A man accused of murdering a Derry woman said he snapped and grabbed his victim's throat when she told him the child she was carrying was not his and that she was going to have an abortion.
Father-of-one Stephen Cahoon (37), of Harvey Street, Derry was giving evidence at the Central Criminal Court in his trial for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, Jean Teresa Quigley.
He admits killing the mother-of-four but has pleaded not guilty to
murdering the 30-year-old at her home at Cornshell Fields, Shantallow, Derry, on July 26, 2008.
Cahoon told the court that his mobile rang while he was staying with Ms Quigley at 3.22 that morning. Afterwards, he said, she asked him to check who had phoned him. He claimed that, when he told her it was his friend, Sandra Wilson, Ms Quigley told him to get out.
“I said, why, I’ve done nothing. I don’t want to go. You said you’d let me stay,” he told the court. “She said she’d had enough and wanted me to go. She started screaming ‘f*** off, get out’. I know I should have gone,” he said. “I said no, I want to stay here with you and the baby.”
“She started screaming, ‘It’s not f****** yours’ and that she was going to have an abortion,” he claimed. “She kept saying it.”
He said he asked her to stop, and told her that it wasn’t true.
“I just grabbed her by the throat. I wanted her to be quiet, to stop saying that,” he said. “I didn’t mean to kill her. She just riled me up. I snapped.”
He said he pressed down on her neck for about a minute with one hand.
“I didn’t think she was dead until I saw the stuff coming out of her mouth,” he said, describing it as ‘blood and frothy stuff’.
“I kneeled over the top of her. I wasn’t using my weight to hold her down,” he said, confirming to his defence barrister, Michael O’Higgins SC, that she was struggling.
“When I took my hand off, I realised she wasn’t saying anything, she wasn’t moving. I started shaking her and calling her name,” he said.
“I heard a noise coming from her mouth. I turned her over and there was more stuff coming out,” he said, adding that he wiped her mouth with a sock and tried to give her CPR.
He said that, when the CPR didn’t work, he panicked.
“I couldn’t believe she was dead. I knew it was an accident,” he said. “I thought, how could she be dead after a minute of me holding her like that. I just stood there praying that she might be alright.”
He said that after five minutes, he realised she was dead.
“I was shocked. I didn’t know what to think. What have I just done,” he said. “What can I say?”
He said he went to the toilet, dressed and left the house around 4.15am. He grabbed a key on the way out, locked the door from the outside and threw the key away. He said he walked around and sat in a park for a while before settling at a bus stop for a couple of hours.
“I just cried and tried to think was it real,” he said, explaining that he got a taxi home and fell asleep for a while, before taking a bus to Letterkenny and another to Galway.
