The Cold Case Files (16 page)

Meanwhile, a Garda fingerprint expert would soon find the fingermarks on the tape which have never been identified. While there may be some innocent explanation for the marks, such as that they
were somehow put on in the manufacturing process, this seems a remote possibility. The fact that the marks are on both the sticky and non-sticky side of the tape indicates the finger impressions
were put on as Grace was being bound and gagged with the tape. What is without doubt is that the fingermarks were certainly not Jimmy Livingstone’s.

Another important factor which remains unresolved is that the actual roll of black tape, from which three pieces had been taken to gag and bind Grace, was never found. The tape was strong,
similar to ‘gaffer’ tape which might normally be used to cover wires or cables. Logic would dictate the killer had removed three pieces of tape from the roll during the attack, and had
then taken the rest of the roll of tape with him as he left the house. That roll has never been found.

In the first few days of the investigation a number of witnesses gave statements about a man seen close to the Livingstone house at around 4.30 p.m., a time when Jimmy and Conor were both still
working in Dublin city. Indeed one witness actually saw a young man at the Livingstone front door at 4.30 p.m. To this day this young man has never been identified. He was spotted standing in the
porch and bending down to pick up a pot plant, as if he had just knocked it over. A number of witnesses also reported hearing a distinct sound at around 4.30 p.m., and what they most likely heard
was the sound of the murder, the sound of the shotgun being fired. From very early in the investigation there was a wealth of evidence to indicate Jimmy Livingstone did not shoot his wife.

Almost two decades after his wife was murdered, Jimmy Livingstone kindly met with me and did an interview for this book. He and his family have been through a great deal. In April 2008, he and
his daughter Tara and son Conor settled a High Court action they had taken against the State. Part of the settlement was a declaration on behalf of the Minister for Justice that ‘...
notwithstanding the diligent and exhaustive investigations carried out in this matter, An Garda Síochána can confirm that Mr James Livingstone is entitled to the full and
unreserved presumption of innocence
.’ It had been a long road for the Livingstones to get that declaration. The family had begun preparing court proceedings in the mid-1990s. During our
conversation Jimmy often refers to the second Garda investigation involving a different set of detectives which took place a year after Grace’s murder and which effectively cleared him. This
investigation involved a fresh team of detectives being despatched from Garda Headquarters to study the case. Led by Detective Superintendent Tom Connolly and Detective Sergeant Todd
O’Loughlin, the cold-case investigation surmised that the murder of Grace Livingstone occurred sometime around 4.30 p.m., when Jimmy Livingstone was still at work. “I persisted with my
High Court action because unkind reports were being published erratically about the crime, and none of them ever referred to Tom Connolly’s investigation which cleared me. That was always
played down and the first investigation by other Gardaí was played up. And I wanted to correct that, to have it corrected publicly, and I also ultimately wanted the culprit to be found. I
still believe that can be done.”

It took until 2008 for the High Court case to actually get into court, and it was then scheduled to last up to eight weeks. But on the fourth day the case was settled to the satisfaction of
Jimmy and Tara and Conor. “The State was bloody minded in bringing it that far,” Jimmy tells me. “An estimate of my legal fees had been put at €1.3 million if it had gone to
an eight-week trial. I assume the State was facing the same. As part of the settlement the State paid my legal fees. If I had lost the case I would have gone to appeal and if I had lost that I was
prepared to go to the Court of Human Rights in the
EU
. I had prepared for giving up everything I had financially. What else would you do?”

On 3 March 1993 Jimmy was arrested under Section 30 of the Offences Against the State Act. It was just less than three months since Grace had been found shot dead. Detectives came to
Jimmy’s front door at the same house in which Grace had been found at The Moorings in Malahide. He was arrested and taken to Swords Garda station. By that time Gardaí had established
that, while Jimmy owned a number of legally held firearms, he was also in possession of two unlicensed guns. Jimmy was a gun enthusiast, it was in his blood. His father had owned guns, and Jimmy
had been going shooting since he was a teenager. “I did have an unlicensed firearm, and it was later dealt with in the District Court as a summary matter,” Jimmy tells me. “I got
a fine of £300, it was a rap on the knuckles. I had an unlicensed revolver, it was a Mark
VI
Webley revolver from the First World War. I was also charged with
possession of another gun which had the capacity to fire corks.”

While Gardaí might maintain that they were following the letter of the law in forwarding a file to the
DPP
in relation to the two unlicensed firearms, the
circumstances of his arrest left a sour taste in the mouth of Jimmy Livingstone. In the opening days of the High Court case that Jimmy and his two children took in April 2008, their barrister John
Rogers outlined a number of grievances which his clients had with the original investigation which took place in December 1992 and early 1993. Mr Rogers said his client had no motive and
insufficient time to murder his wife, and that Gardaí had failed to follow through on other leads, in particular the unidentified man seen at the house at 4.30 p.m. on the day of the murder.
The Livingstones argued that Gardaí had failed in their ‘duty of care’ in relation to the case. Because the case was settled on the fourth day without the State outlining its
full defence, we don’t know what it would have said to each of the individual allegations made by Jimmy. But sixteen years after Grace’s murder the High Court settlement was vindication
for the Livingstones. Standing with his son and daughter outside the court just after the case was settled, Jimmy welcomed the public declaration by the State that he was entitled to the full and
unreserved presumption of innocence. “This has been a long, long haul. After fifteen years we have now established that I am not a suspect for the murder of their mother, and my wife. Those
who heard the evidence over the past few days will know what the family has suffered.” Asked if his wife would be proud of her family for the action they had taken, Tara and Conor nodded as
Jimmy emotionally replied, “I think she would.” Conscious that this was an action that the family should never have had to take in the first place, Jimmy Livingstone emotionally told
reporters the authorities should now go and find who killed Grace.

When I met with Jimmy to discuss his family’s ongoing campaign, he showed me some of the boxes of documents he was given by the State prior to his High Court action. Jimmy knows the case
inside out. It has consumed his life ever since he found his wife’s body. He has 77 large boxes of documents, containing 17,000 pages of detail about the case. “There are other
documents I didn’t get copies of, documents where privilege was claimed. I’d say there are between 5,000 and 10,000 documents I was not given. Maybe they had confidential information
from informers and the like. I handled a lot of information myself in my time and a lot was formal and a lot was informal.”

At the time of Grace’s murder, Jimmy was a Senior Inspector of Taxes with the Revenue Commissioners. He worked in the Special Enquiry Branch, tracing people who were evading taxes on a
large scale. It would only be in the aftermath of the murder of journalist Veronica Guerin in 1996 that the Garda Criminal Assets Bureau was established. Prior to this, it was people like Jimmy in
the Revenue Commissioners who were investigating the wealth of criminals or people with subversive connections.

Jimmy loved his work; he had joined the Civil Service in 1956 aged just 18. He had begun working with the Revenue Commissioners in 1959, and during his career had worked in Dundalk, Castlebar
and Dublin. It was in the 60s that Jimmy Livingstone from Co. Monaghan met Grace Vernon from Co. Louth. “I met Grace while I was working in Dundalk, and we got married in October 1968,”
he recalls. “We lived in Whitehall in Dublin, then Biscayne in Malahide, then we moved to Castlebar for a time and finally we moved to The Moorings in Malahide.” The couple’s
eldest child Tara was born in 1970 and Conor was born two years later. In 1977 tragedy struck when the couple’s third child, a little girl, Maeve Elaine, died aged just ten weeks old.

By December 1992, Grace and Jimmy had lived at The Moorings for 16 years. They had been one of the first families to move into the estate when it was first built. The area was home to a number
of professional people including Gardaí and nurses. Each two-storey house was detached and there was a distance of four or five feet between each. Every home had a spacious back garden. The
Coast Road linking Malahide and Portmarnock was just a short walk away and Grace would often walk the family dog along the coast. Grace and Jimmy loved the outdoors, and they often spent time on a
boat they had moored on the River Shannon.

Tara Livingstone was now 22 years old and living in Paris where she was working for an accountancy firm. Conor was twenty, and was studying electronics at the Regional Technical College in
Dundalk. He was still living at home in Malahide and while he waited to repeat a term at college in January of 1993 he was working at an amusement arcade—Dr Quirky’s—in Dublin
city. The family also had two pets, a German pointer gun dog named Shot, and a small black cat called Frisby.

Jimmy and Conor last saw Grace on the morning of 7 December 1992. As they were having breakfast Jimmy and Grace discussed arrangements for travelling to Co. Monaghan that evening. Jimmy’s
brother Peter, who had passed away in 1987, had been a priest in Broomfield near Castleblayney. That December night there was going to be an anniversary mass in his former parish, and Jimmy and
Grace were planning to join Jimmy’s cousins in Broomfield as they had done for the previous few years. They arranged to leave Malahide at six that evening to make it to the mass for eight
o’clock.

It was a normal morning on what was to become the most abnormal and shocking day. Having finished their breakfast Jimmy and Conor said goodbye to Grace and got into Jimmy’s Renault Estate
and headed for Chalfont Avenue on the other side of Malahide to pick up Art O’Connor, a work colleague of Jimmy’s. Jimmy and Art and two others had begun the car-pooling arrangement
some years before, but now it was just Art and Jimmy who were still working in the one building. Jimmy and Conor picked Art up at 8.30 a.m. and they headed into town. Conor was dropped off for work
at O’Connell Street at around 9 a.m. and Jimmy and Art headed to the Revenue Commissioners Offices at Setanta House on Nassau Street. Jimmy parked his car as usual in the car park. Art worked
on the first floor and Jimmy was on the third. They arranged to meet at 5 p.m. to head home.

Grace Livingstone was well known in Malahide. While Jimmy drove a Renault, Grace’s car of choice was a Ford Fiesta, registration number
XYZ
681. She was a familiar
sight at 9 a.m. mass at St Sylvester’s Church in the village. Her particular passion was flower arranging. She was a member of Portmarnock Flower Club and Malahide Horticultural Society.
Grace and Jimmy both shared a love of the outdoors. Grace would often join her husband when he was going shooting or fishing, and she would gather wild flowers to cultivate at home, or she would
gather leaves and moss to make hanging baskets. On a recent trip, they had gathered holly to make wreaths to be sold at the Christmas fairs of both the Church of Ireland and Catholic churches in
Malahide.

At about 11.45 a.m. on 7 December 1992 Grace was in her driveway. Her next door neighbour Bernard Owens was also in his driveway and they had a chat, talking about plans for Christmas.
Everything was normal. Bernard and his family later headed out to Dun Laoghaire for the afternoon and then on to Bray. Bernard was a Garda, and the following day it was he who would go to the
hospital and identify Grace’s body to State Pathologist John Harbison.

Another neighbour of Grace’s spoke with her at around 1.50 p.m. Anne Watchorne lived across the road and was a good friend. Anne was a nurse and she had helped to care for Grace’s
sister when she had passed away in the Livingstone home some years before. Anne walked across to Grace’s house to give back a basket she had borrowed, and the two women spoke at the front
door for around 15–20 minutes. Grace was in good form, and they spoke about a sale-of-work they had helped organise the day before. Grace was wearing a check blouse, wool cardigan and
trousers and had some rollers at the front of her hair, with the rest tied back in a pony tail. She told Anne that she and Jimmy were heading to the memorial mass in Co. Monaghan that night. Grace
offered Anne some green cuttings and she spoke about making arrangements for dinner. It was a normal everyday chat. Anne said goodbye to Grace at around 2.10 p.m. and headed back to her own house.
Apart from the killer, Anne would be the last person to see Grace alive. Anne collected her daughter and then went to Malahide village, before calling to another neighbour’s house and heading
home again. It would be about 6.10 p.m. when she would see a flashing blue light in the street and a neighbour would tell her that Grace was dead.

Jimmy Livingstone spent the morning working in his office. At about 12.50 p.m. he dialled home but there was no answer. Grace may have been out in the village, or she may have been out the back
in the greenhouse and not heard the phone. Just after 1 p.m. Jimmy met a work colleague, Joe Stone, and they travelled from Nassau Street to go swimming at Marion College in Ballsbridge, as they
did every Monday lunchtime. Jimmy returned to the office at 2.15 p.m. or so and stayed on the third floor all afternoon. He left the office just before five o’clock and met Art O’Connor
in the car park for the journey home.