A PARTY of burglars who broke into a house in Askeaton in May 2015 made a grim discovery that sent them straight to the local Garda station.
Expecting to find lucrative scrap metal to steal and sell, the badly shaken group instead found dead bodies.
Inspector Gearóid Thompson was the man they asked to speak to.
“I went into the public office. I saw a family that I would know locally – the leader of the family and four young males belonging to him. They were very upset. They were blessing themselves and had holy pictures. I brought him into a room. The story he started to tell me was amazing,” Inspector Thompson recalled.
The four men registered how they were confronted in the house by the dead bodies of Julia Holmes and her husband, Limerick man Thomas Ruttle.
“Burglars finding two dead bodies and reporting it to us before our knowledge,” Inspector Thompson recalled. “Could we have predicted who this woman would become?”
The veteran Limerick Garda is one of many interviewed for new RTÉ documentary Swindlers, a true-crime series, the first episode of which aired last Wednesday and is now available on the RTÉ Player.
The three-part series tells the extraordinary and shocking stories of some of Ireland’s most renowned con-artists and white-collar criminals through the voices of the victims, friends, and colleagues they deceived, the journalists that covered the cases, and the law enforcers who fought for justice to be served.
The first episode revealed the shocking story of international con artist, bigamist, and sweet-talking criminal, Tyrone woman Julia Holmes.
Julia swindled millions of pounds from multiple victims across three continents over four decades using 40 aliases. She spent time in prison in Texas for fraud and was the subject of multiple criminal investigations involving the FBI, the PSNI and An Garda Síochána at the time her body was discovered in the Limerick farmhouse.