“Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table…”
– W.H. Auden

Well, thank Christ the Graham Dwyer trial is finally over. I was thoroughly sick of seeing that sick bastard’s irritatingly smug and and deceptively banal features staring out at me from the front pages every time I ventured into the newsagents. When the notorious paedophile priest Brendan Smith was first led to court in chains, he was tricked into pulling a leering face by the waiting press photographers. That grotesque image was used thereafter, and really did seem to portray the root evil of the man.
We had none of that with Graham Dwyer. The slightly puffy-faced, 42-year-old architect looked arrogant, but also composed and smartly dressed, in all photographs, like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Despite the smugness, he actually looked completely respectable, decent even, the kind of guy you probably wouldn’t look twice at if you saw him hanging around near a children’s playground. The kind of person you simply wouldn’t suspect of wrongdoing. The kind of person who’d leave a note with their phone number on your windshield if they’d accidentally scratched your car in a parking lot. Or so you might imagine…
Outwardly, he was a model citizen – and also, apparently, a model airplane enthusiast. It turned out that he was also an a musician of sorts, playing bass with a number of rock bands, including in his native Bandon in his younger years. Ironically, given where he is right now, one of them was called Strangeways. In Dublin, he joined a band called The Swing, which also featured Aussie Steve Hadley, leaving only when his girlfriend emer O’Shea became pregnant with Dwyer’s first child, Sennan.
Of course, as everybody now knows, Dwyer is neither decent nor respectable (a quick search through the Hot Press archives having failed to find any mention of Strangeways, the jury is still out on his musicianship). Now that he has been found guilty of Elaine O’Hara’s murder, it has been revealed that the media was legally forbidden to publish photographs or broadcast footage of him in handcuffs.
Although he had no previous criminal convictions, investigating gardai vehemently opposed the granting of bail. He was denied bail by both the High Court and the Supreme Court on the grounds that he represented a serious danger to women, and was also a flight risk. He’s actually been locked up since his early morning arrest at his Foxrock home 18 months ago. Had the jury been aware of that fact, it could have prejudiced the case against him.
It says a lot that neither his wife (who voluntarily testified against him) nor his two young children have visited him even once since he was taken into custody.
Even without that knowledge, the jury – who have all been offered counselling because of the graphic sexual nature of some of the videos shown during the trial – unanimously pronounced him guilty of the murder of 36-year-old Elaine O’Hara for his own sexual gratification after a harrowing trial that lasted nine weeks, heard testimony from 197 witnesses, and exhibited 320 pieces of evidence (much of it digital).
Architects draw up plans, but Dwyer’s plans were of a very different nature. There’s no need to repeat the multitude of facts and details, but it was a truly gruesome business as the story of a cruel, sadistic predator preying upon a vulnerable, confused and emotionally fragile young woman emerged – much of it told via chilling text message exchanges between ‘Master’ and ‘Slave’.
As with Joe O’Reilly’s infamous murder of his wife Rachel, it was almost the perfect murder. Dwyer got caught by chance. If the waters of the lake near the Dublin mountain where he so callously discarded O’Hara’s lifeless body hadn’t been so unusually low, the bondage gear, knives, gags, mobile phones and keys which ultimately linked him to his victim might never have been found. The Gardai have deservedly suffered a lot of reputational damage in the last couple of years, but the investigators who so painstakingly pieced together the evidence and got their man here deserve nothing but the highest of praise.
Other facts that couldn’t previously be reported for legal reasons have now emerged. Apparently, he had attempted to convince Elaine O’Hara to pose with him as a married couple interested in buying a house, in order that he could rape and stab a female estate agent to death. He suffered from anger management issues, and had once been fired from a job after thrashing a colleague’s work station following a minor row. He had sneakily filmed himself having sex with women he met online, without their knowledge or consent (often they were blindfolded). Not that it’s especially relevant, but one of these women was apparently a senior public official.
To the tabloids, and some of the broadsheets, too, this case was pure gold. Dwyer first met O’Hara on the website alt.com, and sex – more specifically BDSM – was a huge factor in this case. Cue acres of newsprint. Sex sells, but kinky sex sells even better. It was a bizarre, and somewhat unfortunate, coincidence that the Fifty Shades of Grey movie was released soon after the trial started.
After the trial, the Irish Independent journalist Miriam Donahue tweeted, “And it would be great now the #grahamdwyer trial is over if the focus shifts to dangers of the internet and how it promotes vile practices.” To which someone rightly responded, “Miriam, if you mean BDSM, it predates the internet.”
Donahue is entitled to her opinion, of course, but the reality is that there’s absolutely nothing vile about BDSM, once whatever activities happening are by mutual agreement between consenting adults. It’s just about whatever turns you on. Unfortunately, what turned Graham Dwyer on was stabbing and blood. That has little or nothing to do with sex. In the sexual spectrum, BDSM is hardly abnormal. The truth is that Dwyer’s bloodlust had little to do with sex, and everything to do with psychopathic, sadistic power. Knifing a woman in the guts as you orgasm is a criminal act, not a sexual one.
The trial may be over (he’ll be sentenced, almost certainly to mandatory life imprisonment, on April 20), but, sadly, we haven’t heard the last of Graham Dwyer. He’s still all over the news, and will be for quite some time. As I write this, on Monday March 30, the headlines are screaming ‘Dwyer Abused Ex-Girlfriend and Took LSD and Ecstasy’ and ‘Dwyer Got Amorous Letters and Lingerie in Jail’. This one will undoubtedly run and run.
It almost goes without saying that an appeal is inevitable. Some barristers of my acquaintance expressed surprise that he was actually found guilty, given the circumstantial nature of much of the evidence against him. He himself definitely expected to get off. He had reportedly boasted to prison officers that he’d be eating steak and drinking wine last weekend. Instead, he was holed up in the cell where he rightly belongs.
However, the scary reality is that without the presence of a jury, and examined from a purely legal perspective, the prosecution’s painstakingly built case against Dwyer could well collapse on appeal.
A most unappealing prospect…