She had been under Eid’s total control she told him.
Even when you were in another country? he further queried.
Yes, she had always been under his control. She had prayed to be arrested on that second trip to Ireland, just so she could get away from him, she said, adding that she had been trapped in America. Eid had made her sell her car and give up her job; he wouldn’t even buy her cigarettes, or so she said.
‘But you’re back with your family now,’ countered O’Higgins. ‘You’re back with the support of your sister and the twice married Todd Engle.’
‘I’m not with Todd any more,’ she insisted, ‘but yes, I did marry him twice.’
She agreed she had neglected to divorce him before marrying Eid, when pressed by the barrister.
O’Higgins moved away from the subject of marriage to the matter of P.J. Howard’s American Express card. Where had she got the details?
Collins had emailed the details to them before they had booked the flights to Ireland, she said. O’Higgins paused for a second before dealing his latest blow. There was no mention of the American Express in any of the emails. There were a lot of other numbers mentioned, safe combination numbers and alarm codes, but no credit card details. She had seen the email, Engle said.
‘Can I suggest to you that all you are doing, far from wishing to tell the truth for its own sake, is seeking to advance your situation in the US,’ he said.
Engle showed a rare flash of emotion as she countered, ‘That’s absolutely not true.’
He moved onto another point. The keys that Collins had supposedly left for Engle to collect when she arrived in Spain; the key’s to P.J. Howard’s penthouse apartment. Where had they disappeared to? Since neither she nor Eid had got the chance to make a return trip to Fuengirola, presumably someone had the keys.
Engle nodded; she had brought them with her. She said she had them on her when she was arrested. O’Higgins then posed a question that had the desired affect; if this was the case, why weren’t they listed amongst her possessions when she was arrested. The gardaí listed $32, cigarettes, and a letter but no keys. No one had ever seen keys in her possession. She had got rid of them in the court house at Ennis, she told him. She had gone to the toilet, wrapped the keys in some tissue paper and dropped them into a bin. They might even still be there, she said. She looked directly at O’Higgins. She had come to this court to tell the truth, she told him.
‘What I am saying now, I agreed to tell the truth against my attorney’s advice here,’ she said.
‘What you say here has a major affect on what sentence you receive in the States.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ she responded.
‘Can I suggest that that too is a lie?’
He sat down and allowed David Sutton, Eid’s formidable defence barrister, to take over. Sutton got straight down to business. Wasn’t it true that Engle was the one person in this trial who had a criminal conviction? She had pleaded guilty to her part in the Californian case. Engle objected when he insisted on calling her a fraudster but admitted that she was certainly an incompetent criminal.
She agreed that her living arrangements with Lisa and Eid had been unusual to say the least after she had moved into the Camden Cove Street house in June 2006. He asked her who else had access to the computer there, or was it just used by Eid. No both herself and Lisa used it as well, she said adding that she would have had Eid’s email passwords and so would Lisa.
Sutton was cutting on the subject of the ricin. They had simply cooked it up in the house? Did they test what they had made on anyone? Even a passing mouse? he asked.
Engle shook her head. Sutton went in for the kill by proclaiming they had never intended to kill anyone. It was all a scam, he said.
‘Miss Engle, what that operation was all about was shaking people down, stealing and robbing them, not killing them,’ he proclaimed.
‘That’s not what the website said.’
She insisted that the website should be taken at face value. She said the intention had always been to kill. Sutton was incredulous.
‘This piece of nonsense?’
She nodded, thinking her point was made. ‘That’s what the intention was.’
The barrister glanced briefly around the room to be sure of his audience.
‘The reason you are saying you intended to kill is that you are trying to do yourself a favour in America where you have pleaded guilty to another shakedown. You are dressing this up,’ said Sutton.
Despite her protestations that the plan had always been to carry out the threats to kill, and it had only been Collins’s failure to make contact that had commuted the outcome to a spot of extortion, the damage had been done. Even though, as she took her seat back in the public gallery, Eid looked into the crowd smiling and drew his finger across his throat in a jokily despairing gesture, Engle’s credibility had been sufficiently dented to give the jury pause for thought.
The next couple of days seemed to underline the fact the hitmanforhire.net may have fallen short of delivering what it promised. The trial suddenly received a little Hollywood glamour with the arrival of a posse of FBI agents from the Californian investigation. There were detailed descriptions of the search of Eid’s house in Las Vegas by agents who looked like actors from an American cop show, but it was the agent in charge, Ingrid Sotelo, who raised the most hackles among the defence counsels.
FBI Agent Sotelo, who was in charge of the Californian investigation, told the Central Criminal Court that she had come across the ricin residue on a visit to question Lisa Eid about Ashraf Gharbeiah. Engle had told her that they had made ricin the previous year and Sotelo decided to check out the information while she was at the house in Camden Cove Street. Lisa showed her through to the garage and pointed out a blender and coffee carafe that she said belonged to Engle.
Sotelo told the court that she could see the white residue from across the room. When she tried to take some photographs of the scene she discovered her camera batteries were flat, she said. She explained that Lisa stepped in and offered to use her own camera to take the shots and then email them to the FBI. Sotelo told her what to photograph and the Irish court was shown the photographs, although they were not formally entered as evidence.
Sotelo told the court that she had warned Lisa to stay out of the garage until the offending kitchen equipment was removed but said she took no further action as this would be outside her jurisdiction.
The barristers for the defence sought to find out why she had not thought to ensure that the local FBI branch in Nevada had done their duty, and cleaned up the traces of ricin from Engle and Eid’s home. Sotelo, efficient and with a haze of blonde curly hair, was cutting as she tried to explain the peculiarities of federal jurisdictions. If she had seized any item from Eid’s house, even with Lisa Eid’s consent, she would have been breaking the law, she repeatedly explained. She had phoned it in when she got home to L.A. It wasn’t any of her business what action was taken by the local FBI office.
But this was a deadly poison, the defence teams demanded, weren’t you at least curious? Sotelo kept quiet on the subject of her curiosity, suggesting in her silence that puerile curiosity was not fitting for an FBI agent. Sotelo had brought a photograph of the tin of acetone she had found in the garage at 6108 Camden Cove Street. The photograph was shown to the court but not passed into evidence. The questioning went round in circles several times before a stale mate was reached and Agent Sotelo was allowed to leave the stand.
It was a welcome break in the tension to see Private Brian Buckley take the stand, bringing some much needed comic relief as his bafflement at being drawn into the trial radiated from the witness box.
‘In the end I didn’t see it as a joke. I didn’t see it as serious either,’ he said referring to the hitmanforhire website.
The court bubbled with barely suppressed giggles as he was questioned about why exactly he had chosen the number in his email address, [email protected]. It was
just a number, he insisted, looking as amused as the rest of the room. But the hilarity was to be short lived. Buckley disappeared back to his life and matters in the court room turned to the technicalities of forensic computer examinations. The week ended with lists of computer data found on the reception computer in Downes & Howard. Finally this was the first tantalising glimpse at the full text of the emails that had promised so much in O’Connell’s opening speech and an indication of just how much these particular nuggets would be mired in technical information. Each email would be read out in the order it was discovered. If it had been discovered cached on more than one computer, the email would be read once again for each discovery. The contents of the flirty emails between ‘Lyingeyes’ and ‘Luciano’ would become almost sickeningly familiar by the end of the trial.
But the computer evidence wasn’t proof of much more than two people flirting under dubious circumstances without the ricin evidence. The courtroom went quiet as two army witnesses took the stand. Commandants P.J. Butler and Peter Daly were from the Explosives Ordnance Division (EOD), and were called in when the news had arrived from America that Eid might have been harbouring deadly toxins in his prison cell. There was evidence of an evening swoop by men dressed in white sterile suits, the finding of the lens case and its subsequent testing and transport to the UK. A veil of secrecy surrounded the three scientists from the UK who had been responsible for the final confirmation of the presence of ricin. LGC Ltd had formerly been the laboratory of the Government Chemist, the court was told, until it succumbed to privatisation and became a commercial enterprise. The description of the precautions that had been taken with the little lens case lifted the story briefly out of farce and into the realms of James Bond.
There was one scientist to process the case and swab it out with sterile cotton buds to make the samples for testing, another scientist in a different lab carried out the test. Emma Stubberfield, the biologist who had tested the samples in a nearby veterinary lab, was called back to the stand to answer questions about her results, which showed a fail on one of the tests. This was normal scientific practice, she explained. It was necessary to show the average result because this kind of thing happened all the time. The results were produced and suddenly became another piece of evidence in the trial.
Both defence teams were unhappy that they had not been allowed to hire independent scientists to verify the results but Dr Stephen Kippen, the man in charge at LGC, explained that there was no guarantee that whatever ricin had been present would have been stable enough to have survived for over a year since the initial tests were carried out. There was no guarantee that once it was in solution it would even still be ricin after this amount of time, he told them. He said he was happy that the lens case had been submitted to the best tests available, and that there was no better test. He knew that because he was developing a better one himself and he hadn’t perfected it yet, he said.
The trial dragged on. Four weeks … five … the first month passed without mention. The email evidence trickled into the record; countless emails between ‘Tony Luciano’ and ‘Lying Eyes’, who should not have kept referring to herself as Sharon. The emails were read out as they had been extracted from the four computers in the case: the Advent desktop from the reception in Downes & Howard, Robert Howard’s Toshiba laptop, the Iridium laptop from Collins’s home, and the merged hard drive that represented the two computers seized from Eid’s Nevada home. The emails had been opened on different computers, and sometimes reopened and read again when the reader needed to check something. Each finding had to be read into evidence as the story of ‘Lying Eyes’ and ‘Tony Luciano’ was set out before the jury.
The story came with illustrations. Gardaí had found several photographs on the various hard drives that corresponded with shots discussed in the emails or presented by Eid to Robert Howard when he had made his house call to extract money. Every time a photograph was shown, those in the public gallery would crane their necks to make out the distant shapes. The jury and all members of the judiciary and Bar were given little red booklets of photographs. Eid would stretch with the rest, beaming as he saw his beloved yellow Corvette, and himself with his arm around his smiling daughter’s shoulders. The legal teams bickered about whether Eid should be identified in the photographs, a bone of contention since Eid’s team were denying all forms of identification in connection with ‘Tony Luciano’. Eid listened carefully and watched as the photographs were passed between the barristers. He grinned while they argued that the grinning man wearing shades in the sports car was him, eventually settling on an uneasy legal compromise. The photographs would be admitted into evidence for the jury as showing an unidentified man. Each photograph was described in turn for the benefit of the stenographer. This was a man in a car, this was the same man with an unidentified younger woman. Eid leaned forward to see the shot of Aya again and beamed up at the jury.
‘That’s my daughter.’
There was a moment of silence as the proud father’s words settled uneasily into the court record. Then came several snorts of laughter as the impact of what had been said sank in. Eid grinned all the wider and nodded vigorously before compounding his mistake.
‘That’s my daughter.’
Eid’s defence team sat down and allowed the prosecution to continue. So the computer evidence dragged on. The callous details of the proposed murder were read again and again, never quite losing their emphasis. Collins and Eid sat impassively as the courtship that had been conducted between their computers was picked over in minute detail. Eid would grin as the more bizarre emails were read but Collins did not.
It can’t have been the first time she and her sons had heard the details in the almost playful emails, but it was possibly only now the full implications were sinking in. When the email detailing the allegations she made about P.J. Howard involving prostitutes and transvestites was read out, with its preamble of a cosy evening at home with her younger son, the blood drained from her face. The contents of this email showed that Collins was capable of saying anything in order to advance her own interests. The smear was a callous attack on the man who had shown her nothing but love.
The trial continued on its course as the summer term passed. Every Monday crowds of potential jurors gathered to be picked for the latest list of trials and a succession of men and women were brought in to be tried. But through all of this the proceedings in Court Two continued. The two defendants took their seats every morning and endured the scrutiny of the busy public gallery. Collins had worked her way through several Post It pads by now while Eid was busy making friends with everyone. He would joke with the prison guards and journalists, smiling a welcome as each familiar face arrived for the new day’s business. After his gaffe with the photographs he seemed to have relaxed, listening to the day’s evidence with a look of almost rapt attention. Collins was equally alert but seemed markedly less impressed; frequently bowing her head to murmur to her sons and shaking her head vigorously when the evidence seemed damning. By now attention had moved to what the conspirators had told the gardaí and statement after statement was read to the jury. It was slow going. Collins’s defence team kept querying differences between the written account of the interview and a transcript of the video that had been taken of it. The gardaí were not trained stenographers it was pointed out. They did the best they could. But Collins had said she was unhappy with the way things were written down. Eventually a copy of the video of her interrogation was produced and the whole court could watch Collins from above as she patted and pleated her handkerchief.
The sound, never good on these video recordings, was terrible. The courtroom acoustics did not help. The reporters in the public benches leaned forward to hear better and even the jury showed their frustration from time to time. Two jurors had holidays booked in a week or so. Time was getting on. The taped interview was eventually abandoned and the prosecution case neared its end. But before it could do so the Court was to hear yet another extraordinary twis
t in an already unbelievable trial.
The only piece of evidence that gave Collins a partial alibi was given by John Keating, a builder from Limerick. He had changed the locks on the door of Downes & Howard after it had been burgled. But he had also met Collins on 16 August, the day she was supposed to have emailed and called ‘Luciano.’ Keating was cross examined on the stand on two occasions but gave reliable evidence. He said his own records showed he had been with Collins on this crucial date and produced evidence to support his story. His recollections of events, which he gave honestly, caused the prosecution to worry.
And so the trial entered its seventh week and neared its end. But Collins, for one, was not going down without a fight.
CHAPTER 14:
THE DEVIL IN THE RED DRESS
A defendant in a criminal trial does not have to give evidence. It is, after all, not up to them to prove their innocence. There had never been much doubt, however, that when the defendant was Sharon Collins, the defence would be lengthy and entertaining. When it actually began it even had the glitter of celebrity about it. There was a flurry of excitement on the morning of 1 July when those arriving into court across the Round Hall noticed the familiar figure of Gerry Ryan, the celebrated broadcaster, standing deep in conversation with Collins’s legal team.
The question of his attendance had been hotly debated among the press benches since an email which Collins had sent to his show had been read out in the court earlier in the trial, on 17 June.
The Devil in the Red Dress Page 17