Chapter 19: Killer at Large

Tony Muggivan

On Friday morning, 6 May, Denis Woods and I started searching again. We warned some people to go home and stay indoors until it was over. At one point, Denis Woods asked me what we would do if we met Brendan and he had a gun. I told him that I had a loaded shotgun in the boot and that, if we met him in a car, I would try to ram him with my car. We now knew that Fr Walsh’s car had been found burned out and hanging over the edge of Williamstown Pier. We drove to Williamstown and saw the burned-out car. Brendan had tried to drive or push it over the edge. The car had got straddled when the front wheels went off the edge. I think it was a front-wheel drive and lost traction when the front wheels were off the ground. It seemed like a suicide attempt. Knowing Brendan, I thought that it might have been a fake attempt to distract pursuers, or an attempt to destroy evidence. The water was deep enough and dark enough to keep a car from being found for a very long time. The car was found close to where Brendan’s friend had been drowned a year and a half earlier. We began travelling all of the back roads. The back roads are very rough so the driving was slow. We met one woman cutting waste timber on the edge of the forest. We stopped the car and Denis advised her to go home as Brendan could harm her. She said that she had her saw to protect her. Denis told her that the saw wouldn’t be a lot of help to her and that she would be better off to go home and stay in the house. She saw that Denis was serious and she followed his advice. We met another couple out for a walk and gave them the same advice. We arrived home for food about 2 p.m. and, while we were eating, the guards phoned and asked me to help find Brendan. They offered to come to my house but I told them that I would prefer to meet in the garda station at about 3.30 p.m. I went to Scariff garda station and told them that I had searched all the holiday houses and had seen no sign that Brendan had been in any of them. I told them that Denis Woods and I had also been searching all day and that the only place we hadn’t searched was the forest around Cregg. I said that Brendan talked a lot about this area. I noticed that they had very clear maps of the entire area around Whitegate and Mountshannon. The officer in charge asked me to look at the

map and show them the area I was talking about. I did this and pointed to the Cregg area. He asked me if I would go to Cregg Wood with two guards and show them the area. They took me ina squad car to where I had pointed out on the map.

As we drove, I began to feel more certain that Cregg Wood was the best place to continue searching. I remembered Brendan telling me about a deer which he would often see in the field around his old family home. I also remembered that that it was in Cregg that he had burned Denis Tirnan’s car a number of years previously.

I directed the guard driving the car to go straight into the forest at Cregg Cross. On the way in, we passed a number of side roads before coming to one in particular.

At the entrance to this road, we turned left into the forest in the direction of Brendan’s old family home. The road was short and came to a dead end.

At the end of it, it was possible to walk a short distance through a part of the forest, and through a field or two, and come to Brendan’s original family home.

At the entrance to this short road, there was a dead pine tree partly blocking the entrance. We stopped the car at this spot. I did not know yet that we were within a few hundred yards of Brendan’s victims.

There were marks on the dead tree which showed that someone had driven a car over it. I said that no local driver would risk damaging a car by driving over the tree and that the person who had driven over it must have been in a great hurry.

There was a clear tyre track of a small car and some of the bark was stripped off the branch. I immediately believed that we had found the first tracks of Brendan and that this was where the search should be focused.

We removed the tree and drove in the side road about a hundred yards. We stopped and found more tyre tracks going all the way to the end of the road where there was a circular clearance for turning around.

As we searched around for signs, I shuddered when I looked and saw one guard about twenty yards away from me and realised that he had no gun. If the other guard had one, it was hidden. I remember saying to myself, ‘My God, if Brendan is around, we are all sitting ducks.’

I had a sudden, intense fear that we were in danger and that Brendan could be very close by.

I started to walk towards the guards when one of them said we should return to Scarriff and immediately arrange for a big search of the area. The full search was arranged for early the following morning, Saturday 7 May 1994. It was getting dark in the forest and it was very silent. I was glad to get out of there.

That night, my oldest son, Brendan, came home from Dublin. I felt a bit more secure. Everyone was in bed by midnight but I stayed up thinking about what to do next.

Brendan O’Donnell had not been seen by anyone that we knew of for over a week. The Rineys had not been seen since the previous Friday. Fr Walsh had not been seen since close to midnight on Tuesday night.

I stayed up all night and was in constant contact with Killaloe garda station.

I was wondering what Brendan was doing for food. I hadn’t heard of any car being stolen or of a break-in at any house. As there had been no report of a stolen car since Fr Walsh’s car had been found, it was likely that Brendan was on foot and probably looking for a car.

I phoned my brother several times and we talked of precautions. Like JJ, I was now convinced that we were searching for bodies and that Brendan was now more dangerous that ever.

Until now, I had never been sure that he might shoot me. But if he had killed his hostages, killing others would be likely if he needed to escape or get away. I believed that we were very close to the end of the search and that something significant was about to happen.

Having fastened all of the windows and turned off all the lights, I sat in the front room with the loaded shotgun in my hand. I didn’t have the dog any more. He was a good watchdog but he had died of old age. I remembered him barking the night Brendan had first come to my home.

I was listening carefully for sounds. I had never realised before how many sounds there are in a house with a family, but I had never previously listened so intently, or for so long.

I was very tired, having had almost no sleep since leaving Cologne on Tuesday. It was now Friday night and I was anxious to stay awake. I was afraid to lie down on the bed in case I would fall asleep.

I remembered the threatening phone call I had got years before. I remembered the guard telling me that Brendan would get me for having set him up to be arrested in my home.

My thoughts were suddenly disturbed by the sound of the phone. It was five minutes past one o’clock. The sound frightened the life out of me. I was sitting on the floor right beside the phone in the front room, as there are a lot of glass windows in that room.

I picked up the phone and said ‘Hello’ a couple of times. There was no response and no tones to put money in the box as there would have been if the call had been from a payphone. Then it went dead.

I wondered if Brendan had rung to see if I was home or to ask me to drive him out of the area. I called the guards in Killaloe and told them about the phone call. I told them of my belief that Brendan might make an attempt to get me to help him escape.

The guard who answered told me that they had my house under constant observation as they also expected that Brendan might make an effort to come to my home. He told me to be careful as all roads out of the area were closed and there was a lot of fire power out.

I assured him that I would not cooperate with Brendan in any way but wanted to have a plan in case he overpowered me. We made arrangements regarding what I should do if I were taken hostage. I described my car and told him that it was a left-hand drive. I told him that if I was driving, I would have four headlamps on, and if Brendan was driving, there would be only two lights on.

I believed that Brendan would not know about pulling the switch further out in order to put the four lights on. If there was shooting, I wanted the guards to know which side of the car to fire at.

The guard said that he would give this information to the guards on the roads. Just over an hour later, at 3.30 a.m. to be exact, I saw the lights of a car driving on the road a couple of hundred yards from the house.

I called the guards again and they told me that they had decided to be visible around my house. They told me not to worry. That didn’t help much.

Mary got up at about six o’clock and I lay down for a while. I dropped off to sleep. Mary called me at about seven and told me that Brendan had been spotted in the Whitegate area and that there was a guard in the kitchen wanting me to talk to him if contact was made. In case he put up resistance, the guards wanted me to try to persuade him to give himself up.

Mary told me that she would have a cup of tea ready as soon as I got up. The guard’s name was P.J. Higgins. I had known him for many years as he had once been stationed in Mountshannon.

He told me where the sighting had been and I was familiar with the area. I drove my own car to the place known as O’Donnell’s Cross. There were guards with guns everywhere. They showed me where he had been seen.

I went down a small road and started crossing through some fields, hoping to come on his tracks. I tried to stay as close as possible to stone fences. The guards had told me that there was no report of Brendan having a gun and that there were no reports of a stolen gun in the area. This didn’t mean very much as most people don’t check their guns very often.

My head was throbbing from lack of sleep and my stomach was paining me with nerves. I got over a fence and into a field where there were sheep. I noticed that all the sheep were lying down and jumped up when they heard or saw me. I said to myself that if someone had been here earlier, the sheep wouldn't be lying down as they are very alert and wary animals. Cattle will remain lying down, looking at a person with curiosity, but sheep will usually run all over the place.

There was a fresh drain with soft ground on each side. I went along this for a while but saw no tracks anywhere. I started back for O’Donnell’s Cross as I saw a helicopter circle overhead and

suddenly take off in one direction. I believed that Brendan had been sighted again somewhere else.

I hurried back at a run and saw a number of guards listening to the radio in a squad car. One guard told me that Brendan had taken Fiona Sampson hostage and that he had a car.

I went up on high ground with two guards but could see no sign of anything in the surrounding mountain area.

At that moment, a report came in that the car had been sighted. It was crashed and abandoned on the mountain road leading into Woodford in County Galway. I knew exactly where it was as it was near my mother’s family home. I had my own car and wondered for a while if I should take a short cut through the forest to the location of the crashed car. I decided against it since parts of the road were very bad and washed away from flooding. If I got bogged down, I could be stuck for hours.

I told the guards to follow me as they were not familiar with the area. We were there in about fifteen minutes. We had some delay as we met a timber lorry some distance from the crashed car.

We could see the helicopter circling in the distance. When we got to where the helicopter was, I asked a guard if they had seen Brendan. He said that Brendan was gone and still had Fiona Sampson.

This was the first time I lost my temper and, for a while, was verbally abusive to some guards. I now realise that this was completely out of order. At the time, I was angry because it seemed that the search was concentrated on the mountain, and entry to a nearby forest was still possible for Brendan. I believed that if he got into the forest, he would be free for days, or even weeks.

Not much later, news came in that Brendan had been captured and that his hostages, Fiona Sampson and Eddie Cleary, were safe.