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Chapter 1: What shocking news did the Collins family receive about Sandra Collins?
So what did you hear about it first? The day he was arrested. That was the first time you heard his name? Yeah. And what did they tell you about him? Just that he was married and... Had three kids. He had three kids and that he had been... I don't know what you call it, a relationship or what you call it.
They'd been seeing each other.
They'd been seeing each other anyway. It wasn't that we lived miles and miles away, like... Or one end of the country from the other. Yeah, I was a bit disappointed in the people that she hung around with, that they couldn't have come to me and said, being the oldest in the family, that they couldn't have come to me.
Around me at my work, there was loads of ways they could have reached out to me and just told me that...
this was happening and what was going on he was arrested in March of 2011 and then he was kept for 24 hours and released and then another man was arrested the next day and then he was released and then that was March and then in December of 2011 he was re-arrested again on foot of new information that had come in between we'll say March and December okay and he was charged with murder on the 28th December yeah
This is Ghost, a Crime World subscriber exclusive series. Episode 7, Trial and Tribulation. It seems a little bizarre that the very first time the Collins family ever heard Martin Early's name was when he was arrested in March 2011. As we've explained before, Fotish is less than a 20-minute drive away from Killala.
As you can tell, Bridie and Patrick were upset that no one had ever told them about Sandra's involvement with Early. Not even their Aunt Anne, who, as we know, rang Early's wife in the weeks before Sandra disappeared to tell her about her husband's infidelity. Colin's family had quite a while to stew over this shocking new information.
Early was arrested twice for questioning and released, before finally being arrested and charged on the 28th of December 2012, more than 20 months since they were first made aware of his connection to Sandra. Poor Bridie was struck down with a cruel flu that Christmas and was only back on her feet when she got a call from the guards on the evening of the 27th.
As it happened, Patrick and their brother Davy had called in to her to see how she was doing.
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Chapter 2: What details emerged about Martin Earley's arrest and background?
Just this waiting was just unbelievable. So when the girls came in then, they were all dressed in uniform, of course. I think she lost her life. She didn't know what was going on, God love her. And we went and sat by the corner at a table and she was going around, she was eavesdropping, God love her, but they didn't mind.
And then they just said that they had got the direction back from the DPP after whatever length of time, a year or whatever it was, 18 months. And we said, all right, and that they'd formally charged her with Sandra's murder. He was remanded in custody. That was on the Friday. And then I think about two weeks later he got bail in the January of 2013. Then we had to wait for over a year then.
Well, I think it was in April of 2013 that they set the date for April of 2014. So he had a year, another wait to go. It was really hard. Because every day I used to say to myself, oh... Anything can happen, anybody, at any given time.
So I used to pray like that we'd all be there and that Daddy would be there and he wouldn't get sick or we wouldn't get killed in a car accident or, you know, not catastrophizing it, but just trying to be a realist, but yet keep this in the back of the mind, you know.
And there was such hope that...
We might get answers.
We'd get answers, and if he was the one that he'd give her back to us, and, you know... Yeah, there was such great hope. It'd be all over, and, you know, she'd be at peace, we'd be at peace.
It'd finally be over.
To a certain extent, you'd almost think he'd be at peace as well. Because God almighty, I don't know how, whoever, unless they're a monster altogether, how they've lived with this.
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Chapter 3: How did the Collins family react to learning about Sandra's secret life?
Everyone was so supportive and so kind to us. But at the end of the day, it was down to the five of us. We were Sandra's family and we were the ones that had to sit through it and prepare ourselves.
mentally, physically, and emotionally, to go through a journey that nobody wants to be on, nobody wants to be there, and to maybe hear things that you didn't know, upsetting things, so it was quite... I don't really think you can ever fully prepare yourself.
It's like asking, you know, when you know somebody belonging to you is going to pass away, and you say, oh, you've got six months, and you think, oh, I've got six months, and sure, I can pack a lot in. You're never really fully ready when the person's time is to come to say goodbye. So I don't think we were ever really fully 100% prepared for it.
Like we'd never sat inside at the front of a courtroom or we'd never been in a court in our lives. But I suppose we had to go home at night time and try and get ourselves ready ourselves mentally in the build up to it. It's like dropping a stone into the middle of a pond and all the ripple effects that come out of it.
All the other people, we've all had to carry on with our lives and the emotional baggage and turmoil we've had to carry. And every time there's something positive, it always keeps encroaching.
back in it's almost like a shadow or I don't know how you describe it it just keeps you try and separate it and keep it out there but it's too hard like it's too difficult especially in this scenario anyway where you don't know where she is and where where she's buried I don't know about people that have
had a burial and obviously murder is murder but I don't know if it's easier is the wrong word but it's certainly it's more difficult because like you just don't have anywhere to go and you keep wondering searching it's harder to switch off I think anyway I don't know it's the lasting impact that the actions of somebody has on you that you weren't even there that night I wasn't even there and yet here it is 25 years later still impacting my life
I try not to think about it too much, but I think about who the Patrick would have been if this had never happened. And I wonder where he'd be and what he'd be doing. And I'm kind of sad for him, if that makes sense. That sounds really weird, but I don't mean that.
I'm not talking about myself now in the third person, but I'm thinking how my life could have been and where I would be or where I could be.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did the Collins family face while preparing for the trial?
That it's finally over. We had to go there for five and a half, six weeks nearly, every day without fail. Getting up, getting into trial mode and trying to be there to represent Sandra and to do her proud and to... You know, because there was no way we weren't going. We wanted to be there.
The whole lot of us wanted to be there for ourselves, but we wanted to be there more so for Sandra and to be Sandra's voice and to let people know that, you know, she mattered and she was loved. And some people might have thought she wasn't, but we had news for them and we had big news for them. She was loved and loved big time and that she really did matter.
So, yeah, quite daunting, like, quite... Intimidating isn't the right word, it's just quite... It's to wrap your head around it and, you know, like I said, all the cameras and being on the television, being on the 9 o'clock news and, you know, like, it was quite overwhelming at times because we were really, like, nobodies, you know, and we are, but...
Nobody's but just like every other family in Ireland. Anonymous, I suppose, is the word. They're just going about our everyday lives and only for this, nobody knows. So it's quite difficult then for your family and your face and everything to be put front and centre into people's television sets and papers and radios and they're talking about your family like and your sister and...
And you know that people are at home talking about it naturally, which we would be doing ourselves if it wasn't us. And that's quite like, oh, OK, nothing we can do about that. It's just quite hard. It was on the radio every day, the local radio station, naturally, and people were commenting on it and, you know, obviously. So that's the nature of human beings.
But it was quite difficult, like it was quite hard to... I suppose unless you're, unfortunately, I hope nobody ever does find themselves in that predicament, it's very difficult to describe to people how you do, how you react, how you feel, unless you're actually there, you know?
where everybody, like everybody else, every other family up and down the country, the length and breadth of this island, and then all of a sudden, we're not anonymous anymore, and we have people in Little or Tesco's or whatever, or any other things, you know, we're thinking of Ian, and the support has been brilliant, and it's great, it's lovely, but all of a sudden, you're not anonymous anymore.
You know, you're Sandra's brother, or you're Sandra's sister, or... And she's not anonymous, whatever about us, like... Everybody knows everything about her and I, like, she's not even here to talk for herself. And she was so private and so quiet and so shy. I often wonder, I often think I'd love to talk to you just for five minutes.
And I'd love to think what you'd think, because she'd be so embarrassed, like, because she was so private and so reserved, you know, that everybody knows her name. And like, she lived in a one-bedroomed house in the middle of nowhere. And like... You know, obviously we worked hard to make sure that everybody did know her name. But like, I often wondered what she'd make of it.
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Chapter 5: What emotional toll did the trial take on Sandra's family?
So Sandra went downtown to the phone box. And she said, oh, the next time you ring me, or I ring you, I'll be lying on my bed. Because if you go out in weather like this, it was teeming rain, and I'll be able to ring you from my own bed, and I'll be warm and dry.
But definitely, I think, hearing, you know, her last movements, and then she went into the village inn, in the pub in Killala, and she was, this is before half six, I think it was about half five, she went down to get cans for Anne. Cans of Guinness, because she'd only drink special type of Guinness, like everything else. She had to... It was all special, wasn't it, about her?
But anyway, they used to have to order them in for her. So Sandra went down to collect them. And they had a little girl who was three. She's 13 now. But Sandra was playing. When the woman came out, they don't want to pop... I don't know how old she was, she was about one, two or three. It was a small child anyway.
But the woman said, or the man said at the trial that when he came out, Sandra was down on her two knees in front of the fireplace playing with, but I pictured her below on her two hunkers and just thinking, oh my God, in a couple hours' time, you were going to be dead. Like, this replaying of her last movements was just so hard and there was just nothing we could do.
In some ways, Bridie and Patrick told us it was like watching a TV series about someone else's life. Except rather than sitting on a sofa in front of a television, they had to endure hours of uncomfortable court benches in a room that got ever more miserably stuffy as the day dragged on. It wasn't always easy to follow. Court cases often don't run in chronological order.
Evidence and witnesses can sometimes come out of the blue without any context. So it's not until later you begin to understand the relevance or significance of what you've just heard. And then there are the practical elements of a court hearing.
Barristers and solicitors who use complicated legalese language, witnesses who often speak so softly they can't be heard beyond the first few benches in the room, proceedings being constantly halted and the jury being asked to leave so the lawyers can argue about the use of upcoming evidence. But the Collins family were determined to last the course, however long it took.
You've been listening to Ghost, The Disappearance of Sandra Collins, a nine-part subscriber-only podcast special from CrimeWorld.com. Written and produced by Jenny Friel. Presented by me, Nicola Tallent. Senior producer and editor, Ian Mullaney.
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