A look back at the third week of evidence in the Richard Satchwell trial.
It was lunchtime on 12 October 2023 when the story Richard Satchwell had been telling for more than six-and-a-half years finally changed.
Human remains had been found buried under the stairs in the house he and his wife Tina had shared.
The narrative that she had left their home on 20 March 2017, taking their savings with her, could no longer be sustained.
Richard Satchwell was rearrested at two minutes past midday in Youghal and taken to Cobh Garda Station. Gardaí told him they were there to listen to whatever he had to say.
Video footage of his interview was played to the jury in the Central Criminal Court. In the interview room, Mr Satchwell took off his glasses and sobbed as he began to tell a different version of events to those he had recounted to gardaí and journalists previously.
He had been up early on the morning of 20 March. It was the anniversary of the death of Tina's grandmother, who had been like a mother to her. So, he said he tried to make breakfast "a bit special" for her, cutting up apples, mandarins and grapes and mixing them with yoghurt.
He went out into the shed to do some plumbing work. hhen he came back in, he claimed his wife was standing at the bottom of the stairs scraping at plasterboard he had put up with a chisel.He asked her what she was doing, and he said she "flew at him" sending him "flying backwards".
Mr Satchwell was hard to understand as he cried and demonstrated with his hand the stabbing motion he said his wife had been making with the chisel, as he held her back with the belt of her bathrobe which he said was at her neck.
Then, he said, "that all stopped".
His wife fell down on top of him, her body limp. He held her for a "good 20 minutes to half an hour", he said.
Then he went out, taking their two dogs with him. He lit a candle for Tina at a church.
He went to their favourite spot in Youghal, trying to think what to do. Then, he said, he panicked. "And once the lie was told I couldn’t go back on it -and that’s the truth."
The court heard details of how the location of Tina Satchwell’s remains began to become apparent to gardaí within a short time of entering the house at Grattan Street in Youghal on 10 October 2023. The house had previously been searched in June 2017, but not in the "invasive, extensive" way that was now planned.
One area the search team intended to focus on was an extension built by Mr Satchwell at the back of the house in the years since he had reported his wife missing. Gardaí planned to demolish this completely.
But in the first hours of the search, trained cadaver dog Fern had taken an interest in two areas in the main living room in the centre of the house, in particular an area at the bottom of the stairs. On 11 October, the area under the stairs was searched with ground penetrating radar but nothing was detected.
That evening, Detective Garda Brian Barry of the Technical Bureau was in the living room talking to builder Pat O’Connor about their plan for the next day. Mr O’Connor explained to the jury that the demolition of the extension was going to be complicated and they were discussing whether an electrician would be required.
As they talked, Garda Barry was looking at the brick wall partitioning off the area under the stairs. He said it was built very poorly and "didn’t look like a wall built by someone who knew how to build walls". He knew the cadaver dog had indicated interest in the stairs and he decided to have another look at the floor underneath it.
Garda Barry, Mr O’Connor and builder James McNamara examined the area using strong lights. The court heard they pulled back a piece of lino and they could see the shape of new concrete, in a rectangular shape, six feet long by three feet wide.
Mr McNamara tapped at it with a small hammer. Mr O’Connor said as soon as he struck the area it sounded hollow. Detective Garda Barry phoned the Crime Scene Manager, Detective Sergeant Shane Curran, and got the go ahead to break open part of the area with demolition equipment.
Mr O’Connor said the concrete was quite shallow, they could feel something soft and could see black-grey coloured plastic. They stopped digging and a forensic archaeologist was called in.
Dr Niamh McCullagh had been at a meeting with Sergeant Curran about the case at Midleton Garda Station when she was asked to return to Youghal.
As she continued excavating the area identified by Garda Barry, she said she could see "human made interference within the natural order" of the soil. At a depth of almost .7 of a metre she identified "articulated human bones". Garda Barry saw a human hand. They stopped work until the morning.
The next day excavations continued with Dr McCullagh and her colleague, Aidan Harte, assisted at one point by the Assistant State Pathologist, Dr Margot Bolster and forensic anthropologist, Laureen Buckley.
They uncovered a decomposed human body in what was now being described as a clandestine grave. Dr McCullagh said she observed some surviving soft tissue and fabric and she said the body had been placed on plastic sheeting which was folded over the top.
Dr McCullagh told defence counsel, Brendan Grehan, that her own research into "concealed homicides", showed female victims tended to be disposed of closer to their own home addresses than males. And she said all concealed homicides tended to be disposed of within one kilometre of their home address.
Forensic anthropologist Laureen Buckley, an expert in bones, was asked to assist in the post-mortem examination of the remains. She noted that as the body had been found face down in the grave, the front of the body was better preserved than the back.
She gave evidence that she found no evidence of any fractures to Ms Satchwell’s skull or any other bones either at the time of her death or any other time before that.
The court heard Ms Satchwell was wearing her pyjamas and a dressing gown. A purse containing a number of forms of identification was in the pocket of the gown.
The excavation of Ms Satchwell’s remains was ongoing as gardaí rearrested and reinterviewed her husband. Over several hours of interviews on 12and 13 October, Mr Satchwell set out what he said had happened to his wife and what he had done afterwards.
His steady East Midlands accent, at times mixed with the cadences of his adopted home of East Cork, recounted details that were often shocking.
He described how he put his wife’s body in a disused and unplugged chest freezer in the shed, to keep it away from their two dogs. "I lifted her onto it and she just fell in," he said.
He advertised the freezer on website donedeal.ie on 31 March and gave it away for free to someone who came to collect it.
Asked to tell the gardaí about the burial of her body, he said it was Tina herself who had previously spotted that there was an area under the stairs which wasn’t concreted. He told gardaí that he knew this was "sick" but he wanted to keep her with him, he didn’t want to leave her alone.
He thought he began digging on the morning of Sunday 26 March. When he’d finished, he said all his knuckles were bleeding.
He wrapped his wife’s body in plastic sheeting as he didn’t want her to get dirty. And he said he carried her down into the hole in the ground in his arms. "I wasn’t disrespectful," he told gardaí, "I didn’t chuck her down."
He had wanted to buy roses to put in the grave but couldn’t get any so he settled on some tulips from Tesco instead. He wanted to make the "self-funeral" as "special" as he could for her, he said, also describing himself as "a f***ing idiot".
He said he wanted her to know that the "hand that killed her was also the hand that loved her".Finally, he covered her body in concrete he mixed himself using a spade.
In the days and weeks afterwards, he said, he used to open the door and talk to his wife. "Sometimes it could be for hours, at other times it could just be 'hello love’."
After telling Detective Sergeant David Noonan in an interview in 2021, about a family issue involving paedophilia, he said he went home, sat down under the stairs and apologised to Tina for letting her down by telling the gardaí something she had asked him not to reveal.
In his second interview, gardaí began to push him for details on her death and its aftermath, telling him his account of what happened "didn’t make sense".
Mr Satchwell insisted it had all happened in a flash and told them he had nothing to gain by lying because he would be pleading guilty when it came to court.
He claimed that before he was rearrested, he had intended to come and speak to gardaí and that his rearrest had not been necessary.
After a night’s sleep in custody, he told gardaí an image had come into his head indicating that he had placed his wife in the grave in the same position as she slept in.
He suggested that the fact that her body was found "pretty well preserved", meant that he did "kind of make her comfortable", which had been his intention.
Mr Satchwell described his wife to gardaí as "physically perfect" and was able to give them all her measurements, describing a woman who was around 5 ft 5 inches in height and a dress size 10-12.
In his third interview, this time with Detective Garda Noelle McSweeney, he acknowledged that he was 6 ft 2 inches in height. He agreed that he had done all the work on the house at Grattan Street himself, including the new extension as well as changing the bathtub and plasterboard.
He acknowledged that he was physically strong. But he said he wasn’t able to grab the chisel off his wife when she "lurched" at him. He said "there was no chance of taking it".
He said a "small person can be stronger than any big man" and he had had no warning about the attack. He insisted that what happened wasn’t calculated or premeditated.
He refused to look at images of his wife’s body, saying he wanted to remember her the way she was, "not the way I made her".
Asked if he replaced glass in one of the doors in the house and said he had not, telling Detective Sergeant Noonan that he must have "cotton wool" in his ears, if he hadn’t heard him say that already.
He said he had replaced the bathtub because the enamel was damaged and he couldn’t repair it.
The court heard further evidence from forensic scientist Brian Gorey about fragments of glass found on Tina Satchwell’s scalp and one of her arms.
Mr Gorey said he couldn’t make an inference of the source of the glass, but said it was "toughened" in nature, which is done for safety and is used in patio doors, table tops and the like.
Dr Patrick Burke, the Satchwells’ GP from 1999, also gave evidence.
He said Mr Satchwell had told him that he had been assaulted on a number of occasions.
The doctor said he had told him the violence was frequent and, at times, severe.
But he said Mr Satchwell had not mentioned any of this violence to him before his wife went missing in March 2017.
The trial continues on Monday.
