An architect obsessed with stabbing women during sex acts has been handed a mandatory life sentence by the Dublin high court over a murder that has both repelled and fascinated Ireland.
The trial of Graham Dwyer for the killing his “sex slave,” Elaine O’Hara, has shone a light on the dark underworld of the nation’s violent sadomasochistic scene.
Dwyer was convicted last month of luring O’Hara to the Dublin mountains on Aug. 22 2012, stabbing her to death and then concealing her body. The evidence heard was among the most graphic and disturbing heard by a jury in Ireland.
During a two-month trial, jurors were shown a series of disturbing videos of the 42-year-old architect stabbing O’Hara while she was tied up.
In some videos she was heard begging him to “please stop.”
O’Hara was not the only woman filmed by Dwyer, who at times simulated stabbing those he tied up. The Garda Siochana is now attempting to track down the other women, depicted by Dwyer as his “slaves.”
Some did not know they were being filmed because they were blindfolded.
O’Hara emerged during the trial as a deeply troubled, lonely woman who yearned for a baby, but also had severe mental health issues — vulnerable quarry for a dangerous predator on S&M Web sites such as Dwyer.
The court heard a series of text messages from the start of the relationship in 2007 between O’Hara, 36, and Dwyer in which he was referred to as “master” or “sir” and her as “slave.”
Overall, there were 2,600 text messages filled with rape and murder fantasies.
When O’Hara was hospitalized after a suicide attempt in August 2012, one of Dwyer’s text messages read: “You must be punished for trying to kill yourself without me.”
When she pleaded with Dwyer to make her pregnant, he replied in another text trying to persuade her to help him kill another woman.
“OK, a life for a life. Help me take one and I will give you one,” he texted her.
Dwyer visited an alternative sexual underground Web site to fulfil his deep-seated fantasies to spill women’s blood during sex acts. He came across O’Hara, who had a history of self harm.
Early on in their master-slave relationship, Dwyer told O’Hara via another mobile phone text: “My urge to rape, stab, kill is huge. You have to help me control or satisfy it.”
In September 2013 — more than a year after O’Hara had gone missing — a dog-walker discovered her body at Kilakee in the Dublin mountains. Two days later, her bags and mobile phones were discovered at a reservoir in Roundwood in nearby County Wicklow, where Dwyer had dumped them.
No murder weapon was ever recovered from either scene and the autopsy of the victim could not establish exactly how she died. There was no direct DNA evidence linking Dwyer to the two sites. Police identified Dwyer as the killer after retrieving text messages and videos from the mobile phones.
During and after their “relationship” Dwyer always maintained the facade of being a respectable, successful professional and family man. His main hobby outside work at a Dublin architects’ office was flying model airplanes.
Although Dwyer’s wife and fellow architect, Gemma, had no idea about her husband’s alternative lifestyle and fetish fantasies, a figure from his past did — his ex-girlfriend and the mother of his first child, Emer McShea. She gave evidence in court that back in the early 1990s Dwyer told her of his fantasies about stabbing women while having sex with them.
McShea told the trial that Dwyer’s fantasies got as far as leaving a kitchen knife by their pillows when they were in bed having sex.
Following Dwyer’s conviction, detectives in Dublin are now examining a series of other unsolved murders involving fatal stabbings.
According to a Garda source, they include the killing of 17-year-old schoolgirl Raonaid Murray.
She was killed 14 years ago after being attacked in a lane in Glenageary, south Dublin, after returning from a night out with friends in the pub.
No one has ever been convicted of her killing.
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