when they arrived home. Donnelly and Kerrigan had to walk all the way home from Trim in the dark.

Now, the lads were back in the community where tensions were high. They were regarded as suspects by the Lynskeys, but the investigation didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Kerrigan, the youngest and most vulnerable of the three, was targeted, and when tensions did boil over one night, he was abducted during a roadside row, by James and John Lynskey and their cousin, driver John Gaughan.

On the way up to the mountains, he was beaten to within an inch of his life in the car, and left for dead in a ditch. Whether he was dead or not at the time of his dumping was the difference between the three being charged with murder or manslaughter. A sinister injury close to his scrotum which was determined to be inflicted after death meant that there was nothing to prove that he was actually dead when they left him in the mountains. The pathologist told the court that he died when something interfered with his breathing, causing asphyxia.

Sean Lynskey and John Gaughan were sentenced to three years in prison. James Lynskey, who was only 18, was sentenced to two years in St Patrick’s Institution.

A week before that murder trial began, Dick Donnelly and Martin Conmey were charged with the murder of Una Lynskey. In a way, while taken aback, the families saw it as a welcome development, as they hoped in the legal process, that the truth would come out.

So many different scenarios were presented to the court, with each man’s supposed admission contradicting the other. The strange man in the Ford Zephyr was discounted by the Prosecution early on, and witnesses who had previously thought it was Donnelly’s car now weren’t so sure. Una’s body was left in a pond, under a bridge in Lucan, had been hit by the car, was left in a ditch near a mountain.

The three young men, backed up by witnesses, stated that they never saw Una at all that night while driving on the road.

But after 12 hours of deliberations, the jury found the men not guilty of murder, but guilty of manslaughter, and they received jail terms of three years in prison. Dick Donnelly appealed his conviction, and was successful in overturning it. Because Conmey had signed a statement, and also because a former flatmate had claimed he admitted involvement in Una’s death, he was to serve most of his three years.

He was then to spend a lifetime fighting to have his conviction overturned.

In November 2010, the Court of Criminal Appeal overturned this conviction after finding that early statements taken from witnesses Martin Madden and Seán Reilly – which tended to favour Mr Conmey – were not disclosed to the defence and were “radically inconsistent” with later statements by the same witnesses and evidence given at the trial.

Arising out of the 2010 decision, Mr Conmey sought a declaration that his conviction was a miscarriage of justice. In 2014, the Court of Criminal Appeal said Mr Conmey was convicted on the basis he was involved in a joint enterprise with others. It said there was no incriminating evidence that Mr Conmey was involved in a joint enterprise.

This was because three original statements of other parties were suppressed by a person unknown, but connected with the prosecution.

On this narrow basis, the Court of Criminal Appeal found there had been a miscarriage of justice, and this led to the State apology in the High Court two years later.

But the case has left so many unanswered questions, and 50 years on, still casts a shadow over the area. The Lynskey family moved out of Ratoath while Sean and James were serving their sentences for killing Martin Kerrigan, exhuming Una’s body and bringing it with them.

The double tragedy and fall-out brought forged a closer bond amongst some of the other families. Dick Donnelly married Martin Kerrigan’s sister, Anne. Padraic Gaughan, who believed in the young men’s innocence since the start, and had fallen out with his Lynskey cousins as a result, married Martin Conmey’s sister, Mary.

Una Lynskey’s killer has never been brought to justice, and Martin Kerrigan died with a stain on his memory. There are those who are convinced that the killer - the strange man in the dark Ford Zephyr - was somebody who was able to influence the direction of the garda investigation away from his presence in Porterstown that fateful October evening.

‘Crimes & Confessions’ airs at 9.35pm on Monday on RTÉ One, featuring dramatic first-hand accounts from those who were there during this most turbulent time in Irish history, shining a light on the key witnesses involved and re-examining some of the most successful - and controversial- cases amid ongoing rumours of a Garda ‘Heavy Gang’.

For over 40 years, the existence of a Garda ‘Heavy Gang’ has been denied.

For the first time the series will draw links between cases and ask vital questions about accountability as some of the victims of injustice speak out after years of suffering.

Episode two revisits the infamous 1976 Sallins Mail Train robbery, where similar allegations again emerge against some of the same detectives. It paints a picture of the climate at the time and focuses on the role of the non-jury Special Criminal Court in the subsequent trials.

Episode three picks up the story in the 1980’s as further allegations emerge even after the international publicity surrounding the Sallins case. It also re-examines the Kerry Babies story, where the allegations of forced confessions were again made against some Gardai by Joanne Hayes and her family. It features interviews with those close to the story and one of the investigating Gardai.