Dumb Riffs

Crowds at the Green Street Courthouse; the grey car to the right of the picture belongs to the accused. (Source: Irish Independent, 4/2/1926)

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Lily O’Neill left home just after sunset on a warm summer evening in 1925. By the time the sun rose the next morning she lay dead, her corpse abandoned on a lonely mountain road, a bullet hole through her right breast.

Her body was found at around 7am the following day, Tuesday June 9^th. The young woman was fully clothed, dressed in a grey dress and a black hat. There was an old scar on the left of her face; by her side, a partially smoked cigarette. Her left foot was bare, the shoe missing – it lay some distance from the body, as if it had been thrown.

The investigation into her death was followed closely by the newspapers of the time, who sought to communicate in sensational detail the excitement their readers craved. Eventually, when the case went to trial, the courts were filled by fascinated onlookers who had queued for hours, waiting for the doors to the courtroom to be opened.

A journalist covering the story described the scene of the crime, at the crossroads in Ticknock near Lamb Doyle’s pub: ‘the place […] is sparsely populated and in a lonely spot. Nearby is a disused quarry, and stretching towards the mountain is a large gorse-covered tract. Within a few yards is a thick fence of briars, towards which the feet pointed, the head resting on the grass-margined roadway.’

In addition, the same journalist noted that the bullet had made a hole ‘almost the size of an egg’ in the road surface ‘after ripping through the body.’

Over the next few days, details about the crime began to emerge, and interest grew in the chain of events that led to murder. From early on in the investigation, it became clear that O’Neill had worked as a prostitute, and that on the night she died, she had been seen on the north side of St Stephen’s Green, opposite the Shelbourne Hotel. And one other detail: she was known to all as ‘Honor Bright.’

Reports initially referred to the murdered girl as ‘Lil’, ‘Lilly’, or even ‘Lizzie’. Eventually most papers simply stuck with her pseudonym, which had the effect of making her seem fictional, of keeping the realities of the incident at arm’s length. People responded to the murder, and ensuing trial, as if she was a character in a novel who had met an unfortunate end. Plot and suspense were everything, and the Honor Bright murder trial delivered both unrelentingly.

Witness depositions made during an afternoon’s court session were swiftly written up for that evening’s newspapers.

On 4^th July, two men were arrested, charged with Lily O’Neill’s murder: a medical doctor, Patrick Purcell, from Blessington, and Leopold J. Dillon, an ex-superintendent of the Civic Guards, from Dunlavin, Co. Wicklow. They had driven to Dublin in a grey two-seater car on the night of Monday 8 June, returning to Blessington in the early hours of the next morning. Both of the accused claimed innocence.

Lily lived in a tenement house at 48 Newmarket Square in the Liberties, and, on the night of her murder, had made her way from her home to Stephen’s Green, clearly used at the time by prostitutes as a ‘promenading ground’ where they could meet potential customers.

At around 2.30am, a cab driver had seen the girl he knew as Honor Bright called over by two men who fitted Purcell and Dillon’s description. Their grey car had pulled up between Kildare Street and the entrance to the Shelbourne.

Dr Purcell reportedly said to another cab driver, James McCabe, that money had been stolen from him by a girl earlier in the night, and that ‘only I had my £1 note in my pocket with my gun it would have been gone also.’

Purcell told McCabe that the girl responsible for the crime had bobbed hair and wore grey clothes. Then, Purcell was reported as saying that ‘if he got her he would put a gun through her mouth and bring her to the country, where no one would find her, and, if he did not get her, some other girl would fall a victim.’

Purcell had apparently also shown the gun to Madge Hopkins, a friend of the deceased who also lived in the Newmarket tenement. Later Dr Purcell would claim that the only thing in his pocket was the stethoscope that he always carried.

Lily O’Neill went from the Green in a cab, and was dropped by the driver at Leonard’s Corner – the junction of South Circular Road and Clanbrassil Street – less than five minutes walk from her home. As the cab driver headed back towards the Green, a grey car similar to Purcell and Dillon’s raced past him, towards where he had just left the girl.

The grey car was then spotted by a guard between 3am and 4am in Harold’s Cross. Two men and a woman, who had been talking at the side of the road, jumped into the car and sped off in the direction of Terenure. Soon after, Lily was dead.

When the case came to its final day of trial, on February 3^rd 1926, interest was at fever pitch. Newspapers noted that ‘an unusual amount of public interest was centred in the proceedings.’

Crowds thronged outside the Green Street courthouse where the Central Criminal Court was sitting, seeking admission to hear the shocking evidence. Witnesses, and even some court officials, were delayed in getting past these crowds. The courtroom itself was full, and the attendance included ‘several well-dressed women’.

The counsel for the defence characterised the two men as having fallen victim ‘to the lure of wine and women’, but stressed that this did not make them ‘moral degenerates’ and asked that they should not be treated as ‘human vampires’.

Instead, he suggested that Lily ‘must have fallen into the hands of the police’, and that she was murdered ‘by some of those sinister societies that had arrogated to themselves the power of life and death’. This suggestion was subsequently rubbished by the prosecution.

Soon, though, the crowds outside got the sensation they had been seeking: just after 9pm, after it had deliberated for three minutes, the jury found the defendants not guilty. And with that, Purcell and Dillon walked free, Honor Bright passed into myth, and Lily O’Neill was forgotten.