Bernard Brian McGrath died on a moonlit night. According to both his wife and his daughter, it was a gruesome death at the hands of the man who would become, a few short weeks later, his son-in-law.

It was a death recounted in Technicolor detail, a series of grim tableaux building a scene of sheer brutality -- being chased with a slash hook, hounded into a ditch, pleading for his life.

It was a savage end to a life that had few chances from the beginning. A foundling, McGrath grew up in institutions, spending some of his formative years in the infamous Artane Industrial School. He married young, running away with his teenage bride, who he had met when she was just 12 and he only 16.

The marriage was stormy; four children and a living eked out on London's building sites and seasonal farm work followed. A better life beckoned in rural Co Westmeath.

In 1979 the whole family left Dublin to move into a little cottage in the village of Coole. But the clean country air didn't ease the tension within the marriage. His wife spent several spells in refuges with the kids but she always came back to him.

By 1985 things had reached a flashpoint. A row erupted, gardai were called -- and the local doctor. His wife and his eldest child, his only daughter, wove a tale of his rages, hallucinations and delusions. The gardai left but McGrath was carted off to St Loman's Psychiatric Hospital, where he would spend a week being assessed -- institutionalised as he had been as a child.

Neighbours who saw him after that week described a changed man. Formerly friendly, willing to stop for a chat, he became quieter, withdrawn, as if struggling to understand the betrayal by his nearest and dearest. But worse was to come.

Over the past five weeks a jury in the Central Criminal Court has heard the intimate detail of McGrath's marriage and death. They have heard events described by his daughter, his three sons, his wife and his former son-in-law. None of his children describe a violent man, although all remember a single event in their shared childhood when the three boys were beaten in their beds while their sister ran to the neighbours' for help.

Their mother describes her life as "hard" and not as she would have wished but she also has no specific tales of abuse. The former son-in-law based his description on what he had been told by his ex-wife. His own memory of his father-in-law was of a man, not big, not small, who didn't seem to be a violent man, even though he attempted to talk the talk.

Yet the daughter, the wife and the son-in-law all say they were present for McGrath's violent death, even though their accounts of what happened that night, some time in the spring of 1987, differ drastically. Next week, when the jury members begin their deliberations, they will have to tease apart the different accounts of what happened that night, wade through the inconsistencies and contradictions to reach a verdict.

Vera McGrath, now 61, denies murdering her husband. Her co-accused, 47-year-old Colin Pinder, also denies murdering his former father-in-law -- though he does admit to manslaughter, even if his account makes no mention of slash hooks and moonlit laneways.

Testifying against both of them is the prosecution's chief witness, Brian McGrath's eldest child, Veronica. She says that her former husband chased her father around the garden that night, cornered him in a ditch and slaughtering him like an animal at the end of the boreen that runs beside the house in Coole.

She also alleges that Pinder was whipped into a murderous frenzy by her mother. She says that she herself was merely a passive observer to the scene. Watching in horror as her mother and fiance hunted her father down, yet never calling for them to stop.

The prosecution says that her testimony is borne out by the similarity her account has with the story her mother told gardai when she was arrested in 1993, when the case was first investigated. Vera McGrath's account shared many key details with her daughter's, despite a shift in focus. They both agree that Vera had wished her husband dead when she arrived at the caravan where young Veronica was living with her fiance, Colin Pinder.

Both women say that Pinder responded to the wish by brandishing a silver-coloured spanner, which he said was the "very thing" for the job. They both agree the four of them walked back to the house in Coole, a journey that would have taken around an hour. They agree that Vera had to climb into the cottage through a bedroom window to open the back door.

They both describe the chase around the moonlit garden and Brian McGrath's cornering in a ditch beside the house. Pinder was chasing him, the women say, armed with a slash hook, with which he slashed McGrath's legs.

Both say McGrath pleaded for his life from the ditch, begging for his car keys to drive out of their lives for ever, his pleas falling on deaf ears. That he threw a ladder at Pinder trying to get away before ending up in the ditch.

The defence, on the other hand, dismisses the similarities in the statements of mother and daughter. They are easily explainable, according to Vera McGrath's counsel Patrick Gageby, if Mrs McGrath was made aware of her daughter's statement during her interrogation.

In his speech to the jury, Mr Gageby pointed the finger at the garda investigation.

Raising the spectre of the Morris Tribunal, he reminded them of missing statements and interview notes that were often mentioned during the month-long trial, the fact that when gardai first went to talk to Veronica McGrath in 1993, in a meeting that took two hours, they didn't make a single note.

The proof that Vera McGrath had been aware of what her daughter was saying, a fact denied by all the interviewing officers, Mr Gageby said, had been brief. "You might have missed it." He pointed to the evidence of two gardai who had agreed on the witness stand that Mrs McGrath had indeed been aware of the details, something that would make the similarities between the two accounts meaningless.

Mr Gageby asked the jury why Colin Pinder would kill a man at the word of his future mother-in-law. Surely it was more plausible, he suggested, that the encouragement had come from the woman he loved, a woman who was perhaps not being 100 per cent truthful about her own part in events.

Speaking in defence of Pinder, Conor Devally told the jury that he didn't believe a word she said. His client's version of events is substantially different to the account Veronica McGrath has given.

Pinder told gardai he had loved Ireland. It was "quiet, sky full of stars, fishing for pike" he said. He had been worried about being able to get a job when Veronica, who he called Ronnie, had persuaded him to move, but he wasn't expecting the racism he would experience as a mixed-race man in rural Ireland.

It wasn't surprising; Mr Devally suggested to the jury that McGrath had been antagonistic towards him. Pinder had arrived in time for the second attempt to get him committed. McGrath, his trust in those close to him already eroded past saving, was unlikely to trust the "exotic creature" his daughter had brought back with her from England. A younger man, who seemed to be siding with the women who wanted to put him away.

The racist reception that Pinder described to gardai was understandable, his counsel points out, in those circumstances. Ireland in 1987 was a different country and attitudes were not as they are now. Pinder says that he hit his father-in-law, sending him spinning into the kitchen range after a tirade of racist abuse. He had made it clear they were not welcome, Pinder says, and refused to allow the Liverpudlian to stay on his land, arranging for the caravan the young couple were using to be towed to a neighbour's house several miles away. That night McGrath had been out drinking, Pinder told gardai, and was argumentative when he came home. He shouted at his daughter to get her "nigger boyfriend" out of the house.

Pinder told gardai that earlier that evening he and the two women had been to the local pub, staying there for several hours. They had discussed Brian McGrath, mulling over his faults and had come to the conclusion he was a "bastard" who deserved a good hiding.

The central point that links the accounts of Colin Pinder and the McGrath women is the silver spanner. The two women both say it was in his hands. However, he maintains he was not the one who used it. He says Vera McGrath wielded it when she hit her husband over the head after the fall on the range proved less fatal than they had thought. Pinder says Vera McGrath told him to finish off her husband, or he would never see the baby Veronica had told him she was carrying. He says he picked up a concrete balustrade from the garden and threw it at McGrath's head as he was lying on the ground outside the house.

The jury will begin its deliberations after it is charged by Mr Justice John Edwards next week. They have a lot to consider.

- Abigail Rieley

Originally published in