Body in Kildare canal trial: Prosecution says man shot friend ‘in an act of premeditation’.

The prosecutor in the trial of a man, who shot his friend and dismembered his remains, has told the jury that the deceased was not just murdered but executed ‘in an act of premeditation’.

Sean Gillane SC was giving his closing speech yesterday, Thursday November 1 in the Dubliner’s murder trial at the Central Criminal Court.

Paul Wells Snr (50) of Barnamore Park, Finglas has admitted shooting dead fellow Dubliner Kenneth O’Brien and dismembering his body. However, the father-of-five has pleaded not guilty to murdering the 33-year-old at his home in Barnamore Park on 15th or 16th January, 2016.

He claims that the deceased had wanted him to murder Mr O’Brien’s partner, so that he could take their child back to Australia, where he had previously lived.

He told gardai that Mr O’Brien had brought a gun to his house for this purpose on the evening of the 15th but that he didn’t want to do it. He said this resulted in a scuffle between them, that the gun fell, they both tried to get it, but that he got to it first and shot his friend in the back of the head.

He said that he then panicked, ‘chopped him into pieces’ with a chainsaw Mr O’Brien had lent him, put his torso into Mr O’Brien’s suitcase and dumped it in the Grand Canal.

Mr Gillane said that there was a body of evidence, which established beyond any doubt that ‘Mr Wells Snr murdered Kenneth O’Brien and did so in an act of premeditation’.

He described the suggested plan to murder Eimear Dunne as ‘a nonsense wrapped in self-defeating contradictions’.

He noted that Mr O’Brien had told their young son that he was moving home to Ireland for good.

He questioned Mr Wells’ story that, having decided to make himself a single parent through an act of violence, Mr O’Brien had arrived at the accused man’s house with nothing but the clothes on his back and a gun in his waistband.

He reminded the jury of the pathologist’s finding of a contact entry wound, where the gun had been pressed up against the back of Mr O’Brien’s head.

“That, I suggest, is overwhelming evidence even on its own of an intention to kill or cause serious injury,” he said.

He addressed Mr Wells’ admissions to gardai three days after his arrest. The jury had seen DVD recordings of the relevant interview, where he had accepted ‘physical responsibility for what he’d done’.

Mr Gillane said that one might well think that this was done out of empathy or sorrow. However, he said that this ‘was not the product of conscience’ but was as a result of ‘the crushing weight of evidence’.

“Those tears are not tears of sorrow. We can also cry because we’re caught,” he said. “What you see in that interview thereafter is Mr Wells doing what he’s being doing since the moment he pulled the trigger on Kenneth O’Brien: exercising control, control and manipulation from the very word go.”

He said that from the moment the accused had engaged with gardai, he had sought to demonise Kenneth O’Brien. The barrister said that he wasn’t going to do the opposite.

“I'm not going to try to suggest he was a saint,” he said. “Like all of us, we’re somewhere on that spectrum, a combination of good and bad.”

He accepted that Mr O’Brien was someone, who could hurt people, be it through affairs or meanness.

“So what? That’s a smokescreen,” he suggested. “Just because you’re having affairs or whatever you're up to doesn’t dilute your essential humanity. Nor does it mean what’s suggested to you, a plan to murder the mother of your child.”

He spoke of the accused man’s account of Mr O’Brien’s arrival to his home that Friday evening, having not been there in more than a year.

“Yet he’s chosen to arrive on the one day the matriarch of the house is away in Cork with his son, which was planned and known about by Paul Wells,” he said. “A stroke of bad luck for Kenneth O’Brien.”

“He’s also chosen the one day that Gary Wells isn’t at home,” he said of the accused man’s adult son.

He reminded the jury of this son’s testimony that his father had told him not to be at home that evening because he was expecting a friend.

“Perhaps that involves a question of ur toleration of coincidence,” said Mr Gillane.

He recalled Mr Wells’ account of his scuffle with Mr O’Brien and his description of both of them ‘flipping head over heels to arrive in a row-your-boat position’.

“Mr Wells now in interview has to explain how it is that someone gets shot in the back of the head in self defence,” he remarked.

“I say to you, not only was Mr O’Brien murdered, he was in effect executed efficiently with a single bullet to the back of his head and, after being killed in that way, his body was desecrated,” he concluded, asking for a guilty verdict.

However, Michael O’Higgins SC, defending, questioned whether a prepared killer would have carried out the crime and the cover-up as his client had.

He drew the jury’s attention to what Mr Wells had told gardai had gone through his head as he sat on a beer crate in his shed after the shooting. He claimed he had wondered how he would get the body through the family home without destroying the house and he had worried that someone could walk in at any minute; there was evidence that this was a house where people regularly called unannounced.

“If you were going to kill somebody in the backyard of your own house..., you wouldn't wait until you were sitting on the beer crate to pose all these questions,” suggested the barrister. “Surely, you would have posed them before you carried out your plan.”

He noted that his client had involved three of his adult children in the cover-up. He had rung his daughter, asking for ratchet straps, had asked one son to dispose of the chainsaw and another to remove rubbish from the scene.

“If you really were planning to kill somebody, would you be turning to three members of your family to get you out of this mess?” he asked. “I suggest no.”

He noted that the disposal of the remains involved two trips to the canal near Celbridge.

“What state of preparedness would involve a situation where you took the torso away at 5am and left the other body parts and did not dispose of them until 7pm?” he asked. “What sort of plan would that be?”

He suggested that the argument that this was a planned event did not add up.

“You could not even be satisfied that this was probably the case, never mind satisfied beyond reasonable doubt,” he said.

He then outlined a number of factors which he said supported his client’s case about the alleged murder plot to kill Eimear Dunne. He reminded the jury that Mr Wells claimed that the alleged killing was to take place on Friday, 15th January.

He noted that the CCTV system in Mr O’Brien’s and Ms Dunne’s home had been working day and night from midnight 7th January until the early hours of 13th January. It then operated for about a minute on 14th January before going blank.

Its access code had also been changed by the time Ms Dunne tried to check it after her partner went missing. She agreed in court that the only person who could have changed it was Mr O'Brien.

“There's no evidence before the court as to how or why this machine stopped,” said Mr O’Higgins.

He noted that Ms Dunne’s birthday party, scheduled for 15th January, had been cancelled at Mr O’Brien’s request because he said he had to work.

“But it was an out and out lie, and to this day nobody has ever been able to shed any light whatsoever on why that lie was told,” he said, reminding the jury of his boss’s evidence that the work had been cancelled.

He noted that Mr O’Brien had got keys cut on 14th January.

“Another odd coincidence, the CCTV is out, he’s cutting keys, the party is changed and the rationale for changing it is non-existent work,” he remarked.

He pointed to the removal of the numbers of two of Mr O’Brien’s bosses from Ms Dunne’s phone.

“That is an extraordinary thing to do, to go to your partner’s handset and start deleting numbers,” he suggested. “It’s not normal. It’s not eccentric. You can’t file it under odd behaviour.”

He said that it wouldn’t be unreasonable to speculate that one reason might be to prevent Ms Dunne finding out that he wasn’t working that Friday.

He pointed to what he said were Mr O’Brien’s multiple phones and the fact that his passport was missing from the safe, where it was usually kept.

Mr O’Higgins will continue his speech this morning.