Man (35) found guilty of murdering his partner Gillian Curran in Waterford

A 35-year-old man has been found guilty of the murder of his partner who was found with serious head and abdominal injuries at his home in Waterford last year.Marcus O’Neill had denied the murder of Gillian Curran (47) at O’Brien Street, Waterford, on January 25th, 2025, but a jury of five men and seven women found him guilty of the charge.The jury at the Central Criminal Court sitting in Waterford deliberated for 11 hours and 39 minutes but could not reach a unanimous verdict. Judge Caroline Biggs said she would accept a majority verdict. The judge agreed to an application by prosecution counsel Conor O’Doherty for an adjournment to allow for the preparation of a victim impact statement from the Curran family.READ MOREBiggs remanded O’Neill for sentence at the Central Criminal Court in Dublin on October 12th. The court heard that O’Neill said in interviews with gardaí that he and Gillian Curran had been drinking on the night of January 24th, 2025 and she fell four times including hitting her head twice off a table downstairs, once as he brought her upstairs and once after he put her to bed.He claimed that when he got up the following morning, he came down to find her naked at the bottom of the stairs. He picked her up and dressed her before putting her on a couch and ringing the emergency services.However, State Pathologist Dr Heidi Okkers who carried out a postmortem on the woman at University Hospital Waterford on January 26th, said that while some of Gillian Curran’s injuries may have resulted from falls, others did not and were the result of punches or kicks in an assault.Okkers spent almost four hours over two days listing a total of 143 external bruise and abrasion injuries she found on Gillian Curran’s face, head, neck, torso, arms and legs as well as over 20 internal injuries she found during the postmortem.She found that the woman’s brain was swollen diffusely and further specialist examination by neuropathologist Dr Francesa Brett had confirmed the dead woman had suffered extensive contusions and axonal injuries where nerve fibres in her brain had torn.Such axonal injuries resulted from the brain moving within the skull and this was due to traumatic blunt force trauma and was not normally associated with a fall where there was no evidence of a skull or cervical spine fracture, and Gillian Curran had not suffered any skull fractures.Okkers also said that a pattern of abdominal injuries including a perforated duodenum which the woman had suffered in the two to six hours before death, was consistent with direct trauma and she attributed the perforated duodenum to a punch or a kick to the stomach.Okkers said toxicology tests had found Gillian Curran, who was a chronic alcohol user, had a blood alcohol concentration of 309mg per 100ml, over six times the legal driving limit but below the toxic level. It may have affected her responses but was not a contributory factor in her death.