A 23-year-old man has been found guilty of murdering Cameron Reilly, the teenager who was found dead in a field in Dunleer, Co Louth, in May 2018.
The jury of the Central Criminal Court, consisting of seven women and five men, delivered a unanimous verdict this afternoon on their third day of deliberations in the case.
Mr Justice Tony Hunt thanked the jury for their hard work and told them they had done a “very hard and long shift”.
“These are terribly difficult cases,” he added.
He exempted each of them from jury duty for a period of 15 years.
The jury had deliberated for a total of 10 hours and 39 minutes.
Aaron Connolly, Willistown, Drumcar, pleaded not guilty to the murder of Mr Reilly (18) in Shamrock Hill, Dunleer, on 26 May 2018.
Dundalk IT student Cameron Reilly was socializing with friends in a field just outside the city on the night of May 25, 2018.
Friends of Mr Reilly said at trial that a group of about 15 young people gathered in the field at night and consumed alcohol and cannabis. The group then went to a local takeaway restaurant shortly after midnight to get food before leaving at 12:40 am.
The teen’s body was found the following morning, May 26, 2018, in the field near Shamrock Hill by a man walking his dog.
State pathologist Linda Mulligan told the jury that Mr Reilly’s cause of death was asphyxiation due to external pressure on the neck, with no other factors involved.
At trial, the court heard Connolly say in his initial statement to Gardaí that he and Mr Reilly went in different directions at the end of the night and after the pair parted ways near the residential area of Beechwood in Dunleer, he “never looked back’ to see which way Cameron was going.
Last week, lawyers for Connolly, who denied the murder of the 18-year-old in Shamrock Hill, Dunleer, told the court that the suspect had engaged in oral sex with Mr Reilly on the night he was killed.
Defense counsel Michael Bowman SC provided evidence on behalf of Aaron Connolly by formal admission to court.
He said that Aaron Connolly had oral sex with Cameron Reilly and when he left, Mr. Reilly was alive and standing.
In his garda interviews, Connolly said he couldn’t remember what he was doing during a “missing hour” the night Cameron Reilly died violently because he had taken a combination of drugs that caused him to pass out.
He told Gardaí: “I know I didn’t kill him, I would know if I had killed someone.”
Connolly told investigating officers that he took two grams of cocaine and half a gram of MDMA.
The jury also heard that Connolly had initially denied that anything sexual had happened between him and Mr Reilly and had told Gardaí that he was “straight”.
Forensic scientist Dr Clara Boland has provided evidence that an immunological test on a swab taken from Mr Reilly’s penis revealed human saliva which was a mixture of two people, the largest sample being Mr Reilly’s and the minor having an incomplete profile that matched Mr. Connolly’s DNA.
Friends of Mr Reilly stated at trial that the teenager confided to them shortly before his death that he was bisexual.
The murder trial also heard evidence from Jack Conway, who said he and Aaron Connolly had sexual relations on a number of occasions when they were teenagers. He told the prosecutor that he and the suspect had about 20 sexual encounters after that.
Mr Conway said Aaron Connolly would tell people he was straight.
In her testimony in court, Chief State Pathologist Dr Linda Mulligan said during an autopsy that she found evidence of external injury to the neck in the form of abrasions and bruises and that there was also evidence of deep bruising around the neck and hyoid bone. “All of these features are consistent with the application of external pressure to the neck. This was the cause of death,” she said.
There were no obvious ligature marks or circular bruises, the pathologist told the court, and the injuries sustained were more consistent with a stranglehold or the application of a rough object to the neck.
In his closing statement to the jury, Prosecutor Dean Kelly SC alleged that Aaron Connolly “lied from the beginning of this investigation to the end” because he killed his friend.
He said the “constant foxy evolution” of Mr Connolly’s lies counters the suggestion that a young person might lie to protect his personal sexual preferences.
Mr. Kelly said that in a way this case was about lies and about science. He said lies are the subject of “grey areas”, but science speaks the truth.
People lie for all sorts of reasons, Mr Kelly said, but science tells us certain things and it tells us those things with absolute certainty.”
However, defense attorney Michael Bowman SC argued that “strategic lies” had been told by several young people who were there that night. He said people had lied about drug and alcohol use in a murder trial because they were afraid.
Mr. Bowman told the jury: “The law says that the mere fact that the defendant is lying is not sufficient evidence. They may lie out of panic and confusion; they may lie because they are afraid for all sorts of reasons.”
More to follow…