Groomed: The Murder of Katie Simpson

Nicola Tallant, top Irish crime journalist and author of Groomed: Coercion, Control and a Cold-blooded Murder, joins me to discuss the horrific murder of Katie Simpson, a 21-year-old showjumper in Northern Ireland who fell into the clutches of Jonathan Cresswell, a horse trainer (pictured) who was also her brother-in-law. This is the government review she mentions in the episode: https://www.justice-ni.gov.uk/publications/katie-simpson-review 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome back. This is episode 16 of the Total Crime Podcast. And I have a very special guest today. It's um all the way from Ireland, uh, Nicola Tallant, who is um probably the best uh crime reporter in Ireland, I think most people would agree. Um, from the Sunday World newspaper and website and podcasts. How are you doing, Nicola?

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Thank you very much. I'm doing well. So, yes, podcasting away on Crimeworld, and uh we've actually launched our new website, Crimeworld.com, which has taken over from sundayworld.com. It's funny, it just shows you the interest that there is out there for crime.

SPEAKER_01 0:40

Right. Yeah, so yeah, I mean I've always thought it quite uh always noticed that the Irish media and also the Scottish media seem to cover a crime a lot more than your sort of London-based media, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 0:54

That's a that's definitely the case. I don't know whether it's a smaller kind of place and you can kind of get more intimate with what's going on and who these people are, but of course, we have also um you know got our premiership team, the Kinnihans, to keep us all interested, you know, top of their game out there.

SPEAKER_01 1:13

Yeah, I did a um I did a substack and uh I think on a podcast the other day as well where I I hope you don't mind, I used a little clip of your um your interview with Jerry Hutch where it's it was such a such a great scoop and amazing to get him to sort of be so um open about what wide um what had happened.

SPEAKER_00 1:35

Um certainly the details of the um you know the attempted assassination and him and all the rest of that I just found fascinating. You rarely get firsthand account of that. He's actually Jerry Hutch has just made a second bid to become a politician, a TD as we call them. And he came fourth in his constituency, didn't quite get in, but is polling really well, 11% of the vote he got. So uh we have to try and work out what's happening. That uh Jerry Hutch is more popular than the the regular sort of Fina Fall and Fina Gael parties. Yeah, so he was an independent, was he? Yes, he was, yeah. Yeah, and he did his own campaign mainly on social media. He didn't really do much media this time. The last time round, the reason I interviewed him that time in the podcast was he was going for general election as well.

SPEAKER_01 2:24

Yeah. Um, okay, but we're we are talking about a very different subject today. So far away from sort of inner city Dublin or you know the the loyalist paramilitaries or the Republicans of of Northern Ireland, but we're in the north of Ireland um talking about the Katie Simpson case, which I must say I didn't know much about, and I've sort of tried to educate myself in the last few days. But you you've become a bit of an expert. Do you you wrote a book on it?

SPEAKER_00 2:54

I wrote a book on it called Groomed, and I have a nine-part podcast of the same name um available wherever you get your podcast, which tells the story uh through a sort of a couple of the key characters really who changed the um who changed where it was going because ultimately Katie Simpson was buried in her grave and her killer was had got away with the murder, had it not been for a handful of people who were insistent that uh the narrative around the fact that she'd committed suicide was not right.

SPEAKER_01 3:33

What did you you got to know that sort of horsey world, the equestrian world, show jumping?

SPEAKER_00 3:38

Certainly a bit, it wasn't a world I was aware of. I always thought it was a very privileged place for people to be in and around. Um, I did know it was a two-tiered society, it had like the stable hands who were kind of the workers, and then you had the rich people, I suppose, who could afford to show jump and pay for their kids' lessons and stuff. But it is, yeah, it can be, if non-regulated, as many of the stables and um schoolings are in presumably in the UK as well. You've the British Horse Racing Board, we have Horse Racing Ireland, which actually is the regulatory body for everybody within the industry, but you don't actually have to be in it, nor do you have to, if you're not in it, you don't have to adhere to their safeguarding. So a lot of the places that I was investigating as part of the story of Katie Simpson weren't affiliated to any of these things, they were independently operated and a bit rough and tumble, a little bit like that world seems to be early mornings, late nights, a lot of hard work. You have people there who absolutely love the animals, who it is their life and their lifestyle. And I think I found that in particular, it's typically one of these um sports that really draws young girls who just want a pony. They just want to be on a pony. And you know, you can see in an unregulated environment how there's lots of opportunities for people um, you know, who would be acting inappropriately or who may be paedophiles. There's a lot of barns, there's a lot of private spaces within it that could be certainly used for somebody with um those kind of um, you know, who who wanted to abuse somebody. So Katie Simpson is a young show jumper, she's 21 years of age. When she dies, she's from a small village in a border town in County Armagh, which there's little in except a church, a graveyard, a pharmacy, and there was a stables which was called Dartonry Stables. She grew up there, like all the kids in the area. She sort of tumbled into those stables as a small child, as did both her sisters. And they'd helped muck out in the hopes that they could ride a pony or you know, get a go or whatever. And that was their lives. That's how they simple sort of a life, I suppose, but um definitely they were very much drawn to the horses. When she was about 10, her older sister Christina began a relationship with a young jockey who came to train there, a guy called Jonathan Creswell, and um a report just recently published in relation to the whole Katie Simpson life and death has indicated that the grooming of Katie by Jonathan Creswell began when she was only 10. So that's where it all started. So her sister was 15. So Creswell comes in at about 18 to work in the stables. He's recommended there by a friend of his, Jill Robinson. He is, you know, many would have said he was a kind of a handsome guy, he was good on the horses. They'd ride up through the village in the morning, and they were kind of like the rock stars, the jockeys. Um, he was in a relationship with a girl called Abby Lyle, who was uh a little bit older than him, also a show jumper. Um, they weren't together that long, but it was eight months, and the relationship, which started in her mind to be very romantic and all the rest of it, had quickly turned violent, and he had beaten her up a number of times. She had eventually escaped him, I suppose, a coercively controlling relationship, gone to the police, and he was brought to court on charges. All of this not long after he'd arrived in this little village. Um, but Creswell said Abby Lyle was mad, that she was very jealous of him, that she believed he was away with other girls, that she had injured herself, that she was attention seeking. And he was backed up in that narrative by a number of sort of female associates, friends. By the time the case came to court, he took a plea deal, pleaded guilty to say, a sample of five charges, but the worst of them, the kidnapping, because he had basically driven her across the border one night, brought her into a forest, and you know, she thought she was going to die. But the kidnap was dropped in in because he took the guilty pleas. So he did get a short jail term, three months. All the while he changed the story a little bit to say, yeah, Abby's still mad, she's crazy, but uh I just said I was guilty because I didn't want to have to put her through anymore. She obviously has problems. I just sucked it up. I'll do three months in jail, you know, and she doesn't have to give evidence, and this thing can all be parked. So he kind of returned back to that little village to a party and to support from people within the industry.

SPEAKER_01 8:54

So he somehow made turned that around and made himself out to be some sort of hero or some sort of some sort of you know, yeah. An honorable gentleman who's gonna sort of take the bullet for some troubled woman, you know.

SPEAKER_00 9:08

That's exactly. He did that, and he did that uh with with sort of, I suppose, the friendship of a number of women, and also Christina Simpson, who is Katie's older sister, 15, 16 at the time. She had started a relationship with him and was visiting him in prison and was there waiting for him when he came back. So, you know, and and his best friend was a female. This sort of seeps through the story. Jonathan Creswell was always surrounded by women. Um, and from that point on, his partner, Christina, they would go on to have two children together. So while he was grooming other younger women, he had her there at his side as cover, you know. I think people, parents, and stuff would have been more wary had he been just a man on his own. But he came, you almost feel as if it's the backing of um you know, females. Um, so he It reminds me of uh Fred and Rose West.

SPEAKER_01 10:08

I've still got that in the brain because I I was sort of talking about it a lot recently, but uh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:13

Very much so, so similar, similar kind of a thing. J just to clarify, for some listeners might be thinking jockey, uh therefore very small stature, but we're talking sort of show jumping, so that either sort of No, no, he was small, all right, and he had to he actually was he actually found it difficult to keep his weight down, which is why he kind of sort of aspires to become a trainer and an owner of you know horses. He he wants to, you know, he wants to come up, he wants to have his own yard, he wants to be buying and selling horses himself, training them, etc. So that's his aspiration. But nonetheless, he works as a jockey for a period of time, and they all do. You know, Katie Simpson, her sister Christina, they're they're quite good, and they're traveling around the country, they're often staying over at these shows, um, and all of these places offer him opportunities. Um, so he he leaves eventually Darton Ree and he starts to work in other yards in different counties. There's a complaint made about him at one point in Antrim by a Scottish girl who he was very inappropriate to, who he scared, and who he boasted about what he did to his previous girlfriend. She knew none of the details of this. Um, and she actually made a complaint. She went back to Scotland and made a complaint there to the police who contacted the PSNI, who did little by way of trying to find him to question him, because he was in and out of the north. He was sort of based in Donegal, which is just over the border. County Donegal is up in the northwest, and he was living there and he was over and back all the time. So there's failures the whole way in this story by the police and protective services. Um, he ultimately ends up in a house in County Derry, and he's living in that house with Christina, his partner. They're two young children, with Katie, her sister, and with another young woman called Rose de Montmorency, right?

SPEAKER_01 12:20

Yeah, right. So that name jumped out of me.

SPEAKER_00 12:25

Yes, yeah. Um, so they're all living together, they're working very hard, they're in and out. His mother's minding the children during the day, they're all show jumping. Um Katie has at this point hit 21. She's, we will subsequently learn, pretty much worked for Jonathan Creswell for free most of her life at that point from 16 upwards. She was, would have been earning money, would have handed it over to him. And we subsequently learn as well that he's abusing her all this time and others. But she uh had anyone who knew her said she was full of spirit, and she had actually caught the eye of this boy, her own age, and she liked him, and they had sort of tentatively started this little romance together. Um, they had spent one night together in uh her mother's house, unknown to her mother, because he sneaked in a window. Oh, very innocent, really. But um, he was unfortunately seen on the way back to his home. And word got back to Jonathan Creswell that this young man more than likely spent the night with Katie Simpson, which seemed to send him into a spiral of temper and anger. Um the following day, he makes a panicked phone call 999. He says he's been at home, that everyone's gone out to work, he's dropped the children to his mother's as usual, and he's returned to the house to find his partner's sister, Katie, hanging from the stairwell. And he tells the ambulance services or the 999 that he's cut her down, he's put her in the car, and he's going to drive to the hospital, which is only 10 minutes away. Um, the ambulance service contact him, they say they'll meet him on the road, they tell him to pull in and they advise him how to do CPR. So when they do meet him, he is um he's there with Katie on the side of the road. She's rushed to hospital. She's stabilised briefly, but they don't know how long she hasn't had oxygen. And for seven or eight days, she survives on a life support system before she ultimately dies from a heart attack, 21 years of age. And at her bedside during that time is her mother, her sister, and Jonathan Creswell, whose behavior is a bit strange. The hospital, some of the staff at the hospital are they don't know why he's behaving the way he is. They've noticed injuries on Katie's body that he has claimed happened when she fell from a horse, but they don't seem to add up. Um a few of the staff members try to go to the police and say they think there's more to this. The police have made a decision that they believe Jonathan Creswell's story that she's committed suicide.

SPEAKER_01 15:14

I think wasn't one of the injuries um vaginal bleeding, which which he suggested it was from the horse riding injury.

SPEAKER_00 15:23

He wasn't even asked per purpose particularly about that, but there was bruises around uh her body, and he has said that's from the horse. They because I think she lived for eight days, they didn't do probably what should have been done, as we know now. All of that should have been investigated, and should have been everybody should have been quizzed about it. Photographs should have been taken of her injuries because over the eight days they healed a bit. Right, yeah, you know, while she was uh so so when she died, she was eight, nine days in the condition that he had ultimately left her in, if you know what I mean.

SPEAKER_01 16:00

Um the fact that he stayed by her bedside, is that her him checking to make sure she doesn't wake up and say anything?

SPEAKER_00 16:07

Or yeah, well, in hindsight, knowing what we know now, he was obviously there to keep an eye that that nobody was raising an alarm, that there was always an answer if questions were being asked. He would sort of speak to the nurses and ask them why they were taking notes, and you know, um he was making out as though he was devastated by this, and that Katie was, you know, his little almost like his little sister as well. Um during her funeral, he actually is behaves like a chief mourner and he lowers her coffin into the grave in that little village I explained to you where she grew up. So he he goes back to work and everybody kind of goes back to their lives. There's a few people that are going. I don't, this doesn't add up. One of them is a journalist, a local journalist, who heard the evidence originally in his bail hearing when he was charged with assaulting his ex-girlfriend and remembered a lot of it, felt similar, the choking that he had he had tried to hang this ex-girlfriend in a tree. He had driven her across the border. There was a lot of things that found felt familiar with the sort of the timeline of what uh had occurred with Katie the night before she she was brought to hospital. Um a relative of his, actually in Derry, who didn't like him, never trusted him, he was also kind of going to the police, and a nurse from the hospital had returned to the police a number of times. But ultimately, um a second investigation team were put on it, and within days, this was months later, but within days they recognized this was a murder, this was a homicide, and the chief suspect was Jonathan Creswell. Everything untangled for him, and he ended up charged with her murder.

SPEAKER_01 17:58

What would that have been sort of 2022 or 2021?

SPEAKER_00 18:03

Yes, 2020. So she's sorry, she she actually died in the August of 2020. It was during COVID lockdowns in the hospital, which made it extra peculiar that he was even at her bedside. In January of 2021, the second investigation was launched under a new team of detectives, and by the March, he was arrested and charged before the courts.

SPEAKER_01 18:26

Because I read about a guy called Paul Lusby, who was sort of tried to whistleblow, apparently, and then he ended up taking his own life in 2022.

SPEAKER_00 18:36

Paul Lusby would have been a distant relative of Jonathan Creswell who knew all of the people involved in his sort of network and who didn't like what he'd seen before about the way Jonathan treated women, and he just didn't, he knew Katie didn't believe for a second she would have committed suicide. So he tried to sort of become an investigator himself, and he tragically took his own life. Um friends and family would say, from the stress of not being believed and being afraid of Creswell. Now, a new report was out only last week, a government report criticizing a huge amount of elements of this investigation by the PSNI, but also the equestrian industry and the lack of safeguarding within it. Um there is, I mean, the list of criticism about the original police investigation just goes on and on.

SPEAKER_01 19:27

The fact that they accepted ask about one facet of that, which so that this is the Melia review. That's the yes. Um so yeah, so there's apparently you know, sort of institutional misogyny in the PSNR. And I was surprised. Well, I I don't know, I don't know him well enough, but maybe you weren't surprised. But um John Caldwell, his name popped up. So he was obviously this famous detective who was later shot by the well, allegedly by um various paramilitaries in in c cahoots with each other. But he yeah, what's what what was his role then? What and what exactly did he do?

SPEAKER_00 20:13

Well, he was one of the the sort of the lead investigators in the original case, but he has since retired, and um I don't think he's come under any disciplinary in relation to this. Um, there was some commentary he made in relation to Jonathan Creswell. I just don't have the exact quote in front of me, but it was something like he was referred to as a not a bad badly behaved or something like this. Bad boy, perhaps. And it was something feels very inappropriate now in the light of what was going on. And he said that was really just kind of talk and you know that with regular language that they they would have used within the um look, I'm sure it it looks horrendous in a report given all that has actually happened, but uh um he was defending himself, saying he didn't mean anything by it, but it was sort of pointed out that misogyny is rife within the PSNI. I think they were overall pointing out that um they believed the word of an abuser, a previously convicted abuser. They didn't seek to sort of dig into that and to the uh aspects of that case, which were indeed very similar to what had happened to Katie in the in the run into her uh supposed suicide. Um that a lot of opportunities, investigations were missed because of the decision to go with the killer's narrative. So you know, CCTV wasn't harvested at the time, which could have obviously been used. There was interviews maybe door to door not taken properly. People who knew her at the time weren't interviewed correctly as they should have been, and really that the PSNI in a case where the There is a supposed suicide that doesn't seem right. I suppose that there isn't indications that it should be maybe looked on not quite as a homicide, but it should be investigated more thoroughly than accepting the word of somebody. So it's a big rap on the knuckles for the PSNI. Now, Jonathan Creswell himself was charged ultimately with murder, and the second day of his trial, he took his own life. So he he left behind three of his female friends to carry the can because they were convicted. They actually pleaded guilty to their role in covering up for him. But they it was uh the judge at the case said that they did not know he had murdered Katie. They believed when they were helping him cover up that he might have beaten her, but that he would be blamed by the police on her suicide if they found that out. So, you know, but they they each got suspended sentences. This review has happened, and the next thing that will happen will be the coroner's courts in relation to both Katie and Jonathan's death.

SPEAKER_01 23:04

Um yeah, so I read about them. So we've got Jill Robinson, who I think you mentioned earlier, she was sort of a longtime friend of his.

SPEAKER_00 23:12

She was, and she was older. They were in a relationship many years ago when he was a teenager boy, and she was in her twenties, like an eight-year, six to eight-year difference, uh, which is a lot when you're younger, you know. Um, and they had remained friends throughout. It was her that introduced him to Darton Ree Stables where he got the first jockeying apprentice job.

SPEAKER_01 23:30

And then there was Hayley Robb, do you know?

SPEAKER_00 23:32

Uh yes, Hailey Robb was uh she she was uh somebody else he had picked up along the way that uh was in a relationship with him. She actually ultimately would be the whistleblower. Um, and it was her sort of honesty and her conscience that kind of blew the whole uh thing open as regards what had happened in the background. And uh finally there was the aforementioned Rose de Montmorency Wright, who was living with them at the time, a young girl who um, you know, if you go through the questioning and what she told police, etc., none of it still to this day makes sense. Um she had said that she saw Katie alive that morning before she left for work when the PN would suggest she was sort of dying at that point. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 24:23

Um it's weird because um I tried to find sort of actual copy from the first day of the trial, obviously turned out to be the only day of the trial. Um and I couldn't find a lot on it, but it seems to be the suggestion was that you know, yeah, he was very insanely jealous because of this other guy, and yeah, that's why he killed her.

SPEAKER_00 24:43

So presumably, rather than sort of go into her house and finding her dead, he he'd gone a bit earlier than that, and then he'd got into a temper when he'd found out she'd spent the night with this um new boyfriend. He had she'd gone to a show that day, and he had been quizzing her all day and taking her phone, looking through the messages. He had then gone with her to look at a horse, and they had driven across the border where their phones were static for a period of time, suggesting that they were out of the car and something was happening. And um he had then brought her back to the house in Derry where she was living with the others, and there had been varying accounts of how she came in that she'd fallen off a horse, that she hadn't, that she was in good form, that she wasn't, that etc. And by the next morning she was dead.

SPEAKER_01 25:34

So, yeah, do you did you cover the the trial itself, or can you tell me what happened when you know he suddenly um committed suicide? Because I I covered uh years ago Fred West's brother, John West. He went on trial. Yeah, he went on trial for rape, and he uh he committed suicide the day, I think it was the day before the verdict. Right? Yeah, so I've got to I didn't realise that.

SPEAKER_00 26:00

Well, what happened with Jonathan Creswell was there was the opening in which the prosecution laid out this case against him. Um now he would have had the book of evidence anyway, so it wasn't a surprise, but I think the realization dawned on him how much evidence there was against him. Um and he went home that evening, and the following morning the court was called and there was a delay, and the next thing a police officer came in and basically said that he had been found dead in the bail address. So I actually came upon it in full when I was in Derry and I covered the case of the three women who'd helped him cover up the women we spoke about. Um, and I just thought, you know, here were three women in the dock. They'd obviously betrayed their friend in the worst way possible. And also, how could this man have so much power and control over them? So that's really where I came to it, which was just a few months after he had, about six months after he had died. Um Creswell was a difficult guy to get your head around, but he seems to have he was born to a young mother who'd had a relationship and affair with uh a wealthy married farmer, a guy called Herbie Lusby, who ended up taking Jonathan in at one point when he wanted to leave the north. He had a lot of land in Donegal. Um uh he'd been reared by his mother, but in what I was told was a very uh stable home because his grandparents had stepped in to sort of be the parents, and he had started off in stables and in horses very early, like as a kid, had been very talented at that, not so at schoolwork. So he had competed from the age of about 10. And somebody, be it his grandfather or his mother, you know, there's a lot of hard legwork that goes into that as a parent, brought him around all those places and you know, got him all the gear and paid for the lessons and everything. So um he that in his background, but and he also maintained a relationship with his mother up until the day he died, and she sort sort of supported him and backed him, took him in after uh the Katie died, and and they had to leave the rental home. He she took in him and Christina. Um, he seemed to have been somebody with this confidence that you don't see too much in teenage boys. He had a confidence with older women, younger women. He was able to pass himself in the company of men, but never had very many male friends. Again, when I dig back into his background a bit, I could see that kind of the only male friends he had were themselves troubled. One was a prolific paedophile who was later charged and convicted in the UK. He was sort of working as a babysitter and he was abusing the kids in his care. And the other two had convictions as well. They were in the north, sort of all social misfits. Uh, but Creswell was also very divisive. People either thought he was really funny and charming or they absolutely hated him and they felt there was something creepy and weird about him. Um, but he he did hold an incredible power over a lot of women, and not all of them dropped out of school early. A lot of them were very educationally, you know, successful. Once they meet him, they drop everything to sort of almost become it's almost like a cult situation he has going on around him. Yeah, they they kind of they work for him, they hand over their wages, they uh are physically and some of them sexually abused by him. There's the partner, Christina, who is certainly aware of some of it, uh, and the the two kids, and everybody seems to muck in and help Johnny and everything he says they do.

SPEAKER_01 30:04

Can I just ask you about the uh the fact that he was given bail? Because in England, Scotland, and Wales, I am pretty sure you wouldn't get bail if you're on a murder charge.

SPEAKER_00 30:13

Um, but it seems like you wouldn't get it here in the Republic either.

SPEAKER_01 30:17

No, it seems like Northern Ireland, A, they seem to take an awful long time to come to trial, and they seem to be quite generous on giving bail. I mean, I think the Lyra McKee defendants, are they on bail?

SPEAKER_00 30:29

Um Yeah, because they to that's exactly why, because it takes so long to come to trial. Um, the justice system is very, very slow there. I mean, I was looking at the the kind of the timeline with the bail for him, and he was refused it a few times, and then eventually the you know, the police are never ready with the case file, and they're kicking it along, and eventually a judge kind of gets a bit angry with them and sort of says, you know, I'm actually gonna you're gonna force my hand here to give him bail if you can't come up with what we need, and they don't. So he eventually gets bail on very strict conditions. He's not allowed into certain counties, he's not allowed near any of these women. He has to give up the bail addresses, passport, and sign on twice. So we I'd say it was as good as they could do in the circumstances.

SPEAKER_01 31:16

Yeah, there's a there's another case, isn't it? Do you know Operation Albaisha, the um the royal raid dissidents trial that's been going on for well and uh God knows.

SPEAKER_00 31:27

Oh, listen, like I cover another case in the north, the murder of Robbie Lawler. I wrote a book on it. It happened in 2020 on the 4th of April, and uh they're currently trying to extradite a guy from here to the north for the murder. Um so you're talking six years later, and that murder happened as Enchrachat was live. So they have this sort of what the PSI would describe as kind of slam dunk evidence, yet it's still taken six years to even extradite him. Uh, he's gonna fight that. By the time he gets up there, you know, he's unlikely to win. He's gonna challenge the legality of Enchor Chat material, which has been challenged many times in many countries and has failed. So it's unlikely he'll win that. But even when he's extradited, he could be three or three years or so waiting for trial. Like, so it's a crazy system.

SPEAKER_01 32:25

Can I ask you just last question about Katie Simpson? And um, so you wrote a book about it, and you know a lot about the um the equestrian industry. And um, do have there been any sort of um changes? Have any uh that sort of industry made any sort of effort to uh sort of you know safeguard, especially young women in in the industry a bit more?

SPEAKER_00 32:51

Well, the review that is only recently out, the government review into the handling of the death of Katie Simpson, uh pointed out that there is a new sort of PSNI-led operation Gallup in place, which is supposed to kind of work with the industry in an effort to bring them, bring in safeguarding, etc. But I mean the PSNI are the ones who are so highly criticized in this report in the first place. So you've got a police force that have come out of it as not only misogynistic but utter failures. Policing an industry where it's been discovered there are many lacks of safeguarding. So um I would have thought the equestrian industry themselves would be better to come together as opposed to standing back and leaving it to the PSNI.

SPEAKER_01 33:48

Yeah. Okay, well, we'll we'll watch that with interest. Um okay, I'm gonna let you go now, but one I can't let you go without asking one question. What's happening to uh Kinnehan? Is he is he gonna be finally extradited, or do you think uh there's another twist in the tail?

SPEAKER_00 34:05

I don't think there is. I think he's going to fight that extradition in the Emirates um in any way he can. I think he's going to cite his human rights. There is talk that he has converted to Muslim over the years that he was living out there, so he will try and attempt to use that. It's very difficult to know what's going on because we have no access. The public or the court systems are not public in the United Arab Emirates. I would say um, so Sean McGovern is number two, his home is actually due for sentence next week, pleaded guilty um to some serious criminal charges. He was eight months coming back from time of arrest, and I think a lot of the bureaucratic tape and the problems were sort of probably ironed out during that. So I would think from arrest, Kinnehan will be back within six months or four. So you're probably looking at September. Um, at which point he'll be brought to the special criminal court, charged. He will be held in Port Leach prison where there's already plans underway for his incarceration, how and where to house him. And um then we could we we're quicker, so we we might be next year with a trial. The special criminal court is operating very efficiently. So, no, I don't think there's another twist in the tail for him, other than um and again, the evidence would be very similar to Sean McGovern's, which was all based on PGP phones. The phones got the whole lot of them, really.

SPEAKER_01 35:34

It might have taken a long time, but uh that was PGP rather than it was a predated Inchorage.

SPEAKER_00 35:42

It was yeah, pretty good privacy was they were using them around 2016, which is the time that the Regency Hotel attack happened, the attempt on Daniel Kennahan's life, and the lash out that came after that, which is what he has now been caught up in, what the Irish state say they have evidence to prove that he was directing a criminal organization directing murders, and um there's still a file with the DPP in relation to an actual murder charge for him for the murder of Eddie Hutch, who dies three days after the Regency. Okay, well, we will listen out for the I'll keep you posted on that one, Chris. No doubt we'll be talking about that again.

SPEAKER_01 36:20

And I would recommend people follow your Crime World uh podcast and website. It's all it's the best place to find out about uh what's going on in the world of Irish crime, especially organized crime.