Nicola Anderson on the Las Vegas 'hitman' trial that transfixed the nation
They sat at either end of the same bench, the neatly-groomed blonde and the moustachioed, two-bit Las Vegas crook, a gulf between them.
But for the internet, they would never even have met.
Sharon Collins did not glance over at Essam Eid very often over the course of their eight-week trial but when she did, her eyes betrayed loathing and revulsion. It was a look that asked: "What have I trawled from the depths of the Google search engine?"
She had only herself to blame.
Anyone eyeing this extraordinary story in the hope of making a pitch to Hollywood executives would be dismissed out of hand.
The plot is simply too preposterous to be remotely believable: A 45-year-old mother-of-two who plotted to kill her older 'boyfriend' and his two sons in the hope of inheriting their substantial business interests, turning to the internet to provide the solution to her dilemma.
The fact that Collins lived in Ennis, the 'information age town' with its highly-prized, high-tech internet connections, served as an added irony in this bizarre trial.
Locals in the town sniped that Collins, an attractive and precise-looking blonde, had moved from one rich man to the next following the break-up of her marriage 18 years ago, which had left her with two sons, Gary, 23, and David, 21, on whom she openly doted.
The two young men stood by their mother throughout her lengthy ordeal -- Gary appearing particularly supportive, sitting closely by her side and gazing at her with concern during the increasingly difficult moments.
Tragically, David's relationship with his mother seemed more strained by the revelations about her. At one point, somewhere around the middle of the trial, Collins took her younger son's hand. David held it politely for a few moments before withdrawing it, as resignation and regret were written large on Sharon's face. It was a telling moment between mother and son.
But it was David whose tears fell first, as a drawn-faced Collins was found guilty of conspiracy to kill, facing a possible jail sentence of 60 years.
Collins' solicitor, Eugene O'Kelly, described Gary and David as two fine young men whose lives have been "shattered" as a result of the outcome.
It was in November 1998 that Sharon met wealthy, local property businessman PJ Howard -- separated from his wife -- following the death of his partner, Bernie Lyons. Collins and her sons moved into Howard's house for Christmas and never left.
She nursed him through a quadruple heart bypass in 2000 and yearned to marry him, but he worried that marriage would affect the inheritance rights of his sons, Robert and Niall, and would only go so far as to make a commitment to her in a church in Sorrento in October 2005.
That previous April, Collins had emailed the Gerry Ryan radio show, claiming she was living in an "unbearable situation" where her "husband" made sexual demands on her that she refused to carry out -- such as having sex with a stranger and suggesting she work as a prostitute. He, himself, used the services of prostitutes and had sex with transvestites, she claimed.
By August 2006, Collins was trawling the internet for a contract killer, stumbling upon the website hitman.us, which she contacted via a new email address she had created, lyingeyes98@yahoo.ie, where Egyptian man, Eid, appeared to offer such services under the name Tony Luciano. She called herself the "devil in the red dress", and asked that a hit be carried out on three men -- one in Spain, two in the west of Ireland, saying: "Should look like an accident, if poss."
Eid asked for $90,000 -- but whether he ever really intended to carry out the hit is debatable.
He sent his wife Teresa -- one of two wives -- to Ireland to meet up with a friend of his, with the instructions to poison the drinks of the two sons with prescription drugs to bring on a heart attack. That plan fell through and Eid took matters into his own hands, searching the internet for a recipe for the deadly poison, Ricin, with ludicrous accounts by his wife to the court of how he had ground it up on the kitchen table.
In the emails that flew back and forth, Collins suggested that the poisoning of Robert and Niall might lead PJ, then holidaying in his Spanish apartment in Fuengirola -- on hearing news of his sons' deaths -- to plunge from his 14th storey balcony in grief.
But in the end, it seems, Eid went for the easy option -- extortion over murder -- and he decided to confront Robert Howard, tell him of the plot and try to get him to buy the contract. But Robert simply went to the gardai and that was where the intrigue came to an abrupt halt.
"First time in Ennis, looks like last time too," Eid ruefully quipped during an interview at Ennis garda station.
The first two weeks of the trial boded well for Collins, who claimed that she had been set up. But too much personal information, only known to her, emerged from the 'lyingeyes' emails.
The turning point of the trial was arguably when lawyers for Eid attempted to argue that a photograph of their client, being shown in court, could not be proven to be him. A younger woman was pictured with this man. "Yes. That's my daughter," Eid had beamed.
There could be no going back from there.
- Nicola Anderson
