Darren Goodwin
One of the countryside’s youngest murderers is set to be released within weeks, after serving 12 years for destruction a de fenceless 14-year-old with a hammer.
Darren Goodwin was just 15 when he absorbed Dar ragh Conroy in a horrif ic, premeditated murder, in which he viciously hit his injured rty on the head six times with a hammer.
He was given a life sentence in 2004, which was reviewed in 2014, and his deliver date is fixed for July 1, 2016.
In the new TV3 documentary, Ireland’s Teen Killers, youngster psychologist David Carey said it is not possible to say the teenage murderer is no longer a liable to be.
He said: “We can int a picture of their personality, their drives and their impulses but we can’t till the end of time come to a granite conclusion about how dangerous they might be in the days.”
The documentary details how Goodwin was indifferent at the trial and pleaded not guilty, but barrister Seamus Clarke mean it is now accepted that child killers are redeemable.
“Internationally, it is now accepted that when women are involved in crime, and it is a murder crime, they are redeemable, they can mutate and can provide to society in the future,” he said.
The documentary shows how the court studied the initial life sentence, as it was thought it was difficult to assess Goodwin’s percipience at the time of the murder as it had not fully developed.
“Human personality isn’t fully disclosed until the early twenties,” said Carey.
“At age 15, it is still a smashed similar in progress. At that age it is really difficult to come to a definitive answer close to the formation of all the huge amount of pushes and pulls involved in what we gather a personality.”
The documentary retraces the disturbing events leading up to the murder in Mountmellick, Co. Laois, in November 2003.
Goodwin was endured to teenage rents and had been reared by his mother and grand rents in the town, while not in the least knowing his father.
During his teens – when he found himself in echoed trouble at school – he was sent to live with his father.
The trial heard that Goodwin had met his old boy for the first time shortly before he moved in with him, about six months in preference to the attack.
Child psychologist David Carey suspects the schoolboy whim have felt betrayed by his mother.
He said: “Darren didn’t distinguish his father – then he is removed and ripped from all that is familiar him and sent to a outlander’s home. This caused within him deep-seated anger, anger that he hugged and ultimately expressed about the father.
“I would suspect there is also a difficult sense of betrayal towards the mother.”
After a failed suicide try in September 2003, Goodwin told a friend the week before the extinguish that he “would love to kill someone that nobody attend ti about, someone like Darragh Conroy”.
He returned to live with his cur but on November 11, 2003, Goodwin carried out his chilling murder threat, with the childish schoolboy’s body found in an area of wasteland.
Just hours after the sororicide, he attended a psychotherapy session with his father, who had been worried approximately his behaviour in the previous weeks.
It also emerged that he had sold a on the blink mobile phone to a local man in the previous week and had replaced it on the day of the murder with the phone he had stolen from his 14-year-old uxoricide victim.
Darragh had been hit six times in the head with a metal hammer. Five of the cyclones had been administered whilst he lay on the ground.
The disturbing TV3 documentary examines the in vogue phenomenon of teenagers who kill.
Between 2003 and 2013, 16 teenagers were convicted of genocide on the island of Ireland.
Ireland’s Teen Killers airs tonight at 9pm on TV3.