A father left a bloodstained note apologising for how he murdered his wife and three children, but claimed he had no choice.
Alan Hawe, a primary school vice-principal, used knives, a hatchet and his bare hands to kill his wife Clodagh, 39, and their children Liam, 14, Niall, 11, and Ryan, six, before finally killing himself in August last year.
“I’m sorry for how I murdered them all but I had no other way,” he wrote, according to the Irish Daily Star.
It emerged yesterday the 40-year-old killed his family after realising his marriage was failing.
Hawe had experienced a recent “fall from grace” which The Irish Sun learned to be over a “sexual matter”.
The last day is psychotherapist saw him, in June 2016, he said Hawe had been “stressed”.
Psychotherapist David McConnell told the inquest Hawe had wept and said, “People think of me as a pillar of the community. If only they knew.”
Psychiatrist Harry Kennedy, who never had direct dealings with Hawe, said the vice-principal had a “severe depressive episode with psychotic symptoms”.
However, Clodagh’s family believe it was a calculated mass murder. They maintain Hawe meticulously planned the slaughter rather than experience a catastrophic breakdown.
“We are aware that he was concerned at his imminent fall from that position and the breakdown of his marriage,” Clodagh’s sister Jacqueline Connolly and mum Mary Coll said in a statement.
“While the psychiatrist has attempted as best he could to create a retrospective diagnosis based on items and records, his GP who knew him for five years said he never displayed any signs of depression.”
Hawe had transferred thousands of euros to his own account in advance, cleared his planned murder path of furniture and laid the family’s financial files on the kitchen table during the massacre.
