Mark Nash pleads not guilty to double murder

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

Mark Nash has pleaded not guilty at the Central Criminal Court to the murders of Sylvia Shields and Mary Callanan. The charges concern the killings of Shields, 60, and Callanan, 61, between 6 and 7 March 1997. The proceedings were reported on 15 April 2015. Nash’s defence was summing up its case to the jury that day.

The defence argued that the jury could not ignore another man who had admitted the murders but later retracted those admissions. Defence counsel Hugh Hartnett said the DPP had charged Dean Lyons, who had previously admitted the murders, and had considered there was a significant case against him. Hartnett said the prosecution had ignored the matter because it did not fit its case.

Prosecution counsel Brendan Grehan told the jury that the case rested on three elements: Nash’s admissions, DNA found on his jacket linking him to the women, and a boot-mark at the scene matching his Caterpillar boots.

Nash had last addresses at Prussia Street and Clonliffe Road in Dublin. The trial heard that the women were living in sheltered accommodation in a house attached to St Brendan’s Psychiatric Hospital in Grangegorman.