According to rock'n'roll legend, members of the Eagles were drinking in a bar
in Los Angeles in the early 1970s when they spotted a beautiful young woman
with an older, fat but clearly very rich man. They suspected the attractive
woman was unhappy in the relationship. One of the band commented: “Look at
her, she can't even hide those lyin' eyes.”
Laughing, they all began grabbing cocktail napkins to write down lyrics that
might follow this remark.
More than 30 years later, Una Ni Raifeartaigh, a prosecution barrister, quoted
the words of the Eagles' song in her closing speech to a Dublin jury charged
with deciding if Sharon Collins from Ennis was guilty of conspiring to have
her older partner and his two sons killed.
Ni Raifeartaigh told the jury that Collins was the only person who could have
used the e-mail lyingeyes98@yahoo.ie to organise for PJ Howard and his sons
Robert and Niall to be “snuffed out”.
Sharon Collins was motivated by “her greed to look after herself and her own
brood”, according to the prosecution barrister, in a reference to the
woman's two sons from a previous relationship, who sat beside her throughout
the trial.
“Any decent child would do the same for their mother, but should she be asking
them to?” Ni Raifeartaigh asked. “She has betrayed her own sons and made
them unwitting allies in her deceit.”
Collins's sons reacted with angry shakes of their heads before Ni Raifeartaigh
concluded the prosecution case with some Shakespeare. “A man may smile and
smile and be a villain,” she said.
The petite Collins had smiled frequently at the jury during the trial, but if
this was an attempt to convince them that she could not be the villain, that
she wasn't Lying Eyes, then it failed utterly. On Wednesday, the former
aerobics instructor was found guilty on three counts of conspiracy to murder
and a further three counts of soliciting to murder. It was a unanimous
verdict.
Essam Eid, the Egyptian poker player and supposed “hitman” that Collins hired
from Las Vegas, was found guilty of being in possession of stolen goods and
of demanding ¤100,000 with menaces from Robert Howard.
The bizarre plot was variously likened to a cheap thriller; a Machiavellian
setup; a plot worthy of the Coen brothers; an episode of America's Dumbest
Criminals or Dial M for Murder.
It was one of the longest and most expensive criminal trials of recent years.
While tabloid newspapers were inevitably scathing afterwards about Collins's
“murderous greed”, many observers who sat through the case were unconvinced
of her guilt. So just how did the jury decide beyond a reasonable doubt
Collins was guilty as charged?
When she was arrested in February 2007, gardai told Collins that in more than
20 years of investigations they'd never seen so much evidence against a
person. The garda investigation was run by two Ennis-based detectives,
Jarlaith Fahy and Michael Moloney.
They were provided with most of their evidence through the the computer-crime
section of the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation based in Harcourt Square,
Dublin.
The same detectives who had retrieved vital text messages and e-mails that
helped convict Joe O'Reilly of murder last year were put to work on laptops
and computers used by Collins, and a computer retrieved from Eid's Las Vegas
home by the FBI.
The detectives trawled though Eid's and Collins's phone records and discovered
that the two had made contact almost 50 times by mobile phone. Other than
the evidence of Teresa Engle, Eid's ex-wife who accompanied him on his
journey to Clare in September 2006, and letters written by Collins to the
director of public prosecutions (DPP), the computer-crime team's efforts
represented the bulk of the case against the Ennis woman.
Collins worked in the offices of Downes & Howard at Westgate Business Park
in Ennis. The business was owned by her partner PJ Howard, and she worked
alongside his two sons from a previous marriage.
An Advent laptop, which was stolen from these offices by Eid, was retrieved by
gardai and a forensic analysis revealed that the lyingeyes e-mail had been
in communication with the e-mail hire_hitman@yahoo.com to request that PJ
Howard and his two sons be killed.
With help from Yahoo!, gardai were able to retrieve all the e-mails sent
between these addresses and establish the lyingeyes e-mail was created in
Downes & Howard's offices on August 2, 2006. Eid responded to the
e-mails using the alias Tony Luciano.
The lyingeyes e-mails, some of which were signed Sharon, said it was
unfortunate she needed to kill PJ Howard's sons, but she had no other
choice. “His boys are going to suffer now,” the e-mail said. “I wish it
didn't have to be like this, but I know that if my husband was dead and they
were still here, they'd screw me.”
The e-mails asked Eid/Luciano to kill the two sons first and make it look like
an accident. PJ Howard was to be done away with in such a way that it seemed
he had thrown himself from the roof of his Spanish apartment in despair at
losing his sons.
The e-mails were damning for Collins. Her only explanation was that she was
being blackmailed by a Maria Marconi, a “writing mentor” that gardai believe
was a fictional character. She also insinuated that Robert Howard, PJ
Howard's eldest son, would have been able to send the e-mails in an effort
to set her up.
Eid's ex-wife was the prosecution's key witness as she was able to verify that
Eid and Collins were in fact Tony Luciano and Lying Eyes. Engle testified
that after Eid received a deposit of ¤15,000 through a FedEx package, the
couple travelled to Ireland and charged the cost of the flight and a hotel
room in Ennis to PJ Howard's American Express card. The card's number had
been provided through the lyingeyes e-mail. Collins later claimed she had
lost the card in Spain.
Engle, who the defence lambasted as an unreliable witness because of her
criminal past and immunity from prosecution in Ireland, also revealed that
Eid had created ricin poison from a recipe found on the internet.
The pair agreed to break into the offices of Downes & Howard and steal two
computers that Collins said needed to be removed. Eid also helped himself to
a poster of old Irish money and a digital clock.
After the break-in, Eid had difficulty contacting Collins, who was in Spain.
He decided to double-cross her and approached Robert Howard on September 26,
2006, at the offices of Downes & Howard.
He introduced himself as Tony and offered the Howards the chance to buy out
the contract on their lives for ¤100,000. Eid gave him an opportunity to
raise the cash, and instructed Robert Howard to meet him next day in the
Queen's hotel in Ennis. Instead, Howard phoned the gardai, and the
assassination plot began to unravel.
A gardai surveillance operation was put in place, and when Robert Howard went
to meet Eid at the hotel, both Engle and Eid were arrested. Gardai also
recovered the Advent computer from the hotel, which would later prove to be
the key to unravelling the case. Engle soon turned state's evidence.
When he was shown a photograph of Collins, Eid told gardai that he had been
having an affair with her “for two, three years”. The Egyptian said he had
spoken often with Collins by phone, and visited her a month earlier on her
partner's boat in Malaga. He had stayed in a nearby hotel.
At this stage, Collins made a statement to gardai saying she was being
blackmailed. It was not until computer forensics found the lyingeyes e-mails
that she was arrested in February 2007.
After her arrest, Collins communicated with James Hamilton, the DPP, in three
letters written in strangely familiar terms that asked, begged and cajoled
him to consider not prosecuting her. The letters were sent despite the
protestations of her solicitors who “hit the roof” when they discovered what
she was doing.
Collins told Hamilton that she had a special relationship with Robert Howard,
but he seemed determined “to point the finger at her” in relation to the
murder plot.
Collins started a relationship with PJ Howard in 1998. She was 14 years his
junior and they had agreed not to marry as the businessman, who is worth
¤12m, didn't want to affect his sons' inheritance rights.
The couple did, however, hold a public celebration of their “marriage” in
Clare in 2005 after pledging themselves as a couple in a church in Italy.
They referred to each other as man and wife, but gave documents to their
solicitors confirming they were not spouses. Collins, however, didn't hand
hers to her solicitor until after she was arrested.
In one of her letters to the DPP, Collins said the news of their “marriage”
went down “like a lead balloon” with the Howard sons. It was clear the jury
had to decide whether the boys could have set up their “stepmother” in an
effort to break up her relationship with their father.
All the computer evidence, however, pointed towards Collins. Not only were the
hitman e-mails retrieved, but search records showed that the same user
ordered a proxy marriage certificate; researched inheritance rights for
cohabiting couples; booked flights to Malaga in the name of Sharon Collins;
bought weight-loss drugs in the name of Sharon Collins; and logged into
Sharon Collins's Eircom e-mail account.
If Collins's apparent obsession with money and inheriting her partner's
business wasn't enough by way of motive, the gardai were also able to
retrieve an e-mail sent by Collins to the Gerry Ryan radio show. In this
partially recovered e-mail, which Collins did not deny sending, she
proclaimed herself to be in an “unbearable situation” with PJ Howard because
of his sexual desires. These included pestering her to have sex with strange
men. She also claimed that while in his holiday home in Malaga he slept with
prostitutes and transvestites.
Throuigh her letters to the DPP, Collins revealed a personality that seemed to
crave attention. Why else would she volunteer her views on the death penalty
to the head of the state's prosecution service? “I believe in assisted
suicide,” she wrote. “I'll stick my neck out, but I believe abortion is
necessary in certain circumstances. The death penalty has its place ... but
I'm not so sure now I'm in my predicament.”
She pointed out that people can be falsely accused, and that while PJ Howard
had said that Saddam Hussein's execution was not justified, she had thought
it the right thing to do.
The strongest argument against the mountain of evidence stacked against her
was that it was too straightforward. She told the DPP that while she was not
an expert in computers and had never heard the term “IP address” before the
investigation began, she didn't think it possible to contact someone on the
internet to “wipe out three people” and expect to get away with it.
“Basically what I am saying is that a five-year-old would have covered their
tracks better,” she wrote.
The only other feature Collins had going for her was the continuing loyalty of
one of the “marks” - PJ Howard. He testified that he didn't believe she'd
done it, and wrote a letter to the DPP saying the same. For good measure, he
kissed Collins in front of the jury to emphasise that he held no grudge
against her.
PJ Howard didn't return to the trial after the embarrassing Ryan e-mail was
read into evidence. His two sons, however, sat behind Ni Raifeartaigh during
her closing speech - in order to “eyeball” the jury, according to Eid's
barrister.
After almost 11 hours studying the evidence, including two charts displaying
all the e-mail and phone activity between Collins and Eid, the only count on
which the jury couldn't agree was the conspiracy-to-murder charges against
Eid.
Clearly the jury decided that while a five-year-old might not have left such
an obvious trail as Collins and Eid, a youngster would have come up with
more plausible excuses if caught.
“You can't hide those lyin' eyes/And your smile is a thin disguise/I thought
by now you'd realise/There ain't no way to hide those lyin' eyes.”
Crime of passion? Avarice, more like.
