Jason O’Driscoll double murder trial hears limits of phone analysis

This report is a localnews.ie summary based on public court reporting and records; sources are listed below.

Jason O’Driscoll has pleaded not guilty to murdering Anthony Burnett and Joseph Redmond in Co Louth on 7 March 2012. His trial was continuing at the Central Criminal Court before Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy. The proceedings were reported on 23 November 2017.

The trial heard that firefighters were called to a burning car in Ravensdale Forest Park shortly before 11pm on the night of the alleged murders. The bodies of Mr Burnett and Mr Redmond were found inside with gunshot wounds to their heads.

Crime analyst Eddie McGoey gave evidence about contacts between eight phone numbers of interest, including phones attributed to the deceased. He also presented CCTV footage and phone credit records. On 23 November, defence counsel Seán Guerin SC provided him with a separate table of mobile phone data during cross-examination.

Mr McGoey agreed that, after lengthy calls between a phone attributed to Mr Burnett and a witness’s phone, the Burnett phone contacted an unknown number with which it had not been in contact during the previous six weeks of available records. He said Gardaí had not furnished him with records for that number, so he had omitted it from his original table. He accepted that potentially significant information was unavailable and that, in theory, the unknown number could have used the same cell sites as the phones attributed to the deceased.

Mr McGoey also agreed that the unknown number did not feature in the records of two numbers referred to as the Mulkerns numbers. Under re-examination by Alexander Owens SC, prosecuting, he agreed that one of those numbers had not been used during the period covered by the defence table. The judge said he felt the case was moving towards a close.