Three stories from inside the Satchwell house

RTÉ News​

a day ago

In mid-November 2017, Tina Satchwell had been missing eight months. RTÉ Prime Time reporter Barry Cummins visited her home in Youghal, unaware that her body lay less than ten feet away buried beneath concrete. He was there to interview Tina's husband, Richard, who was yesterday found guilty of her murder.
Here he writes about that day, and later learning that her remains were feet away - a fact that troubles him to this day.
As part of a special programme on the trial of Richard Satchwell, he has since spoken with others who were also in 3 Grattan Street before Tina's body was discovered, six-and-a-half years after she went missing.
James McNamara has a story like no-one else. He was the Limerick builder who dug down to the spot where he found the sheeting which held the body of Tina Satchwell.
It was Wednesday 11 October 2023 when James brought a Kango hammer into the house and down to the confined space, inside a cubby hole, underneath the stairs of the Satchwell home.
The house had been sealed off since the evening before, when Richard Satchwell had been arrested on suspicion of murder.
After a fresh review of the missing person's case, a search warrant had been obtained to allow for an intrusive search of the property. That gave gardaí the power to dig up floors, pull down walls, and excavate wherever they saw fit.
A plan had been devised six weeks before James and his colleagues assisted gardaí with work at the house. The strategy was that there would be ten search zones at the property - inside, to the rear, and to the side.
A kitchen extension which had been built by Richard Satchwell at the back of the property was originally earmarked for special attention by gardaí.
But once the house was sealed off, and before any excavation work commenced, a cadaver dog from the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) - Fern - was brought in to walk the scene.
Fern has successfully found many bodies which lay hidden beneath the ground or underwater. She and her handler were brought south to Youghal and walked the entirety of the four-storey property.
Fern started at the top of the stairs and walked down the four flights of stairs with her handler.
At the bottom of the stairs, in the hall, towards the bottom steps, Fern suddenly lay flat, giving a firm indication that something was to be found nearby.
The house was a mess. Dog faeces were on the floor in many parts of the house, and you couldn't see much of the floor space. A concrete mixer and a sofa were among the many items blocking access to the understairs cubby hole.
Part of the structure beside the narrow door under the stairs was a brick wall, with one brick a different hue to the others.
The wall looked odd, once you could get a proper look at it, with all the items finally removed from the floor space in front.
The brick wall looked amateurish, not professionally constructed.
James McNamara and his colleague Pat O'Connor, and a garda from the Technical Bureau, Brian Barry, were standing in the living room on that October evening, discussing the demolition and excavation work to be commenced the following day, when they found themselves looking at the under stairs cubby hole.
"The house was manky, I'd never seen anything like it in my life. The smell was very bad," James told me.
As they chatted, they decided to take a closer look under the stairs. James went into the cramped space through the narrow entrance beside the brick wall.
"Brian gave me a flashlight and I shone it down, and there was lino on the floor. We pulled away the lino and we could see the colour difference in the concrete," James said.
A section of the concrete floor was a lighter shade than the rest. Detective Brian Barry quickly contacted the incident room in Midleton. Gardaí immediately agreed the area should be searched.
James McNamara got the Kango hammer inside and began drilling into the concrete, but he soon stopped the machine.
He had been expecting to drill through up to four inches of concrete, the normal amount that might be laid for flooring, but the concrete under the stairs was much thinner.
"When I took up the floor the concrete basically fell apart. The filling underneath should be solid, but it was just loose filling," James told me.
James quickly put the Kango hammer aside. The space was too cramped to use a large shovel to dig. Down on his knees, he began using a trowel to remove soil and put it to the side. Even the trowel seemed too big for the space.
Soon, James was using his hands to remove the earth and dig down.
A portable light was put close beside him to help him see what he was doing, as Detective Barry and James' colleague Pat stayed nearby.
James remembers it took just a few minutes.
"I went down about the length of my arm, two-and-a-half feet, and that's when I came across the polythene plastic."
Detective Brian Barry immediately told James to stop his work, and gardaí began preserving the scene.
"Brian said to me 'Right lads, you're done' and told us to leave," remembers James.
Two forensic archaeologists, Niamh McCullagh and Aidan Harte, then began slow and methodical work to carefully unearth what was hidden beneath the stairs, a staircase I myself had previously walked up while being given a tour of the house by Richard six years before.
Interviewing Richard Satchwell
By the time I had entered the house, in late 2017, Tina Satchwell was missing eight months.
Myself and two colleagues, producer Kevin Burns and camera operator Shirley Bradshaw, spent most of that evening in the front room of the house in the company of Richard Satchwell, who had agreed to an interview request.
By then, Satchwell had, on a number of occasions, been openly asked if gardaí considered him a suspect in his wife's disappearance. I knew as I entered the house that November evening that gardaí had previously spent a full day searching the house with no sign of Tina being found.
I can remember as I entered the property the smell of must and dust, as I sat in the front living room smelling the bird droppings which littered the cage in which the couple's parrot lived.
Valentine was the parrot which had replaced the previous one, Pearl. Richard told me that the couple were heartbroken at Pearl's death.
"We cried for weeks, we had an autopsy done and everything," he said as I stood with him looking at various items on a shelf which spoke of the life of a missing woman.
Various bottles of nail varnish sat on the shelf, the ones used by Tina the day before she "got up and left" as Richard Satchwell described it.
The bottles were covered in dust, the house was dirty, and the situation was unpleasant.
The interviewee picked up a dusty full bottle of Cava which he said he'd bought in Tesco to mark the couple's 25th wedding anniversary the year before.
"Tina never opened it," Satchwell recalled, as Pearl looked on. "I don't drink, I'm a teetotaller," he added.
We looked above the shelf at a photo of Tina. "She got that done up in Tallaght," he said as we stood beside the parrot in the narrow living room.
Richard Satchwell pointed at clothes on hangers resting on a door behind a couch. The clothes Tina bought at a car-boot sale the day before she disappeared.
That night, we only filmed in the front room. But to reach it, we had to walk through the hallway and the middle room beside the stairs.
As we carried our filming equipment into and out of the house, we would have walked less than three feet from the understairs clandestine burial area.
I have often reflected on my interactions with Richard Satchwell, and I am still processing it all.
I was doing my job, interviewing a man who was making public appeals for his missing wife. On every occasion I met him - and I even had Richard Satchwell in my own car as we drove around Youghal - I would learn new information.
The more I met him the more he talked, and the more he lied.
Prosecution
The interviews I conducted with Richard Satchwell were used as part of the prosecution's case, showing his demeanour and his comments even as his wife's body lay just feet away from where he and I sat on a couch in his home.
I was one of a small number of journalists who had been inside the house at Grattan Street as Tina's body lay hidden, still dressed in her pyjamas and nightgown, as she lay face down beneath the stairs.
Kyran O'Brien was working as a photographer with the Irish Independent when he photographed Richard Satchwell at the top of the house, beside the walk-in wardrobe where Tina kept the many clothes she had purchased at car-boot sales and in charity shops.
The clothes were often designer labels, Tina always had an eye for a bargain, and she always had an eye for fashion.
"All the clothes were immaculately folded and put in plastic and displayed very well," remembered Kyran.
"And then he showed me another room where there was a sunbed that he had built as well. And it was all quite tight. It was quite a tight stairs. It was an old, very thin house. The rooms were quite small, but there were basically walk-in wardrobes."
Like me, Kyran remembers there was a smell in the house, a smell of damp and dust and neglect.
"There was dog poo and there was parrot poo and it was dirty. It was unkempt, it was smelly. It wasn't clean. And he kept trying to offer us cups of tea. And I kept sort of saying to him, 'we have a long drive home, so I'd rather not'," Kyran said.
"It's terrible," Kyran told me, "to know I was in the house and the poor woman was not ten feet from where I was sitting. It'll stick with me."
James McNamara did the State, and Tina Satchwell, a service when he got down on his knees and began to dig that October evening in 2023. It's a moment he won't forget.
"We knew what we were doing was very important work. It was great to be involved with a case like this. It gives a family peace, so it was actually massive."
The fact that machinery such as ground penetrating radar failed to give an indication of a body beneath the stairs is due perhaps to the fact the grave was so deep.
Tina's body had been buried nearly three feet down, under soil, concrete and a layer of lino.
And for years people, including myself, walked those stairs above, never knowing.
There are many lessons to be learned from this case for everyone, and there are many vivid memories that will stay with me of my interactions over a number of months with Richard Satchwell.