Mark Nash given two life sentences for murders

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

Mark Nash was given two life sentences for murdering Sylvia Sheils and Mary Callinan. Jurors unanimously convicted him on each murder charge.

Sylvia Sheils, 59, and Mary Callinan, 61, were killed in March 1997. Both were psychiatric patients whose sheltered accommodation was near the hospital in Grangegorman.

The jury deliberated for about four-and-a-half hours following 48 days of evidence.

The prosecution relied on traces of both victims’ DNA on Nash’s jacket, a bloodied footprint matching his boots and admissions he subsequently withdrew. The report said advances in DNA testing produced conclusive evidence against him in 2009.

Nash was already serving life sentences for the murders of Carl and Catherine Doyle, whom he stabbed during a visit to their Roscommon home. Catherine Doyle was his then girlfriend’s sister. He also attacked his girlfriend Sarah Jane in 1997. After his arrest for those offences, he admitted the Grangegorman killings before retracting his statements.

Dean Lyons had falsely confessed to the Grangegorman murders, and the charges against him were later dropped. Former assistant garda commissioner Jim McHugh said Lyons had spent nine months wrongly imprisoned and described him as vulnerable and failed by the system. Lyons died in Manchester in 2000.

Sylvia Sheils’s sister Stella Nolan said hearing the details in court had been extremely difficult and that the murders continued to affect her. Her daughter Suzanne Nolan read her statement outside court.

RTÉ updated its report on 21 April 2015.