This is an especially horrifying story, in fact it's so distressing and grotesque I'm almost shocked there aren't cautionary nursery rhymes about it. But there aren't, and despite this being only thirty years ago, it feels like an ancient relic, involving people unknown to any living soul.
It's also completely fucking infuriating, with the guilty party treated to an appallingly lenient sentence.
Be Warned - Details of fetishistic murder, sexual assault, dismemberment of human bodies
It was September 1991, and Michael Bambrick's whole life was thrown into turmoil.
Michael lived with his long term partner, Patricia McGauley, and their two children in Clondalkin, a suburb of Dublin. While the children's names are widely used online I feel less than confortable doing so, and will use pseudonyms. Their first daughter Annie was born in August 1984, with little sister Laura arrived August 1990.
Born September 12th, 1952, in England to Irish parents, Bambrick had moved with his family back to Ireland, specifically the slums of Dublin city, when he was five years old.
Just over a year after Laura's birth, a horrible mystery befell the family, and Michael Bambrick could find no explanation for it.
Patricia had vanished off the face of the earth. They'd had an argument one evening and she stormed out - but they argued a lot. About alcohol, quite often, and while they'd both been heavy drinkers, since the children came along Patricia had been determined to sort things out. Michael Bambrick, on the other hand, had always been overly fond, or more accurately, entirely dedicated to his own needs alone.
Patricia was meant to have gone to her mother's house, a short walk away. She never arrived. He was stumped, he told GardaΓ. He had no idea where she might be.
Patricia wasn't the type to just go missing - she had those two small children, for a start. She was also very close to her mother who was now elderly, had always lived in Dublin - even her friends were the same as those from childhood, who she'd gone to school with. And her kids were small - Laura had only just turned one. She'd never leave her children, not by her own free will.
Little of this made sense, but sadly, in the east of Eire during the 1990's, many women went missing in what became known as the Vanishing Triangle, almost as if they'd been swallowed from the ground up.
The GardaΓ were condemned by families for not investigating properly: for assuming the very distressed or mentally ill will just kill themselves, and there's little point wasting resources on searching; for making hasty, prejudiced assumptions that some women had just 'got themselves into trouble', were of loose morals and didn't want finding anyway - for, whatever their reasoning, just not taking it seriously enough.
How many were victim to serial killer(s) or stranger attacks, and how many were vanished by someone they knew, in the terminally minimised sphere of domestic or interpersonal violence, is anyone's guess. Many are still missing.
On the night before her disappearance, Patricia's mother had been looking after her two children while the couple spent the night in the pub, drinking til last orders. It was September 11th, the night before Bambrick's birthday, although for some reason this is never, in all I've read or heard, mentioned.
At some point in the evening, Bambrick and Patricia had a row, and once out of the pub they fetched their children from Patricia's mother to go home.
Bambrick says that he argued with Patricia that it was too late to go get them, and that she also crossed words with her mother, who said the same, but she insisted.
I myself wondered if it's not him telling her to go get them. It could be he was throwing his weight about, enjoying causing friction with the family while still having taken advantage of the childcare - maybe he wanted to make her look crazy. Who decides to drag their small children out of bed, where they are safe with family, in the middle of the night? And just to bring them home, where the adults are pissed and arguing?
It could be more sinister. Perhaps the act of someone who had a plan already in mind, and didn't want to raise the alarm early by collecting the kids himself, alone?
The row reignited at home: there were no cigarettes, and Patricia wanted Bambrick to go buy some from the garage. He refused, he says - they'd only just passed the garage, she should have said then. The fighting escalated. Some of the neighbours heard shouting and screaming, but it all settled down when Bambrick found a packet with one cigarette in it, which by his account he magnanimously gifted her, to shut her up.
A day or two later (the various sources sometimes conflict on the details) one of the neighbours had seen Patricia walk up towards the park, in the clothes Bambrick would describe her in when she went missing. It was dark; "there goes Patricia, not a bother on her", she remarked to her daughter, or words to that effect. All that screaming and now she's off for a night out with the girls, heels and all.
Bambrick had met Patricia McGauley nine years earlier, and the relationship was tumultuous from the start.
He was an odd guy. He had two elder brothers who were normal - agreeable, independent and hardworking, and three half sisters he never met. Michael seemed to struggle with society and its expectations, not wanting to work or even to leave the house, except for the pub.
At some point he joined the army, but after a couple of months went AWOL. He headed straight back home, and for two years sat around watching TV at his parent's home, evading capture. Eventually, he gave himself up, and was duly taken back to the barracks. On that same day, he did a runner, climbing over the boundary wall.
Except for a couple of brief spells where he tried to survive independently, Bambrick lived with his parents until their deaths in the early 80's. But he wasn't just feckless; Bambrick clocked up numerous convictions for burglary, larceny, and for sexual assault. He had a filthy temper and had on a few occasions beaten up his own mother, leaving her covered in bruises, and full of excuses for him. He was let do what he wanted at home; sleep all day, watch TV, eat the food but never cook or clear up. Never contribute.
When his parents died, he sold the house but was not much later in corporation accommodation (social housing). The money was pissed up the wall in pubs and living without working.
Patricia had been married in her early twenties, to a man she met while working on the assembly line at a soap factory. It soon went wrong - he was alcoholic, aggressive, violent, and they argued the whole time as Patricia herself was no pushover. She left after two years, but in the process had formed some wounding coping strategies, becoming too fond of the drink herself. Divorce was not an option back then in Ireland, and these abandoned, stray marriages overshadowed people and their relationships long after the fact.
Bambrick later gave evidence at Patricia's inquest. According to him, they'd made up from the argument and "started to have sex". In his initial confession, he stated they began to 'make love'.
During this testimony, Bambrick is repeatedly described as chillingly callous, even 'relishing the details'. Unaffected by the horror of it all, he casually gives his account which, highly selective and largely comprised of face-saving, mitigating lies as it will be, is extremely disturbing and much of the time incomprehensibly brutal.
"We started to have sex" he claimed: "I tied her hands behind her back and put tights in her mouth".
He was dressed up in her clothes.
"I got enjoyment out of this and she sometimes let me do it"
Ah well, so she 'let' him.
'Sometimes'.
What does 'she let me' actually mean?
'Let me' as in, she was physically incapable of resisting, or too drunk, or too scared to object? Or was she just really up for this particular brand of profound helplessness, especially that night, with a violent drunk, having just got the kids home, in the immediate wake of a furious argument?
Did she have a safe... not safe word, since of course, she couldn't speak, but was there some way for Patricia to tap out, Michael?
Because, sure as the Pope's a Catholic, he knew first hand that what he was doing could have tragic consequences. He was married, once, to a woman called Marie. He was twenty when they tied the knot, and soon enough they had a child together.
Not long into the marriage, Marie came home to find Bambrick dressed in her clothes. She was horrified and urged him to seek counselling, and again accounts differ as to whether he refused, or attended a few sessions before fucking it all off entirely.
But the transvestism was just one of their troubles, as his drinking and determined unemployment was a constant source of rows.
These rows grew more intense, with Bambrick's rage and sadism unleashed yet further by alcohol. After one particularly savage episode, Marie went to sleep, exhausted, only to wake up with Bambrick again dressed in her clothes, this time holding her down on the bed. Out came the tights, which he tied around her head and neck, the feet stuffed in her mouth and down towards her throat. He choked her, intently watching til she blacked out, and then once she regained consciousness, he raped her. Soon after this terrifying assault she fled, with their child in tow. After that, it's divergent stories again. Either he attacked and sexually assaulted one of Marie's friends, or he sexually assaulted the partner of one of his friends, after being invited in for a cup of tea. It could be both. His punishment was a suspended sentence.
If he was capable of telling the truth, I imagine he'd tell us he attacked Patricia just as he had attacked Marie. He liked women to be helpless, and to be sleeping is to be especially helpless. It's like he felt he was owed it.
Again, the night Patricia met her end was September 11th, 1991 - the night before his 39th birthday.
I think Bambrick was 'treating' himself.
It is as he approaches the subject, on the stand at the inquest, the time to describe his 'bondage session' attack on Patricia, where you can sense it's his most prized possession - those final moments of her life - where the dead-eyed, dispassionate confessional flickers. And while he tries to shield it with fake sensitivity and contrived squeamishness, the thing I can sense most is his possessive secrecy.
It's a sleight of hand; he replaces the novel with a heavily redacted pamphlet, a cursory synopsis.
Those details are private. They are his. So he repeats under oath this is the whole truth, skipping over the gaping chasm of things unsaid.
Let me remind you - he has her restrained and gagged. He loves this and doesn't get it as much as he wishes. It's his birthday. So:
"I heard her gasping and.."
...and?
"... she died."
Note how, in his retelling, just how passive his role is here - he heard her gasping, that's all. You can't help hearing something!
He just heard. His ability to act though, that has seemingly abandoned him. He was as helpless then as he is now, remembering it all. It's not like it made a difference, of course, because with the gasping, she was, already, dead. He puts the events together as if one inexorably and instantly led to the next. It's an inevitability: like "I dropped a ball, and it bounced on the floor". What could he do?
What could he do, when it was Patricia who went and died?
In some more detailed reports, Bambrick is quoted as having panicked; he saw her going blue and tried to remove the tights from her neck. They were dug into her, strangling her. Those tights had not 'just' been wrapped around her head, they'd been knotted around her neck, tight. They weren't 'just' tucked in her mouth, she would still breathe unless they were packed in, forced down, right to the back of her mouth, almost into her throat. No. He had tied them so tight he needed to run downstairs to rifle through the kitchen drawers and find scissors to cut them loose.
Then, in one interview, he'd let slip that there'd been "a small bit of a struggle" and some shouting - Patricia shouting for him to get lost, leave her alone, stop. Neighbours reported shouting and screaming, a 'ferocious row', while Bambrick ensured even the worst was punctuated with caveats to diminish, naturalise or share the load of responsibility. 'A small bit' of a struggle - it was probably part of the game, eh. He characterises the rape as 'making love', death as unforeseeable and near immediate. A gasp, and she was just... dead.
Years before Bambrick and McGauley were living with each other, neighbours had plenty of thoughts on what kind of man he was; "We used to call him Josephine because he kept nicking knickers from the line," said one woman.
"He was into children's clothes and young girls bras. Our mothers didn't have much then. They couldn't afford him stealing things. So they would sit around at night and watch him".
And when they saw him approach their washing lines, they would shout "not tonight, Josephine", a phrase "used to spurn someone else's sexual advances or overtures." It has been (probably mis)accredited to Napoleon, who's wife, Josephine, was allegedly more horny than he could manage.
So now, a drunken Bambrick is left with a significant problem; Patricia's dead body. By the next morning, she was locked in the box room. Bambrick took their eldest to school and the youngest child elsewhere, to Patricia's mother seems likely, since he also was there to collect Patricia's welfare cheque. Later, he collects Annie from school and leaves both the children there.
Even for this cretin, who's whole life is an unconscionable and shameless pursuit of selfish urges, surely this would be horrific and intolerable: turning up at the home of her elderly mother, making small talk, leaving the kids there, taking the money she has cashed for her daughter? How in God's name would you do this without a complete breakdown?
Well, he doesn't mention it from what I can see, but, when left alone to contemplate this entirely unforeseeable situation, Bambrick claims he decided to confess. It was probably the first time in his life he was ready to take responsibility, and the most serious situation. So he went to hand himself in to the GardaΓ. But as he approached the station, he was suddenly overwhelmed by a sudden sense of whimsy and childlike fear, and just could not go past the gates. But he tried.
So instead he decided on something he would find easier. He returned to the cold, naked body of Patricia, and put to work a disposal process and new backstory:
"I cut up the body with a hacksaw. I cut off her arms, head and legs and put them in huge refuse sacks"
One of the things he neglects to mention is he also removed her breasts with Stanley blades. And, he skinned her.
The next stage was disposal. Bambrick knew of a local corporation (council) dump that had long ago sprawled out onto neighbouring fields. It was about a ten minute cycle away.
He tossed her remains out of the bags and covered them with the mess others had left, then returned home. Some parts he dug a shallow grave for.
The reports sometimes contradict one another, but over the following couple of days he went on numerous trips to dispose of Patricia, the bloody rags and Stanley blades covered in the gruesome tale of her desecrated corpse.
He also went to the GardaΓ and reported her missing, having finally found the courage to approach them, with a constructive lie.
He then, in a grotesque pantomime, put on her clothes, her lipstick and heels, tottering up to the park one night, in the direction of Smithfield, where Patricia's mother lived.
Bambrick may have thought this a great alibi, and it worked for some, but others saw him and knew it was him.
Bambrick was weird, everyone knew that, and he'd been seen cross-dressing many times. Plus, people didn't know anything had happened to Patricia. I wonder how much of this act was criminal scheming, and how much was simply fetishism at its most liberated. Maybe he was resurrecting her for his own twisted conscience. Or just killing her entirely, after skinning and dismembering her, he walked her out of the home like the runaway mother he wished her to be. He owned her, and he destroyed her.
Finally, after heavy rainfall Bambrick returned to the sprawling dumping ground. He wanted to check Patricia's remains were still hidden:
"I went back ... to see if the body was covered
"I found her head floating in water".
Wow.
So, this is the woman you've lived with for almost a decade, the mother of your children - who sure to hell will be asking, begging to know where she is. Tearful, restless, afraid. And surely that hurts? - and here you are, confronted with the horrific consequences of your actions. Her head, sawn from her body, after several days of decay, is partially submerged in filthy water at a dump. It's an unimaginable scene.
What did he do?
"...and I got a concrete brick and smashed it and buried it."
Life went on for the rest of the world, and while Laura was soon taken to live with Patricia's sister, Annie remained with Bambrick for several more years, even though the local Gardai suspected him of killing the girls' mother. At one time, on visiting the house they'd seen a blood soaked mattress in the small, unused bedroom. Ah, Bambrick had explained, Patricia had a miscarriage on it. From the drinking, probably.
For seven year old Annie, these were not good years, unsurprisingly.
Some ten months after Patricia disappeared, and Bambrick had been dating a lot of different women. He'd never been faithful to Patricia, which was well known among the clientele of the pubs he frequented. Those who gave it thought sometimes, with undeserved generosity, came to the conclusion he couldn't cope, and wanted a new mother for Annie.
Not everyone was convinced, given he was also regularly dressing up in skirts, dresses, in full make-up, and going to town. It was Ireland in the early '90s - a deeply sexually conservative place. But that was the unnerving side of Bambrick few wanted to consider, and not so many neighbours knew about it anyway. One Garda said "Bambrick was a transvestite but wanted more. He wanted to be a transsexual and had discussed the medical implications with a number of people".
The projects - housing estates - of Dublin are, like any poor, inner city housing, infamous for all sorts of negatives like crime, poverty, disadvantage. They're also known for eccentricity (for Dublin, it's horses. Horses everywhere).
One of the abiding positive stereotypes has been the community. People looking out for each other. Bambrick is never spoken of as known much where he lived, apart from their overhearing rows. Patricia and he were barely known by any of their neighbours, despite living in only two places for the nine years they were together.
One evening he met Mary Cummins, a single mother with a drink problem and an excruciatingly sad backstory.
Mary had spent the first four years of her life in an orphanage, after her mother, a teenage girl from Wales, had fled to Ireland for shame of her 'illegitimate' pregnancy, and to pass the baby on to the convent orphanage system. (Brief personal spill - my grandfather spent most of his childhood in one in Tipperary, and it was, from the undoubtedly generous angle he put on all his recollections, a fucking hell hole).
The Cummins family adopted her, as well as another girl who was only separated in age by a few months. They became known as the Cummins twins, were dressed the same and bonded.
Sadly, the adoptive father Mary was landed with was also an abusive bastard who went in big for the domestic violence. If this story is the examination of anything, it is the patterns of survival women try to forge while surrounded by violent, selfish men, and the costs they, and often their children, bear for it.
Mary had more misery to come when her adoptive mother died of cancer when she was just 16.
Unsurprisingly, she struggled in life and in her early twenties forged a relationship with a man much older than her who, as ever, was a violent shithead. He died and left her an inheritance, which she aimlessly frittered, gave and drank away. Shortly after the money ran out, Mary became homeless and the authorities took her three children into care. She must have been broken.
She had then met a man who, praise the lord, is not described as violent, nasty or otherwise bad for or to her - Luke. They had one little girl together, Samantha, and although the relationship had ended, it appeared they were on good terms. It's painfully poignant, but in the run up to meeting Bambrick she'd begun to get back on her feet. She got a flat, was caring for her daughter and was drinking less.
One evening Samantha had started playing with another little girl in the beer garden of a local pub, The Advocat, after spending the day shopping with her mother. That child was Annie, and their parents began chatting.
This turns into a confusing tale marking out a pub crawl, Mary needing to take her 'messages' (shopping) home, cab journeys and babysitters, but ultimately Samantha was up late playing with Annie at Bambrick's home while they were out drinking, before they both returned and she was collected and taken back by friends. The babysitter left, and Annie was put to bed.
When she woke up the next morning, Bambrick told her Mary had left late the night before. She asked why Mary's shoes were still in the house, and Bambrick said she'd bought new shoes that day and didn't want to take the old ones with her. Later on, Bambrick burned them.
GardaΓ: "Isn't it strange that two women in your life have gone missing?"
Bambrick: "Yes, isn't it a terrible coincidence? It's just a misfortune and bad luck. But I had nothing to do with it."
A few years later Annie would walk into the GardaΓ station, accompanied by an adult who lived nearby, wishing to make a statement on just how terrible those years had been.
Her dad had long been neglectful, violent and cruel. He left her alone in the house, sometimes for days. He would lock her up in the shed in the yard, for hours on end. He refused her food, got mindlessly drunk and returned home with an inescapable fury and malice. Poor Annie was alone in all this; dragged around pubs, expected to care for herself and him, and him turning on her over any tiny perceived infraction. He was ferociously angry: he had returned late one night, so consumed with sadistic spite he had grabbed Annie's pet cat and bludgeoned it to death against a brick wall, to punish her. He did the same to her dog. This is such extreme sadism, it seems a miracle Annie was neither dead nor senseless from the trauma, but she had had enough, and it appears that it tipped her over the edge in a highly positive way. Annie was only eleven years old, and she had a fearsome memory, the Garda were stunned at the detail. This was enough to implicate him in serious matters.
Thank God for Annie.
And Annie was not alone is reporting this abuse towards children. At least three local children, and possibly Annie herself, had gone to the GardaΓ to let them know he had sexually assaulted them. It was ultimately this which brought him down: for some time, GardaΓ had wanted to investigate Patricia's disappearance further, specifically they wanted to search the garden. They even liaised with the specialists involved in the recent serial killer case in England - the home of Fred and Rosemary West, on Cromwell road.
There was a review of cold cases regarding the missing women of Dublin and Leinster province, motivated in part by the disappearance of young American woman Annie MacCarrick, who was living in Dublin when she too disappeared. GardaΓ had known of Bambrick's contact with Mary, and were extremely concerned about the correlation of him spending time with two disappeared women in less than a year.
By the time they had grounds for the warrant to search the house, Bambrick had sublet the property, making it essentially impossible to negotiate the triple claims to the property and acquire a search warrant. He managed to frustrate and misdirect them for several years. When they did finally get the warrant they needed to excavate, the only bones they found were that of a dog - the dog belonging to Annie, presumably, who's head was staved in against a wall during his unhinged, brutal act of domestic terrorism. One other thing, though - in the room where that bloodied mattress had laid, they found blood spots on fifty floorboards.
"The babysitter at the house went away. We started kissing and I was feeling her. I tied her hands behind her back"
That's what he said. At one time. At another time, he told a more plausible story - he'd made a move on her, trying to kiss her, and she'd given him a shove, telling him to fuck off. The fact these murderous assaults are so frequently referred to in print as if they occurred in the course of sex is infuriating to an extent I can't begin to articulate. It is light years beyond my descriptive ability.
He tied her hands behind her back with a belt. It reminds me of John Wayne Gacy and his 'trick' that left young men, boys, restrained and at his mercy.
There never is any mercy, it's sewn up from the start. This is in no way 'risky sex games gone wrong', it's calculated. It's planned, the complete opposite to spontaneous. It's a torturous ambush.
"I put the tights in her mouth. She was muttering that she was choking and was telling me to stop.
"But I couldn't stop. I got enjoyment out of it."
- "I" "She" "I" "I". It's as if Mary's inability to breathe is on a par with his inability to stop. It was just out of his control.
He got enjoyment out of it, in part, because he could "do what I wanted" to these women, but I would put money on the overriding motive being his sexual sadism. Curiously correlated with voyeurism and indecent exposure, paedophilia, animal abuse, and transvestism. The delight in causing pain, shock, in outraging and violating.
Bambrick had some significant gaps between recorded offending, and I can only guess he has many other victims. What began as stealing knickers and burglary had blossomed like the herpes virus.
Again, he dragged the woman he had just raped and murdered into the box room. He skinned her with a 'paper knife' - Stanley blade. He sawed through her arms and legs, decapitated her, bagged her up and took her to a nearby dump - this time in a wheelbarrow. Not the same as the one Patricia's remains lay broken and scattered in. About a mile away. And, of course, he burnt her shoes.
The Gards had been interested in Bambrick from the beginning of the search for Mary. They knew he left the pub with her. Back then he told them he'd left her at the bus stop. What happened to the statements of Samantha, who was five - old enough to explain they went to a man's house - or the babysitters, or the friends who collected her from Bambrick's home, is a mystery.
He became homeless, while, bizarrely, renting out the house he had committed these atrocities in. And quickly he got with a new woman, Stella Mooney, who he met in a hostel - perhaps another reason to defend single sex services.
She had two small children, and was soon pregnant with his child. Now as a couple, they were moved around Dublin, and the stereotype of tight communities rang true - his neighbours detested him. At one point, they were placed in Clondalkin, the area his house was in, and there the neighbours had long suspected he was a murderer. The community hounded him and his new family out. In one of these places, a small child accused him of sexual abuse. From place to place - five times from what I can ascertain - he was ejected by residents. Then one day, he was accused of illegal ownership of a shotgun. He was nicked, and 13 hours later had admitted to the murders. He was glad to get it off his chest, he said. Now 'the girls can have a decent, Catholic burial'.
On interview, Stella had some disturbing anecdotes of her own: he loved dressing up in her clothes, and she didn't know what to make of it. He was most excited by bondage, tying her up and gagging her - exhausting and highly uncomfortable for her, especially when heavily pregnant.
He told her one night that in days gone by he had killed a girl in Clondalkin, but didn't want to remember it because it was "too disgusting". I wonder how much she knew about the disappearance of Patricia - she must have known, he was accused of being guilty all those times she had been forcibly evicted with him. What happens to women so battered by life they feel sympathy with, or find excuses for these men, not blinding fear and fury as they run to save themselves and their children?
A report came out at around the time of Bambrick's prosecution, focusing on the tabloid treatment of rape victims. It referenced the press behaviour in response to these tragic crimes. Among the findings were oft-repeated feminist critiques of society's shirking responsibility or men's sexual violence: making out the endemic violence and oppression suffered by Patricia, Mary and their mothers, sisters and daughters is an issue of lesser importance, and one for them to fix; the tendency to categorize these crimes as 'private', behind-closed-doors, domestic issues with their roots in women's bad behaviour, character or choices, it lay into several real life examples, including the coverage of Bambrick's outrages.
The often salacious headlines and gratuity was criticised, with all the descriptions which trivialised and demeaned - "pretty Patricia McGauley" and "Sex Monster's Lesbian Lover". The press refers to these hideous crimes as 'kinky sex', 'intercourse' or 'bondage sessions'. We're told the women "died during a bizarre sex game".
And despite being grown women, of 36 and 42, Mary and Patricia are constantly referred to as girls. These women were accosted, ambushed. They were restricted, raped, likely tortured, murdered and dismembered before being dumped into waste grounds. These were not his 'lovers'.
Remember, these incidents happened after furious arguments, with women who were presumably angry and hurt, and were justified in expecting to be left asleep, in their own beds. Women who said 'no' and 'stop' and 'I can't breathe'. These were rapes, exceptionally violent rapes, from the get go, and that word is never used apart from the attack on his former wife.
They only ever found fragments of bone, a couple of teeth. In the time between Patricia's murder and her funeral, her sister was hit by a vehicle and killed. The tragedies never really stop for some. Bambrick robbed them of lives, bodies and explanations.
Because out of some straight faced cuntery, Bambrick had claimed to be wracked by remorse but also, not a murderer, and the prosecution accepted a plea of manslaughter. This meant at sentence, Judge Carney was unable to give what he felt an appropriate sentence. He would like to have given him life for each death, to ensure he remained inside til the end of his days.
He got 15 years for murdering Patricia, and 18 years for murdering Mary. Manslaughter. My apologies. These ran concurrently. He got time off for what he'd served on remand and further time off for good behaviour.
No time for defeating the ends of justice, desecration of a corpse, rape, and I can find nothing on the multiple accusations (does anyone doubt he's guilty?) of child sexual abuse. Not even for the abuse of Annie or murder of her pets. Not even the firearms charges.
Judge Carney did say he feared for anyone who came into contact with him again as he was "a sadistic type of offender almost impossible to rehabilitate." He also said in the sex offenders jail he was in, the details of his crimes would be a masturbatory material held in high regard. A tradable commodity. Currency.
"The probability is that he will have a pent-up appetite for this form of bondage, fuelled by group fantasising with other sex offenders in Arbour Hill Prison".
Bambrick has completed precisely zero sex offender's courses. Because he was convicted of manslaughter, he is not on licence. He was released in April 2009, having served 12 years and 9 months. He is not on the sex offender register as he was convicted before the introduction of tougher laws.
He claimed he would leave Ireland for England on release, but he lied - he's been tracked down to the outskirts of Dublin a couple of times, often using the pseudonym John.
He since hit the headlines for winning legal aid, to argue he was entitled to sex reassignment surgery on the NHS (as he was born in England) and again for being on the waiting list. But this has not transpired.
"I don't know what came over me either of these occasions. I don't know how to explain it. I got enjoyment out of stuffing the tights in their mouths."
This is from his supposed confession. It's like he was overcome by an evil spirit, possessed, but now he's back in the room, as if there were a decent, reasonable side to him. But there isn't. He's wholly worthless and repugnant.
Still, the wording - "I don't know" followed by "I don't know" followed by "I". He knows it was him and he knows why. He's the kid with a face covered in ice cream, perplexed at the empty pot in front of him.
"I now realise the danger of what I did on these occasions."
My, such a towering intellect.
Having been tracked down by The Sun in 2016, using the pseudonym John Milton, Bambrick was followed around Dublin city centre on his dole pay day. Yes, he still lives in Dublin.
Apparently with a female friend who vociferously defended him, he milled around, talked to shop assistants about getting a Sky package, browsed womens wear and visited sex shops. It was said there were people in the community aware of who he was, that he attends sex parties and is often seen walking around with a young woman who has a baby.
“He’s still going to sex parties and one homeless woman in the area has already admitted that a number of women have been sleeping with him. He has been seen buying women’s clothing and there’s no doubts that he still gets his kicks from dressing up as a woman. Everyone is just praying he doesn’t strike again”.
The sleazy, dull-witted, banality of evil. Why anyone has anything to do with him, except for former jail mates who value his close personal experience of rape, murder, child abuse and desecration of corpses, I have no clue. It's beyond repulsive he gets to enjoy his days, walking around and, presumably if having sex with homeless women, continuing his predatory cunt life.
The day Annie walked in to the station to give a statement, she was immediately taken from Bambrick on the grounds that the house was unsanitary and unsafe. The one good thing here is, she also was reunited with her sister and maternal family.
I just hope to god the aunt they went to is not the sister of Patricia who was killed in a road accident.
She is the hero of the story. A little girl who went through unimaginable trauma and, if there's any justice, anywhere, is living a happy life now.
"I only have one photo of my Mother Mary. It is from the hospital on the day I was born, with my father, Luke.