The Eagles were right, after all. You really can’t hide your lying eyes. It’s a shame Sharon Collins didn’t pay more attention to the lyrics when she chose that song title as her alias for the contract she took out on her lover and his two adult sons. It might have prompted her to think twice before she tried to use those big baby-blues as exhibit A in her defence, to flutter and flirt and cajole her way out of a conspiracy-to-murder charge by making cow eyes at the jurors.

The state was smart to hire a young woman prosecutor to take on Collins. Una Ni Raifeartaigh was able to call her on the studied simpering act with a frankness that would have made a male lawyer look like a bully. I know Sharon Collins, all women do: I’ve never met her, of course, but like the prosecutor, I reckon I can spot her type at 50 paces. She’s one of those women who have perfected the art of turning men into blobs of jelly and wrapping them round their little fingers. It’s a work in progress, a lifetime’s endeavour, but one that consumes all their energy and ingenuity.

The tools of their trade are tears, flattery and vulnerability. It’s a tribute to her skill that the man she humiliated, bad-mouthed and planned to murder was still enthralled enough to embrace her in the dock.

The conspiracy to bump off the Howard family has been likened to the plot of a Coen Brothers movie, but I’d imagine the inventive Coens would be rightly aggrieved by that comparison. If there’s any fictional parallel, it’s probably with a Minnie the Minx comic strip, because the plot was so cartoonishly flimsy and improbable.

Get a fake marriage certificate and then hire a hitman over the internet? I wouldn’t even buy a pair of shoes over the internet. Tell him to wipe out three grown men and “make it look like an accident”? That has to be up there with “follow that cab” in the annals of B-movie clichés. Play the grieving widow and then turn up with your fake marriage certificate, trust no inconvenient relatives emerge from the woodwork, hope the probate office doesn’t look too closely at your documents, and bank your €12m?

Fortunately for the prosecution, the charge of conspiracy to murder doesn’t include the requirement that the conspiracy need have the remotest chance of success. Essam Eid, the putative hitman for hire, is a low-level conman and fantasist, the sort of chap for whom fake lottery scams and pyramid selling schemes are too sophisticated.

He must have thought his ship had come in when Collins, with the e-mail moniker lyingeyes98, swallowed the bait and sent him a down payment of ¤15,000 for three murders. His particular schtick involved taking “contracts” from gullible clients and then approaching the target to extort money for calling off the hit. He was wanted by the FBI for an almost identical wheeze in California. It’s hard to understand how any halfway intelligent human being could have been taken in by him.

The defendants in so-called crimes of passion in this country recently have tended to be men. Mostly it was indeed passion, whether jealousy, hatred or lust for another woman, that motivated their actions. For men, it seems, money is rarely the sole consideration. Joe O’Reilly, for instance, wanted his wife, Rachel, out of the way because he was conducting an affair with another woman and was afraid he would lose custody of his children in the event of a separation.

Money was an element of Brian Kearney’s motivation in murdering his wife, Siobhan, but there was also jealousy and vengeful possessiveness — she was planning to leave him. Deceit, infidelity, taunts of sexual inadequacy prompting sudden, blinding outbursts of rage — all have featured in a number of cases over the past decade or so where men have killed wives or girlfriends.

Most of the women jailed in this country for killing their partners have pleaded self-defence, claiming that the act was a desperate, spur-of-the-moment response to years of domestic violence. This was obviously true in cases where the abuse was well documented. In others, though, there was little more than the defendant’s word against the deceased man. Perhaps the law needs to be more sceptical with such killings in future: you could argue, based on the cases of both Catherine Nevin and Collins, that when women embark on a course of premeditated murder, they are chillingly capable of leaving all passion out of the equation.

Eid turned out to be a crook and a buffoon. I doubt that genuine hitmen have their own “hitman for hire” websites. But there was nothing fake about Collins’s determination to have three men murdered in her own financial interest. She portrayed herself as the vampish heroine of some film noir, describing herself as “the devil in the red dress” in one e-mail to Eid. Perfectly understandable, of course: after all, here was another man to be bent to her will with a seductive blend of sulphur and vulnerability. She was in “an impossible situation”, she wept, and only he could save her. Those pleading letters she wrote to the DPP, begging him to drop the charges while she was on remand, fit that same pattern.

Collins had obviously traded on her looks and charm for years and must have felt that, at 45, the time for bagging a rich man was rapidly running out. For all her efforts, PJ Howard wouldn’t marry her (you don’t amass a €12m fortune without acting on the best financial advice) and she wasn’t walking away without a decent payday.

But she had a good life with a man who appeared to love her and, it seems, they had an interesting and varied, if not entirely conventional, intimate relationship. If that wasn’t enough she could have ended the relationship — she didn’t need a hitman to get her out of it. I suspect, though, that women like Collins secretly despise the men they snare; they hate them for being so sloppy and clingy and pliable, so easily reeled in, so eager to please. That would explain her sense of entitlement, the absolute conviction that this ¤12m was hers, and that this obstinate old man and his pesky sons were simply standing in her way. And if Howard didn’t play ball, then he left her with no option but to throw herself on the mercy of a complete stranger to save her from her awful dilemma. So you see, it was all his own fault, really.

brenda.power@sunday-times.ie

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