Jim Callaly was there too. "He said this was the way she must have been murdered. I nearly got sick, I was going to pass out."

Paul Callaly stayed and watched Joe continue the re-enactment. "He moved to the bathroom. There was a drop of blood on the floor. He [Joe] said, 'He [the killer] must have stopped here and heard her making noise, groaning'. Then he moved back outside the bedroom and dropped on one knee and enacted another blow."

Denise Callaly had been outside. She came down to the bedroom. "He was on one knee, with his fist clenched and he hit down into the ground, like he was hitting Rachel on the ground." Denise Callaly broke down in the witness box.

Jackie Connor gave similar evidence from two weeks later. On 25 October, she attended Adam's birthday at Joe's mother's house in Dunleer. There, Joe told her Rachel came to him in a dream and said, 'Why are you doing this?'

Two days later, at the house in Baldarragh, Jackie went down to Rachel's bedroom. "I was trying to make sense of it. Joe was in the hall. He said in the dream it was like he was doing it. He enacted two or three whacks. He turned towards the bathroom and said, 'They heard gurgling, came back and gave her another whack at the door [of the bedroom].'

He said they held her down."

There was further evidence of re-enactments performed by Joe for Rachel's friends Fidelma Geraghty and Sarah Harmon on two other separate occasions around the same time.

White ruled that the re-enactments didn't display any "secret knowledge" known only to the killer. Therefore, its inclusion in the trial proper would be prejudicial rather than probative. He ruled it would be unsafe to put the evidence before the jury.

Back on the day of the murder, a car resembling Joe's passed Murphy's Quarry at 9.59am, going away from the family home. At 10.07am, he sent a text to Rachel. "Hope you and the boys slept ok. Wish Jackie happy birthday from me. xx."

The affectionate tone was at complete variance with the contempt in which he wrote about her in the emails to his sister a few months previously. But now, according to the jury's verdict, he was communicating with a dead or dying woman rather than the living person whom he regarded as an impediment to his future plans. In a letter he would place in her coffin, and a message he was to leave on her mobile answering service a month later, the same affectionate tone was present.

By 10.38am on the day, Joe's phone was bouncing off a mast in the north inner city.

Soon after, his and Derek Quearney's cars were caught on CCTV leaving Broadstone bus garage. He travelled from there back to his office in the Bluebell Industrial Estate.

As he entered Viacom, the receptionist Michelle Slattery noticed him. "His face was puffy, blotchy red, eyes the same, " she told the court. "He looked like he had been crying. I said, 'You look like shit.' He shrugged his shoulders and said, 'Ah Jesus.'" Aftermath Rose Callaly was the first person on the scene. At around 1.20pm, she was alerted by Joe that Rachel hadn't collected Adam from Tots United. She arrived at the house around 2pm.

The patio door was open, which was unusual. "And the curtains were drawn. I had never seen that before, " Rose Callaly told the court.

Inside, she noticed that the sink tap was running quite strong. There were clothes folded on the kitchen table. Other items looked like they had been "placed on the floor", she testified. She walked through the house, calling her daughter's name. She looked in the boys' room. She came out and noticed something at the door to Rachel's room.

"As soon as I saw her I knew that she was dead and I knew she was murdered, " Rose Callaly told the court.

She knelt down beside her daughter. Forensic evidence would show that the knees of her trousers were stained in Rachel's blood. "I talked to her. I felt her arm but it was hard, " she remembered.

Joe arrived soon after. En route, he rang Rachel at 1.45pm and left a message on her answering service. "Me again, I spoke to your mother. I've been crying, you have me worried. I'm just coming onto the M1 now." It is unclear as to why he would be crying, just half an hour after hearing that Rachel hadn't collected Luke.

At the scene, Joe moved a box that was near the body, later suggesting to a garda that he hoped he hadn't ruined the crime scene.

In the weeks that followed he made a number of strange statements to some of Rachel's friends concerning a murder weapon and the time she died. They were unusual things to say but in no way incriminating. A letter he left in Rachel's coffin, one of a number placed there by family and friends, was slightly more pointed.

"This is the hardest letter I've ever to write for reasons only we know. Rachel, forgive me. Two words, one sentence. I'll say them forever."

He asked Pelley to lie on his behalf. "I told gardai it was just a sexual affair. Joe told me I should say that. If it was a relationship it might be seen as a motive to kill Rachel, " Pelley told the court.

On 22 October, O'Reilly and Rose Callaly appeared on The Late, Late Show to appeal for help in catching Rachel's killer. That evening, he left RTE separately and spent the night at Pelley's house in Rathfarnham.

He set about spreading muck. He told Rachel's parents there would be rumours he had an affair and that they had abused their daughter. He pointed the gardai in the direction of men he had fired at work. He brought Rachel's half-brother Thomas Lowe into the picture. (Blood matching Lowe's was found on the washing machine in Lambay View. He cut himself two months prior to the murder while building a deck. The gardai ruled him out as a suspect early on. ) He told a neighbour, James McNally: "You're a suspect, I'm a suspect, we're all suspects."

Then there was Naomi Gargan, whose daughter attended the same creche as Adam.

She met Joe at Rachel's funeral and offered to help with collecting the kids. On 9 November, he asked her to meet him in the Little Chef carpark in Swords. "I'm going to be arrested, " he told her. "Don't worry, you didn't have a murderer in your house. They are saying I had an affair. You might be targeted."

Everybody could be targeted in Joe's mind.

Everybody was a suspect. Everybody, including the Callaly parents, could be victimised along with him. There was safety in numbers.

He wasn't as clever as he thought. The email he sent to his friend Ciaran Gallagher on the morning in question is instructive.

He didn't cancel a lunch appointment he knew he wouldn't keep. That might leave a trail. He told Gallagher he would be "out and about most of the morning and in poor phone coverage areas". He didn't want to be contacted by phone, yet he obviously didn't know the extent to which phones could be mapped.

At 9.52am, Gallagher texted O'Reilly with a reply. The text was routed through the Murphy's Quarry mast near the O'Reilly home, putting him in the vicinity of the crime.

He was obviously reluctant to use his phone that morning. Between 7.30am and 1.15pm he made only one outward call (to Quearney at 10.04am for seven seconds) while receiving 11.

It was as if he thought refraining from initiating a call himself would be sufficient to eliminate his phone use as incriminating. He told Pelley to minimise their affair. Yet on the day in question, there were 18 communications between the pair.

On 4 November, exactly a month after the murder, O'Reilly left a message on Rachel's mobile answering service. "Hi Rach, it's me Joe. I'm very sorry for the early morning call. This time a month ago you were probably doing what I'm doing now, getting the kids ready for school. Now, you're so cold.

"The sun was out. It was a normal day.

You had less than two hours to live. I don't want to live without you and that's the truth.

I miss you and love you.

"I just want to go back in time and say I love you. Sleep well and rest in peace. I have to get the boys ready. I love you. I miss you. Chat later. Bye."

What does it say about his state of mind?

Regret? Bereaved? Playing games with the cops?

O'Reilly was arrested twice, a month after the murder and again in March 2006. On both occasions he exercised, for the greater part, his right to silence.

The case against him was circumstantial.

The most damning evidence was from the cell site anaysis that tracked his mobile phone on the day of the murder. Once that was elicited, most of the other circumstantial evidence hung from it. The email exchanges with his sister the previous June formed a large part of the motive. His alibi, Derek Quearney, was shaky as to the time he first saw Joe at Broadstone that morning.

O'Reilly said he arrived at the depot at 9am. He couldn't locate the man he said was working there, Damien Tully, but he located Tully's van and mobile phone. As it turns out, Tully had been reassigned to another job that day. His replacement, Noel Pratchett, told the court he arrived at the depot at 10-10.15am.

By that account, O'Reilly was hanging around the depot for an hour, without attempting to track an employee he suspected of dossing on the job. O'Reilly provided a street-by-street guide as to his journey to work that morning. He didn't specify any street on the route he says he took to Broadstone.

The prosecution also suggested money was a possible motive. The couple's home was insured against the mortgage in a standard manner. In the event of one dying, the other would receive roughly the cost of the remaining mortgage, around 216,000 at the time of Rachel's death.

O'Reilly's defence counsel Patrick Gageby, in a well-thought-out speech, pointed out that his client's guilt simply hadn't been proved beyond a reasonable doubt. He blamed the media for creating a climate of suspicion against his client. The prosecution, he said, were trying to "marry a little science with a lot of suspicion". The jury disagreed.

Altered lives On Friday, Joe O'Reilly spent his last night as a free man. His two sons have been staying in Derry since before the trial began. If O'Reilly's conviction stands, in all likelihood the boys will be adults the next time they meet their father without constraints. How they remember their mother may well be dependant on who cares for them through the remainder of their childhood.

On Friday, when the jury retired to deliberate, superintendent Joe Kelly requested O'Reilly's bail be revoked. He told judge Barry White the children were outside the jurisdiction and there were fears that Joe might flee. He also said O'Reilly had made comments to the effect that he would commit suicide if convicted. The judge refused the request.

Ann O'Reilly now live