French For Valerie

The story of my sister 's death at the hands of her husband and its devastating aftermath
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80458-330-2
Verlag: Gill Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten

In June 2019, Valerie French Kilroy was brutally murdered by her husband at their home near Westport, while her three young sons lay in bed. For her brother David and the rest of her family, it was the beginning of a battle against a system unprepared to protect the three innocent children whose father remains their legal guardian, despite being convicted of their mother's murder. From the devastating shock of hearing of his sister's death to the multiple criminal trials before the guilty verdict was delivered, David describes the issues his family faced in the aftermath of Valerie's murder. He provides a deeply personal insight into Valerie's marriage and the hidden struggles she faced in the run-up to her murder. This book is both a heartfelt tribute to Valerie's life and legacy and an urgent call to rethink the way our society responds to domestic homicide.

David French is the brother of Valerie French, who was murdered by her husband in 2019. He is the eldest of five, and along with his other three sisters, he has been drawn into the complex aftermath of the killing. David grew up on the family farm in West Cork in the 1970s, attended UCC and has worked in IT in Ireland and abroad. He lives in Wicklow and is a keen motorcyclist. This is his second book. The first is titled Mefloquine Dream.

Autoren/Hrsg.

French, David

Leseproben

Preface

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.

W.H. Auden

This book describes the context and aftermath of my sister Valerie’s murder in 2019. It contains my personal impressions, opinions and observations as someone drawn into this horrific space. In many places I have used quotes from other people affected by domestic homicide – Mary Coll, Frank Mullane, Luke and Ryan Hart, Amani Haydar and others. Their words emphasise the fact that Valerie’s murder was not a one-off incident, but rather part of a much larger and very obvious pattern.

Unless otherwise stated, opinions throughout are my own. None of these opinions are professional as I have no qualification in psychology, psychiatry, law or criminology.

I am not sharing any information that is not already known. Even now, after the murder trial, I am massively constrained in what I can say due to considerations of privacy, ongoing legal actions and the threat of litigation by Kilroy and even the state. Much of what has happened since the murder has been omitted; I have a lot to say that cannot be published at this time.

In most cases the people mentioned in these pages were acting with good intent and doing the best they could within the limitations of their abilities, training and the scope of their roles. Where people’s actions – or the actions of their organisations – are criticised as lacking, the hope is that they will use it to learn.

Anybody who claims that someone murdering their partner is ‘unprecedented’ is clearly missing the point. My sister’s murder had numerous precedents. In fact, she was the third Irish woman whose partner was charged with their murder in this country in the first six months of 2019, and there was nothing special about that year. Silencing the victim is the aim of murder. This book is an attempt to give voice to Valerie’s perspective and the perspective of her family and to put on record some part of her story. Books like this one also help to minimise recurrences of this type of crime and that is very clearly in the public interest.

Minister for Justice Helen McEntee made a statement on combating domestic, sexual and gender-based violence in November 2020. The government aims at that time were to increase the awareness of domestic and sexual violence, bring about a change in long-established societal behaviours and attitudes and activate bystanders to decrease and prevent this violence. This book adds the perspective of lived experience to that. To quote Ida B. Wells-Barnett, one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (or NAACP), ‘The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.’

Society needs to be more aware of the risk factors and not treat the killings of women as one-offs. There are growing volumes of research on the subject of women being killed by men. There are academic journals devoted to new studies and countless true crime books detailing individual cases.

According to the United Nations, femicide is the murder of women because they are women, whether it is committed within the family, in a domestic partnership or any other interpersonal relationship, or by anyone in the community and whether or not it is perpetrated or tolerated by the state or its agents. This isn’t something far away, foreign or exotic. A great deal of research across the English-speaking world, from Australia to Canada and the USA, has been devoted to the area of femicide. The UK has extensive and ongoing research in this area. At this stage there is simply no excuse for ignorance or a hand-wringing recourse to the ‘shocking one-off event’ defence.

During his address to a Women’s Aid Seminar marking the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women in November 2020, President Michael D. Higgins said that ‘violence against women in Ireland remains shockingly prevalent’. Despite this, there is still widespread denial at societal and systemic level of the seriousness of the issue. Lessons can only be learned after society accepts that there is a problem.

In her book Murder, Gender and the Media: Narratives of Dangerous Love, Professor Jane Monckton Smith writes:

We cannot rely on official institutions to reveal abuse – they may not be aware. We cannot rely on perpetrators to reveal systematic abuse – they may be self-interested. We do need to listen to everyone – especially the victim, however that may be achieved – to identify risk factors, dangerous characteristics and those behaviours which may indicate escalation and dangerousness. Victims’ families and friends may be holders of information they are not aware they have, they can reveal the nature of control and abuses by telling of the relationship. The victim’s voice is at the very least half the story of a homicide, not a passive silent, irrational and un-objective witness to events.

The victim’s voice which she speaks of, in our case, can only come from Valerie’s family.

There is a typical and very predictable dynamic around information in a killing of this sort. The victim’s family wants more information from the investigation whereas the killer wants there to be less information and less publicity. He hopes everyone could just write it off as an unfortunate accident without any consequences and allow him to move on. A killing cannot simply be passed over.

Valerie’s is one of a long list of murders in Ireland which are themselves part of a larger pattern of domestic violence and abuse. Proper examination provides lessons that can prevent more of the same. Reminders that women are continually being killed by men are constantly in the media like a steady background hum. I have mentioned many of them in this book to show that Valerie’s story is only one of many.

A dead person has no rights or status in the eyes of the law. None of their rights or status pass on to others, while the perpetrator effectively retains all of his. The aim of this book is to describe a specific instance of femicide and thereby show the need for organisational reforms to address it and the aftermath.

Or we can cut through the dry systemic thinking and say the aim of this book is to be a warning. You can treat it as a preview of the likely outcome should you become a victim of domestic homicide. In that case, your children will be kidnapped by the state, your family will be sidelined in the midst of their suffering, your partner will try every legal trick to avoid responsibility and your house will become his alone. Some people that you thought were friends will try to excuse his behaviour while your in-laws will stand by him to the end while competing with your family and trying to claim sympathy. People will blame you for provoking him, for choosing him, for putting up with him, for not leaving him when they think you should have or for leaving him when they think you shouldn’t have. Your children might forget who you were and all you did for them while many in society will pretend this was a one-off incident that has never happened before and is immune to analysis. Your life is gone, your parents and siblings will suffer guilt by association and you will become a tragic statistic. Your partner might be jailed for a few years, but then he will carry on about his life.

If you are a woman whose partner shows any of the warning signs, then please seek help and advice while you still can. You can contact organisations such as Women’s Aid or SAFE Ireland. If you are assaulted, it is a matter for the police.

In Southeast Asia, fatal road traffic accidents are common. What really strikes a westerner who happens to witness one of these is that many bystanders immediately flee the scene and abandon survivors. This is often due to a fear that the ‘bad spirits’ which quite clearly caused the disaster are lingering about and might now latch onto another victim. In their minds, road manners and driving behaviour has nothing to do with accidents; instead it is caused by sheer bad luck and defies all rational analysis. There is no point therefore in taking preventative measures to avoid recurrence. The typical Irish reaction to domestic homicide shows a very similar superstition. We grimace at the horror, ascribe it to evil demons and quickly rush away, learning nothing. Two months later, it happens again.

When I listen to other families affected I am always struck by intense similarities across all of the cases. On 28 August 2016 in Barconey, County Cavan, Alan Hawe murdered his wife Clodagh and their three sons, Liam, Niall and Ryan, before committing suicide. When Clodagh’s mother Mary Coll was interviewed on Today with Claire Byrne, she said:

I wanted to shout from the rooftops, ‘That’s not the truth, that’s not what happened.’ We’ve been controlled since this happened by our decency, our sense of decency … it’s not easy to sit and talk about this but we just feel that people need to be aware of the truth and that is the truth … I felt initially am I being disloyal to Clodagh, talking about her personal life, her children, her husband, but then I think of the horror, I think of what her last minutes must have been like, how worried for her children she must have been,...