Tina Satchwell could never have imagined the tight space under the stairs at her home at 3 Grattan Street in Youghal would be her final resting place.
And it very nearly was after it took more than six years for the grim discovery of her remains in October 2023.
I stood in the front room of her home - a few metres from those stairs - as her husband Richard emotionally explained the impact her disappearance was having on him.
The date was 26 June 2017. It was exactly 14 weeks to the day on which he said she went missing.
We heard during the trial of Richard Satchwell for his wife's murder that she had already been buried under the stairs at that stage in June.
We stood there, in the front room, and talked.
And Richard cried.
In an interview for RTÉ News a few minutes later, across the road from his home on the old pier in Youghal, Richard Satchwell was at his most accommodating, repeating the conversation we had earlier at the house.
He professed deep sadness and anguish at the disappearance of Tina.
It was about Tina, but it was about him too.
"As time's gone on, I'll be honest with you now, I'm just getting more and more worried. I find it more difficult to sleep, I'm losing weight with worry, struggling to eat and I just wish, I just know somebody out there has to know something," he said.
The interview was the first to be played to the jury during the trial from a series of interviews which Richard Satchwell gave journalists following his wife's disappearance.
Richard Satchwell engaged with journalists from several media organisations during those weeks and months. He was uber-available. He seemed happy to go over the details of what had happened and of the couple's lives together, repeatedly and without complaint.
So, we became familiar with the story of Richard and Tina Satchwell: how they were in their 28th year together the year Tina disappeared, in 2017, after they met in Leicester. Tina, from Fermoy, was staying with her grandmother, who was living next door to Richard's brother.
Richard and Tina had spent most of their married life in Fermoy, before selling up there and moving to Youghal 18 months prior to Tina's disappearance.
We heard, from Richard, that on the day she disappeared, she came down stairs at around 9.20am. He made her tea and toast, and she asked him to go to Aldi in Dungarvan for her. When he came back, he found her keys on the ground inside the front door and Tina was missing. Two suitcases were also missing, along with €26,000, which was gone from a secret hiding place. The money was from the proceeds of the sale of their home in Fermoy.
That was Monday, 20 March, 2017, Richard Satchwell said. He said he felt Tina had gone away "to get her head straight", but when he met members of her family in Fermoy four days later and learned that she hadn't been with them, he went to gardaí and, as he put it, voiced his concerns.
That was Richard Satchwell's version of events.
These interviews with him invariably included an appeal by him to Tina to come home, or to make contact with someone to let everyone know she was safe. He very often turned from the interviewer to stare directly into the camera lens to do this.
One such appeal, on RTÉ's Crimecall in June 2017, was particularly memorable.
"Tina, come home. There's nobody mad at you. My arms are open. The pets are missing you. I just can't go on not knowing," he said, again facing the camera directly. "Even if you just ring the guards, let people know that you're alright. This is killing me Tina, love. Please."
Members of Tina's own family, in Fermoy and elsewhere, were also doing media interviews. Their approach was more low-key and nuanced.
For all of Tina's love of fashion and bling, her sister Lorraine Howard described her as a shy person.
"She might have seemed bubbly, but she wasn't," Lorraine told RTÉ News. "She was a very quiet, shy kind of a person. [She] kept to herself, loved her animals, loved her dog, loved her parrot. A real animal lover and a real fashion lover is how I would describe Tina."
Just over three months after Tina had disappeared, Lorraine said she feared the worst.
"I don't know what to think has happened and I am very, very concerned," she said. "It seems to be a mystery how she can walk out the door one minute and just be gone the next.
"The last three months have been horrific for our family. It's the not knowing what happened... It's a terrible position to be in and, unless you're there, you can't appreciate how difficult it actually is."
Early in March 2018, as the first anniversary of Tina Satchwell's disappearance approached, there were genuine hopes of a breakthrough.
Investigating gardaí cordoned off the 40-acre Mitchell's Wood in Castlemartyr, a village around 20 kilometres from Youghal.
The area was encircled with fencing three metres in height, covered in tarpaulin to shield what was happening within the cordon from public view.
Backing up the garda search teams on the ground was the Defence Forces Corps of Engineers Specialist Search and Clearance Team and search dog teams. A garda incident command vehicle was on site for the duration of the search and there were a number of portacabins and a generator to provide them with power.
The search was initiated after information was received from what was described as a credible source.
Richard Satchwell and Tina's own family were informed by gardaí about the search in the days before it began, so that they had notice and could prepare themselves.
The scale of the operation fuelled hopes of a breakthrough.
Tina Satchwell's cousin, Sarah Howard - one of the last members of her own family to see her alive - told RTÉ News at the time that they feared the worst. She said, while they had to remain hopeful, they needed closure too.
She said the family was "trying to stay strong, but it's hard".
Garda Superintendent Colm Noonan, who at that time was leading the investigation, wouldn't speculate on whether gardaí were searching Mitchell's Wood for Tina Satchwell's body.
"Today, we are looking for evidence in relation to Tina's disappearance and we have, for the purposes of this search, restricted access to this area," he said. "My appeal is that any members of the public who have any information in relation to activity here at Mitchell's Wood during March 2017 to contact the gardaí."
Two days into the garda search in Castlemartyr, Richard Satchwell told RTÉ's Prime Time that Tina would never have gone willingly there, either alone or in the company of another person.
"I know Tina, I can vouch for this, Tina would never go near woods on her own, or go in the company of anybody," he said. "She wouldn't even go near a strange woods with me. I can 100% put that on the line."
He said that neither he nor Tina had ever been in that woodland before.
The search continued as daylight allowed in early March 2018, but after 11 days it was wound down, the protective fencing was removed and public access was restored.
It's understood that nothing of evidential value to the investigation was found during the search.
There were several long lulls in the publicity surrounding the Tina Satchwell case in the six-and-a-half years between the time she was reported missing and the discovery of her body under the stairs at her home. And while garda superintendents came to and went from Midleton to lead the Tina Satchwell investigation, there was no let up at any stage in the work on it. Avenues were constantly being pursued.
Some of these happened openly, in full public view, like the search of the couple's home and car conducted in June 2017, three months after Tina had disappeared, and the search two months later of the waterfront in Youghal, metres from Richard and Tina Satchwell's home, conducted by the Garda Water Unit. There was also a simultaneous search of scrubland at Golf Links Road in Youghal that weekend.
In March 2020, on the third anniversary of her disappearance, gardaí announced that they were conducting a peer review of the investigation to date into the disappearance.
At that stage, they confirmed that they had followed up more than 370 separate lines of inquiry, had viewed more than 100 hours of CCTV and had taken more than 170 statements.
Much of what happened in relation to the garda investigation from there was conducted well away from the public glare.
For instance, Detective Garda David Kelleher, who ultimately arrested Richard Satchwell at 8.07pm on the evening of 13 October, 2023, and charged him with Tina's murder, had spent the previous two years of his working life going through the investigation file line by line.
The review of the Tina Satchwell investigation led detectives to a number of conclusions.
Gardaí went public with these on the evening of 10 October, 2023: The Tina Satchwell investigation was now being treated as a murder case, and a man in his 50s had been arrested on suspicion of her murder.
That evening, a cordon was placed around the Satchwell home in Youghal and an intensive search began.
The following morning, two mini-diggers, a vegetation shredder and a refuse skip were moved onto the property, inside the cordon. The sound of chainsaws could be heard at work in the overgrown garden at the rear of the house. A cadaver dog was brought in to search the house.
At 5pm that afternoon Richard Satchwell, who was being questioned at Cobh Garda Station, was released without charge.
Four hours later, having been drawn to that area initially by the cadaver dog, gardaí find human remains buried under the concrete floor, under the stairs at the Satchwell home.
Gardaí did not make public the discovery of the remains until noon the following day, when Richard Satchwell was located at a bus stop in Youghal and re-arrested.
The remains were subsequently confirmed to be those of Tina Satchwell.
Richard Satchwell was brought back to Cobh Garda Station, where he was charged that evening, before being brought before a special district court sitting in Cashel on the following morning, Saturday.
A week-and-a-half later, Tina Satchwell's old neighbours and friends in Fermoy gathered near her home at St Bernard's Place to sympathise with and support her family.
They lined the street in respectful silence as the hearse bearing Tina Satchwell's coffin made its way slowly along the road, on its way to her final resting place.
