Such a cruel fate for a family with an only girl

THERE should have been lots of occasions, on into the future, when John Buckley could have pictured himself standing up before an audience to read a speech he’d written in praise of his only daughter.

It’s her birthday next Friday, she’d have been 25, and the quarter-century would surely have been marked by a bit of a celebration in the Buckley household. There would have been toasts and congratulations, maybe even a few words from her dad to mark the day.

Then there would have been her graduation to look forward to, when she came home from Glasgow with her hard-won degree. There would have been an engagement party to plan at some stage, and there would have been her wedding – a big day for the only daughter in a house full of boys. As the father of the bride, John Buckley would have been called on to make a speech, and like any dad he must at times have wondered if he’d be up to it. Perhaps he pictured himself standing up in front of everyone, clutching the pages of the words he’d written, the speech he’d practised for his wife and the boys, so as to do Karen proud.

In his worst nightmares, John Buckley could never have imagined the circumstances in which he would have to speak in public about his beautiful daughter and how much he loved her. He would never have dreamt of a bank of television cameras and a scrum of reporters with microphones, as his family clustered round him in silent support and a policeman from a foreign force stood staunchly at his back.

If any single image conveyed the dreadful aberration that was Karen’s fate, it was the very ordinariness and realness of her heartbroken father in that most extraordinary and unreal of situations.

He’s a farmer from a small village in Cork, he shouldn’t be standing in front of the media and reading statements from the steps of a Scottish courthouse – he should have been at home in his fields on a fine summer’s day, drawing silage or saving hay, not on television telling the world how much he missed his only daughter.

In another life he should have been welcoming her new husband into the family in front of a roomful of relatives, not denouncing her cowardly murderer before an audience of strangers.

If anything underscores the obscenity that is murder, it is the bizarre incongruities foisted on those left behind, the wrenching apart of their normal and modest existences, the destruction of their unassuming contentment forever.

And if the Buckley family’s ordeal could be any more wretched, they have been left with shockingly vivid images of Karen’s last moments and yet, for all the horrific detail, very few answers. They do not know why Alexander Pacteau singled her out that night, nor what he said to coax her to leave the nightclub and accompany him to his car.

They don’t know if the killing was impulsive, a drunken response to a stray remark, or the fruition of a plan to commit the ‘perfect murder’. He’d prattled to friends about killing a victim and destroying the body with caustic soda but, said one, they thought it was ‘just Alex talking s***’. They don’t know if he’d been stalking someone else in the nightclub, or if any woman unlucky enough to stray into his clutches would have satisfied some murderous urge.

NOT that answers from Pacteau would have been any more credible or comforting than his feeble apology. There’s no explanation on earth that would change the truth of her distraught father’s words, on the steps of that courthouse this week: ‘We will never see Karen again in this life, never see her smiling face, hear her laugh and hear her voice.’ Indeed, if it wasn’t for the prompt concern of the Scottish police, which reacted immediately to her out-of-character disappearance, they might not even have had a body to bury.

Although her remains were so mutilated that they could not see her or kiss her goodbye, if Pacteau had succeeded then, as John Buckley said, ‘ she would never have been found’.

‘Truly evil’ were the words he used to describe Pacteau, and the chilling inhumanity of that young man’s actions does make you wonder whether evil really is a powerful and palpable force in our midst.

Whatever it is, and however much the philosophers and theologians and cynics might debate its nature, there’s no doubt that Karen Buckley met evil on a street in Glasgow in April. And her family will live in its shadow through all the years to come, all the years that should have been so very much different for them.