The Devil in the Red Dress

by Abigail Rieley

  Then in April there was another development when they found ricin in Eid’s cell in Limerick Prison. Engle had been keen to show the FBI her willingness to cooperate and had continued to sing like the proverbial canary. She had described how they cooked up ricin in their kitchen and told Agent Sotelo where to find the blender in the garage at Camden Cove Street. Eid would have still had the lens case she said. So the FBI once more rang the gardaí and the men in white space suits turned up to cause a break in the monotony of prison life. Eid and his cell mate were banished from their cell and a full search was conducted. Eid would deny pointing the gardaí to the exact position of the lens case but they found it quickly nonetheless. The small flat case was found in a wash bag under his bunk. It was empty, except for a slight yellow stain at the bottom of one of the wells. Whatever it had once contained had been flushed long ago. Field tests signalled the presence of the deadly toxin, however.

  The empty lens case was wrapped in a cocoon of plastic bags and loaded onto a waiting military jet with all due care and attention. Accompanied by senior members of the gardaí it flew through the night to England to an ex-government lab that has expertise in toxins. In the end the tests were done in a veterinary lab although the sample of pure ricin was provided by the secretive commercial lab, LGC, formally the Laboratory of the Government Chemist. Once again ricin was detected and the diagnosis was flown back to Ireland, although the contaminated lens case was locked away in the safety of the lab. No one argued. This put things into a whole different category.

  Collins was unaware of this development. She had been staying in Spain while Howard made sure everything was all right back home. She found out about the ricin when Howard called her, after seeing it in the papers. It suddenly made the idea of a murder plot seem serious and all the more deadly. Howard was still standing by her but she decided she would return home. Howard met her in Dublin and tried to reassure her. Collins could feel things were getting out of control, so she wrote a second letter to the DPP. She explained her predicament and the lethal jail cell find, and explained that the longer this nastiness was hanging over her head the more stress it was putting on her family. She told the Director, who she now addressed with the familiarity of a pen pal, that she was not the kind of woman who would ever have anything to do with weapons of mass destruction, no matter what the papers might be saying. She pointed out that a lot of the press reports had been wildly inaccurate. They had been saying she was American for one thing, it didn’t reflect what was going on at all. She hinted darkly that she was being set up. She didn’t want to name names but there were people at home who wanted to hurt her. She was the victim of a sting far closer to home than any internet plot.

  The guards had continued gathering their evidence. The computer analysis was taking time but a very clear picture of the plot was emerging. In June 2007 Collins was arrested again. She was still sticking to her story of Maria Marconi. She pointed out that Marconi might not have been American at all; she could have been locally based in Clare and able to have provided all the local knowledge that made the Lyingeyes emails so incriminating. She said she had also written exercises describing every aspect of her life. It wouldn’t have been hard for someone only moderately creative to weave these details into the emails and make it look like it was her writing them. She had nothing to do with the plot; she had never met Essam Eid and never heard of a ‘Tony Luciano’. The gardaí were unimpressed. They had found several things on the hard drive of the Advent computer that they felt would be extremely difficult to explain away.

  Collins hinted that the blackmailers may have had an accomplice, and once again hinted that she knew who this could be. No one believed her story but they probed her to see what she would say. This was a game of cat and mouse. She wouldn’t say that it was one of Howard’s sons who had never wanted her to marry their father and now wanted her out of the way. When the gardaí suggested this to her she was indignant. She didn’t want to accuse anyone wrongly when that was precisely what had been done to her. The gardaí suggested one of her own sons … possibly David since Gary had been away in Australia at the time. They pointed out that it wasn’t just Howard’s sons who might have had a reason to want the relationship over, especially if they had any inkling of the allegations she seemed willing to tell to almost anyone. No one believed for a moment that the Howard brothers or her own sons would do such a thing. The detectives were testing her to gauge her reactions. She didn’t take the bait.

  Instead Collins reacted angrily—her sons would never do anything like that, and she could hardly blame Niall and Robert who she had wanted to kill. It was Maria Marconi and some man posing as ‘Tony Luciano’. The gardaí, over hours of interviews, tried to make some headway but Collins wasn’t budging.

  The computer analysis had thrown up some very interesting irregularities though. They presented a photograph of Eid sitting in a bright yellow sports car, grinning at the camera. He was wearing large sun glasses and a baseball cap but was still recognisable as the man currently trying to explain the presence of a contaminated contact lens holder in his prison cell. It had been found on the hard drive of the Advent computer and corresponded to a description of a photograph sent to Lyingeyes by ‘Tony Luciano’. Collins looked at the photograph with interest. Wasn’t that Marconi’s boyfriend? He drove a yellow sports car she seemed to recall, it must be a photograph Marconi had sent her. No, she didn’t know why there were no copies of the emails that had flown back and forwards between herself and Marconi. The ones sent to her Eircom email account had been deleted by a phantom hacker along with all the emails from the blackmailer. If they didn’t believe her they could ask Eircom. She couldn’t explain why so many emails sent to Lyingeyes had survived when a correspondence that had lasted for several months longer had disappeared without a trace. It must have been the Irish accomplice, someone with access to the computer at Downes and Howard. She couldn’t say who. She wouldn’t put someone else in the position she found herself in but there must be someone trying to set her up.

  She berated Detectives Sergeant Michael Moloney and Jarlaith Fahy for putting her through the embarrassment of an arrest. She had nothing to hide, she said, she would have been completely happy to come in under her own steam. She wouldn’t listen to their argument that it was more normal in an official investigation for suspects to be properly arrested and detained. She had her reputation to think of. The gardaí were not impressed. After all, by this stage they had also started an exhaustive examination of the impressive collection of phones that had been taken from Ballybeg house. Eid had at least three phones registered in his name and Collins had not made things easy either. She had a mobile for use at home in Clare and a separate one with a Spanish SIM to use when she was away with Howard in Fuengirola. Then there was the little used one registered in the name of Sharon Howard and a fourth registered to P.J. Howard, which he had used as a temporary solution while his normal phone was away being repaired. It had taken months and a bewildering array of requests from both Irish and American phone companies to get the full list of calls.

  Then it was a matter of sifting through thousands of calls and finding the calls too and from the relevant numbers, but slowly a damning picture began to emerge. The gardaí found that not only were there phone calls that fitted neatly with the timing suggested in the Lyingeyes and ‘Luciano’ emails but another pattern was beginning to emerge. The emails already seemed to suggest that whoever had been emailing ‘Luciano’ had been not just following Collins’s movements and possessing an intimate knowledge of her life but also was actually travelling with her. The phone records backed this theory up perfectly. Calls were made from the Irish mobile when Collins was at home in Clare and from the Spanish one when she visited Fuengirola. The calls also suggested a closer relationship with the blackmailer than Collins had been suggesting. There were calls lasting for almost half an hour at a time, more than long enough to allow for the flirtatious relationship obvious in the emails. The gardaí
were beginning to think that not only was Collins their culprit but she was the only one who could have possibly made all the calls.

  Feeling the evidence mounting up against her Collins wrote for the third and final time to the DPP. She made one last passionate plea to have her case dropped, it would cost those she loved far too dearly, she wrote. She said she was worried about David, always a sensitive child, whose epilepsy was threatening to re-emerge under all the stress he was under. She told the Director that David was taking her predicament harder than anyone.

  But David wasn’t the only one. She warned the Director that if he went ahead with the case against her he would be responsible for the deluge of misfortune that was about to strike her family. Howard was bound to keel over from his heart condition and her mother was well into her 70s. How could the Director be so cruel as to put an old woman through such an ordeal? She said that despite her views on the death penalty, euthanasia and all that she had always been opposed to suicide. It was not something that sat well with her Catholic spirituality. This horrible situation though, was putting her under so much personal stress that she had been reconsidering her position. If the Director went ahead with the charges he would be responsible for up to four deaths, three of them of people who had no accusations against them. Surely no criminal conviction was worth this high a cost in human life.

  The letter was nothing more than an ill-conceived attempt to stop the investigation into her murderous conspiracy from proceedings. It was never going to work as the DPP would never entertain such dubious correspondence.

  She even persuaded Howard to write as well. He duly wrote echoing Collins’s passionate pleas. The woman he knew, who had nursed him through his illnesses would never do anything to harm anyone. His wrote that his Sharon was not the woman that she was being painted; she was a good woman and an honest one. When he wrote to the DPP he was not considering what a jury would make of his words. He only wanted the woman he loved to remain by his side.

  The Director still didn’t answer but it became obvious later that summer that Collins’s pleas had been in vain. At the end of June, Collins was arrested and brought before Ennis District Court where she was charged with three charges of conspiracy to murder and a matching three of soliciting Essam Eid to murder P.J. Howard, Robert and Niall Howard. Essam Eid was also charged with conspiring to kill the three Howards and also had to face additional charges of demanding the money with menaces from Robert Howard, robbing the Downes and Howard offices and handling some of the items taken in that burglary.

  But it was going to take the DPP far longer to prepare a book of evidence. At the end of August 2007, Eid’s solicitor, John Casey, complained that his client had been locked up in jail since his arrest in September 2006, almost a year before. The incarceration had not been easy for the poker dealer who, despite his recent extra curricular activities, had no previous convictions. Eid was a diabetic and his condition was flaring up in jail. Casey warned the District Court judge that his normally cheerful client was becoming withdrawn and depressed and his health was deteriorating alarmingly. He demanded that his client’s rights were recognised and asked the DPP to deliver a book of evidence or release Eid.

  The DPP representative explained that an unforeseen problem had arisen but the evidence would soon be delivered to the defence.

  Eid was to be sent back to his cell for another fortnight while the book of evidence was assembled. It was not an auspicious start for one of the most bizarre cases to appear before the Irish courts but, as happened throughout the trial, the DPP got it together and the evidence was produced although some of the finer points of the internet and phone evidence were not completed until the case had reached the steps of the Four Courts. The process had been put in place that would lead to a packed courtroom for nearly two months the following summer.

  CHAPTER 13:

  POKER FACE

  On 21 May 2008 all the principals arrived for the final showdown. Collins’s letters to the DPP had fallen on deaf ears and even Howard’s pleas that she was innocent and didn’t believe a word of the charges against her had failed to prevent the trial. Her threats of suicide and the decimation of her family had come to nothing and the only thing left for her to do was to try to and charm the jury. Wednesday, 21 May was the first day back after the courts’ traditional Easter holiday. Court One, where all the juries for Central Criminal Court trials are sworn in, was packed with an airless pit of lawyers, gardaí, the accused and the general public, with members of the press pushing forward to hear what was going on. Hoards of barristers had gathered for the day to day business of the courts, looking after all the small legal difficulties that needed to be dealt with for a case to come to court.

  The wooden benches were stuffed with the rather bemused jury panel, staring at the organised chaos exploding around them. Most were there unwillingly, just waiting for their chance to tell the judge why they couldn’t do their civic duty. The rest were looking around anxiously, trying to spot the accused people among the throngs, trying to guess what story they would watch unfolding over the next week or so. They chattered amongst each other, trying to work out if any of the stories they had read in the papers would be presented for their entertainment. It might be an important part of the justice system but who wanted to waste a week or more watching something boring? Most of them didn’t look in Collins’s direction. In her smart black suit she looked like one of the solicitors. She was a small blonde presence flanked by her two sons, smiling easily while her solicitor stood a short distance away deep in last minute discussions with the rest of her legal team. For the jurors, glancing around the courtroom trying to ascertain the accused parties, she didn’t even register.

  For the reporters who had gathered together for the first time after the break, the main topic of conversation was not the petite blonde standing a short distance away, although several glanced curiously in her direction. The case had not yet registered in the media’s consciousness. It had simply not rung the bells that usually ring in a trial that has the magic ingredients of sex and violence and the newsrooms were slow to get excited about a conspiracy that had failed to lead to a murder.

  Even so, when the case was called and the two accused pushed through the throng to the front of the court to answer the charges against them there was a small murmur of interest through the courtroom. For the first time people got a look at Eid as he was led forward by two prison wardens. On pure face value he certainly looked the part. Collins half-heartedly stepped forward. Even at this early stage she certainly had no wish to stand beside her co-accused. They both stood and stared ahead as the ten charges were read out to them, allowing them to say whether they pleaded guilty or innocent. This was the first time the room had any inkling of the full extent of the allegations, but couched in dry legalese the full impact of the case still hadn’t been made. It was then, once both Collins and Eid had denied all of the charges against them, that Tom O’Connell, the State’s senior barrister, stood up and cleared his throat. He explained to Justice Paul Carney, the most senior of the judges who sit in the Central Criminal Court, and overseer of the jury selection for that court, that the jury had a right to know what they were letting themselves in for. It would be a complex trial and a long one. The State estimated it would take a month—in the end it would take almost double this. It might be an idea if he ran through the main points of the case so they knew what they would be facing. Justice Carney raised an eyebrow but nodded his consent.

  O’Connell sketched out a potted history. He mentioned the fact that P.J. Howard was a wealthy businessman who divided his time between Ennis and the Costa del Sol. He told the suddenly silent courtroom that Collins was accused of hiring Eid to kill Howard and his two sons after her eight year relationship didn’t look like it would pay out. Dozens of people looked at the small blonde who stared straight ahead and ignored the interest in the room. O’Connell told the room they would be hearing about a conspiracy that had started in the casinos of Las
Vegas where the co-accused had a day job as a poker dealer. He mentioned the hitmanforhire.net website, the trail of emails, and demands for money with menaces. By the time he sat down the room was agog and the chances of finding a jury that would stay the distance had just gone up considerably.

  Justice Carney warned the room that estimations on the duration of trials were invariably on the low side and the case would probably not finish until the end of June. With the holiday season about to start, it was with reluctance that several of the selected jurors stepped down. The legal teams refused others the chance to sit on the jury. In the end, eight men and four women sat in the padded seats of the jury box to be told they could select a foreman and get ready to begin. The trial itself would not start until the following day. Until then the three legal teams would start their negotiations, which would continue until the trial had passed the four week mark set by the prosecution, past the six weeks proposed by Justice Carney, to commandeer the entire term, eclipsing every other case that came and went in that period.

  The next day it was standing room only in the court. Not because the masses had descended on the courtroom but because proceedings had started in one of the smaller courtrooms on the upper floors of the Four Courts complex. These rooms are usually used for civil matters, trials that are unlikely to require a lot of witnesses or public interest, where the more intimate surroundings suit the proceedings. The courtroom Collins and Eid found themselves beginning their trial in was No. 16, which was a small room on the second floor, often used to cater for cases of a sexual nature where the public are banned and the witness list tends to be small. The room is more modern and less imposing than the four courts that open off the Round Hall in the heart of the building. The windows are large and look down over the main gate onto the Liffey. Although the traffic is muted by double glazing it gives an impression of a world outside, a less claustrophobic feel than the windowless wood panelling found in the main four courts.