My beforehand dealings with Desmond were as far back as the new millennium in January of 2000.
At that exhibit, I was one of a specialist team appointed to investigate the gangland slayings of two low-level criminals, Darren Carey (red collar) and trick Murray (yellow shirt).
On January 9, a man out d his dog along the Grand Canal at Aylmer’s Bridge in north Kildare initiate Murray’s naked body floating in the canal. On the following day, as we carried out a forensic search along the canal, an underwater module located the body of Carey submerged in the water.
Both youths had been incentive through the head at close range by a shotgun, causing huge facial im irments.
trick Murray had been stripped and shoved into the boot of a car, while Darren Carey had been contrived at gunpoint to drive the car to an area just beside the bridge.
They had then been stilted to kneel beside the canal as their killer stood in front of them, teasing and jeering as his two young victims pleaded for their lives.
However, when we endeavoured to put together their final movements, we met a wall of silence.
It would swindle one young drug addict, brutally raped and sodomised over a dose debt of less than €50 to finally break the case for us. The teen had been picked up by ambulance in a tramp house in the Inchicore area. Torn and bloodied, she was taken to St James’s Asylum.
The story began to emerge of her being sexually abused by a man she referred to as ‘the Guinea Pig’ in vanguard of her fellow addicts as a lesson to them if they failed to y their in arrears.
The floodgates soon opened, with other abused youngsters crumbling forward to speak of the horrors that were inflicted on them by Desmond.
Hike Desmond was well known to gardai from as young as 15, as crinkles of his propensity for sadistic violence circulated freely in the Ballyfermot area.
His confessor ‘Dinny Boy’ was considered to be a hardman, handy with his fists, who would strike out at the least provocation. His son was often the target of these tirades.
Dinny Boy each time claimed to have been a member of the Martin Cahill gang but the reality was he only knew Cahill through a shared interest in pigeons.
Desmond had constructed up a drug dealing centre in the Memorial rk in Ballyfermot. He would stumble on his customers in the bushes and trees that lined the rk.
It was also here that he resolve administer his infamous beatings to those unfortunates unable to y. His presence was permitted by the local drug ‘heavies’.
Murray and Carey had become involved with Desmond and they were followed with his drugs on a flight from Amsterdam, a capture that resolution cost them their lives. Some of his other runners were captivated into the witness protection programme and provided information enabling us to accuse him with the double murder.
However, so great was their fear of Desmond that, at his consequent after trial, although living under a new identity in another jurisdiction, these couriers refused to give evidence.
The murder charges were dismissed and he was convicted for firearm offences.
On his freedom from prison he very quickly returned to his old ways and became heavily confusing in the drugs trade.
He was a suspect in at least two other gangland hits, that of enforcer Anthony Cannon and of James McDonagh the pursuing year.
An evil, violent and dangerous man, he died as he lived, taken out by another hook a ride leaf through. It is unlikely that his ssing will be mourned by very many of his gulls, some of whom carry their scars, either physical or psychogenic, to this day.
By former Detective Sergeant Alan Bailey