TO OUTSIDERS Joseph O’Riordan was a community stalwart who did more than his share of charity fundraising and was in a devoted marriage to a woman nearly 30 years younger than him.

Then president of the local branch of the Royal British Legion, he had been re-elected as an independent Polegate town councillor in October 2013, after resigning earlier that year as the Polegate Residents’ Association representative.

Yet in private, the 73-year-old’s marriage was falling apart.

He had a growing fixation on their failing relationship, his wife’s whereabouts and her affair with another man that would end with his savage knife attack on her in their bedroom.

After returning from a shopping trip he took the knife from the kitchen and said ‘Look at what you made me do’ before stabbing her eight times.

The nine inch blade went all the way through her body during the attack on the evening of October 22, leaving wounds at the front and back.

Then while in prison awaiting trial O’Riordan sent his wife a letter asking her to send him his favourite suit to wear in court. Yesterday jurors convicted O’Riordan of trying to murder Amanda O’Riordan.

He installed a tracking device on his wife’s car and had her followed by a friend after learning of her affair with their former postman.

O’Riordan had told his wife in the car on their way home that he had a call from a private investigator leading him to believe she was still hiding things from him over her brief affair with Nicholas Gunn.

Mrs O’Riordan had recalled an incident years earlier in which he had punched a wall, and told jurors that he had smashed her crockery following an argument in September.

Detective Chief Inspector Mike Ashcroft, who investigated the case, said that in general damaging property would have a “mental impact” on someone watching and in that sense was a form of emotional abuse.

He said: “There is the old saying you never know what goes on behind closed doors. You cannot stereotype where perpetrators or victims of domestic abuse come from – it all depends on individual circumstance.”

He added: “The victim has suffered horrendous medical injuries, but who knows how long her emotional scars will remain, especially being attacked by somebody who you have spent 25 years with, in your own home.”

O’Riordan will be sentenced today.

A controlling and intense relationship

AMANDA O’Riordan was in her early twenties when she met her future husband and the pair’s marriage ten years ago cemented what she described as a loving and devoted relationship.

They moved to Guardian Court in Polegate due to her job as a live-in manager for the sheltered housing scheme, and in-between her full-time work she would frequently help out with her husband’s community work, catering for fundraisers and accompanying him to events.

The pair had renewed their marriage vows at a church in Eastbourne last year and her husband was preparing to celebrate her upcoming birthday by booking a table at their traditional birthday restaurant, The Grand Hotel in Eastbourne.

Yet she had started to feel increasingly suffocated in their relationship, exhausted by his constant demands.

“It just seemed like something changed,” she told police.

“I don’t know, it just seemed to me that the intensity started to step up and that is when I started to struggle with it.

“I think it was getting too much for me and could not deal with it anymore and that is when I started to feel that I was under a lot of pressure.”

In her brief affair with their former postman, Nicholas Gunn, she found something that helped her feel “more me”, she said. She felt with him she could do whatever she liked, or simply nothing at all.

Reflecting after the stabbing on her husband’s behaviour during their marriage, she recalled a “passionate” man but not one who had been violent towards her.

She told jurors he had smashed her crockery in the months before the attack, and told police about an incident years earlier in which she said she had punched a wall.

She described a pattern of her apologising in the relationship without ever knowing what she had done wrong.

And she recalled feeling “awful” when she learned her husband had her followed over the affair.

Responding to questions from the defence about an apology letter to her husband, she said it had nothing to do with the affair. She said: “This was something that happened periodically but I always apologised.

“He would say, ‘you don’t show me any affection,’ and I would say, ‘I am no different than how I have been for the past however long’, but then things at home would be fraught and uncomfortable, so I would apologise and say, ‘I am sorry,’ to try and put it right, but I would have no idea what I was trying to put right.”

The court heard she had discussed her unhappiness with her husband but he had threatened to kill himself if she left.

She suggested staying at home and keeping up appearances as a married couple even if things would not be the same. Yet if her husband at first seemed pleased with that, it did not last.

She said: “He was like, ‘I am really pleased that you are going to do that, because I cannot live without you and won’t live without you’.

“And I said, ‘but we have to move on then, but you have to ease off me, you have to give me some time of my own and let me do things by myself and on my own.

“Then that would be ok but then there would [be], ‘I just need to get this straight in my head’, and then of course we would be going back over the same ground again.

“It was practically every day in the couple of weeks leading up to the incident, so it was quite exhausting.”

The possible end of their relationship formed the basis of the defence lawyer’s final, failed effort to convince the jury that O’Riordan did not intend to kill his wife.

“Perhaps you are never so unhappy as when you think you have lost the love of someone,” Peter Doyle QC told them at the end of his summing up.

“Perhaps in these circumstances you are exposed to the broad sweep of human frailty – and that frailty is not found perhaps in the passions we have, but in our inability to control them.”

Then while awaiting trial O’Riordan wrote his wife a letter asking her to send him a suit for court.

He said: “My rosary from the car; I still require its protection; my blue suit, three ties that will go with that. I need all that for my trial.”

Background

  • In February Joseph O’Riordan pleaded guilty to wounding Amanda O’Riordan with intent to cause grievous bodily harm.
  • Prosecutors did not accept that plea and pushed for the attempted murder conviction.
  • Detective Chief Inspector Mike Ashcroft, from Sussex Police, said Mrs O’Riordan’s injuries were so severe, she was not at first expected to survive.
  • He said: “I was getting ready for a murder investigation.
  • “And massive credit to the police officers who first attended the scene and the medical staff who saved her life, because she would not have survived without medical attention.”