Rose: I heard Rachel's voice in my head say 'Ma, he did it'
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ROSE Callaly heard her daughter Rachel's voice telling her that she had been murdered by her husband.
Mrs Callaly said she knew, from the minute she found Rachel slumped on the floor of her home in The Naul, that she had been the victim of a cold-blooded murderer.
"I could hear Rachel's voice in my head, without it sounding barmy.
"I could hear her in my mind saying to me, 'Ma, he did it'."
It didn't take her long to suspect her son-in-law.
In an interview on television last night, in which both Rose and Rachel's father Jim broke down in tears, Rose said her maternal instincts told her immediately that Rachel was killed deliberately and was not the victim of a botched robbery.
She recalled how she became immediately suspicious when she found Rachel's curtains drawn - her daughter rarely drew them - on the morning she found her body, and found the entire crime scene looking "contrived".
"I knelt down beside her and was talking to her and I just sort of lost it. To my dying day I'll never forget the lonely feeling when I found her, a feeling of desolation.
"She died on her own in horrific circumstances and I got that sense and that will haunt me to the day I die. A horrific sense of desolation."
Rose said she suspected Joe after witnessing his cold and bizarre behaviour when he pretended to see Rachel's body for the first time.
"Joe didn't lift Rachel, which struck me as being very, very odd. He certainly didn't mention any words of love or anything. "I didn't know it, but even if he didn't love her, she was the mother of his two children. And if you found anybody in this horrific situation like that, I would have felt he would have showed some emotion."
But her worst fears were confirmed when Joe returned to the murder scene less than a fortnight afterwards and began to re-enact how the killer struck "to what we felt was the last detail of every blow."
"Even making reference to the blood spatter on the wall - my brain couldn't take in his words after the first half of it. Jim felt the same. We were in total shock."
But when Joe bizarrely played back the telephone messages left the day Rachel died, Rose said she had an eerie feeling Rachel was speaking to her from beyond the grave.
"I could hear Rachel's voice in my head sayin to me, 'Ma, he did it'."
"Jim felt he didn't want to know. He said it was shock. But I just had that sense coming out of that house - Joe killed Rachel."
She added that the 'Late Late Show' episode in which Joe appeared alongside was the worst experience of her life, other than than the killing itself.
But she said her strong faith in God and belief that justice would prevail kept her and Jim going through their darkest days.
And after enduring almost three years of a living nightmare, Rose said she and Jim slept soundly for the first time after the guilty verdict.
- Allison Bray
