East Clare farmer Tony Muggivan knows better than most the story of how 29-year-old artist Imelda Riney, her threeyear-old son Liam and Galway priest Fr Joe Walsh met their deaths.

The nine days during which the garda hunt for O'Donnell became an unprecendented national news event, ended 12 years ago today, when the 20-year-old was arrested after taking two more people hostage; teenager Fiona Sampson and farmer Eddie Cleary.

"There was an awful injustice done to Brendan [O'Donnell], " Tony Muggivan says. The farmer, who fostered O'Donnell when he was in his teens, believes that others in the east Clare area have suffered and continue to suffer the fallout from the high-profile murders.

Among the unanswered questions is why O'Donnell had been able to roam the east Clare area for weeks while he was believed to represent a risk to people's safety. Much of the local rumour that gardai on the ground did not do enough to apprehend O'Donnell is unfair, Muggivan insists. "There are still major questions about how the whole thing was handled higher-up, " he says.

O'Donnell was facing charges for stabbing his sister with a knife at her flat in Portumna in east Galway, after which he was briefly put into psychiatric care.

After this, he fled to the UK, but was arrested there for another offence. He received a two-year sentence in Wolverhampton prison. Recent revelations have put the spotlight on senior garda management of the case prior to his return to Ireland.

Garda sergeant Ciaran Sheehan, who remains suspended from full duties from the force on an unrelated matter, said that several requests were made by Scarriff gardai over a period of six months to travel to the UK and bring O'Donnell back to Ireland in garda custody. These requests received no response from senior gardai, Sheehan insists.

O'Donnell was eventually granted early release from Wolverhampton prison, arriving back in the Clare area in March 1994, just weeks before the triple murder. Fearing he may be picked up at an Irish port, Muggivan believes that O'Donnell probably returned via Belfast.

The Muggivan family fostered O'Donnell when the troubled youth needed a home, but in the following years, he had become increasingly volatile, fearing that people wanted to poison his food.

More than anybody, Muggivan is aware that O'Donnell posed a risk to gardai and others. "He had said he'd get a guard some time, if he got the chance. Sergeant Sheehan wanted to get him into custody with the least likely harm done to anyone, but from his account of it, there doesn't seem to have been a response to his requests to get that done."

O'Donnell was aware that gardai wanted to take him into custody. Since his youth, he had a deep-rooted mistrust and hatred for the guards. His mother, to whom he was close, had died when he was nine years old. He did not have a good relationship with his father.

But while gardai wanted him arrested, nothing was done to make that happen.

All the while, his paranoid delusions were convincing him of the need for desperate action. What tipped the balance in O'Donnell's mind has, for many years, remained a mystery in the case.

However, new information obtained by the Sunday Tribune indicates that on the morning that he stole a gun, O'Donnell believed that gardai were pursuing him and that he was facing a dramatic showdown. Fearing what he perceived to be a show of force, O'Donnell is likely to have stolen the gun from a local person with the intention of taking flight out of the east Clare area.

Local farmer Liam Perrill, a distant relative of O'Donnell's, claims that he was told that gardai were going to use lethal force against the fugitive. O'Donnell called to Perrill's farm, at Middleline near Mountshannon, on the morning of 28 April hoping to get food. In a state of panic and fear for his own young family, Perrill shouted at him to get away "or we'll all get killed".

Speaking to the Sunday Tribune this week, Perrill said: "I knew then it was all over, when he went away from the farm that morning. I didn't know how it would turn out, but I had a feeling it would end up very bad, and it was bad for everyone."

Unanswered questions What then happened is now well known.

He kidnapped Imelda Riney, an artist who had moved to east Clare with her two children, Liam and Oisin, to begin a new life after her marriage had ended.

O'Donnell wanted to flee the area, supposedly to travel to France, and is believed to have planned a robbery to fund his escape.

He killed Riney in Clegg forest after sexually assaulting her, then shot dead her three-year-old son. He then kidnapped Fr Joe Walsh at the curate's home in Eyrecourt, Galway. He brought the priest to the woods and killed him. Sampson and Cleary would almost certainly have been killed too had Cleary not grabbed the gun from O'Donnell as gardai closed in.

While Tony Muggivan and others insist that questions remain unanswered after O'Donnell's subsequent arrest and conviction for murder in 1996, his death a year later while in the central mental hospital in Dundrum removed any possibility that he could shed more light on his motivations on the last weekend in April 1994.

A dozen years after the murders, few people involved in the O'Donnell case will discuss it publicly. Imelda Riney's exhusband, Val Ballance, has kept his silence . . . only once making a public pronouncement when he urged media not to publicise Edna O'Brien's 2002 fictionalised book on the subject, In The Forest.

He told the Sunday Tribune that he would not be commenting, nor would his and Imelda's surviving son Oisin.

The Sampson family, who survived a terrible ordeal, declined to speak of the case. Until such time as there is a thorough probe into how O'Donnell managed to slip through the system, including the failure by gardai to take him into custody after he finished his sentence in England, Muggivan insists that major parts of O'Donnell's story will go untold.

Timeline of the killings MARCH 1994 O'Donnell is released from prison in Wolverhampton in the UK after serving part of a two-year sentence. He returns to Ireland, where he is wanted on outstanding charges related to stabbing his sister.

After spending some time in Eyrecourt, Co Galway, O'Donnell travels to Whitegate in Clare.

MID-MARCH/APRIL 1994 O'Donnell commits a series of crimes in the east Clare area, and rumours spread that he is threatening and attacking elderly people for food. Local gardai become aware that he is in the area.

27 APRIL, 1994 Gardai confront O'Donnell, who claims to be armed, but he eludes them.

28 APRIL-1 MAY, 1994 O'Donnell steals a .22 rifle and kidnaps Imelda Riney and her son Liam. He sexually assaults her and kills her and Liam at Clegg forest. He kidnaps Eyrecourt-based curate Fr Joe Walsh and later shoots the priest dead.

7 MAY, 1994 O'Donnell abducts 18-year-old local girl Fiona Sampson and elderly farmer Eddie Cleary. Gardai close in as he tries to flee the area in a stolen car with his hostages. Cleary grabs the gun as detectives approach the car. O'Donnell is arrested between Woodford and Whitegate.

2 APRIL, 1996 O'Donnell is convicted of murder at the central criminal court. A minority of the jurors believed him guilty but insane. He is sentenced to life imprisonment and goes to Arbour Hill jail 24 JULY, 1997 O'Donnell dies after suffering a rare reaction to his medication while in detention at the central mental hospital in Dundrum.