The Court of Appeal has dismissed Regina Keogh’s appeal against her conviction for the murder of Gareth Hutch, upholding the Special Criminal Court’s 2018 decision.
Keogh was convicted on 2 November 2018 of murdering Hutch at Avondale House, North Cumberland Street, Dublin, on 24 May 2016. She was tried alongside her brother, Jonathan Keogh, and Thomas Fox, who were also convicted. The appeal judgment, delivered by Mr Justice McCarthy on 15 July 2021, rejected all grounds of appeal.
The prosecution case against Regina Keogh relied primarily on evidence from Mary McDonnell, who had received immunity from prosecution and financial assistance from gardaí. The trial court treated McDonnell as an accomplice and considered it dangerous to convict on her evidence without corroboration. It nevertheless found her account true on the crucial points and identified evidence it considered corroborative.
The appeal focused particularly on surgical gloves found in McDonnell’s flat after the murder. The trial court accepted McDonnell’s account that Keogh brought gloves to her flat the night before the shooting for her brother to use. DNA matching Jonathan Keogh was found on gloves later recovered from a housecoat pocket in McDonnell’s bedroom. The Court of Appeal held that the gloves’ location, the DNA result, CCTV footage of Keogh visiting McDonnell’s flat and other evidence made the finding of corroboration open to the trial court.
The appeal court addressed an apparent error in the trial judgment, which referred to Jonathan Keogh’s DNA being on the inside of the gloves despite forensic evidence described elsewhere in the judgment sampling their outside. It said the trial court had correctly stated the evidence when dealing with Regina Keogh and that the misstatement in the section about her brother did not affect the conclusion in her case.
The court also upheld the use of telephone records as corroboration. The records showed repeated contact between Keogh and burner phones attributed to her brother and another person before and after the murder. It said the suggested innocent explanations for those contacts were speculative and did not undermine the trial court’s findings.
Finally, the appeal court accepted that evidence of substantial funds being sent to Belfast for Jonathan Keogh after the murder corroborated McDonnell’s account of a proposed payment for access to her flat. It rejected the argument that the evidence could indicate only assistance to an offender after the crime.
The Court of Appeal concluded that the trial court’s assessment of the evidence and its reasons disclosed no basis for intervention. The appeal against conviction was dismissed.