By Ken Foy
Tuesday August 09 2011
Wife killer Brian Kearney has taken a new interest in politics behind bars and has been encouraging other inmates to vote in the upcoming presidential election.
Jail sources have revealed that Kearney has been going from cell door-to-cell door with forms which prisoners can fill-out to apply to vote in the big election in late October.
"Kearney is all into it -- he is trying to get all the other prisoners on his landing to vote in the election -- he has been very active," explained a source.
MODEL
Kearney (54) is serving a life sentence for the murder of his wife Siobhan at their plush home in Goatstown, south Dublin, in February, 2006. She was strangled to death.
He has been banged up in Wheatfield Prison since being convicted in March, 2008, after a dramatic murder trial.
Sources say that he has been using his time on the inside very productively and is described as "a model prisoner."
"He has kept himself very busy by doing lots of courses including Leaving Cert standard Maths and English, a course in study skills and a Red Cross course," the source pointed out.
Kearney has also started to learn Spanish which may come in handy if he is ever released because he owns the boutique Hotel Salvia in Mallorca.
Kearney put the hotel up for sale a year after being sent to jail and just after he failed in his bid to get his murder conviction quashed at the Court of Criminal Appeal.
He opened the luxury hotel in the upmarket resort of Soller in north-west Majorca with wife Siobhan in 2003, three years before he strangled her to death and then tried to make it look like suicide.
He handed the running of the hotel over to his daughter Aoife after he was jailed for life for her murder.
The hotel is now run by Kearney's brother, Patrick.
In 2009, he first put the upmarket hotel up for €3.4m.
But the asking price was slashed to €2.75m in just five months as Spanish property prices crashed with the recession.
It was taken off the market earlier this summer.
Kearney from Knocknashee, Goatstown, Co Dublin,was found guilty of strangling his wife with a vacuum cleaner flex in March 2008.
A jury took just over five hours to reject his claim that she committed suicide and found that he murdered her on February 28, 2006 -- his 49th birthday -- as she lay in bed in her pyjamas.
After killing her, Kearney tried to hoist her over a door in her bedroom in an attempt to make it look like she had killed herself.
During the 13-day trial, the court heard Siobhan, mother to the couple's then three-year-old son Daniel, was filing for a divorce and had sought legal advice.
FAMILY
The jury was also told that Kearney would have been hit badly by a separation after remortgaging the family home to build a new home next door and pay for the Majorca hotel and leaving himself asset rich but cash poor.
Kearney and his wife bought Hotel Salvia in December 2002 and opened for business in March the following year after he carried out refurbishments.
See Page 10
- Ken Foy
No comments:
Post a Comment