Witness box ordeal for accused’s wife
For an hour she battled to stay calm as she spoke of life with Graham Dwyer
IT WAS easy to spot Gemma Dwyer waiting to take her place in the witness box.
She was sitting in the corner of the room, surrounded by gardaí, clutching a tissue. Her shoulders were hunched, her blonde hair forming a protective curtain that shielded her face from view.
As her name was called, the wife of the accused made her way to the witness stand around the back of the dock where Graham Dwyer was seated, rather than the customary route past the defendant.
She positioned herself with her back to her husband, angling her frail frame towards the judge as she began to tell the court about the life they shared.
‘You are the wife of the accused man, Graham Dwyer? asked prosecutor Seán Guerin. ‘I am,’ she said. ‘You met him when?’ asked Mr Guerin. ‘When we were both students of architecture in Bolton Street,’ she said.
Just a few yards away to her right sat her greying 42-year-old architect hus- band, bent over his A4 notebook, filled with handwriting in blue ink. He is charged with murdering childcare worker Elaine O’Hara, 36, on August 22, 2012. He has pleaded not guilty.
Throughout his wife’s testimony, which lasted almost 60 minutes, he barely moved.
Some said he glanced up at least once at her, others weren’t so sure that he ever looked away from his notebook. Gemma Dwyer, by contrast, was struggling to remain composed.
As she recalled their daily routine, her voice began to break.
‘Graham left earliest in the morning?’ asked Mr Guerin.
‘Yes that’s correct,’ she said. ‘He was commuting to Baggot Street.’
Her voice was at times a little quiet, prompting the prosecutor to remind her a couple of times to speak into the microphone for the sake of the jury.
They heard her speak brightly about her husband’s ‘fantastic’ way with computers, of his interest in cycling and motorbike meets at the Hellfire Club, of his colourful car collection, including the one he called his ‘baby’– a Porsche 911, of his fascination with remotecontrolled model aeroplanes for which he often took Wednesday afternoons off.
Throughout her evidence, it was the routine aspects of their life together that seemed to trigger the most upset. Fighting back tears, Mrs Dwyer told the court she stayed in Holles Street one night after the birth of their daughter and had a lot of family visiting over the following days.
‘It was a wonderful time, the birth of a child,’ she said.
There was standing room only in Court No. 13 as more and more spectators began to filter in.
The crowds who swarmed in after unch listened with interest as the witness revealed other details of the busy, middle-class life in Foxrock, Co. Dublin she had shared with the accused. She told of the night that they celebrated their birthdays together in a Mexican restaurant in Dublin, of camping trips for him away in Cork with members of his family and recollections of one trip in particular for her, when she took their two children to visit her parents in Sligo, sending a reassuring message to her husband – who had planned a night in with some friends – that the ‘fridge had plenty of food in it’.
But it was one issue – a spade she said went missing from their back garden in 2013 – that took up the main part of her evidence.
‘I mentioned it to Graham a few times,’ she said. She recalled that after her husband was arrested in September 2013, she noticed there was a different spade in the garden. She said she thought it had been left behind by the gardaí who had searched the house and garden.
Mrs Dwyer said she recognised the spade found on Killakee Mountain, where Elaine O’Hara’s remains were found, as being the spade from their house as it had stickers on it and splatters of orangey-red paint.
Fences and sheds in their garden had been painted and the paint had got everywhere, she added.
In a brief, tense exchange about identification marks on the spade alleged to have come from their Foxrock garden, defence counsel Remy Farrell said: ‘To coin a phrase, a spade is a spade.’ She replied: ‘Oscar Wilde – yes.’ (It later emerged in technical evidence that the paint on the spade found near Elaine O’Hara’s remains did not match the paint kept at the Dwyer home).
Leaving the witness box, she again walked around the back of where her husband sat, their eyes never meeting.
‘It was a wonderful time,
the birth of a child’ ‘I mentioned the spade to Graham a few times’