Ireland Crimes and Mysteries

00:00 Hey guys, and welcome to another episode of Ireland Crimes and Mysteries. I want to thank you for joining me today. And if you're a returning listener, I want to say a big thank you for your continued support. 00:11 If this is your first time listening to my podcast, welcome. It's great to have you on board. 00:17 So without further ado, let's get started on today's story. 00:21 Ireland Crimes and Mysteries is presented by Go Loud, Ireland's leading audio publisher and the home of Irish podcasts. Find new episodes on the podcast first on the Go Loud app and on your favourite podcast platform. 00:36 Shortly after three o'clock on the morning of the 31st of August 2000, Barry Cassidy saw a young man lying on the ground outside the Burlington Hotel in Dublin. 00:47 Club Annabelle had closed about half an hour earlier and hundreds of young people had come out onto Sussex Road. There had been shouting and a number of fights and people were still trying to find taxis and make their way home. 01:00 Barry went over to the young man and tried to open his eyelids, but he got no response. 01:05 Another friend, Morgan Crean, tried to lift him. He wasn't responding to him either. 01:11 The young man was Brian Murphy. He was 18 years old and this was his first night in Club Annabelle. Only a few minutes earlier, Brian had been standing outside with his friends. There had been jeering. Brian accidentally bumped into another young man. Words were exchanged and Brian threw a punch. 01:30 Then a number of people moved towards him. 01:33 Witnesses described Brian being punched, knocked or pushed to the ground and kicked while he was down. 01:40 The Court of Criminal Appeal would later put the main part of the attack as somewhere between 15 and 30 seconds. Now Brian was lying there and nobody seemed to realise just how badly injured he was. 01:54 Barry helped carry him away from the crowd. A security guard put him in the recovery position and tried to give him some water while they waited for the ambulance. 02:02 The ambulance arrived about 20 minutes later. 02:06 When Brian reached St Vincent's Hospital at about half past three that morning, his heart had stopped. 02:12 Doctors immediately began trying to bring him back. 02:15 Hey guys, welcome back to Ireland Crimes and Mysteries. I'm Newells and thanks for joining me today. Now today's case takes us to Dublin and to August of 2000 for the death of 18-year-old Brian Murphy after a night out at Club Annabelle in the Burlington Hotel. 02:32 Brian lived in Clonsky in South Dublin with his parents, Dennis and Mary, his two sisters and his younger brother Robert. 02:40 He was the eldest of four children and his mother would later describe the family as extremely close. 02:47 Mary remembered Brian as confident and exuberant, full of cheer and very much larger than life. She never tried to make him out to be perfect. She said he could be naive. He did silly things and he did fabulous things as well. But he was her pride and joy. 03:03 At Brian's removal, Father Brian Lawless described him as a unique teenager who was full of life and vitality. 03:10 Hundreds of young people came to the Church of St Trays in Mount Merriam to say goodbye to him. 03:15 Brian was a keen footballer. Despite all the rugby and rugby school talk that would later surround the case, he wasn't particularly interested in rugby himself. He had played football for Mount Merriam Football Club and had also been involved in the Scouts. 03:32 He had grown up knowing many of the young people who would later give evidence about his final night. 03:37 Elizabeth O'Mahony was a lifelong neighbour and the sister of Brian's best friend. 03:43 Alan Leonard knew him through the Scouts and had played football with him at Mount Merion. 03:49 Michael Hussey had known Brian for several years and they had become closer during the last year of Brian's life. 03:56 Barry Cassidy became friendly with him while they were attending Bruce College. 04:01 And then there was Matthew Morne, one of Brian's closest friends, and the person who would go to Annabelle's with him that night. Brian and Matthew were working together in the storeroom at Brown Thomas during the summer of 2000. 04:15 Brian had previously attended St Conleth College and Gonzaga College before going to Bruce College. 04:21 He completed his leaving certificate that summer and was only 11 days away from his 19th birthday. 04:28 He'd been saving money and was hoping to travel to Australia. 04:32 So Brian was at that stage of life where school had just finished and everything else was still ahead of him. Work, travel, relationships and figuring out what he wanted to do next. 04:42 The photograph of Brian that appeared in most of the newspapers showing him smiling at the camera with the hood of his top pulled up. His mother would later speak about how difficult it was to sit through the trial and hear her son described as the deceased, the body or simply the person in the red shirt. 05:01 But the Brian she knew was the confident, cheerful and sometimes silly young man at the centre of their family. 05:08 On Wednesday the 30th of August 2000, Brian was at home getting ready to go out. He wore navy combat trousers, a white t-shirt with a red lacrosse polo shirt over it, brown loafers and a silver chain around his neck. 05:22 He met Matthew Moran at the UCD sports bar and they spent part of the evening there. They later took a bus to Apean Way where Matthew collected his ID from his younger brother before heading to the Burlington Hotel. 05:36 A barman they knew had arranged to put Brian on the guest list for Club Annabelle. Brian had never been there before. 05:43 Club Annabelle was attached to the Burlington Hotel on Sussex Road. 05:47 Wednesday was its student night, promoted under the name Libido. The club had a strict door policy and drinks promotion and it could attract between 700 and 800 people in one night. 05:59 The nightclub and the people who were there that night would later be talked about almost entirely through the schools they had attended. Black Rock, Gonzaga, St Conlet's, Ternour and Clongos were names that appeared again and again in newspapers. 06:17 A lot of young people knew each other, or at least knew of each other, through school, rugby, friends, family holidays, and the fairly small social circles they mixed in around South Dublin. 06:29 Brian had never attended Blackrock College or Clongos, but some of the later reporting made it sound as though this had been a fight between rival schools. 06:39 A senior Garda investigator later said there was no evidence that school or rugby rivalry had caused any of the violence. 06:47 Inside Annabelle's, there was a lot of drinking going on. That became a major problem when Gardie later had to work out what people had seen and how reliable their memories were. 06:57 Matthew Moran said he had consumed somewhere between five and ten pints before sharing two cannabis joints with a group that included Brian. 07:06 Other people who would later become important witnesses described drinking large amounts of beer, vodka, Alcopops and vodka mixed with Red Bull. 07:14 There was singing, joking and general messing among the different groups as well. There were several disagreements going on between different people and some of them had started before Brian became involved at all. 07:26 At around half past two that morning the nightclub closed and hundreds of young people came out together. 07:32 Some were waiting around the hotel entrance looking for their friends. Others were trying to get taxis heading towards Leeson Street to get food or making plans to continue the night somewhere else. 07:42 A lot of them had been drinking for hours. 07:45 People were standing around the entrance on Sussex Road and near the taxi rank. There was shouting and jeering and more than one confrontation was beginning in the crowd. 07:54 Brian came out of the club with Matthew and the people they had been drinking with. Now, before I name the four men who were charged, I need to be very clear about where each case finally ended. 08:04 Andrew Frame's manslaughter charge was withdrawn from the jury by the judge and the jury found him not guilty of violent disorder. 08:12 Dermot Lade was convicted of manslaughter and violent disorder but the manslaughter conviction was later quashed and retrial did not proceed. His violent disorder conviction remained. 08:25 Sean Mackey was convicted of violent disorder. His jury could not agree on manslaughter and the DPP decided not to try that charge again. 08:35 Desmond Ryan was found not guilty of manslaughter and his violent disorder conviction was later quashed. 08:41 We'll go through exactly how those different outcomes were reached as we continue through the podcast. 08:46 Now, not far from the hotel entrance, four or five young men were seen pointing and laughing in the direction of Andrew Frame, a former Blackrock College pupil. 08:56 Frame believed the hostility had something to do with people they knew from a family holiday in Spain. 09:02 Another young man, Michael Hussey, later admitted that he disliked Frame because of something he believed Frame had said during that holiday, although Frame denied saying it. 09:12 Frame became involved in a separate fight with Michael Hussey. Michael later admitted that he had struck Frame from behind. 09:20 While that was happening, Brian accidentally bumped into another young man called Sean Mackey. 09:25 Words were exchanged between them and Brian punched Mackey. Brian's punch struck Sean Mackey in the face. Michael Hussey later told the trial that four more people then moved towards Brian. 09:37 What happened next was over very quickly but the people who saw it gave slightly different accounts depending on where they had been standing and which part of it they'd seen. Paul Amoroso initially thought he was looking at two groups of young men fighting each other. It was only when he got a better view that he realised several people were attacking one person and he recognised that person as Brian. 10:00 Another witness, Alan Leonard, saw Brian throw a punch and then fall heavily to the ground. 10:06 He said Brian was kicked three or four times around his upper body and shoulder area while he was down. 10:13 Michael McFadden saw a group argument break out and described a young man being punched and kicked in both the body and the head. 10:20 Morgan Crean saw Brian falling as people ran towards him and began kicking him. 10:26 Maeve Kenny believed there was around six men repeatedly kicking Brian after he fell, although witnesses gave different estimates of how many people were involved. 10:36 Marie Flavin remembered hearing what sounded to her like a cheer before seeing a person in a red shirt coming out of the crowd. 10:44 John Paul Lynch described Brian as motionless and badly beaten after the people around him moved away. 10:51 As I said, the Court of Criminal Appeal later described the main part of the attack as lasting somewhere between 15 and 30 seconds. There was other fighting and shouting going on for longer, but the serious violence against Brian happened in less than half a minute. 11:06 The accounts differed, but they did have one thing in common. Brian had become isolated from his friends. He was knocked or pushed to the ground and more than one person kicked him while he was lying there. 11:18 The exact number of people involved has never been established. 11:21 Witnesses also disagreed about where the cakes landed, who had delivered them and the order in which everything happened. And some of the people trying to describe those seconds had been drinking very heavily. Now... 11:34 Drinking was a normal part of a night out for a lot of young people at the time. Having a few drinks before heading into town and then more when you got there wasn't unusual. 11:44 But the amount some of the witnesses had consumed became important when they were asked to remember exactly what had happened. 11:52 Morgan Crean said he had consumed six pints of Carlsberg and four vodka and Red Bulls. 11:57 David Cox, another important witness, described drinking five large cans and an egg of vodka before going to Animals, followed by four pints and two Alka-Pops inside the club. 12:08 Cox didn't consider himself very drunk but the amount he had consumed became an obvious issue when his memory and identification evidence were examined during the trial. Other witnesses had also been drinking for most of the evening. That didn't automatically mean their evidence was untrue but they were being asked to remember a very short chaotic incident in poor conditions with a large crowd all around them. Now, by the time people began trying to help Brian, some of those involved in the fighting were already moving away. 12:39 Barry Cassidy carried Brian across the road to get him out of the crowd. 12:44 Desmond Ryan later helped move him back towards the hotel grounds while they waited for medical help. 12:49 Kenneth McAndrew said they tried to get a taxi to take Brian to hospital, but the driver refused because he didn't want blood in the car. Barry Cassidy later said that as he remembered it, the ambulance crew initially thought Brian was simply very drunk and hesitated before taking him. 13:06 Brian was taken to St Vincent Hospital, where Dr Nick Hussain and the medical team tried to resuscitate him. At 4.57 that morning, Brian was pronounced dead. 13:18 Professor John Harbison, who was the state pathologist at the time, carried out the post-mortem examination. He found multiple injuries to Brian's face and head. He described evidence of considerable violence and said the injuries weren't consistent with Brian simply falling and striking his head off the ground. 13:37 There was bleeding and swelling around the brain and blood had entered Brian's lungs. 13:42 Professor Harbison gave the cause of death a cerebral oedema, which is swelling of the brain, complicated by the inhalation of blood into the lungs. 13:52 In his opinion, the injuries had been caused during the assault. But he couldn't point to one particular punch or kick and say that that was the injury that killed Brian. There was no footwear or sole print found on Brian's head and no single injury could be identified as the fatal one. The injuries had to be considered together. Brian's blood alcohol level was recorded as 132 milligrams per 100 milliliters of blood. 14:19 Professor Harveston said that in the context of his work as a pathologist, he didn't regard that as an excessive level. 14:26 Witnesses had said Brian shared cannabis joints during the night, but no drugs were found in his body during the post-mortem examination. 14:34 So, from the beginning, Gardie knew Brian had been subjected to a serious group assault. What they didn't know was which injury had caused his death or who had inflicted it. 14:44 They had hundreds of people to trace, dozens of witnesses who had seen at least part of the disorder and an attack lasting less than half a minute to reconstruct. 14:57 The investigation began with a scene that was about as difficult as it could have been. Hundreds of people had left Annabelle's at almost the same time. There had been several separate confrontations outside and by the time Gardie arrived, many of the people who had been there were already gone. 15:14 Investigators had to work backwards. They used the club's guest information and security footage to identify people who had attended. They examined hours of video, drew maps of the area and looked at details like the lighting and even the weather because all of those things could affect what a witness had been able to see. 15:33 The figures vary because some reports were counting people, some were counting statements and some included repeat interviews. But the scale is clear. Close to a thousand people were traced or interviewed. Some reports put the number of interviews as high as 1,200 and the inquest later heard that more than 800 statements were taken. The problem wasn't a lack of witnesses. It was that they had seen different parts of a very short attack in a crowded, badly lit area after a night of heavy drinking. 16:04 Some knew the people involved and some didn't. Some saw Brian standing while others saw him after he fell. And a number of them originally thought they were looking at a fight between two groups rather than several people attacking one person. 16:19 There were disturbing details in those accounts. Paul Mooney described an unidentified man running back towards Brian and delivering what he called a flying kick before moving away again. 16:30 Paul Carl saw one man swinging punches at a taller man before another person ran in and punched the taller man in the face. 16:38 At that point, he said, the whole place erupted. 16:42 Matthew Moran remembered a deep cut to Brian's chin damage to his teeth and blood around his nose and mouth other witnesses described punches being thrown across the crowd people kicking someone on the ground and somebody apparently boasting about having started the trouble but hearing a remark in a noisy crowd was one thing proving who said it what they meant and what they had actually done was an entirely other thing Four young men were arrested in early morning operations on the 26th of September 2000 and questioned at Dunnybrook and Harcourt Terrace Garda Station. 17:19 In February 2001, a Garda file recommending manslaughter charges was sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions. The case wouldn't come to trial until January of 2004. 17:31 There was another event from the morning after Brian died that became a major part of the public discussion. 17:37 Dermot Lade and his friend Alan Dalton went to Black Rock College, where they had both been pupils. They met the principal, Alan McGinty, who advised them to write down what they remembered while it was still fresh. 17:50 McGinty and a priest at the school, Father Tom Nash, signed the accounts. 17:55 At the trial, McGinty denied that he was trying to protect Black Rock College's reputation. The meeting happened and it was understandable that people asked why former pupils had gone back to their old school before going to the Gardaí. 18:08 But no court found that the school had organised a cover-up, coached witnesses or interfered with evidence. The questions around that meeting would later become mixed up with much wider assumptions about class and privilege. 18:23 Four men eventually stood trial. Andrew Frame, Dermot Laid, Sean Mackey and Desmond Rhine. 18:30 All four pleaded not guilty to manslaughter and violent disorder. The charges were the same, but the evidence against each man wasn't and neither were the final outcomes. 18:41 The trial opened at Dublin Central Criminal Court on the 13th of January 2004 before Judge Michael White. It lasted for more than six weeks with over 100 witnesses reported to have given evidence. 18:54 The two charges asked the jury to answer different questions. 18:58 Manslaughter was about criminal responsibility for Brian's death. Violent disorder under Section 15 of the Criminal Justice Public Order Act 1994 applies when three or more people who are present together use or threaten unlawful violence and their conduct taken together would make a reasonable person fear for their own safety. 19:18 Each person convicted must also have intended to use or threaten violence or been aware that his own conduct might be violent. That difference was at the heart of the case. The prosecution said the evidence showed group violence against Brian but it couldn't identify one punch or kick as the fatal injury and Professor Harbison couldn't identify the person who caused it. 19:42 So for the manslaughter charge the prosecution relied on a common purpose argument. As a person who joined in the group violence could be held responsible for the death that followed even if the state couldn't prove he personally delivered the fatal blow. 19:57 the jury still had to decide whether that case had been proved against each man beyond a reasonable doubt. 20:04 The jury heard again about the drinking, the jeering, the accidental bump and Brian's first punch. It also heard how quickly everything escalated. 20:14 There was no one neat sequence. The evidence came in pieces from people who had different views of the scene. 20:20 David Cox said he saw Dermot Laid throwing punches and later saw a group kicking Brian. Cox also said Laid appeared shocked afterwards and showed him a cut on his hand. 20:31 As we heard earlier, Cox had consumed a considerable amount of alcohol that night, so his ability to observe and remember was closely examined. 20:41 Some of the statements made by Laid's co-accused also contained allegations about Laid's actions. They went further than the prosecution's own witness evidence against him, and they would become extremely important on appeal. 20:56 During the trial his name was replaced in those statements with the label Mr A. The problem was that everybody could still work out who Mr A was. 21:06 Sean Mackey accepted that Brian had punched him first. In his Garda statement Mackey admitted striking Brian in the head and giving him one kick while Brian was on the ground but he denied kicking him in the head. 21:20 Elizabeth O'Mahony said Mackey told her about two weeks later that he had kicked Brian. A taxi driver, William Quigley, gave more damaging evidence about a conversation he said he overheard. The defence challenged Quigley's account and argued that he had heard fragments and put them together incorrectly. 21:40 Desmond Ryan admitted in a Garda statement that he had thrown two punches towards Brian's jaw as Brian tried to get back up. 21:48 Ryan said he then walked away because he realised the scene was wrong. 21:53 He also described a group of people kicking Brian. 21:57 Later, when Brian was unresponsive and people were trying to get help for him, Ryan assisted in moving him back towards the hotel grounds. 22:06 The case against Andrew Frame was different. Frame had exchanged abuse with people in Brian's group and had become involved in the separate fight with Michael Hussey. 22:16 Hussey admitted striking Frame from behind and said he didn't see Frame strike Brian. 22:21 On the 16th of February, Judge White ruled that the witness evidence placing frame in the main assault was infirm and unreliable, with no supporting evidence, and withdrew the manslaughter charge against him. The violent disorder charge was left for the jury to decide. 22:38 And this was why it was dangerous to describe the whole thing as one fight with one agreed beginning and end. 22:45 The court was dealing with confrontations that overlapped. A person could have been involved in disorder outside the hotel without being proved responsible for the violence that killed Brian. 22:56 The prosecution had to establish the case against each accused man separately and beyond a reasonable doubt and that was no easy task. 23:05 On the 25th of February, the jury found Dermot Lade guilty of manslaughter by a majority of 10 to 2 and also found him guilty of violent disorder. 23:15 Andrew Frame was found not guilty of violent disorder, leaving him without a conviction on either charge. 23:21 The following day, Sean Mackey and Desmond Ryan were found guilty of violent disorder. Then, on the 27th of February, Ryan was found not guilty of manslaughter. The jury said it couldn't agree on the manslaughter charge against Mackey. 23:35 On the 8th of March, the DPP confirmed that Mackey would not be tried again for manslaughter. 23:42 So after the original trial, Laid had been convicted of manslaughter and violent disorder, Mackey and Ryan had been convicted of violent disorder and Frame had left the trial without a conviction and there was no manslaughter verdict against Mackey. But even then, nobody had been identified in court as the person who had caused Brian's fatal head injury. 24:04 Before the sentence was passed, Dennis, Mary and Brian's sister Clare addressed the court. 24:10 For more than six weeks they had listened while their son and brother was discussed through witness statements, medical findings, items of clothing and legal arguments. 24:21 Mary said the family had been brutalised first by the attack and then by the trial. 24:26 She spoke about hearing Brian called the deceased, the body and the person in the red shirt. 24:32 At one point she asked, where is my baby in all of this? It was a short question, but it explained what the process had done. 24:40 Brian had become evidence in everybody else's case, while the person his family knew seemed to disappear from the room altogether. 24:48 Dennis said he knew there could never be justice in the fullest sense because Brian was dead. What had kept him going was the hope that the truth would come out. 24:58 But after listening to the trial he said the family had been left with more questions than answers. 25:04 Clare said the only way she could cope was to separate the brother she loved from the brutal way he had died. 25:11 The defence teams placed strong character evidence before the court. They spoke about the men's ages, their lack of previous convictions, their education and employment, their cooperation with Gardaí and the effect of the publicity and public hostility on them. 25:26 The judge had to consider all of that alongside the seriousness of the violence in Brine's death. 25:32 On the 15th of March 2004, Judge White sentenced Dermot Laid to four years for manslaughter and a concurrent two years for violent disorder. 25:42 The judge said there had been no premeditation and that the state had not proved Laid delivered the final kick. Sean Mackey received two years for violent disorder. Desmond Ryan received nine months, but the warrant was deferred so he could complete his university exams. 25:59 Laid and Mackey were taken into custody. Ryan was later granted bail pending his appeal and never served the nine-month sentence. But the legal process was still far from over. 26:11 Sean Mackey appealed the severity of his two-year sentence rather than the violent disorder verdict itself. 26:18 On 24 November 2004, the Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed that appeal. 26:24 It found that Judge White had carefully balanced the mitigating factors against Mackey's own conduct and was entitled to distinguish his role from the others. 26:33 The appeal court accepted that Mackey hadn't planned the incident and that he was a young man of previous good character. 26:40 It also accepted that Brian had thrown the first punch. 26:43 But it upheld the trial judge's findings that Mackey's involvement escalated the violence and that his kick to Brian's body while Brian was defenceless was serious, although not in itself life-threatening. 26:55 The two-year sentence stayed in place. 26:59 Dermot Leed and Desmond Ryan appealed for completely different reasons. 27:03 Both decisions were given on the 24th of February 2005. The reasons are often brushed off as technicalities. That word doesn't explain what the court actually found. 27:15 Now, the problem in Lade's appeal was what the jury had heard in statements made by the other accused men. 27:23 Those statements could be used as evidence against the men who made them, but they couldn't be used to prove that Lade had done what those men had said he had done. 27:33 During the trial, Lade's name was taken out of the statements and replaced with Mr A. 27:38 But it was still obvious to the jury that Mr A was Lade and some of what was said about him in those statements went further than the evidence given by the prosecution's own witnesses. 27:50 They included claims that Lade had repeatedly punched Brian as he fell and kicked him while he was on the ground. 27:57 The Court of Criminal Appeal said there was a very real risk that the jury had taken those claims into account when they found Laid guilty of manslaughter. So his manslaughter conviction was quashed and a retrial was ordered. 28:10 Laid's conviction for violent disorder was not overturned. The appeal court said there was enough separate evidence that he had taken part in the fight and struck Brian and that the trial judge had properly explained that charge to the jury. 28:25 So the conviction and its two-year sentence remained in place. 28:30 Lade later accepted that conviction and said his behaviour that night had been unacceptable while continuing to maintain that he had not caused Brian's death. 28:39 Brian's appeal succeeded for a different reason. Gardie had entered his home under a search warrant that the trial judge found to be invalid. 28:48 The prosecution then had to establish another lawful basis for the entry and arrest and the Court of Criminal Appeal found that it had not done so. 28:57 Ryan's arrest and detention was therefore unlawful and the statements obtained during that detention could not be admitted. 29:05 Without those statements, there wasn't enough evidence left to support Ryan's violent disorder conviction, so it was quashed and no retrial was ordered. 29:14 Ryan had already been found not guilty of manslaughter. After the appeal, he had no conviction arising from the case. 29:22 The important thing here is that the appeal court wasn't deciding whether Brian had been attacked. That wasn't the question. It was deciding whether these particular convictions had been reached fairly, using evidence that could legally be used against each man. 29:37 For Laid, the result was a new manslaughter trial. For Ryan, it was the end of the case against him. 29:44 Laid then asked the Court of Criminal Appeal to reconsider the retrial, or if it would not do that, to allow an appeal to the Supreme Court on a point of law of exceptional public importance. 29:57 On the 29th of June 2005, both applications were rejected. 30:02 Laid and Mackey were released in September that year after serving about 18 months of their two-year violent disorder sentences with remission. 30:11 Dermot Lade's manslaughter retrial was due to begin on the 24th of April 2006. 30:17 Three days earlier, his solicitor received a new statement from the state pathologist, Professor Mary Cassidy. 30:23 When the case was called, Prosecutor Edward Common told the court that the DPP was entering a null prosecute because ongoing evidential difficulties could not be overcome. 30:36 A null prosecue is a formal decision by the prosecution not to continue a charge. 30:42 The retrial ended without evidence being called. Laid was discharged and his violent disorder conviction was unaffected. 30:50 There were two connected medical difficulties. Professor John Harbison, who had carried out Brian's post-mortem and given evidence at the first trial, was ill and unavailable to give fresh evidence. That made a difference because the defence had to be able to test and challenge the pathology evidence presented against Laid. 31:08 Professor Mary Cassidy, who had succeeded Harbison as state pathologist, reviewed the post-mortem photographs, toxicology and other surviving material. It was a review of existing records. 31:20 In her April 2006 statement, she disagreed with Harbison about the precise mechanism of debt. 31:26 She believed Brian's head injury had been complicated by alcohol-induced apnea, or a period when breathing stopped and acute brain swelling. 31:37 Harbison had recorded the cause of death as swelling of the brain, complicated by the inhalation of blood, and attributed it to multiple facial injuries from the assault. 31:47 Cassidy still said Brian had died after an assault and that a head injury was involved. but she considered the visible injuries relatively minor and believed alcohol had made the breeding problem more likely. 32:00 With two different medical opinions about how the assault led to Brian's death, causation had become even harder for the prosecution to prove beyond reasonable doubt. 32:11 Mary Murphy objected when Cassidy's review was spoken about as though it were a settled fact that cleared everybody. 32:19 She said it was a medical opinion that had never been tested before a jury and that both pathology positions should have been put before one. 32:27 The decision led to a heated Dahl debate about the State Pathology Service, the continuity of expert evidence and the way the criminal justice system had handled the case. 32:38 The Minister for Justice at the time rejected suggestions of a hidden explanation or conspiracy. He pointed instead to the number of people involved in fast-moving violence, the heavy drinking, conflicting witnesses, disputed causation – and the requirement to prove criminal responsibility beyond reasonable doubt. 32:56 None of that made the result any easier for the Murphy family. 33:00 They had already lived through one trial and a successful appeal. 33:04 Now the retrial they expected had ended before a jury was sworn, leaving them again without a manslaughter conviction and with a new public argument about the part alcohol may or may not have played in Brian's death. 33:19 Brian's inquest had originally opened in October 2000 and was then adjourned while the criminal case continued. 33:26 After the retrial ended, Dublin City Coroner Dr Brian Farrell began the process of bringing it back. The coroner considered the work of three pathologists, Professor Harbison, Professor Cassidy and Dr Derek Carson, an Northern Ireland forensic pathologist retained by the Murphy family. 33:45 At a preliminary hearing in March 2007 after hearing further evidence, Professor Cassidy told the coroner's court that Brian's death was due to head injuries and not alcohol. That was significant because her April 2006 opinion had raised alcohol-induced apnea as part of the mechanism of death. 34:04 Dr. Carson's view was that the alcohol had not played a significant part. The head injury itself was central to the medical evidence. Because of that evidence, the coroner sent the file back to the DPP for another review. 34:18 On 2 July 2007, the DPP confirmed that there would be no further prosecutions. 34:24 The full inquest resumed on 18 September. 34:28 After hearing the evidence, a nine-person jury returned a unanimous verdict that Brian had been unlawfully killed. 34:35 An inquest verdict now does not decide that a named person is criminally or civilly responsible. It wouldn't replace a manslaughter trial or identify who had inflicted the fatal injury. What it did establish, seven years after Brian's death, was that his death was not accidental. The jury found that he had been unlawfully killed as a result of the violence inflicted on him. 34:58 Dennis and Mary praised the work of the coroner's court, but said they still felt the wider criminal justice system had not delivered truth or justice. 35:08 The verdict answered the question of how the debt should be classified. It did not answer the question they'd been asking since the first morning. Who was responsible for killing their son? 35:19 It can sound contradictory to say Brian was unlawfully killed, while also saying that nobody has a manslaughter conviction for his death, but those two outcomes answer different questions. 35:31 The inquest jury could consider the medical evidence and the overall account of the assault and decide how Brian died. It was not permitted to return a verdict assigning criminal or civil blame to a named person. 35:43 The criminal jury had a different and much narrower job. It had to consider the admissible evidence against each accused man and be sure beyond reasonable doubt that he was legally responsible for Brian's death. 35:57 Evidence could prove an unlawful attack and an unlawful killing overall, while still leaving doubt about the role and legal responsibility of any one person. 36:07 And in Brian's case, those doubts were very real. 36:11 Witnesses differed about who was where and which blow they had seen. The state couldn't identify the fatal blow. One jury couldn't agree on the manslaughter count. One manslaughter conviction was set aside because statements made by other accused men created an unfair risk of prejudice. 36:29 A separate violent disorder conviction was set aside because key statements followed an unlawful entry, arrest and detention. 36:37 Then the planned retrial faced the unavailability of the original pathologist and a serious dispute over the medical mechanism of death. 36:45 It is tempting to call each one of those things an excuse or a loophole, especially when the final result is so painful. 36:53 But the rules about fair evidence, lawful arrest and proof beyond reasonable doubt exist because a criminal conviction carries enormous consequences. 37:02 They have to apply even in a case where there is no doubt that a young man was violently and unlawfully killed. 37:10 And that is the central legal frustration in Brian's case. 37:14 The inquest found that he had been unlawfully killed. Two violent disorder convictions remained against Lade and Mackey but there was no valid manslaughter conviction against any individual for Brian's death. 37:27 From very early on, Brian's death became a national argument about far more than the evidence outside Annabelle's. 37:34 The schools attended by the young men, their addresses, their parents' occupations, their clothes, holidays and rugby connections were all used as shorthand for class and privilege. Some newspapers used labels like the Blackrock Boot Boys or called it a posh kid's trial. At points, people were described in ways that didn't reflect the final legal outcomes. 37:57 Judge White imposed reporting restrictions during the proceedings. 38:01 The Star on Sunday, the Irish Examiner and the UCD College Tribune were later found in criminal contempt over material published during the trial. 38:11 They were fined 20,000 euro, 1,000 euro and 250 euro respectively. That gives you some idea of just how heated the coverage became. 38:23 The background of the case did raise legitimate questions. People noticed that former pupils had gone back to Black Rock College that morning after Brian died. 38:32 They saw well-resourced legal teams, intense concern about the school's reputation and years of proceedings that ended without a manslaughter conviction. All of that helped create a public belief that privilege had shaped the result. 38:45 But the appeal judgments did not quash convictions because the accused men had attended a particular school or because their families had influence. 38:53 They identified specific legal failures, prejudicial material that created an unfair risk in Leeds manslaughter trial and an unlawful entry and arrest in Ryan's case. 39:05 The later prosecution also faced real problems with witnesses, causation and pathology. We can still question how institutions respond to privilege without replacing the documented reasons for the legal outcomes with a theory that has never been proved. 39:20 There was obviously a huge amount of alcohol involved that night and it formed part of the circumstances in which a bump and a punch turned into group violence within seconds. But being drunk doesn't excuse what happened. Brian's own alcohol level later became the subject of medical disagreement, but the inquest still returned a unanimous verdict of unlawful killing. 39:42 In 2008, the disagreement surfaced again in an RTE documentary about the state pathologist. Professor Cassidy repeated her view that Brian's head injury had been complicated by the effects of alcohol. 39:54 Dennis and Mary issued a public statement saying it was extremely distressing to have to defend the record again and that they were doing it to uphold Brian's memory. They pointed back to Professor Harbison's findings, Dr. Carson's opinion and the unanimous inquest verdict. 40:11 The case also moved into fiction. Kevin Power's novel Bad Day in Black Rock was partially inspired by it and the film What Richard Did later adopted that novel while moving even further away from the real events. 40:25 Both works explored responsibility, class and the protection offered by a social group but neither is a factual account of Brian's death and neither can tell us what the evidence couldn't. 40:37 Club Annabelle reopened as Pure in 2009. 40:42 The Burlington Hotel itself closed for a time, later traded as Doubletree and eventually became the Clayton Hotel, Burlington Road. The place looks different now, but the question raised outside it hasn't gone away. 40:55 When the 25th anniversary came round in 2025, the case was revisited again and you can understand why. There are still so many difficult parts to it. The drinking that night, the group violence, the questions around class and privilege, witnesses trying to remember a chaotic few seconds and then all the legal issues that followed. But if we let Brian's story become only a debate about Blackrock College, pathology or legal procedure, we repeat the very thing his mother described in court. We lose him in everybody else's argument. 41:29 And after all of that, I keep coming back to something Mary Murphy said in court. 41:34 She had sat there listening to Brian being called the deceased, the body and the person in the red shirt. And eventually she asked, where is my baby in all of this? 41:44 I think that says more about this case than any legal summary ever could. Because for years, Brian's name was buried under arguments about evidence, appeals, pathology, privilege and procedure. But to his family, none of that was ever the point. The point was Brian. And maybe after everything we've talked about today, that's the most important thing to remember. 42:06 Thank you so much for listening, guys. If you have any thoughts on Brian's case, you can share them with me in the comments. 42:13 But please keep that discussion respectful of Brian, his family and the final legal outcomes. I'll see you all again next week. In the meantime, mind yourselves. 42:24 So guys, that's it for today's episode of the Ireland Crimes and Mysteries podcast. Again, thanks for your listenership. And don't forget to subscribe to the show and hit that auto download so you never miss an episode. 42:36 Until the next time, keep your eyes open and your mind curious. 42:42 This podcast has been compiled from information gathered in the public sphere, like news articles, documentaries and open source material that can be found on the web. 42:53 Everything in this podcast is alleged unless a conviction has taken place.