Acting on foot of information provided by a number of individuals close to the deceased woman, gardai invoked the 1966 Coroners Act, taking the unusual step of raising Rachel's body to learn what, if anything, had been placed in her coffin.

Their intelligence suggested that a note would be inside.

The piece of paper they found inside the coffin had been heavily softened by dampness from inside the casket. The document had been cross-folded several times. On opening, it deteriorated rapidly. Gardai sent the note to the forensics unit at the Phoenix Park in the hope that something could be gleaned from a closer analysis of the paper.

The discovery of a note in a murdered woman's coffin is far from a usual occurrence in a homicide investigation . . . but then the Rachel O'Reilly killing was no ordinary case. The note would prove to be just one of a myriad of twists and turns in what was a complicated and difficult investigation, which had started just over 22 weeks previously when Rachel's badly beaten body was discovered lying in a pool of blood in the home she shared with her husband and two young sons in Baldarragh, north Co Dublin.

The investigation had begun on the afternoon of 4 October 2004, when gardai arrived on the scene after a frantic call from Rose Callely, who had just found her daughter lying dead in a pool of blood in her daughter's own home. Rose had gone to the house when 30-year-old Rachel had failed to turn up to collect one of her children at a creche earlier.

In a case which has seen many false dawns, it has been the public appearances on television of the victim's family and the self-proclaimed chief suspect, Rachel's husband Joe, that has captured most attention. And it has been a story that has been mediated with little subtlety or ambiguity in the media.

The family of the dead woman, including her husband, showed their willingness from the start to speak directly to the public with their appearances on the Late Late Show on primetime RTE television.

Just two weeks after the killing, Joe O'Reilly and Rose Callely appeared sideby-side, speaking to presenter Pat Kenny on the Late Late. They asked for witnesses to come forward. The arrests of three people in November 2004 was the first significant development in the garda case . . .

among them two friends of Joe O'Reilly:

Nicola Pelley, 37, and 45-year-old ex-soldier Declan Quearney. Pelley is a former work colleague of Joe O'Reilly while Quearney, who is originally from Finglas, is a long-time friend of the dead woman's husband. All three were later released without charge after these initial arrests.

The media scrum that occurred when the arrested persons were released from Drogheda garda station was illustrative of the feeding frenzy that has dominated the media coverage of the case. Teams of photographers were deployed to the people's homes;

speculation, largely inaccurate, was rife about further impending arrests and charges soon to follow. One daily newspaper reportedly increased its circulation by 30,000 copies for every day on which it placed a picture of the dead woman on its front page.

It was later reported that Rachel's parents, Jim and Rose Callely, did not see their murdered daughter's children for several months as they were no longer close to Joe O'Reilly. They since have regular access to the two young boys.

If much of the press and broadcast reports have made reference to Joe O'Reilly as the 'self-confessed chief suspect' then it is a burden of his own making. It was Joe O'Reilly himself who agreed to do a newspaper interview in which he acknowledged himself as the chief suspect in the killing. Legally, it gave carte blanche to all newspapers and media to describe him as the chief suspect thereafter . . . even in cases where the story being written had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder of his wife.

Some of these stories were bizarre, to say the least. When Joe O'Reilly changed jobs from one company in Dublin to another, it was splashed across the front page of one daily newspaper.

Aside from stories relating to his wife's killing, Joe O'Reilly was also in the papers for other reasons. When he was stopped by gardai for motoring offences in September 2005, his subsequent appearance at Balbriggan court, charged with failing to show his licence and insurance, received widespread press coverage for a relatively minor motoring charge.

In yet another story that bore almost no relationship to the garda investigation or the context in which the story was of public interest, another newspaper reported, almost a year after her death, that Rachel O'Reilly had been adopted as a child.

Throughout their ordeal, the family of Rachel O'Reilly have had to cope with their daughter and sister's killing while details of the case were being aired almost on a daily basis in print and broadcast. On the Late Late Show three weeks ago, Rose Callely spoke at her distress earlier that week when one front-page news story in a daily tabloid reported that the DPP's office was not bringing charges in relation to Rachel's death.

Some experts have expressed concern at some of the reporting on the murder case. Speaking on RTE radio last year, Ken Murphy, the director of the Law Society, said it was possible that some aspects of the coverage of the case by the tabloid media could, in fact, jeopardise a future prosecution in the case.

A further twist in the long-running story emerged just a fortnight ago, when this newspaper reported that gardai had discovered that threats had been made to seriously harm Joe O'Reilly. Garda sources told the Sunday Tribune that the threats had come from "a person known to Joe O'Reilly". Whether Joe O'Reilly felt threatened or not, he did not ask for garda protection.

The latest, and certainly most significant, development in the entire process occurred just last week. After much speculation about what the outcome would be of what charges could be supported from the massive file prepared by investigating gardai, the DPP initiated charges last week in the case. An angry crowd jeered as Joe O'Reilly arrived at Swords court at 11am last Friday morning. He had been arrested just an hour earlier, at a house at Riversdale Crescent in Co Louth, and brought from there to Balbriggan garda station.

He was charged in court with his wife's murder and remanded in custody to appear before Cloverhill district court next Friday.