One question that was not answered at Richard Satchwell's trial was why gardaí failed to discover Tina Satchwell’s body earlier.
Our Legal Affairs Correspondent Órla O’Donnell looks at what the court heard about the garda investigation and the previous search of the Satchwells’ home in June 2017.
Superintendent Ann Marie Twomey had no involvement in the investigation into the disappearance of Tina Satchwell before August 2021.
On 16 August that year, she was appointed as a senior investigating officer for the first time. By that stage, Ms Satchwell had been missing for four years and five months.
She was joined at the helm of the investigation by newly-appointed incident room co-ordinator Detective Garda Dave Kelleher.
When she gave evidence during Richard Satchwell’s trial, she told the court about all of the material the new team reviewed.
There were reports from house-to-house inquiries and CCTV footage.
There were photographs as well as inquiries made with Interpol, ports, airports, taxi companies, social welfare officials and the passport office.
Supt Twomey told the court there had been 60 or 65 reported sightings of Ms Satchwell at home and abroad. All had to be investigated, and all proved negative.
She added that there had been searches of Youghal Bay and of the coast and sea in June and August 2017. And in March 2018, there was an extensive search of woodland near Castlemartyr in Co Cork.
But there was still no sign of Ms Satchwell.
Read more:
Richard Satchwell found guilty of murdering wife Tina in 2017
Richard Satchwell courted media in years after murder
Unsurprisingly, by late January/early February 2022, Supt Twomey had come to the conclusion that Ms Satchwell was "not a living person and had met with death via unlawful means".
By August, she believed Mr Satchwell’s arrest was necessary to investigate the death of his wife.
However, it was October 2023, more than a year later, before Mr Satchwell was arrested and gardaí went "into the walls" of the Satchwell home on Grattan Street in Youghal.
2017 search of Satchwell home
In his cross-examination, Defence Counsel Brendan Grehan zeroed in on the previous search of the house in June 2017.
In her answers, the investigating officer was keen to avoid publicly blaming the previous team.
"Did you have any information that the search of the house by colleagues in June 2017 had not been a thorough one?" Mr Grehan asked her. Supt Twomey said she knew it had not been "intrusive or invasive".
"Did anyone raise floors?" he asked. "Was there anything to prevent the gardai from conducting an invasive search, including excavations, in June 2017?"
Supt Twomey said she could not answer that question. She said she could not account for the beliefs or thoughts of the previous investigating team.
She acknowledged photographs she had seen in the incident room, taken in 2017, showed building works in the house.
She said what the gardaí did inside a house once they had obtained a search warrant from the district court was a matter for the investigators and what they believed was necessary at the time.
First report of Tina’s disappearance
Gardaí had first become involved in the case on the evening of 24 March 2017 when Mr Satchwell walked into Fermoy Garda Station to tell them his wife had gone missing four days earlier.
He told Garda Conor Gately he believed she had left their home because of a deterioration in their relationship.
The garda described him as "matter of fact" and "not over emotive". He said Mr Satchwell behaved as he would have expected.
Attempts were made to contact Mr Satchwell after this. On 2 May, Garda Thomas Keane from Youghal called to the house and spoke to Mr Satchwell on the doorstep, advising him to file a formal missing person’s report.
Garda Keane told Mr Grehan that he was in touch with Mr Satchwell every two to three months over the years. He would contact him when there were media appeals and gardaí needed new photographs of Tina.
The court heard Mr Satchwell gave a statement to gardaí on 11 May 2017, formally reporting his wife as a missing person and handing over photographs for use in the media.
Sergeant John Sharkey was based in Youghal and told the trial that he first became aware of the report that Ms Satchwell was missing in late March or early April 2017.
He said for a short period of time, the situation was monitored in the hope Ms Satchwell would come home, but he said their concern for her welfare grew as time went on.
Mr Satchwell’s formal missing person report allowed the garda investigation to be upgraded from what was a "casual inquiry" about someone who had left home.
Sgt Sharkey, who is now retired, said gardaí conducted a number of inquiries including a trawl of CCTV in the general area, a social media campaign, house-to-house inquiries and appeals on radio and television.
One of his tasks was to collect CCTV footage at Youghal post office. He said he called to a number of premises in May 2017, and they were fortunate to get any footage from March.
The footage showed Mr Satchwell at the post office on 20 March collecting the Satchwells’ dole money as he had told them he had done.
However, it showed he was there later than he had claimed, at a time when he had told the gardaí he had been running errands for his wife in Dungarvan.
'A corporate suspicion’ among gardaí
By late May 2017, Sgt Sharkey said he had formed the opinion that something criminal may have occurred. He said this was due to the lack of progress and their inability to find any trace of Ms Satchwell.
He said he was not alone in this suspicion amongst gardaí and described it as "a corporate suspicion".
On 2 June, Sgt Sharkey obtained a warrant to search the house at Grattan Street. At 7am on 7 June, he and a team of gardaí called to Mr Satchwell’s home.
Mr Satchwell was working elsewhere in the country and gave permission to gardaí to use a locksmith to access the house.
Sgt Sharkey was cross-examined in detail by Mr Grehan about this search. He described it as "thorough and formal", with up to ten gardaí involved.
The sergeant said he was in the house but did not actively participate in the search operation.
He agreed it was "not a very extensive" property, with two rooms on each of its three floors and a rear yard.
Garda Cathal Whelan was there to take photographs. He described the house as dirty and unkempt with unwashed dishes on counter tops and dog faeces on the floor.
But he said the stairs appeared to be made of relatively new, untreated, unpainted wood, and there was a wall at the side which had unpainted, relatively new plasterboard on it.
Garda Denis Barry was also present. His function was to take possession of electronic devices found at the home.
He recalled fresh plasterboard in the hall and agreed that he had noticed the freshly bricked wall at the side of the stairs. He agreed it was fair to say that there seemed to be a number of unfinished home improvement works.
The court also heard that forensic scientist Dr Edward Connolly attended the scene and examined the house for traces of blood.
Dr Connolly also noted some renovations had been carried out but his tests found no blood.
Gardaí remained in the house for around 12 hours until Dr Connolly had finished his examination, the court was told.
Pandemic hit investigation
Gardaí carried out an extensive and understandably fruitless search of woodland near Castlemartyr in 2018, around a year after Ms Satchwell’s disappearance.
But by 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic arrived, the investigation seemed to have stalled. Det Garda Kelleher told the court that because of Covid "things didn’t progress at all".
When Supt Twomey took over in 2021, the court heard the new team brought a new energy to the investigation.
Det Garda Kelleher began looking at the devices which had been seized by the search team back in June 2017.
He discovered that on 24 March 2017, a search had been carried out on Mr Satchwell’s laptop for the term "quicklime" and a video showing quicklime reacting with water had been viewed twice.
The court heard quicklime has been used to aid the decomposition process and suppress odour, particularly in the context of mass graves.
Det Garda Kelleher told Mr Grehan he was not aware of anyone discovering this reference until he did "well into 2021".
Data from mobile phones was extracted in February 2022 he told the court.
The messages revealed included a text from Mr Satchwell to Ms Satchwell’s cousin Sarah Howard on 30 March 2017, offering her the freezer in which it later transpired he had stored his wife’s body.
Satchwell told gardaí he believed Tina was 'still out there’
In June 2021, Detective Sergeant David Noonan, an expert garda interviewer, carried out what was described as an "enhanced cognitive interview" with Mr Satchwell.
The court heard this was different from a traditional statement and took place away from a garda station.
Det Sgt Noonan said it was an interview in which control was handed over to the person making the statement and was a way to get a lot more detail.
The interview lasted four hours and went into excruciating detail about the Satchwells’ lives.
Mr Satchwell stuck rigidly to his story about Ms Satchwell leaving home on 20 March 2017, taking two suitcases and €26,000 in cash. He told Det Sgt Noonan that he personally believed she was "still out there".
By the time the interview was read back to him in January 2022, Mr Satchwell was unaware that the new investigating officer had formed the view that Ms Satchwell was dead and that the net was beginning to tighten round him.
Supt Twomey had commissioned a report from forensic archaeologist Dr Niamh McCullagh, who specialises in the search for and recovery of human remains concealed in a criminal context.
She was asked by the superintendent to conduct a review of the missing person’s investigation into Ms Satchwell.
Dr McCullagh finalised her report in September 2023. She told the court her research into the concealment of victims showed all concealed homicides were disposed of within one kilometre of their homes, with female victims usually disposed of closer to their homes, than men.
She recommended that gardaí should examine the possibility that Ms Satchwell had been killed at her home and concealed there and that the house should be searched again.
Asked if there were aspects of the initial search that had caused her concern, she said the first search was "non-invasive" and she recommended a more invasive search should be conducted.
'Into the walls' of the Satchwell home
On the evening of 10 October 2023, gardaí arrived at Grattan Street with building contractors and excavators prepared to tear the house apart. Mr Satchwell was arrested on suspicion of murder.
Video footage shot by Garda Mairead Crowley gave the jury an idea of the environment gardaí were working in.
Mr Satchwell had continued to work on the house since 2017, in particular building a kitchen extension which the gardaí planned to demolish.
But in other ways, the house appeared unchanged from the way it had been described in 2017.
The stairs leading up to the first floor from the main living room were still uncarpeted and looked like they were made of new, untreated wood.
There was a red bricked wall blocking the area under the stairs from the rest of the room.
It was not painted or plastered and even viewed on grainy video footage on screens in the central criminal court, did not appear to be built to a professional standard.
The wall and the steps at the bottom of the stairs were areas in which trained cadaver dog, Fern showed huge interest on the first day of the 2023 search.
But on the night of 10 October, gardaí could not immediately gain access to the space under the stairs as it was blocked by a huge couch and other items including a cement mixer.
The house was cleared, and ground penetrating radar was used under the stairs the following day, but nothing was found.
That evening, as a plan to demolish the kitchen extension was discussed, Garda Brian Barry, of the Garda Technical Bureau, who had not been involved in the 2017 search, was distracted by the wall.
He told the court that it "didn’t look like a wall built by someone who knew how to build walls".
He decided to have another look at the area with building contractors Patrick O’Connor and James McNamara.
In the end, the discovery happened very quickly. The builders shone strong lights under the stairs. There was a piece of old "seventies-style" lino on the floor.
Mr McNamara pulled back the lino and Garda Barry could immediately see new concrete in a rectangular shape on the ground.
They broke open the concrete and within a short while they could all see the black/grey plastic containing the remains of Ms Satchwell.
Mr Satchwell was rearrested and admitted being involved in the death of his wife.
'The Taking of Richard Satchwell’
The story he had told and embellished for more than six-and-a-half years had crumbled, and a new narrative immediately emerged.
Now he admitted he had held a belt at her neck as she attacked him with a chisel before she slumped, lifeless, into his arms.
He was charged on 13 October 2023 and replied "guilty, or not guilty, - guilty".
Det Garda Kelleher was accused by Mr Grehan of being involved in a "perp walk" in which Mr Satchwell was unnecessarily handcuffed and marched up to the district court in full view of all the media.
Later, Mr Grehan compared images of the court appearance to the Caravaggio painting "The Taking of Christ", saying it was "The Taking of Richard Satchwell".
He accused the gardaí of trying to foment public opinion in the court room - and trying to get people not to look "too hard" at why it took so long to bring a dangerous man to justice.
Mr Grehan put it to Det Garda Kelleher that the gardaí were "over-compensating" for their failures in the investigation into Ms Satchwell when she first disappeared. He asked him if he agreed that the gardaí "as a corporate entity" had failed in 2017.
Det Garda Kelleher said he could only speak for his involvement in the investigation since November 2021, telling the court he could stand over everything done since then.
Asked if he had any view at all on what happened in 2017, Det Garda Kelleher said it had allowed him to build a foundation for the investigation he was involved in.
Mr Grehan returned to the failure to find Ms Satchwell’s body in his closing speech to the jury and also in a subsequent application to the judge to discharge the jury after the judge’s charge.
He said the failings of the garda investigation were relevant.
The condition of Ms Satchwell’s body meant that pathology evidence which might have benefitted Mr Satchwell was no longer available to him.
He acknowledged that Mr Satchwell himself bore the brunt of the blame for the failure to find the body earlier, but he said the gardaí should examine their own behaviour and the issue should not be swept under the carpet.
"What a different case we might have had," Mr Grehan said, "if this had all been done as it could have been".
