The twins didn’t stand a chance. The injuries sustained by nine-year-olds Thomas and Paddy O'Driscoll, suggest their elder brother Jonathan attacked them in a frenzied fashion before he drove 15km to a woodland where he hanged himself last Thursday afternoon. The 21-year-old killer left no note, so the motive for the murders are unknown.
Hours earlier, Jonathan had collected the twins from school near the family home in Charleville in Cork and brought them to Doneraile Wildlife Park where they spent an hour or two before returning home for the afternoon. He seemed to be in good form, according to witnesses who have spoken to gardai.
The twins had been entrusted into Jonathan’s care by his parents Helen and Tom, who had gone to Waterford earlier that day to buy a miniature horse-drawn caravan for the two boys as a gift. The couple were on their way home when they received the news around 5pm that something awful had happened, after their younger son Jimmy, 5, and his younger brother Martin, 3, were dropped home from a play date.
The five-year-old is said to have been the one who found his dead brothers. Fearing for his own life, the child sneaked out the back door of the family’s extended cottage and shouted across the fence to a neighbour.
Gardai investigating the murder- suicide suspect that Jonathan was mentally unwell, possibly delusional, and had become jealous of the twins because — unlike him — they were not adopted. Jonathan had been trying to identify and locate his birth mother for the past two months but had also sought medical help for depression from the Health Service Executive (HSE).
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Two days before the killings, Jonathan appeared in court charged with possession of a knife following an arrest for being drunk and disorderly in Mallow in February last year. The case was a minor one and likely to result in no more than a warning being issued under the Probation Act.
“We have no idea what happened,” remarked one senior garda last week. “Ascribing motives is just an exercise in speculation.”
The murder of the twins was not a singular event. There was another case of fratricide, the murder of one brother by another, in Co Sligo in late July when Brandon Skeffington, aged 9, was found dead in his family home near Tubbercurry before the body of his older brother Shane, 21, was found in a nearby shed.
Shane had taken his own life by hanging himself after he stabbed his younger brother to death for reasons that are still unclear, though the killer had recently been discharged from psychiatric care and had developed a drugs problem.
The murders are still being absorbed in the small communities where the victims lived but there has also been a spate of murder-suicides by parents in Ireland in recent years. A study released last August examined 19 similar incidents over a 12-year period from January 2001 to the end of June last year.
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The report revealed that on average one murder-suicide incident happens per year and 46 people died in the period under review. What is causing fathers, mothers and brothers to kill their loved ones?
PATRICIA CASEY, a professor of psychiatry at University College Dublin, argues that fratricide involving children is rare.
“Fratricide has been around since the time of Cain and Abel,” she said. “It mostly occurs between adults. It’s usually one adult taking the life of another adult sibling. It’s very, very rare for a child to be involved. Some research has been done in Canada, where they looked at all the homicides between 1991 and 2000, and there were only 10 cases, and a tiny percentage of these involved children.
“Fratricide followed by suicide is very rare indeed. In the existing studies they have found that personal grudges were involved in a significant number of them, although it’s not universal. Usually these grudges come against a backdrop of mental health issues. It can be depression, schizophrenia or substance abuse.
“In some cases, people have delusions about their siblings and act on these delusions. In these cases, the killers usually don’t have a criminal record, they don’t have a history of violence generally. It’s the same with inter-family murders, which again usually involve mental illness.
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“If someone kills their spouse or child, it’s usually because they are suffering from a severe mental illness. Some killings do occur against a backdrop of revenge however; it might be a man who separates from his partner. His spouse might form a new relationship and he becomes jealous. It can be someone who resents what is happening. Sometimes they stalk or harass the individual, they might plead with them to come back, they might threaten suicide. Then they realise that is not going to happen, so they do something.”
Casey, who practises at the Mater Hospital in Dublin, believes a combination of mental illness and possible use of illicit drugs such as cannabis and cocaine is contributing to the overall problem.
“We generally live in a more violent society. Stalking and violence occurs. Clearly people who do this are vulnerable, or have serious personal grudges. I think drug use changes the way some people look at others,” she said.
Parents, both male and female, are also killing their children, a phenomenon known as filicide, which usually involves the suicide of the killer. Parents have driven off harbours with their children strapped into the back seat of their cars, or have walked them from the shore into the sea to ensure that they drown. On other occasions, they simply strangle or smother children as they sleep in their beds.
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There have been notorious cases of filicide in recent years. Among them the murder of sisters Zoe, 6, and Ella Butler, 2, who were killed by their father John and left at their home in Ballycotton, Co Cork, in November 2010. The killer, who suffered from depression, later took his own life by crashing a car into a wall.
Una Butler, Zoe and Ella’s mother, believes that the government needs to start examining why such cases happen.
“We need to know why people do this,” she said. “The medical profession needs to get spouses or partners involved when some- one is receiving treatment and they are living with children. I believe doctors would benefit from hearing what the patient is really like to live with when they are ill.
“My husband never physically hurt myself or my children, but we were treading on eggshells the whole time around him. He was suffering with his mental health. It was because he was mentally ill that my children are dead.”
Butler said cases of filicide have a devastating impact on those left behind. “I am still haunted by what happened to my daughters,” she said. “When I see my children’s friends, I think of my own children and what could have been. It’s less than four years since my own tragedy. I’ll never get over what happened. It’s still raw. Part of me died when it happened.
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“Does a parent ever get over the death of a child? If a child dies of an illness it’s terrible, but I think it might be easier to cope. If someone in the family murders a child, it’s completely different. It’s so unnatural. I’ll never recover.
“They say time is a healer, but it’s not. You just exist for a time when it happens. I couldn’t feel anything, I was so numb. The pain was so excruciating. It could drive you to kill yourself.
“I hear priests talking about faith when something like this happens; I say, where is God when all this happened? They have no idea what loss is.”
She believes the authorities need to respond to such cases by organising broad investigations to try to establish what happened and if it is possible to identify people who are reaching a point where they might kill and then take their own lives.
“To be honest, I think the cases are so horrific that nobody looks for answers,” said Butler. “It’s just brushed under the carpet. It suits everyone. The authorities need to start looking into these cases and trying to learn from them. I sought an investigation into what happened in my case and got a one-page report.”
MARTIN DONNELLAN, a retired assistant garda commissioner, shares Butler’s view. Donnellan investigated the deaths of Adrian and Ciara Dunne and their daughters Shania, 3, and Leanne, 5, who were found in their home in Monageer, Co Wexford, in April 2007.
Donnellan described the case as one of the most horrific and tragic he had ever worked on.
An inquiry into whether the deaths could have been prevented was ordered after it emerged that gardai and social services had been told that Dunne had made funeral arrangements for his family days before he killed them. A garda investigation concluded that Dunne murdered his wife and two daughters before hanging himself, though it should be noted that his wife agreed with the plan to kill her children, who were strangled to death in their beds while clutching soft toys.
A government report into the case did not discover any single definitive motive behind the deaths.
Donnellan, who served as a detective for more than 40 years, believes garda investigations into murder-suicides are insufficient in terms of their ability to gather research that could prevent more tragedies from happening.
“If a killer has died by suicide after killing a family, the pressure is off the investigation team, who are more than likely trying to investigate other crimes and solve them,” he said.
“Detectives aren’t qualified to gather and evaluate information on someone’s mental health. You need proper researchers and medical professionals to try to establish if there are any indicators or signs that suggest that someone could kill. Would it be possible to learn what the danger signs are? It might be.
“If more research was conducted, we might learn lessons. There is without doubt a need to start looking into these cases to see if anything can be learnt. Can some other life be saved? Everyone involved should be interviewed, be they teachers, friends or family, to see if we could learn to identify the signs that suggest something awful is about to happen.
“I don’t know whether it would be legal to act against someone on the basis that they might engage in violent behaviour if they are having difficulties with their mental heath. I personally think there would be a public outcry if the HSE or the gardai removed children on the basis of suspicion, but something certainly needs to be done.”