The death of Catherine Nevin this week has brought me back to the first four months of 2000 when as RTE’s Legal Affairs Correspondent I spent day after day reporting the trial of the Wicklow publican who had her husband murdered.
But when I think of those long days in courtroom number one, it’s not Catherine and her sometimes extraordinary stories of midnight meetings of IRA men and being poisoned by a man in an anorak that immediately come to mind. Rather it’s the seven tall dignified siblings of Tom Nevin walking one after the other into the witness box at that trial to reclaim their brother Tom’s good name.
Proud Galway people, they were without guile, without agenda. Their brother Tom worked hard, built a solid business, and enjoyed hurling and GAA in general. His mistake was his choice of partner. She had him killed in a vicious and callous way as he counted the takings on a St. Patrick’s holiday weekend at Jack White’s Inn near Brittas Bay.
When I think of that trial I think of the words of Mella Carroll, the High Court Judge who heard the case. At sentencing, her voice breaking, she told Nevin: "You had your husband assassinated and then you tried to assassinate his character as well."
But why were we fascinated and horrified by Catherine Nevin and her crimes? In my experience, women kill in response to great provocation, in response to violence, on the spur of the moment and not, with some exceptions, in a cool calm planned carefully choreographed way. Catherine Nevin plotted and planned for years to get Tom out of her life forever.
She never admitted guilt and continued to protest her innocence through the legal process.
Catherine was media gold. With her carefully chosen outfits, she sallied forth every day to the Four Courts, the star in her own drama. She held forth in the witness box with her account of, the world according to Catherine. In one dramatic account, after a brief absence, she claimed she had been poisoned by a man in an anorak who broke into her south Dublin home and forced her to drink a milk like substance. According to Catherine, he told her certain people were angry at what she was saying in her evidence. Her stomach was never pumped but no poison was found and there was no evidence of a break-in.
The jury didn’t believe her carefully crafted story of a robbery and break-in at Jack White’s which left her husband dead. They convicted her of murder and of three counts of soliciting three men to kill him. She never admitted guilt and continued to protest her innocence through the legal process.
Tom died without a will. His family sought to deny her the right to benefit from her crime through that inheritance. Some of those proceedings were still continuing at the time of her death this week.
Tom Nevin’s family defended their brother 18 years ago and in another show of that dignity they demonstrated at her trial in response to her death this week. They simply said, rest in peace.
