This trial will not hear a whole lot about Ashling Murphy - prosecuting counsel Anne Marie Lawlor warned the jury at the outset of her opening speech on Tuesday that they might find this somewhat jarring.
"We're not going to hear a lot more about who she was, how she lived her life, about her people," the prosecutor said.
Instead, she said, this trial would be a cold, clinical dispassionate assessment of the evidence relating to Jozef Puska and what the prosecution says he did on the afternoon of 12 January 2022.
Nevertheless, during a long, intense week of evidence, in a packed courtroom Number 13, there were brief glimpses of the life of the 23-year-old school teacher.
Ms Lawlor warned the jurors that even though the death of a young woman such as Ms Murphy might cause understandable visceral revulsion, they had to approach the case clinically, disregarding any feelings of sympathy or outside commentary on any kind of media.
Roadmap
Ms Lawlor took the jury through what she called a roadmap of the prosecution's case.
The primary school teacher died as a result of being stabbed 11 times on the right side of her neck.
The person who did it would have intended to kill or cause serious injury, she said.
She detailed the evidence the prosecution intended to call relating to 33-year-old Mr Puska.
Eyewitnesses had seen some of the attack. His distinctive bicycle was left at the scene. DNA matching his was found under Ashling Murphy’s fingernails.
She outlined how gardaí had harvested more than 25,000 hours of CCTV.
The footage they had compiled would show Mr Puska "meandering aimlessly" around Tullamore, cycling in close proximity to two other women and heading towards the Grand Canal in the hours while Ashling Murphy was still teaching in Durrow National School.
In the early hours of the following morning, Ms Lawlor said Mr Puska "fled Tullamore" and went to an apartment in Dublin with his parents.
The next day he was taken out of the apartment by ambulance, and Ms Lawlor said the jurors would hear evidence that while in hospital he told gardaí: "I did it. I murdered. I am the murderer."
He went on to tell gardaí that: "When she pass, I cut her. I cut her neck. She panic, I panic."
Ms Lawlor noted that the fact that Ms Murphy had been stabbed was not known publicly at the time.
He also pointed at his own injured abdomen, Ms Lawlor said, and told a garda "I do this".
Ms Lawlor told the jurors Mr Puska and Ms Murphy did not know each other and there was no connection of any kind between them.
The nine men and three women on the jury were given maps of scenes in Tullamore and Dublin as well as booklets of photographs before hearing from the first eyewitnesses.
Eyewitnesses
Jenna Stack and Aoife Marron were both primary school teachers like Ms Murphy.
On the afternoon of 12 January they arranged to meet up for a run beside the Grand Canal. Ms Marron was on maternity leave. Ms Stack had a brief window to get some exercise before picking her daughter up from secondary school.
Ms Marron was able to tell the court that according to her smart watch, they began their exercise at 3:12pm.
They were running along the towpath in the direction of Digby Bridge in the townland of Cappincur. On their right was the canal. On the left, was a steep embankment which sloped down into dense undergrowth full of brambles and briars.
Ms Stack told the court she was the first to notice the distinctive bicycle lying in the embankment.
Part of it was luminous green which stood out against the winter vegetation. She thought it was a strange place for a bike to be. Both women paused and discussed it briefly.
A few feet further on they heard loud rustling in the undergrowth. They were now frightened but also worried in case someone had fallen off a bicycle and needed help.
Ms Stack looked down into the embankment and saw the back of a man's jacket. She shouted 'are you ok'. But when he turned around she said she could see clearly that the man was holding a girl down. That was where the noise they had heard was coming from, she told the jury.
She said she asked the man what he was doing. He gritted his teeth and told her to get away. She said he had an angry expression, his teeth were grinding and it was terrifying.
Ms Stack said the girl was kicking and the man was still crouched over her holding her down. She became emotional in the witness box as she told the jurors the only parts of her body that the girl was able to move were her legs. "She was kicking so hard," Ms Stack said.
"She was crying out for help. She was strong, she was using whatever part of her body she could to get help."
She described the girl she saw kicking her legs as if she was doing scissors kicks in the gym, raising her legs "really high", using her core to lift her legs.
"I knew something bad was going to happen," she told the court. She said she thought the man was going to rape the girl. She told him she had her phone on her and was going to call the guards and shouted at him to "get off her".
She described how he had lunged at her as if he was moving towards her. They did not have their phones on them, and she and Ms Marron sprinted down the canal as fast as they could to try and get help.
Defence cross examination
It was during the cross examination of Ms Stack by Defence Counsel Michael Bowman that the jury first heard what Mr Puska says happened on that afternoon.
Mr Bowman put it to Ms Stack that what she had actually come across was Jozef Puska "endeavouring to find out what had happened and endeavouring to assist Ms Murphy".
"No," Ms Stack replied.
Mr Bowman suggested that when Ms Stack had spoken to Mr Puska, he could not make out what she was saying and had not intended to be aggressive. When he tried to speak to her, he had caught his leg on a briar while he was trying to get out of the ditch and had called out in pain.
"That’s not the impression I got," Ms Stack said.
Mr Bowman said his client had no recollection of Ms Stack saying she would call the guards, that Ms Murphy was not moving her legs in the manner described by Ms Stack and that she had actually reached out and was holding one of his forearms because he was trying to stop the bleeding in her neck. "You didn’t see that?" he asked.
"No," Ms Stack replied.
Mr Bowman put it to Ms Stack that she had made a mistake later on when she was asked to identify the man she had seen in a lineup and picked out a man who was not Jozef Puska. She said the other man looked very similar. And she said she had not made a mistake in her evidence.
The court has heard another man was arrested in relation to Ms Murphy's murder after Garda Andrew Dolan suggested to his colleagues that Ms Stack’s description of the attacker fitted a man who was known to him.
The man was later released and the court has heard no one else was charged with Ms Murphy’s murder.
Witnesses at the scene
Many of those who gave evidence during the rest of the week were those who had arrived at the scene after the alarm was first raised by Ms Stack and Ms Marron.
Cyclist Enda Molloy cycled back to the ditch after meeting the two women in a distressed and animated state trying to explain to two workers from Waterways Ireland what they had seen.
He saw the bicycle and then saw the body of a woman lying in the undergrowth, her hair covering her face. When he called out and didn't get a response from her, he called the gardaí.
One of the Waterways Ireland workers Charlie Kelly arrived shortly after Mr Molloy. He said he knew the woman he could see was dead because there was very little colour in her hands. They were "snow white" he said.
Garda Tom Dunne was one of the first gardaí to arrive after receiving Mr Molloy’s call.
He and his colleague Garda Shane Hunter got down into the briar-covered ditch and began doing chest compressions.
He thought he could feel a faint pulse. He told the court he and Garda Hunter did chest compressions, alternating between them for "maybe ten minutes or more".
Garda Dunne noticed the woman’s gold necklace with the name "Ashling" on it. Garda Hunter told the court her mobile phone was in her jacket with an exercise app still running on it - showing a time of one hour and 24 minutes and a distance of 3.2 kilometres.
When paramedics Paul McCabe and Kieran Daly arrived, shortly before 4pm they knew they had to try to get Ms Murphy’s body out of the ditch to continue working on her. The gardaí and paramedics formed a chain, Mr McCabe said, and lifted her up onto the pathway.
He described Ms Murphy’s hair being matted with blood and totally covering her face. He could see a substantial number of wounds to the right side of her neck he said. And he said Ms Murphy’s eyes and mouth were open.
He got ready to use a defibrillator but it quickly became clear the machine would not be of use.
"She was in a non-shockable rhythm," he told the court. That meant her heart had flatlined and she could not be shocked.
He described to the jury that "Ashling looked dead". Her pupils were fixed and dilated, there was no pulse, no movement, no effort to breathe.
He consulted with the others at the scene and decided to do no more. "Nothing else was going to make a difference," he said. They covered Ms Murphy’s body with a blanket.
Post-mortem examination
State Pathologist Dr SallyAnne Collis gave evidence of carrying out what was described as a "complete and exhaustive examination" of Ms Murphy's body "from head to toe".
Her examination gave a picture of a small, slim healthy young woman, around five foot three in height and weighing less than 53 kilograms.
There was 12 knife wounds to the right side of her neck, Dr Collis told the court. 11 of these were stab wounds and it was these which had caused Ms Murphy’s death. There were no contributory factors. The court has been told by Mr Bowman that Mr Puska accepts these wounds were the cause of Ms Murphy’s death.
The stab wounds damaged her left and right jugular veins and her right carotid artery. The resultant blood loss would have caused Ms Murphy to go into cardio-respiratory arrest, Dr Collis said. One stab wound had penetrated both sides of her voice box, meaning she would have been unlikely to speak or make any intelligible sound after it was inflicted.
The pathologist said injuries on Ms Murphy’s hands may have been caused by her holding up her hands to try to protect herself.
Some members of Ms Murphy’s family left court while the detailed evidence was being outlined.
Dr Collis was asked by Mr Bowman whether a right-handed person was more likely to inflict injuries on the left side of a person’s neck.
She agreed but said that would be the case if the two people were facing each other. Under re-examination from Ms Lawlor she said the situation in this case would have been "completely dynamic" with people moving around.
Evidence gathered from Ms Murphy
After the post-mortem examination was completed, Garda Ronan Lawlor of the Garda Technical Bureau was given Ms Murphy's belongings, including the clothes she was wearing on the day. Some of the items were removed from evidence bags and shown to Garda Lawlor and the jury.
They included Ms Murphy’s top from her local club Kilcormac Killoughey GAA as well as a white T-shirt. Both were dirty and blood stained. Garda Lawlor also identified Ms Murphy’s fitbit, her necklace, a gold ring and a blood-stained scarf. Items he had observed at the scene were also produced in court - Ms Murphy’s sunglasses, her light pink woolly hat with a furry bobble and her blue Nike runners.
In response to Mr Bowman, Garda Lawlor said he had not noticed a pink glove or gloves at the scene.
CCTV footage
The fourth day of evidence was largely taken up with the evidence of Garda David Harney who brought the jury through CCTV footage compiled by members of An Garda Síochána from more than 25,000 hours they had harvested.
The first section showed the movements of Jozef Puska on a bicycle around Tullamore in the early afternoon on the day Ms Murphy was killed.
The footage started at 12:25pm and showed Mr Puska on his bicycle heading towards Tullamore from Mucklagh.
The court heard there was a gap in the footage of around half an hour. The prosecution suggested he was cycling around a park in the town for this period but the footage from the park, later shown to the jury was of "terrible" quality, Garda Harney said.
At around 13:38pm the footage shows a woman in a maroon-coloured jacket walking on her way to Tesco in a retail park outside Tullamore. Mr Puska can be seen cycling behind this woman for some minutes until she goes into Tesco.
At 13:53pm, the footage shows Mr Puska stopping his bicycle and appearing to reach into his pockets.
Garda Harney told the court he appears to hold something in front of his body and then return it to his pocket. However, it was suggested to him by defence counsel, Seoirse Ó Dúnlaing, that the quality of the footage was not good enough to be able to see these details.
Four minutes later, Mr Puska is shown cycling behind another woman on Church Road in Tullamore. This woman Annmarie Kelly was walking her dog at the time. The jury is expected to hear evidence from her in the coming days.
Mr Puska is last seen on this section of CCTV at 14:05pm, entering the Daingean Road car park beside the Grand Canal.
Garda Harney said that from this point on, there are no further sightings of Mr Puska on CCTV that day until much later that night, when the prosecution says he can be seen on footage coming from a bypass outside the town.
The court heard that cameras also captured some of the last movements of Ashling Murphy.
She can be seen leaving Durrow National School at 14:37pm, getting into her car and driving towards Tullamore.
She parks her car at the same car park on Daingean Road where Mr Puska had been seen, and heads off along the canal on her walk, wearing the pink bobble hat later found near her body.
The third section of CCTV footage begins at 20:55pm that night. A man in dark clothing is seen emerging from near a bypass outside the town. Garda Harney told the court he had come to the conclusion that the man was Jozef Puska.
He told the jury it was "very strange" for someone to appear from this area. "You wouldn't generally see people walking on the bypass at nighttime," he said. Judge Tony Hunt pointed out that the area around this location was quite rural.
This figure is seen walking towards town before eventually calling to a house. The footage shows two figures getting into a car in the driveway of the house and driving in the direction of Mucklagh, Garda Harney told the court.
The final section of CCTV is from the early hours of the following morning. At 00:58am, a car pulls up at an apartment building in Crumlin in Dublin. Jozef Puska along with his father and mother are seen going into the building.
Garda Harney said Mr Puska has changed his clothes. He appears to be moving normally. He has facial hair and his phone in his hand.
He is not seen again on this camera until 11:56am the same morning. An ambulance is outside the building and Mr Puska is taken out on a carry chair by paramedics. He no longer has facial hair.
The final shots show Mr Puska being brought into the Emergency Department of St James’ Hospital shortly after midnight.
Evidence will continue tomorrow afternoon. Judge Hunt has told the jury he expects the trial to be over by 10 November at the latest.
