"You're a big man now."
Thomas Dooley was lying on his back on the ground, blood squirting from four stab wounds to his body, one of which severed the artery on his right thigh; another, just above his spine, was 6.5 centimetres or two and a half inches deep. This stab wound was inflicted with so much force that it caused spinal damage.
These were the significant injuries.
Over him stood his brother-in-law and first cousin, Thomas Dooley senior, and his younger brother, Patrick Dooley.
As Thomas Dooley took his final breaths, his brother-in-law jeered him.
"You're a big man now."
Alongside stood the dying man's brother, Patrick - he was grinning.
Both men were armed.
Murder is a remarkable event at any time.
In this case, even before the fatal attack on 42-year old father-of-seven Thomas Dooley, there were some striking features.
Thomas Dooley and his wife Siobhán had been attending the funeral in Tralee of a young woman, Bridget O'Brien, who herself had died following complications after a surgery.
Bridget O'Brien was a wife, a daughter and a sister; a mother of five children and a grandmother.
Her death was unexpected. Her funeral drew a large crowd.
On the final part of her journey from St John's Church in the centre of Tralee to New Rath Cemetery, on the eastern outskirts of the town, her casket was transferred near her home to a glass carriage drawn by four white horses.
It was an arresting sight.
Thomas and Siobhán Dooley didn't make it to the church for the funeral mass and joined the funeral instead at the graveyard in Rath.
Two roads run more or less parallel with each other on either side of the cemetery, one to the north and one to the south. The couple entered from the southern side as the cortege was making its way to Bridget O'Brien's graveside.
It was 11.43am on 5 October, 2022.
Almost as soon as they entered the cemetery, Thomas and Siobhán Dooley were attacked by a gang who were armed with an assortment of bladed weapons, like a machete, an axe, a sword and a bill hook.
The prosecution claimed those who were present and took part in the attack included five men: 36-year-old Patrick Dooley of 33 Arbutus Grove, Killarney, County Kerry, a brother of the deceased; 43-year-old Thomas Dooley senior and 21-year-old Thomas Dooley junior, both of Bay 10, Halting Site, Carrigrohane Road, Cork; 29-year-old Michael Dooley of Bay 11, Halting Site, Carrigrohane Road, Cork; and 42-year-old Daniel Dooley, of An Carraigín, Connolly Park, Tralee, County Kerry.
Thomas Dooley senior, Michael Dooley and Daniel Dooley are brothers. They are first cousins of the deceased. Thomas Dooley junior is a son of Thomas Dooley senior and is therefore also a cousin of the dead man. Thomas Dooley senior is married to Noreen, a sister of the deceased man, and he was therefore a brother-in-law of both the deceased, Thomas Dooley, and of Patrick Dooley.
They were all members of what the prosecution described to the jury as a large Traveller family.
The sixth person identified by the prosecution as being involved is a teenager.
All six pleaded not guilty to the murder of Thomas Dooley.
Thomas Dooley junior also pleaded not guilty to assault causing harm to Siobhán Dooley in the same incident.
The attack on the couple was frantic, ferocious and brutal.
Within two minutes of entering the cemetery, Thomas Dooley was struggling for breath, grievously injured.
He was dying.
Siobhán Dooley desperately tried to save her husband, squeezing between him and his attackers as they vied with each other for space to strike him.
She scraped the face and eyes of Thomas Dooley senior. His DNA was later removed from under her fingernails.
"Take her out too - get rid of her," she heard one of them saying.
Siobhán Dooley and her husband were overwhelmed. Her attackers were pushing each other out of the way to get at him.
Siobhán Dooley received a blow from a sharp weapon, inflicting a clean cut that went deep, to the layer under her skin, and extended for 30 centimetres - almost a foot - from her right shoulder to her armpit.
She would later receive 45 stitches and 30 surgical staples.
There was no more she could do to save her husband. He told her to run and she ran. He may have been already dead by the time she exited the cemetery, seconds later.
Siobhán Dooley got to Kelliher's garage and the Mace convenience store across the road from the graveyard and raised the alarm with a garda who happened to be in the shop at the time.
Michael Kennedy was a halting site caretaker and was attending the funeral of Bridget O'Brien. He said he knew Patrick Dooley for around 20 years as a nice man. He saluted him and Patrick Dooley saluted back, but he wasn't near as friendly as he usually would be.
Michael Kennedy was near the entrance to the cemetery when the trouble kicked off and he gave an eyewitness account of what he saw: he said he heard Patrick Dooley say 'come on now boys', and a group of around six men ran to where an "all-out riot" started.
Later, he walked to where the trouble had been and he saw people trying to resuscitate Thomas Dooley. He said he seemed to be dead; there wasn't a stir out of him.
As Thomas Dooley lay injuried on the ground, a short distance away the funeral of Bridget O'Brien continued.
Her coffin was removed from the glass carriage, walked shoulder-high for 100 metres and lowered into the ground.
Fr Tadhg Fitzgerald, parish priest of St John's, recited the prayers at the graveside.
Fr Fitzgerald said it was only afterwards, when he returned to the parish house on Castle Street in the town, that he learned somebody had been stabbed and killed in the graveyard, not far from where he was reciting prayers over the coffin.
The attack on Thomas and Siobhán Dooley was over in minutes - perhaps as little as two minutes.
The garda response was up and running almost as quickly.
Detective Sergeant Ernie Henderson, whose evidence was later central to the prosecution case, was one of the first gardaí to arrive at the cemetery at three minutes to midday. After ensuring that the scene and the evidence there was being properly preserved, he crossed the road to the Mace store and met Siobhán Dooley at three minutes past 12.
Even though she had serious injuries, Siobhán Dooley was able to name five of the six involved in the attack on her husband and herself. Detective Sergeant Henderson took these and other details from her.
Around the same time, Detective Garda Brian Mackey arrived at the Mace store.
Detective Garda Mackey has a particular expertise in CCTV footage and he began examining the store's security system and cameras. Within minutes, he had assembled a list of vehicles of interest.
All this information was fed into the garda PULSE system and a particular alert was issued to garda units in Cork.
Any serious investigation is like a complex jigsaw. In this case, the pieces of that jigsaw began to appear early, even if they still had to be put in place.
Just over two hours after the alarm had been raised, at around 2.20pm, the garda Armed Support Unit based in Cork stopped one of the vans on the Carrigrohane Road in Cork that had earlier been identified on the CCTV system at the Mace store across from the graveyard in Tralee.
Twenty minutes later outside Ballincollig, on the outskirts of Cork City, the same Armed Support Unit stopped another one of the vans identified in the trawl of the CCTV footage at the store.
In Tralee, an incident room was established at the garda station and a team of around 20 detectives was put in place.
The following day, just over 24 hours after the murder took place and as a result of the information from Siobhán Dooley, analysis of the CCTV footage at the Mace store and the information gathered by the Armed Response Unit and other gardaí in Cork, the first two suspects were arrested on suspicion of murder.
The other arrests came in the weeks and, in some cases, months that followed, but there was a lot of work to do in the meantime, before the jigsaw pieces began to form a full picture.
Samples taken from the scene at Rath and from the vehicles of interest were harvested and sent to Forensic Science Ireland, along with the clothing of identified suspects.
All routes back to Cork were plotted and hundreds of hours of CCTV footage were harvested. In real time, cumulatively, what was gathered amounted to months.
All the CCTV footage was catalogued and viewed, some of it over and over again; some of it frame by frame.
Eventually, it was whittled down to roughly two hours of footage in just over 170 individual clips which were shown to the jury.
As the weeks passed, the initial team of 20 gardaí working on the investigation was reduced to around 10.
That's not unusual, particularly in areas outside the major cities. Pressure comes on for gardai to return to their regular units and their regular duties and, eventually, that pressure tells.
By the time this case came to trial, the core team was down to five gardaí: two detective sergeants, Ernie Henderson and Mark O'Sullivan, who had made all the major arrests; Detective Garda Brian Mackey, who was responsible for the CCTV footage; and detectives Alan Crowley and Claire Dennehy, who were in charge of the assembly of the investigation file.
This team worked under the supervision of Detective Inpsector John Kelly and Detective Superintendent Fearghal Pattwell.
During the seven weeks of this trial, the prosecution offered the jury evidence of a level of pre-planning involved in the attack on Thomas and Siobhán Dooley.
The weapons used in the attack hadn't arrived in the graveyard by themselves, prosecuting senior counsel Dean Kelly told the jury in his closing statement.
He also addressed the absence of evidence which might have detailed who exactly was alleged to have done what.
He said the prosecution case was based on the doctrine of joint enterprise and common design, where a number of persons act together to achieve a common criminal objective, and that each person party to the event is criminally responsible for the acts of the others.
Mr Kelly said it could not be established who drove the knife into Mr Dooley's back or who chopped into his arm or who drove the knife through his thigh.
He said it was not precisely known who had performed those acts.
However, he said the group of accused people had participated to cause at least serious harm to Thomas Dooley and had done so with murderous intent.
The motivation for Thomas Dooley's murder was also addressed during the trial, although the prosecution's positon was challenged by defence counsel.
During her cross-examination early in the trial, Senior Counsel Brendan Grehan for Patrick Dooley put it to Siobhán Dooley that there had been a falling out between her family, on the one hand, and Thomas Dooley senior and his family, on the other.
Siobhán Dooley recalled 28 November, 2019.
"The trouble only started when my daughter Rosie wouldn't agree to marry Thomas' son," she said.
She said Rosie "left" Thomas senior's son, Thomas, that day.
She said it was the date of the wedding of another one of her daughters.
"We never had words. We never actually fell out. We never exchanged words," she said.
She said they couldn't accept her daughter Rosie not marrying Thomas.
"We never fell out," Siobhán Dooley said. "There was a clear break. We never communicated after that; we never spoke. We weren't speaking, but we never fell out."
Prosecuting Counsel Dean Kelly also addressed the issue of motivation in his closing speech to the jury.
He described Thomas Dooley's death as an honour killing.
Mr Kelly told the jury that "honour" had been offended when a relationship between the daughter of the deceased Thomas Dooley and one of the accused men had broken down, and a score was to be settled.
Mr Kelly suggested the motive in the case was 'reasonably clear' and submitted it was because of an unhappy end to a childish relationship.
Defence legal teams bristled at Mr Kelly's language.
Senior counsel Tom Creed, for Thomas Dooley senior, described as "dog whistle rhetoric" the prosecution categorisation of the case as an honour killing.
He said this was based on the contention that there had been a falling out between the families, but it wasn't supported by the evidence of Siobhán Dooley, the wife of the deceased, that there was a falling out. He said Mrs Dooley's evidence was that the families had stopped speaking to each other.
Referring to the reference to an honour killing, Mr Creed told the jury: "That kind of dog whistle rhetoric has no place in this case. Talk of medieval violence - it has no place [in the case]."
Last week, Patrick Dooley, Thomas Dooley senior, Thomas Dooley junior and the teenager were found guilty by the jury. Michael Dooley was found guilty on Tuesday. All of these verdicts were unanimous.
On Thursday morning, the jury resumed its deliberations in relation to the last of the six accused, Daniel Dooley. He was also found guilty. In his case, the verdict was a majority one, on an 11-1 split of the jury of 10 men and two women.
The five men, all of them related to the deceased, Thomas Dooley, will be sentenced next Tuesday.
The teenager's case has been adjourned until October.
