Tattoo artist found guilty of murdering man with sword
Ian Baitson died in hospital in March last year, four days after being injured in the assault on the Newtown Road in Cobh.
The 33 year old had a "sub-total amputation" of his left leg and suffered catastrophic bleeding, the court heard.
Dylan Scannell, 31, of O'Rahilly Street in Cobh, had pleaded guilty to manslaughter but the jury found him guilty of murder.
Mr Baitson, who worked as a chef, died at Cork University Hospital on 19 March 2024.
Tattoo artist Scannell now faces a mandatory life sentence.
The jury at the Central Criminal Court in Cork took just over four hours to deliver their verdict, according to Irish broadcaster RTÉ.
It reported that the judge excused them from any further jury service for the next five years.
Man in court charged with father of two's murder
Murder investigation launched after Cork assault
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Boston Globe
20 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Rose Leiman Goldemberg, 97, dies; her ‘Burning Bed' was a TV benchmark
Ms. Goldemberg was working as a playwright in the mid-1970s when she sent a few story outlines to an unusually receptive television producer. One of them, a drama about immigrants set on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1910, caught his interest. It became a television movie, 'The Land of Hope' (a title Ms. Goldemberg hated), which aired on CBS in 1976. It centered on a Jewish family and their Irish and Italian neighbors. There were labor organizers, gangsters, and musicians, and a rich uncle who wanted to adopt a child to say Kaddish for him when the time came. Such an ethnic stew was a stretch for the network, and critics loved it. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'A thoroughly charming surprise,' John O'Connor wrote in his review for The New York Times. Advertisement As a pilot for a series, 'The Land of Hope' went nowhere, but it made Ms. Goldemberg's reputation, and she began receiving stories to be turned into scripts. 'Where did you spring from?' one network executive asked her, she recalled in a 2011 interview for the nonprofit organization New York Women in Film & Television. 'As though I were a mushroom.' It was Arnold Shapiro, the veteran producer, writer and director behind 'Scared Straight!,' a well-received TV documentary about teenage delinquents being brought into contact with prison inmates, who sent Ms. Goldemberg 'The Burning Bed,' a 1980 book by The New Yorker writer Faith McNulty about the case of Francine Hughes. Advertisement Hughes's story was horrific. For 13 years, she had been terrorized by her alcoholic husband. One day in March 1977, after a brutal beating, she called the police in their Michigan town. Two officers responded and then left, saying there was nothing they could do because they hadn't witnessed the attacks. That night, the beating resumed, and Hughes's husband raped her. When he fell asleep, she doused the bed with gasoline, lit a match, and set the bed on fire. Then she put her children in the car and drove to the county jail to report what she had done. Her husband died that night, and Francine Hughes was charged with first-degree murder. Nine months later, a jury pronounced her not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. The verdict made national headlines. Fawcett, the pinup star of 'Charlie's Angels,' the frothy crime series, was already attached to the project; she had shown her dramatic chops in 'Extremities,' an off-Broadway production about a woman who exacts revenge on her rapist, and wanted to continue working in that vein. Yet the project was initially turned down by all three networks. When it was resurrected, by NBC, in one of those complicated scenarios particular to Hollywood, Shapiro was somehow left out of the production. The movie aired in October 1984, to mostly critical acclaim. (Paul Le Mat played the husband.) It was seen by tens of millions of viewers, and NBC's ratings soared, pulling the network out of third place and putting it on top for the first time in a decade. Fawcett, Ms. Goldemberg, the producers, and even the makeup artist were nominated for Emmy Awards, and the movie set off a national conversation about domestic abuse. Women's shelters, a rarity in those days, began opening all over the country; the film was shown in men's prisons; and Ms. Goldemberg was often asked to speak to women's groups. Advertisement Inevitably, as she recalled in 2011, 'someone would say, 'I couldn't talk about my own abuse until I saw the film.'' She added: 'It wasn't because of me. It was a wonderful performance by Farrah, and the timing was right. It was just a remarkable confluence of the right things happening at the right time.' Still, Ms. Goldemberg began fielding entreaties from other actresses who wanted her to write star vehicles for them, projects akin to 'The Burning Bed.' She did so for one of Fawcett's fellow angels, Jaclyn Smith, cowriting the TV movie 'Florence Nightingale' for her. Broadcast in April 1985, it did not have the same impact as 'The Burning Bed'; most critics found it soapy and forgettable. A Lucille Ball vehicle fared much better. Ball wanted a script about homelessness, and when she and Ms. Goldemberg met at her Beverly Hills house, Ball laid out her terms: She wanted to play a character with some of the personality traits of her grandmother, and named for her. Ms. Goldemberg came up with 'Stone Pillow,' a television film about a homeless woman named Florabelle. In his Times review, under the headline 'Lucille Ball Plays a Bag Lady on CBS,' O'Connor called the movie 'a carefully contrived concoction' but praised Ball 'as wily and irresistible as ever.' Advertisement Rose Marion Leiman was born on May 17, 1928, on Staten Island, N.Y. Her mother, Esther (Friedman) Leiman, oversaw the home until World War II, when she became an executive secretary at Bank of America; her father, Louis Leiman, owned a chain of dry-cleaning stores in New Jersey. Rose earned a bachelor's degree in 1949 from Brooklyn College, where she had enrolled at 16, and a Master of Arts in English from Ohio State University. She married Raymond Schiller, a composer who followed her from Brooklyn College to Ohio State, in 1949; he later became a computer systems designer. They divorced in 1968. Her marriage, in 1969, to Robert Goldemberg, a cosmetic chemist, ended in divorce in 1989. Her first television-related job was at TV Guide in the 1950s, writing reviews of shows airing on what was then a new medium. She eventually began writing plays. Ms. Goldemberg is survived by a son, Leiman Schiller, and three stepchildren, David Goldemberg, Kathy Holmes, and Sharanne Goldemberg. This article originally appeared in
San Francisco Chronicle
a day ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Dan Dillon, S.F. lobbyist who helped bring major PGA tournaments to the city, dies at 64
As a San Francisco hospitality industry lobbyist and City Hall insider, Dan Dillon never wrote anything down. The telephone was for arranging a meeting over drinks at one of his hangouts, and his style was so effective that his contacts put on an Irish wake for him at Original Joe's in North Beach a dozen years ago when Dillon was still alive to enjoy it. A vintage firetruck arrived with a closed and flag-draped coffin, and pallbearers in mourning jackets carried it in as bagpiper played mournful hymns. Waiting inside to speak was the Irish consul general, former Mayor Willie Brown and Supervisor Aaron Peskin. Dillon was president of the Olympic Club, a downtown institution with an outlying golf course, and an officer in the Guardsmen nonprofit serving at-risk youths, so both of those organizations were represented. A mock death certificate had been printed and entered into the record at the moment when the lid flung open and up popped the honoree raising a bottle of Bud Light. 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Among his achievements, Dillon is credited with helping pass state legislation authored by Sen. Mark Leno in 2011 that allows alcoholic beverages infused with fruit and herbs to be served in bars and restaurants, which gave them a major boost. 'With his connections and his ability, Dan got that law done in 90 days, so bars could make cocktails the way people wanted them,'' said Brian Sheehy, owner of Bourbon and Branch, the Lark Bar and a few tiki bars, among 14 in San Francisco. Dillon was also the point person who persuaded the Professional Golfers' Association to bring the PGA Championship, one of golf's four majors, to Harding Park, a public course in San Francisco, in May 2020. He served as event chair, and it went so well that the PGA Championship is coming back to the city in 2028. It will be followed by an even bigger event, the Ryder Cup, a team competition that has not taken place in California since 1959. When it was announced in 2017, Dillon, as president of the Olympic Club, stood between then-Mayor Ed Lee and the PGA president. Both of those events will be played on the Lake Course at the Olympic Club. 'There was nobody more connected to the world of golf than Dan Dillon,' said Brown, who found this out when Dillon personally introduced Da Mayor to Tiger Woods during the PGA Championship. Dillon also introduced Brown to voters in the west side of the city when Dillon and Sheean hosted the first house party for Brown's mayoral run in 1996. That started a partnership that did not end until Brown came to say goodbye to Dillon at San Francisco General, just days before he died. 'Dan Dillon was very much a part of San Francisco for years and years and years,' said Brown. 'He came up with multiple ideas for how to make the city really work.' 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Boston Globe
a day ago
- Boston Globe
‘Just a jumble of bones.' How a baby grave discovery has grown to haunt Ireland
One of the boys, Franny Hopkins, remembers the hollow sound as his feet hit the ground. He and Barry Sweeney pushed back some briars to reveal a concrete slab they pried open. 'There was just a jumble of bones,' Hopkins said. 'We didn't know if we'd found a treasure or a nightmare.' Hopkins didn't realize they'd found a mass unmarked baby grave in a former septic tank — in a town whose name is derived from the Irish word meaning burial place. It took four decades and a persistent local historian to unearth a more troubling truth that led this month to the Advertisement The Tuam grave has compelled a broader reckoning that extends to the highest levels of government in Dublin and the Vatican. Ireland and the Catholic Church, once central to its identity, are grappling with the legacy of ostracizing unmarried women who they believed committed a mortal sin and separating them from children left at the mercy of a cruel system. Word of Hopkins' discovery may never have traveled beyond what is left of the home's walls if not for the work of Catherine Corless, a homemaker with an interest in history. Advertisement Corless, who grew up in town and vividly remembers children from the home being shunned at school, set out to write an article about the site for the local historical society. But she soon found herself chasing ghosts of lost children. 'I thought I was doing a nice story about orphans and all that, and the more I dug, the worse it was getting,' she said. Mother and baby homes were not unique to Ireland, but the church's influence on social values magnified the stigma on women and girls who became pregnant outside marriage. The homes were opened in the 1920s after Ireland won its independence from Britain. Most were run by Catholic nuns. In Tuam's case, the mother and baby home opened in a former workhouse built in the 1840s, for poor Irish where many famine victims died. It had been taken over by British troops during the Irish Civil War of 1922-23. Six members of an Irish Republican Army faction that opposed the treaty ending the war were executed there in 1923. Two years later, the imposing three-story gray buildings on the outskirts of town reopened as a home for expectant and young mothers and orphans. It was run for County Galway by the Bon Secours Sisters, a Catholic order of nuns. Mothers and their children carried that stigma most of their lives. But there was no accountability for the men who got them pregnant, whether by romantic encounter, rape, or incest. Around the time Corless was unearthing the sad history, Anna Corrigan was in Dublin discovering a secret of her own. Advertisement Corrigan, raised as an only child, vaguely remembered a time as a girl when her uncle was angry at her mother and blurted out that she had given birth to two sons. To this day, she's unsure if it's a memory or dream. While researching her late father's traumatic childhood confined in an industrial school for abandoned, orphaned, or troubled children, she asked a woman helping her for any records about her deceased mom. Corrigan was devastated when she got the news: before she was born, her mother had two boys in the Tuam home. 'I cried for brothers I didn't know, because now I had siblings, but I never knew them,' she said. Her mother never spoke a word about it. A 1947 inspection record provided insights to a crowded and deadly environment. Twelve of 31 infants in a nursery were emaciated. Other children were described as 'delicate,' 'wasted,' or with 'wizened limbs.' Corrigan's brother, John Dolan, was described as 'a miserable, emaciated child with voracious appetite and no control over his bodily functions, probably mental defective.' He died two months later in a measles outbreak. Despite a high death rate, the report said infants were well cared for and diets were excellent. Corrigan's brother, William, was born in May 1950 and listed as dying about eight months later. There was no death certificate, though, and his date of birth was altered on the ledger, which was sometimes done to mask adoptions, Corrigan said. In a hunt for graves, the cemetery caretaker led Corless across the street to the neighborhood and playground where the home once stood. A well-tended garden with flowers, a grotto, and Virgin Mary statue was walled off in the corner. It was created by a couple living next door to memorialize the place Hopkins found the bones. Advertisement Some were thought to be famine remains. But that was before Corless discovered the garden sat atop the septic tank installed after the famine. She wondered if the nuns had used the tank as a convenient burial place after it went out of service in 1937, hidden behind the home's 10-foot-high walls. 'It saved them admitting that so, so many babies were dying,' she said. 'Nobody knew what they were doing.' When she published her article in the Journal of the Old Tuam Society in 2012, she braced for outrage. Instead, she heard almost nothing. That changed, though, after Corrigan, who had been busy pursuing records and contacting officials from the prime minister to the police, found Corless. Corrigan connected her with journalist Alison O'Reilly, and the international media took notice after her May 25, 2014, article on the Sunday front page of the Irish Mail with the headline: 'A Mass Grave of 800 Babies.' The article caused a firestorm, followed by some blowback. Some news outlets, including The Associated Press, highlighted sensational reporting and questioned whether a septic tank could have been used as a grave. The Bon Secours sisters hired public relations consultant Terry Prone, who tried to steer journalists away. Despite the doubters, there was widespread outrage. Corless was inundated by people looking for relatives on the list of 796 deaths she compiled. It is expected to take two years to collect bones, many of which are commingled, sort them, and use DNA to try to identify them with relatives like Corrigan. Advertisement Some people in town believe the remains should be left undisturbed. But Corrigan hopes each child is found. 'They were denied dignity in life, and they were denied dignity and respect in death,' she said. 'So we're hoping that today maybe will be the start of hearing them because I think they've been crying for an awful long time to be heard.'
