Alan Hawe controlled every aspect of his family's life. and killed them all because he feared losing their respect.
That’s just one of the explosive theories in a new book, Deadly Silence, written by his sister-in-law, Jacqueline Connolly.
In today’s You Magazine, Jacqueline describes how her sister Clodagh met Hawe as a first-year student at teacher training college, and from the beginning she was in ‘a bubble’ that her family found difficult to penetrate.
Clodagh, 39, rarely did anything or went anywhere without her husband. And she made it clear to her sister that if she told her something, she was also telling Alan. Indeed, Jacqueline found out after Clodagh’s death that she’d been forwarding all her texts to Alan as soon as she received them.
She believes Clodagh craved stability and trusted him implicitly. However, in the spring and summer of 2016, it appears Hawe came to believe his social standing in the south Cavan community – where they lived with their three child dren Liam, 14, Niall, 11, and six-year-old Ryan – was about to be badly damaged.
And on August 28, 2016, using knives and an axe, Hawe murdered his wife and children at their home at Barconey, near Ballyjamesduff. After several hours transferring money into different bank accounts and writing a ‘murder letter’, in which he confessed to killing his family, he hanged himself.
Jacqueline and her mother, Mary Coll, have fought ferociously to try and discover why Hawe murdered their family and for access to details about the months leading up to the killings.
They have harshly criticised the first Garda investigation into the case and are lobbying to have the Serious Crime Review report publicly released, as they believe the findings could help prevent other, similar crimes. They were given a presentation of the findings and told it had concluded that Hawe put a lot of planning into killing his family.
It’s believed he reacted badly after his ‘rampant porn addiction’ was discovered, something about which Clodagh had confided
in her mother six months before she died. Hawe agreed to go to counselling, but Jacqueline believes Clodagh was beginning to
think about leaving him.
‘Social Death (where someone experiences the loss of their social identity) was huge to Alan Hawe,’ says Jacqueline.
‘He thought Clodagh and the boys were an extension of himself and that he was doing them a favour [by killing them]. It was an act of mercy. He thought they couldn’t live without him, that it would ruin their lives.’
In her interview, Jacqueline tells You Magazine: ‘When they got engaged, I was happy for them. I had no real concern. That came later.’
