The Trib (18 page)

Outside, Mickser was visibly shaken. He said he would write the letter of apology that evening. After a few questions, the reporters drifted off. ‘Is that it?' he asked, looking like a man who badly needed a microphone to crank up his self-confidence and restart the spinning machine.

He will be back in court on Tuesday with his draft letter for Dempsey. It might be fitting if he turns up in short trousers and school tie and cap. And he would be well advised to have everything in order. Any excuses about the horse eating his homework won't wash with Peter Kelly.

Meanwhile, if you happen to see Noel Dempsey this weekend, he will most likely have a smile on his face as wide as the Shannon, a spring in his step befitting a mountain goat. The smart money says he will get the letter framed and hang it in a choice position in his loo.

In April 2008 James Livingstone settled a legal action against An Garda Síochána over the manner in which the force had dealt with him following the murder of his wife, Grace.

13 April 2008

T
he investigating gardaí knew who was responsible for the murder of Grace Livingstone. All they were missing was the evidence. Here is what happened, according to the deductions of the investigating gardaí.

Grace was murdered by her husband James on 7 December 1992. He arrived home from work to The Moorings, Malahide, at around 5.50 p.m., a few minutes after dropping off a colleague. He and his wife had a row, probably because she didn't have his dinner ready.

They went upstairs to their bedroom, where James kept a number of firearms. He bound her hands, feet and mouth with adhesive tape.

Then he shot her with a double-barrel shotgun.

He placed the weapon in bushes outside the house. He ran over to a neighbour's house, got no answer, went to another neighbour and ran back to his own house, whereupon he phoned the emergency services at 5.58 p.m. All of this occurred in the space of eight minutes, at the very most.

There was no sign of a break-in. Nobody heard the shot. Nobody among the procession who entered the bedroom in the following minutes ... the neighbour, gardaí, the ambulance crew ... detected the smell of cordite. Livingstone's clothes tested negative for gunshot residue.

There was circumstantial evidence pointing towards a young man acting suspiciously in the area around 4.30 p.m. that day, when Livingstone was at work in the city centre. Some neighbours heard a loud bang around the same time. But the gardaí didn't give that too much thought. They had their man.

The husband did it, whatever about his lack of opportunity, not to mention motive.

James Livingstone is, by his own account, a ‘hard man with a fondness for guns'.

He had eight firearms on his property on the day in question. He was a long-time member of the FCA. He was employed in the special investigations unit of the Revenue Commissioners, a job that required a dogged and committed operator to do the State's work.

He is not a man given to public displays of emotion.

His personality did him no favours in the weeks after his wife's murder, but the gardaí are supposed to be concerned with evidence rather than impressions.

On the night of the killing he gave a statement in which he listed his guns. They were taken away. He admitted that he may not have a licence for some of them.

On 3 March 1993 he was arrested under the Offences Against The State Act, on suspicion of having an unlicensed firearm, which had been in possession of the gardaí since the previous December. The basis for the arrest allowed for his detention for up to forty-eight hours. He was kept in custody at Swords garda station for two days.

He claims he wasn't asked about the firearm during his detention, but repeatedly questioned about Grace's demise. He says he was shown photographs of her naked body during this period.

He was charged with possession of the unlicensed firearm. He pleaded guilty and was fined. A separate file on his wife's murder was sent to the garda commissioner, but not the DPP. Livingstone was never arrested in connection with his wife's death.

In August 1993 Deputy Commissioner Tom O'Reilly asked Detective Superintendent Tom Connolly to review the file. Connolly is an oldschool cop ... understated, dogged and with a career of unblemished investigation behind him. He was joined on the case by Detective Sergeant Tom O'Loughlin.

Soon after his appointment, Connolly met the leading officers on the case in Malahide.

‘I was left in no doubt that Jim Livingstone was the culprit for this murder and they just didn't have sufficient evidence to charge him,' Connolly remembers.

He went in search of hard evidence. There was an issue over the time of death. A GP who attended at 6.35 p.m. on the day said the victim had been dead for two hours.

State Pathologist John Harbison was at the scene at 11.30 p.m. and he estimated the time to be around 6p.m.

A reconstruction of the shooting was set up in the Livingstones' bedroom. The shooter's garments tested positive for gunshot residue.

Another actor, who entered the room five minutes after the shot was fired, also tested positive.

The neighbour who attended on the day of the murder, and the two officers who were first on the scene, entered the bedroom fifteen and twenty minutes after the discharge. The neighbour detected the smell of cordite in the bedroom.

The two cops detected it on the landing outside before even entering the bedroom.

The result raised a vital question: How could Livingstone have shot his wife – as the initial investigators believed – and no cordite be detected within minutes of the incident?

The four neighbours who had heard a bang at 4.30 p.m. were also in situ that day.

High winds meant they didn't hear the shot during the reconstruction. A second reconstruction was set up on a day with similar weather conditions to 7 December 1992. Three of the neighbours heard it. The fourth was unavailable, but a garda taking her place also clearly heard the bang. The conclusion strengthened the proposition that Grace Livingstone might well have been shot at 4.30 p.m., while her husband was working in Dublin Castle, twelve miles away in the city.

Gardaí in the original investigation had put the bang down to work being carried out by cable TV installers who were in the neighbouring Seapark estate that day. The workmen also attended one house in The Moorings, but the cops hadn't even checked which house.

There was evidence that pointed to another suspect, an unidentified long-haired man. Four sixteen-year-old girls had seen this man in the estate around 4.30 p.m.

On the day in question, Philip McGibney was a landscape gardener working in the cul-de-sac where the Livingstones lived. He packed up around 4.30 p.m., got into his van, and turned the vehicle around outside the Livingstone home. As his van's lights shone onto the Livingstone's house, he noticed a young man with long hair straightening a plant inside the glass porch.

The investigating gardaí considered him a truthful witness, but were convinced he had mistaken the youth for middle-aged Grace Livingstone, who wore her hair in a bun. Connolly gives far more credence to the accuracy of McGibney's account.

There was a sighting of a long-haired man getting into a red car and taking off at speed nearby. There were also sightings on the far side of Malahide of a red car driving erratically later that afternoon.

Then there were the fingerprints on the adhesive tape with which Grace Livingstone was bound and gagged. One print on the tape was unidentified.

‘The finger impression is, in my view, most likely to have been put on after the tape was unrolled,' Connolly reported.

Charity collectors who were going house to house on the day in question were quizzed. One, an Englishman, had previously been suspected of stealing from homes. The second investigation went to England to interview him, but it came to naught. His prints didn't match those on the adhesive tape.

Connolly's report concluded: ‘It is my opinion, having carried out the review and further investigation, that the chances of Mr Livingstone having murdered his wife are very slim indeed. One other reason why I feel Mr Livingstone is very unlikely to have murdered his wife is the time available to him, to assault his wife, tie her up, shoot her, call to two neighbours' houses and return home to make a phone call (to the emergency services) at 5.58 p.m.'

Last Wednesday, Livingstone and his son Conor and daughter Tara settled their case for damages against the State, following a day of legal argument. Lawyers for the State read a statement saying Livingstone was entitled to the ‘full and unreserved presumption of innocence'.

There is no case law in this area, and if the judge had ultimately ruled in Livingstone's favour, it would have had major repercussions for the manner in which gardaí can investigate crime. The
Sunday Tribune
understands that he didn't receive any compensation but was given a contribution to his legal costs.

The seventy-one-year-old retiree feels vindicated. How did he manage to carry on with a cloud over his life for fifteen years?

‘Maybe I'm thicker than most,' he says. ‘It wasn't easy, but I had great support from my family and from Grace's as well. And the FCA was like a second family to me.'

Livingstone believed for a long time that the murder was associated with his work, which included investigations of fuel smuggling in border areas. He now accepts, in light of Connolly's investigation, that this is unlikely. He has written an unpublished book on the affair, entitled
Lies, Leaks And Layabouts
.

Tom Connolly says he feels vindicated that his belief in Livingstone's innocence has been shown to be correct.

‘He has been through an unimaginable ordeal. He should have been eliminated as a suspect after a day or two, but all the energy and focus of the investigation remained on him. His wife was brutally murdered and a large section of the community were given to understand, through rumour and innuendo, that he was the culprit. If the investigation had focused on the credible evidence, which became available early on, this crime could and should have been solved.'

The case illustrated the worst and the best of the force. It wasn't the first time that officers put the cart before the horse, identifying a suspect and looking for the evidence to back up their hunch. The review showed An Garda Síochána at its best, doggedly investigating a crime, and letting the evidence speak for itself.

The case of the murder of Grace Livingstone remains open.

22 June 2008

A
nd so the journey into the heart of darkness ends. Last Tuesday saw what should be the final detailed examination of Bertie Ahern's finances. Praise the Lord for eventual, if not happy, endings. Last week, we visited the former Taoiseach's house in Beresford Avenue, in the heart of Drumcondra, from whence the greatest of them all was sprung, and where the seeds of his possible destruction were sown.

We won't bore you with the details this time around. Suffice to say, it's more tales of the unexpected, the bizarre, the quite unbelievable. If Ahern's renting of the house in 1995, and subsequent purchase two years later, is as he claims, then he hasn't offered a single plausible explanation as to why it appears as if his landlord- cum-friend, Michael Wall, acted as a front for him to buy the property in 1995.

In terms of themes, it was déjà vu. Big lumps of sterling cash, money moved around accounts, a change in plans to explain lodgements of sterling and a change of details from earlier explanations. Celia Larkin is again at the heart of his affairs. So is Wall, who, Ahern alleged on Tuesday, had a bit of an obsession with security.

On a previous occasion, Wall told the inquiry that he left a bag with stg£30,000 in a hotel wardrobe when he went off to Bertie's annual fundraising dinner in 1994. Maybe he wasn't on the ball that evening, as he was looking forward to the grub, which he was denied on that other fundraising occasion, the alleged whip-round in Manchester.