Routine clean-up led to jail for manslaughter

Date Published: 12-May-2009

IT ALL started with a routine tidy-up of a fish shop in Henry Street. Ali Jalilvand was making sure that his premises was in good shape for a routine inspection by the health authorities.

In one corner of the freezer room sat a box, which measured a yard square on all sides, and the proprietor decided to check out its contents. That was on the afternoon of June 13, 2007, and by that evening, Gardaí had cordoned off the premises as they officially began a murder investigation.

The box contained the frozen body of a 52-year-old Dublin man, Patrick McCormack, who had last been seen alive in the early Summer of 2002. Nothing had been heard or seen of him since.

However on that evening of June 13, 2007, Gardaí had no idea as to the identity of the body. Initially it didn’t seem to match up with any missing persons on their files but gradually the bits and pieces started to be put together. The only item of significance on his person was a €50 note – detectives investigating the case would have to rely primarily on fingerprinting cross-referencing to provide a positive identification.

A critical aspect of that work related to the timing of the fingerprinting. The body had to be allowed to thaw out to some extent but decomposition also had to be guarded against, as this could wipe out the prints.

The prints were successfully taken from the body and proved conclusively that the body was that of Patrick McCormack from Artane Gardens, Dublin. He was a man known to Gardaí in Dublin as a player in the drug trade and he had been known to visit Galway on a number of occasions.

There were also firearm convictions against McCormack and at one stage he had been shot by Gardaí during an attempted armed raid.

Days of painstaking and old fashioned police work followed and gradually…