Chapter 10: Assault on Ann Marie

JJ Muggivan

After leaving Mountshannon, Brendan went to live in Whitegate with a man named Denis Fahy, and his son, Derek. Shortly afterwards, Denis Fahy drowned.

Denis Fahy went swimming late in the evening or night of 2 September 1992, having been in the village of Whitegate with his friends. It seems that some friends challenged him to jump in the harbour at Williamstown Quay. The water was about nine feet deep.

Brendan and Derek Fahy were present. After he had jumped in the water, it became immediately apparent that Denis Fahy was in difficulty. His son jumped to help him while Brendan O’Donnell ran for help. Efforts to save the man failed and his body was recovered next day by Denis Tirnan and some locals. Brendan was a good swimmer and seemed to have felt some guilt at not having done more to save his friend. He later commented a number of times that he regretted not trying to do more. A number of news reports suggested that Brendan had problems with drinking. These reports are not true. He rarely had more than a couple of drinks on any occasion. When he drank, he would sing and, according to his sister, he wasn’t a bad singer. During one of her visits to Dundrum, she heard him give a fairly good rendition of ‘The Fields of Athenry’. When Denis Fahy drowned, Brendan moved in with Denis Woods in Mountshannon. After staying there for a while, he moved to Ballinasloe and into an apartment near his sister, Ann Marie.

He next left for England, going to Wolverhampton. Not long after arriving there, he was arrested for snatching a woman’s handbag. He was imprisoned for a while and when he was released, he returned to Whitegate.

What follows is Ann Marie’s account of his return:

An argument broke out one night in the family home in Whitegate after Brendan had returned from England the previous night. His father had gone outside to lock the car. I knew I could hear people talking outside but I didn’t know for a while it was Brendan. He came inside the house to the sitting room and I was surprised to see him. He was after telling us he had to leave England

and come home to Ireland, as there were fellas after him and maybe even the police in England. He was after stealing an old lady’s handbag.

After he had told us all of the story of what had happened, with a lot of persuasion of my father, I asked him to let Brendan stay that night as it was bitterly cold outside and where else had he to go.

In the end, he let him stay but told him that in the morning he would have to go. I made up a bed for him in my room and prepared something for him to eat, as he was hungry.

The next morning, he asked him was he ready to leave the house and my father told him he would bring him some distance in the car. He made it quite clear to him he didn’t want him in the house and it would be best for everyone if he left. He drove him a few miles from Whitegate and when he [Brendan] got out of the car he hitched a lift to my grandparents in Eyrecourt. He went to see his grandmother and later he went to see Fr Neylon.

I rang my grandmother later that night to see did he arrive there and she said he did.

She also said that herself and other family relatives would drop Brendan back up to Whitegate that night as there was little they could do to help him and he was very much his father’s responsibility and it was up to him to take care of him as he was his father.

They eventually did arrive in Whitegate with him and my father was angry with them for bringing him up after he told him that morning to go.

Then an argument took place and he told Brendan to leave the house once again, as he was showing him the way to the front door, and he threw him out of the house. Brendan’s words were, ‘Fine, I’ll go. 1 know you don’t care about me anyway’, and he gave his father a good kick in the shins.

Before he left that night, I gave him some money and asked him to let me know where he would be eventually when he got settled somewhere, as he left his home that night with nowhere to go and I did not know what was going to happen next. He told me he would keep in touch with me. I said goodbye to him and he left once again with his relatives, to go where nobody knew or seemed to care. I did, but I just couldn’t do anything to help him or I didn’t know exactly what I could do, nor neither did my grandmother know what to do. As far as I can remember back I

think he went back, again to Fr Neylon.

After the problems with his father, Brendan was able to get some more help from Fr Neylon and he moved into a flat in Portumna. He was soon followed to Portumna by Ann Marie, who began living in a flat in the same building close to him. This was in the autumn of 1992. He was now eighteen-and-a-half years old.

After moving into the flat in Portumna in the autumn of 1992, Brendan dated a girl for a while, but she eventually broke off the relationship.

Ann Marie reports that her brother was now clearly, and obviously, not well. She gave me a detailed description of Brendan’s assault on her and her baby, with a knife. She later described this attack for the court during his trial.

It is revealing to contrast that event with her account of what happened between them a few months earlier on his return from England, and which shows her affection for her brother. She had already chosen him to be her baby’s godfather.

Did Brendan become fully delusional after the drowning of Denis Fahy and the rejection by his father on his return from England? Was it after the events of late 1992 that Brendan truly crossed the threshold from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to a psychotic disorder?

The attack on Ann Marie has new, and ominous, features.

Ann Marie was staying in a flat with her seven-month-old child, and Brendan had a room nearby. One day, Brendan came to his sister’s apartment and asked her to make him a sandwich.

She said that she was feeding her baby and that she would prepare the sandwich as soon as she finished. He said that if she didn’t make the sandwich immediately, he would get a knife and stab her. With these words, he suddenly snatched a knife off the table and swung it directly at her face. She managed to get her hands up in front of her, grabbing his hand with both of hers. She forced his hand downwards causing the knife to penetrate her leg just below her knee.

She later showed me the knife, which is still part of her kitchen cutlery. It was about six inches long, had a black handle, and a stainless-steel blade. It looked like a steak knife except that the

blade was not serrated. It was sharp and was pointed.

Ann Marie escaped into the bedroom with her baby but was unable to get the door locked behind her to prevent her brother from following her. When he entered the bedroom, he kept her cornered and away from the door. He sat on the window ledge and pulled out a switchblade. He began flicking the blade in and out of its handle.

Brendan ordered Ann Marie not to move. She had placed the baby on the bed and was standing some distance away. He stabbed the switch-blade into the mattress beside the baby’s head several times, cutting the duvet. The blade hit very close to the baby’s head.

Throughout the following hours of captivity, Ann Marie made numerous attempts to manipulate an escape with her baby. Brendan responded to all of her efforts by saying that she was only trying to outsmart him in order to escape.

The incident lasted up to three or four hours. The baby got hungry and began to cry. Ann Marie noticed that Brendan was beginning to appear frightened about how it might end up for him. He seemed to have become aware that he was now in a predicament that he was going to have trouble getting out of.

She suddenly said that she could hear footsteps outside the door. Brendan walked out of the bedroom. As soon as he was outside, Ann Marie managed to get the door locked. She began to shout for aman who lived downstairs. After a while, she was able to get his attention. She tried to warn him to be very careful about coming up the stairs, that her brother had a knife, and that he could be very dangerous.

She recalled that the man, very coolly, walked up the stairs, whistling. When Ann Marie opened the door, her neighbour very casually asked her what was going on. At this point, she decided that she could safely leave the room with the baby.

She went downstairs with the man and began making plans to call somebody to get help. Suddenly, Brendan, who she thought had left the apartment, came out with an axe. She later discovered that he had both a hatchet and an axe in his room, and that he had had them for some time.

Ann Marie went to the garda station. She was told that the guards were out somewhere and that there was no one at the station except the sergeant. She was in a state of panic at what she thought unfairly was a lack of urgency on the part of the sergeant. She told him that Brendan was crazy and could be roaming around, and that he had watched her coming down the street. He had been walking on the other side of the street and he had tried to persuade her not to do anything. She tried to communicate as best she could that Brendan was dangerous and that something needed to be done quickly.

The sergeant made arrangements for her to go to a local doctor, Dr Fionnuala Kennedy, because of the stab wound below her knee. She went to the doctor. Upon hearing her account of what happened, Dr Kennedy made arrangements to have Brendan committed to Ballinasloe Hospital.

This incident happened in 1992 at the end of September or the beginning of October. It was within weeks, or at the most a couple of months, of the drowning of Denis Fahy. It was about one year and eight months before the killings.

Brendan was picked up and taken to St Bridget’s Hospital in Ballinasloe. On his arrival at the hospital, there was confusion as to who should sign the committal orders. Ann Marie agreed that if they asked his father to sign the committal orders, he might refuse, and if Brendan ever discovered that his father had signed the committal orders, he might eventually harm his father.

Ann Marie signed the committal papers but did not tell her brother that she had done so. He believed that the guards had signed the papers and he was not told otherwise.

According to Ann Marie, Brendan ‘had a very powerful animosity toward guards’. He always referred to them as the ‘dirt-bags’. When he was screaming at her from the other side of the street, when she was on her way to the garda station, he had kept shouting, ‘Don’t go to the dirt-bags!’

Ann Marie was shocked a couple of weeks later to find that her brother had been released from the hospital and was back in the neighbourhood. She was more shocked when she heard a report — attributed to a nurse from Ballinasloe who was visiting people in the community — that Brendan had convinced the hospital staff that he was mentally stable but that she was the one with

problems.

He had reportedly elaborated on his belief that his sister had been trying to poison him and, apparently, had told a convincing story about her being insane. It was reported during Brendan’s trial that he told staff at Ballinasloe that his sister put poison in milk he was about to drink. Ann Marie worried for some time that people from Ballinasloe Hospital might come to pick her up and have her committed.

While in Ballinasloe Psychiatric Hospital, Brendan was diagnosed as having paranoid ideation. This was his second trip to Ballinasloe, the first having been with Tony about three-and-a-half years earlier. The hospital appears to have done a very limited assessment and did not interview his sister. Ann Marie believes that Dr Kennedy was not interviewed either.

Dr Kennedy gave evidence at the trial that she had asked gardai to take Brendan to the psychiatric hospital. She regarded him as a danger to Ann Marie, her child, himself and anyone he might meet. She had first encountered him in late September 1992 when he had come to her surgery. He was eighteen at the time and had given her a brief life history.

Dr Kennedy recalled that Brendan had phoned her late on the night of 12 November 1992, and had asked her to come to his sister’s flat. He told the doctor that Ann Marie had fallen off a chair while putting up curtains. When the doctor called to the flat, Brendan met her outside and followed her in. He closed the door behind them and stood at it with his arms folded. She felt wary about him and thought that he had a strange attitude.

The doctor said that she found bruising on Ann Marie’s side and that Ann Marie repeated Brendan’s story about having fallen while putting up curtains.

When Brendan attacked his sister with the knife, Dr Kennedy treated her for a puncture wound to her knee. Ann Marie admitted on that occasion that she had not fallen off the chair on 12 November, but had been attacked by her brother. Brendan had accused her of making duplicate keys to his flat and had punched her. He had given the same reason for stabbing her.

Prior to giving her testimony at Brendan’s trial, Ann Marie realised that Brendan had never found out who had signed the committal orders for Ballinasloe Hospital. She realised that he was going to hear who it was for the first time when she testified. She checked to make sure that she was safe in the courtroom before giving this particular piece of testimony.

When she finished with this testimony, Ann Marie decided to look at her brother to see what impact it had had on him. She was surprised to see an amused expression on his face, as if to acknowledge that she had outsmarted him.