Gemma Dwyer, wife of murder suspect Graham Dwyer, took the stand for less than an hour in the Central Criminal Court.
Shoulders hunched, fair hair forming a protective curtain around her face, the wife of the accused and mother of his two small children made her way to the witness stand around the back of the dock where her husband was seated, rather than the customary route past the defendant.
Sitting with her slight body angled toward the judge’s bench, her eyes never met those of the man she has known for nearly 20 years, since they met as students of architecture in Bolton Street, Dublin.
In the densely crowded court, where some perspiring onlookers had to leave for air, she held her composure, nervous and quiet at first, answering questions about their early married life, describing how they had lived in Gulistan Cottages in the Dublin suburb of Rathmines from 2000 for seven years, renovating it together before moving to Foxrock.
As the questioning continued, her voice grew in confidence to a point where she felt able to volunteer details. Asked about their second child, born in Holles St in 2012, she recalled that “lots of family” visited in the following days, before adding in a clear, firm voice: “It’s a wonderful time, the birth of a child”.
In a brief, tense exchange about identification marks on a spade alleged to have come from their Foxrock garden, defence counsel Remy Farrell remarked, "to coin a phrase, a spade is a spade". She replied: "Oscar Wilde – yes".
Occasionally, distress was openly etched on her face, as when she was shown a video-still of her husband taken during their days in Gulistan Cottages. She wept while a letter she received from him in February 2014 was read to the court, asking her not to believe the gardaí.
“They actually have no evidence except my name and someone else’s phone number in that awful girl’s diary. I do know her, yes, and was helping her. And I wasn’t totally honest with you”.
But she never broke down. The court has been told that September 13th, 2012 was the day that Elaine O’Hara’s remains were found. Gemma Dwyer remembers it because her own and Graham’s birthdays happen to fall on September 13th and they celebrated that evening in a Mexican restaurant in South Great George’s Street before getting the Luas home.
She spoke brightly of his "fantastic" way with computers, of his interest in cycling and motorbike meets at the Hellfire Club, of his myriad cars including the Audi TTS and the one he called his "baby" – a Porsche 911, of his fascination with remote-controlled model aeroplanes for which he often took Wednesday afternoons off. On Thursdays, she said, she would sometimes go sailing in Dún Laoghaire.
In many ways, it was the testimony of a normal, busy, middle class life, filled with his work and hers, of building swing-sets in the garden and getting home for the childminder and irritatingly messy paint jobs; of camping trips for him away in Cork with members of his family, his 40th birthday dinner organised by her in a Bandon restaurant, and recollections of one trip in particular for her, when she took their son and three-month old daughter to visit her parents in Sligo, sending a reassuring message to her husband – who had planned a night in with the lads – that the “fridge had plenty of food in it”.
Some 50 minutes later, she was finished, leaving as she had arrived.
