The Rachel O’Reilly murder - and the verdict is guilty!

It was the movement of his mobile phone on the day of the killing – and the fact that it confirmed that he had lied to police regarding his whereabouts – that made the crucial difference. But the use of this, and other forms of electronic evidence – including a series of emails – in the case has given rise to concerns about how private our lives really are in the 21st Century.

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At face value The Sopranos was just a long-running saga of murderous New Jersey Italian gangsters. But as it unfolded it revealed layer upon layer. Brilliant, vast, complex, sprawling, it is being read as a parable of 21st century America and is universally applauded as one of the greatest TV series ever. It had everything, and more.

It has spawned a vast print and web literature. Many doctorates will be achieved by analyses of it over the next two decades, possibly more. Hundreds of millions have watched it rumble towards its conclusion. How would such a huge endeavour be resolved? How would it all end?
With 10 seconds of blank screen, that’s how. Then the credits rolled.
Well, what did we expect? Closure, you might say. People wanted it… to conclude, to wrap. But in this instance, the producers refused to play ball…

This word ‘closure’ appears in the Oxford Dictionary, but the meaning now most generally attached to it is not mentioned. This meaning has seeped into general usage from the ‘talking cures’. In Ireland that means various kinds of therapeutic counselling, to which a large swathe of the population is attached, if not addicted. But the word is also much loved by journalists, who assume that we all share the same understanding of what is a complex thing in itself.
Well, closure you may have wanted but what you got from writer/director David Chase was 10 seconds of black. Those ten seconds are now being mulled over and deciphered and deconstructed. Maybe the end meant that Tony was whacked. Maybe you’re just left to find your own ending. Maybe it’s a statement about the nature of fiction. Maybe there are clues buried in the script…
No such artistic licence or leeway was available to the jury in the Rachel O’Reilly murder trial, which ended approximately 40 hours after The Sopranos’ final episode. They were charged with making a call on a brutal murder. Did he do it or didn’t he? And, like Sopranos-watchers after that last episode, they weren’t given all that much to work with, apart from circumstantial evidence.
The trial grabbed the public’s attention. Everywhere you went people were talking about it. Judge Barry White said that he had never experienced such an intense level of interest in his career. And in its aftermath, the media gave the public the full measure of coverage, including extended news bulletins, special editions and information on evidence that had been deemed inadmissible – all in full gory detail.
It is, of course, not the first murder trial to excite huge public interest. Old folks will tell you about the Shan Mohangi trial and the horrors that engulfed the Green Tureen when an illegal abortion went wrong. In more recent times there was the Black Widow, Catherine Nevin. There was the killing of Robert Holohan. And, in a curious twist of the fates, it is twenty five years since Malcolm McArthur went on his own grisly murder spree, bequeathing the term GUBU to the nation as a result.
What is it that distinguishes these killings from the routine gangland slaughters committed in various parts of Dublin, Cork and Limerick and also in Northern Ireland’s seedier quarters? Why is it that the terrible murder by gangsters of the innocent apprentice plumber Anthony Campbell hasn’t generated anything like the same preoccupation?
Essentially it’s because murders like that of Rachel O’Reilly are not the work of drug dealers and gangsters. The underlying feeling is that they are committed by people like you or me, people we may even have met. In the case of Joe O’Reilly, he is well known in media circles. People in advertising agencies will have dealt with him directly. Ex-colleagues of his are involved in national newspapers and magazines. In many ways he is an Ordinary Joe: hence the morbid fascination. In turn, the media are only too happy to pump up the volume.
What the public and the media wanted from the Rachel O’Reilly trial was ‘closure’. They didn’t want a hung jury. They wanted this movie to end with the bad guy exposed, with the victim vindicated, with a jury foreman delivering the coup de grace, with the judge uttering those damning words ‘you have been found guilty by a jury of your peers… the sentence is…’
And that’s what they got.

Yet, there are notes of unease about this trial. They are faint and peripheral now – but they may become more audible with time. There are those who hold that, while the conclusion was almost certainly the right one – that Joe O’Reilly brutally murdered his wife – the verdict was the wrong one.
Are they right? Well, the principal factor underpinning such reservations is that the prosecution case largely consisted of circumstantial evidence.
No murder weapon was found. There was no forensic evidence that could prove that O’Reilly had been at the scene on the morning – as Rachel’s husband his DNA was all over the house. There was no definitive witness evidence. The only, but as it turned out critical, evidence that O’Reilly might have been the murderer related to the movement of his mobile phone on the day in question.
For a jury to convict someone of murder on such evidence is unusual. But, notwithstanding a brilliant performance by the judge, whose presidency over proceedings was exemplary and who made absolutely sure that evidence that might subsequently be the basis of a challenge was not admitted, the jury were persuaded that O’Reilly was the killer.
The most compelling evidence was electronic. The emails that passed between O’Reilly and his sister Ann. The texts that he had exchanged with his lover, Nikki Pelley. And, most crucially, the mobile records – the fascinating trail left by O’Reilly’s phone as it was picked up by different masts on its peregrinations on the fateful morning, and how that record was at variance with his own account of where he had been. That, ultimately, is what damned Joe O’Reilly.
It isn’t the first time that mobiles have been used like this. Phone records have been vital to the case against individuals charged with involvement in the Omagh bombing. They were also used when Gardaí were searching for Robert Holohan, the 11-year-old who was tragically killed by Wayne O’Donoghue in Midleton in Cork in January, 2005. And in anti-terrorist operations there is widespread monitoring of both verbal ‘traffic’ and mobile travel. Likewise, police tracking child porn have shown what can be gleaned from hard drives. People now know that ‘delete’ doesn’t mean what it says.
But this trial is a watershed in that it’s the first time the wider public has been taken forensically through what their emails and phones can be made to reveal when the chips are down; it is also the first time, in this jurisdiction at least, where evidence of that nature, supported only by circumstances, has been sufficient to convict. Some of the emails were scarifying, in that they laid bare just how crude, sloppy and downright nasty people can be in email communications. It’s as if they don’t recognise the difference between saying something and putting it in writing. Perhaps in the modern era that distinction has been lost.
The issue that arises, however, isn’t to do with catching wrongdoers. Everyone, more or less, applauds when the crims are done. No, the issue is to do with how much of our daily lives is on the record now, how ‘watched’ we all are and how available our routines and our past behaviours are for scrutiny.
Hundreds of thousands of people squirmed when the details of O’Reilly’s text messages and emails were revealed. Given the circumstances, there was an understandable measure of revulsion: the character that came across in those communications was a deeply unpleasant and manipulative one. But there was also, for very many people, a shiver of recognition. Few haven’t sinned, you might say, and the thought that, given one circumstance or another, their intimacies and indiscretions might revisit them in this way is not a comforting one.
There is a major problem lurking here. It is to do with privacy, with your entitlement to not be tracked or watched. You are also entitled to, as it were, write and own your own history, to make mistakes and – in time – to put them behind you. If what had been said in those emails had been put into a series of letters, they would have been burned. But electronic traces seem to last forever.
Police and secret service forces around the world pooh-pooh civil liberty complaints by saying that law abiding citizens need not worry. But they would say that, wouldn’t they? And besides, whatever way you look at it, nothing Nikki Pelley did was against the law. Nor Joe O’Reilly’s sister Ann, for that matter.
Also, as our understanding of the technology increases it becomes clear that it isn’t just the police who are able to root through this vast bank of data that we are accumulating, often unbeknownst to ourselves. (Add in credit card transactions, speed cameras and CCTV footage and you’ll see what I mean, although the judge was very dubious of the evidential value of the last-mentioned).
Whatever way you look at it, in relation to all of these – and the access that third parties can have to the electronic footprints we are leaving – the protections are woefully inadequate.

At the end of the day, one is glad for the memory of Rachel O’Reilly that she can now be left to rest in peace, as the metaphor has it, and that her family has seen her vindicated. You might wonder at the cold, calculating behaviour of Joe O’Reilly; imagine what he must be made of, to deliver those crushing fatal blows; ponder long and hard the almost complete isolation that crept up on him, as watching his reaction over the weeks following the killing, one by one, friends and acquaintances came to the conclusion that he had indeed viciously murdered the mother of his own children.
Her murderer deserves to spend the rest of his days locked away – and not even the faintest sliver of compassion you might feel for a man who thought that he could cheat the bias of a system that shunts separated fathers into the role of weekend daddies could alter the strength of that conviction in the slightest. That his savage murder of his wife means, in fact, that their children are now deprived of both parents and are likely to be the subject of a protracted family law battle is the final tragic coda. What the fuck, you might ask, possessed him?
But the sense of release occasioned by the verdict shouldn’t mask the problems with the case and how it was proven. After the dust dies down, hopefully, lawmakers and civil libertarians will sift through the implications. In so doing they may also have an eye on imminent agreements between the EU and the USA regarding the release of huge amounts of data on air travellers.
In the meantime, be careful with your texts! Remember that, in the 21st century, only people lie and only the living die. Words last forever.