LAST UPDATE | 18 Oct 2023

A LAWYER FOR Jozef Puska, who is on trial accused of murdering 23-year-old schoolteacher Ashling Murphy, has suggested that the accused was trying to assist Ms Murphy and stop her bleeding when a jogger arrived at the scene.

The trial heard today from a series of witnesses who were walking, jogging, cycling or working along the canal in Tullamore on 12 January last year on the afternoon when Ms Murphy was found dead in undergrowth beside the Grand Canal walkway.

Defence counsel Michael Bowman SC put it to witness Jenna Stack that when she came across Puska and Ms Murphy in the undergrowth, the accused was “trying to assist” Ms Murphy. Stack disagreed, saying that the man could have asked for help.

She said he was aggressive, that he gritted his teeth and shouted at her to “get away”. She also said she saw Ms Murphy kicking her legs in a scissor motion while the man was “holding her down”. Her impression was that Ms Murphy was “completely distressed”.

Jozef Puska (33), with an address at Lynally Grove, Mucklagh, Co Offaly, has pleaded not guilty to murdering Ms Murphy at Cappincur, Tullamore, Co Offaly on 12 January 2022.

Stack told prosecution counsel Anne-Marie Lawlor SC that she is a primary school teacher and lives about 7km from Tullamore.

On that day she arranged to meet her friend Aoife Marron at 3.10pm after school at the Daingean Road car park. They went for a run along the canal but as they approached Digby Bridge Stack noticed a luminous green bicycle pushed into the hedgerow.

It looked like a nice bike and it seemed strange to Stack. She thought someone might have fallen off the bike or that it had been stolen. They continued their run but after “a couple of feet” they heard a “rustling in the hedgerow”.

She said: “It was like someone was struggling, to be honest. I thought maybe someone fell off the bike and maybe they were in trouble.” Stack looked towards the steep slope covered in briars at the side of the path and stood out on the grass verge for a closer look. She shouted, “are you okay?”.

She said: “At that point then, this man, he turned. He was crouched over … he was crouching over something, like he was kneeling down.”

When he turned Stack said she could “see his face clearly”.

She added: “I couldn’t see his hands because he was holding a person down. I thought it was a girl because of what she was wearing.”

Stack asked the man what he was doing and he shouted “get away”. His teeth were “gritted”, the witness said, and he had “this angry kind of facial expression. It was terrifying, to be honest”.

She noted the man’s foreign accent, receding hair, shaved head, sallow skin and distinctive, dark eyebrows. He was wearing a zipped up jacket with an emblem on the chest.

She recalled seeing the girl kicking with her legs and added: “She was lying on the ground and the only part of her body I thought she was able to move was her legs and she was kicking, like, so hard.”

She said: “I knew she was strong, she was moving whatever part of her body she could to get help.”

She said the woman looked like a person in the gym doing a scissor kick while lying down.

She said: “she was raising them [her legs] really high, really using her core to lift her legs.”

Stack said she did not hear the woman make any sound and estimated that she was about four feet away from the man when she saw him. She said the entire incident lasted about 30 seconds.

Stack said she “knew something bad was happening” and thought the man might be trying to rape the woman or that he intended to harm her.

She told the man that she had a phone and was calling the gardaí. Stack did not have a phone but hoped that if he thought she did he might “leave her alone”.

When the man “lunged, as if he was going to frighten us” Stack and Marron ran away in the direction of nearby Digby Bridge.

“We were running fast,” she said. “My heart was absolutely pounding.”

They ran about 500 metres to the bridge where they met two men, one of whom had a phone. She told him to call the guards, that there’s “a girl in the hedge and a man has her pinned to the ground”.

She also spoke to a man named Enda Molloy who was cycling his bike. Molloy immediately cycled to the area where Marron and Stack pointed him to.

Marron ran to a nearby garage while Stack went to the nearby home of a person she knew. Gardaí arrived a short time later.

Cross-examination

Under cross-examination, Stack agreed with defence counsel Michael Bowman SC that the event was “deeply distressing”. She said she did not see the man’s hands at any point and did not see a weapon.

Bowman said it is accepted that it was Puska that Stack saw in the hedge.

Counsel suggested that what actually happened was that Stack came across Puska “trying to apprehend what had happened and trying to assist Ms Murphy”.

Stack replied: “No, he could have asked us for help.”

Bowman suggested that when the witness heard Puska shout, he wasn’t trying to be aggressive but had cut his leg on a briar and called out in pain. Stack said that “wouldn’t be the impression I got”.

Bowman said Puska’s recollection is that Ms Murphy was moving but not kicking in the manner described by Stack.

“One hundred per cent that’s what I saw,” the witness said.

Bowman said: “I’m instructed that Ms Murphy had reached out and was holding or had both hands on Puska’s forearms because he was trying to stop the bleeding in her neck. You didn’t see that?”

“No,” the witness replied.

Stack said she could tell that Ms Murphy was moving her legs, the only part of her body that she could move, while Puska was “leaning over her holding her down”.

The witness accepted that she could not see Puska’s hands but, she said, “I saw enough to know she was kicking her legs and completely distressed”.

She said that was the impression she left with when she ran away, adding: “I was terrified.”

Stack agreed that she took part in an identification parade at Tullamore Garda Station on 13 January, the day after Ms Murphy’s body was found.

She said she looked at 10 men who were “broadly similar” but she picked one out as being the man she had seen in the hedge by the canal the previous day.

She agreed that, at the time, she said she could “clearly picture his eyes and head” and that she was “100% sure the person I picked in the identification parade was the person I saw leaning over the girl at the canal”.

She accepted during today’s testimony that the person she picked out was not Puska but, she said, he was “very similar”.

Aoife Marron told Lawlor that when they approached the undergrowth she heard a noise but saw only the top of a man’s head.

When she heard Stack say she was calling the guards, Marron said she became afraid and began to run. As they ran away, she said Stack told her she had seen a “girl in there and she thought she might have been raped or about to be raped”.

Marron said. “I was terrified because I thought he was coming after me and I looked behind to see if he was coming.”

She remembered running to Digby Bridge and screaming for help from two men wearing high visibility jackets. Enda Molloy then arrived on a bicycle and she told him what had happened.

Enda Molloy told Lawlor that he noticed Marron and another woman having an “agitated exchange” with two men at Digby Bridge so he cycled to them to find out what was happening.

The women were “distressed”, he said, and told him something about a man attacking a woman. He immediately cycled to the location they pointed towards and found the body of a woman with hair completely covering her face. He called out to her but there was no response so he called the guards and waited for them to arrive.

Charlie Kelly was one of the men wearing a high visibility vest. He remembered two “very distressed looking, agitated women” who came to the bridge and said a woman was being attacked by a man and that he was on top of her in a ditch.

Kelly ran towards the scene and arrived shortly after Molloy.

He said he saw a woman’s body. She was wearing a GAA tracksuit, facing upwards with her hair covering her face and one leg suspended against a tree stump.

“I knew she was dead. There was very little colour in her hands,” he said.

He noticed a cap a few feet away to the woman’s left side and a bicycle a few feet further along in the ditch.

At the beginning of today’s hearing Bowman made a series of admissions on behalf of his client. He said that it is admitted that Ms Murphy’s body was identified by her brother at Tullamore Hospital and there is no issue with the removal of Ms Murphy’s body from the canal to Tullamore Hospital where she remained until she was identified.

The defence also accepted that the cause of Ms Murphy’s death was stab wounds to the neck with no contributory factors.

The trial is continuing before Mr Justice Tony Hunt and a jury of three women and nine men.

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