The murder trial of Graham Dwyer has heard the paint on a spade that was found near the location where Elaine O’Hara’s remains were discovered does not match the paint that was used in the garden of his home.
Mr Dwyer (42), an architect from Kerrymount Close in Foxrock, is charged with murdering childcare worker Ms O’Hara (36) on August 22nd, 2012. He has pleaded not guilty.
On Wednesday Mr Dwyer’s wife, Gemma Dwyer, told the jury the same spade was “the spade from our garden” and that she recognised it because of stickers on it and splatters of paint. She said the fencing and shed in their garden had been painted and the paint had “gotten everywhere and on everything”.
Bridget Fleming of the Forensic Science Laboratory on Thursday said that tests were carried out on the paint from the spade and the paint from the garden of Mr Dwyer’s home in Kerrymount Close, Foxrock.
She said this was in order to ascertain whether any traces from the spade could have been from the samples of paint at Kerrymount Close.
Ms Fleming said there were small circular spots of paint visible to the eye on the upper part of the handle. They “appeared like dried on paint blotches” or “spots of brown paint”. Samples from Kerrymount Close also contained brown paint, she said.
The samples were “all visually similar in colour”.
She said special equipment was used to examine the paint at a magnification of 200 times. “You see details in terms of the paint granule and pigment,” she explained to the jury. All of this was “similar”.
Further examination of the paint involved the chemical composition where the chemical compounds of the substances are examined and compared.
The chemical compositions were found to be “similar…but differences observed meant they did not match”, said Ms Fleming.
Ms Fleming told the court that the reason for an examination of the paint was because Ms Dwyer had identified it as being from her home.
“I understood it related to the suspect’s wife who had identified it and said the spots had arisen while the garden fence was being painted,” she said.
“And that informed the whole purpose of the analysis?” asked Remy Farrell SC for the defence during his cross-examination.
“That was the background, yes,” replied Ms Fleming.
She said she requested that paint at the home of Mr Dwyer, which was visibly similar to that which was on the shovel, be brought in for tests.
Part of the fence at Mr Dwyer’s home was also brought in for analysis, which Ms Fleming agreed was “a good piece of reference material”.
“You engaged in a process where you compared the paint on the spade with some of the reference samples you obtained,” said Mr Farrell.
In terms of the “microscopic analysis” where the magnification is blown up 200 times, she said the procedure reveals “a lot of detail, both from the point of view of the colour, but also in terms of the shapes and sizes of the different materials present” in the paint.
“They were similar,” she said. “There was good correspondence.
“Paints used for different purposes have different chemical composition. They were similar in that regard. But there were small differences present. That’s the reason I said they were similar but did not match.”
She also said the chemical composition of paint tends to be appropriate to what the use will be.
“Paints are quite a complex mixture but the main ingredients in these [two samples of paint] were the same,” she said.
Asked by Mr Farrell whether these more subtle differences in the paint would form part of the criteria for ascertaining whether the paints are the same or not, she said they would.
Mr Farrell then asked: “The inference being that they are not the same paint?”
Ms Fleming replied: “It was not the same as any paint that I examined from Kerrymount Close.”
Ms O’Hara’s remains were found in forestry on Kilakee Mountain, Rathfarnham, on September 13th, 2013.
Ms O’Hara was last seen at about 5.45pm near Shanganagh Cemetery in Shankill, Co Dublin, on August 22nd, 2012.
Her remains were found in a forested area on Killakee Mountain, Rathfarnham, on September 13th, 2013, by a woman walking her dog.
The trial continues in front of Mr Justice Tony Hunt.
