Mark Nash is serving life sentences in Ireland for four murders committed within five months in 1997. In March of that year two women who lived in sheltered housing for psychiatric patients at Grangegorman, in Dublin's north inner city, were stabbed to death in their beds. In August he killed Catherine and Carl Doyle, a young married couple, at their home in Co Roscommon, and badly injured a third person in the house.
He was arrested the next day and, while being questioned about Roscommon, said he had also killed the two women in Dublin. By then another man, Dean Lyons, a homeless heroin user with a learning disability, had already confessed to the Grangegorman killings and was in custody charged with murder. Nash withdrew his admission within weeks. He was convicted of the Roscommon murders in 1998, but for more than a decade no one was tried for Grangegorman. The charge against Lyons was dropped in 1998, and he died in 2000. In 2009 new DNA tests found the blood of both Grangegorman victims on a velvet jacket gardaí had seized from Nash in 1997. A jury convicted him in April 2015.
Nash was born in Co Mayo in 1973, The Irish Times reported in 1998 and again in 2015. He was an only child. About a year after his birth his mother went back to England and settled in the Bradley area of Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, where he grew up. He went to a local primary school and then to All Saints, a Catholic high school in the town. His grandparents remained in Mayo; he told one partner that his grandmother lived in Ballina, and he had visited them before he moved to Ireland. Some court reports in 2015 described him as originally from England, and in 1997 a court report called him originally from Leeds. He is a British citizen.
According to The Irish Times, he came into contact with soft drugs at a young age. He left home at 18 and moved through a series of flats and bedsits, mixing with petty criminals and drug dealers. His criminal record in England began in 1990, when he was given a light sentence for assaulting a young woman in Huddersfield. A garda witness told the 2015 sentencing hearing that his English convictions included assault occasioning actual bodily harm to a woman, theft, handling stolen goods, driving while disqualified, driving without insurance and failing to stop after a collision.
In 1995 he left Huddersfield, apparently after threats from a local criminal, and moved to Leeds, where he again ran into trouble. In October 1996 he moved to Dublin with his partner, who was then heavily pregnant. Their daughter was born in Ireland the following month.
The couple rented a flat on Prussia Street in Dublin's north inner city, close to Grangegorman. Nash found work with a sales company, selling advertising space on bus shelters. His partner worked shifts at Eddie Rocket's, a diner on O'Connell Street.
At the 2015 trial she agreed with defense counsel that he was a fantasist, and said he lied "not just to me but to everyone." She told the jury that early in 1997 he began showering as often as three times a day, something he had not done before, and that after seeing a television report on the Grangegorman killings he remarked on what kind of place they had moved to. The relationship ended in the spring of 1997. Nash left the Prussia Street flat in May, though he kept access to his daughter.
In April 1997 he met a young woman from Blanchardstown at the Vatican nightclub in Dublin. She later told gardaí that he said he was from Leeds and that he had a daughter. She had given birth to a son that March. They began seeing each other, and she moved in with him; by August they were living in a flat on Clonliffe Road in Drumcondra. She was the younger sister of Catherine Doyle. She survived his attack in August 1997.
Sylvia Sheils was born on November 29, 1938, the youngest of four children. Her sister, Stella Nolan, described her to The Irish Times in 2015 as the most talented of them, lively, fun and beautiful, with "the most beautiful blue eyes." She passed the civil service examination, coming first in Ireland as her sister believed, and spent about 20 years in the civil service as a draughtsman in the Valuation Office before taking early retirement. She had been educated at Loreto Abbey in Dalkey and Loreto Convent in Kilkenny. Her family's statement to the court described a well-read woman who loved music, played chess and followed politics and current affairs; it called her peace-loving and gentle, a woman who was never violent.
Her mental health declined after her mother, Áine, died in 1964. TheJournal.ie reported from the trial that she was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1980. She lived alone in a flat for a time, then entered Grangegorman, where for a period she kept her job and commuted to her office. She moved to Orchard View in 1994. She and Stella used to meet for coffee at the Kylemore Café on O'Connell Street; their last phone call was a few days before she died. Stella later said she was furious that her sister's sheltered home had no alarm or buzzer.
Mary Callanan was 61. Much less is on the public record about her life. She was single, and like Sylvia Sheils she had lived with serious mental illness for many years. When the case finally came to sentencing in 2015, the court heard that gardaí had been unable to find any of her relatives. The Sheils family's statement spoke for both women, describing them as vulnerable people whose lives had been as valuable to them as anyone's, and the judge offered his condolences to the families of both.
The two women shared a house at Orchard View, sheltered accommodation for outpatients attached to St Brendan's Psychiatric Hospital in Grangegorman, Dublin 7. A third woman lived in the house and slept in the third bedroom; she was unharmed.
On the evening of March 6, Nash went to a table quiz with colleagues from his sales company at the GPO on O'Connell Street. A receptionist from the company later said he was "quite drunk" that night. Photographs taken at the quiz show his black pinstriped velvet jacket hanging over the back of his chair; RTÉ's Prime Time broadcast them in 2015. After midnight he came into Eddie Rocket's with two colleagues, walked with his partner to a shop to buy cigarettes, and then walked home toward Prussia Street. She finished work and got home at about 7 a.m., and found him in bed.
That morning, March 7, both women were found dead in their bedrooms. They had been stabbed many times with knives taken from the kitchen. The State Pathologist, John Harbison, wrote that their injuries were outside his experience in 26 years. Senior gardaí, Conor Lally of The Irish Times later reported, feared the killer was sexually depraved and would kill again. Sylvia Sheils's family learned of her death when Stella heard a news report on the radio and suspected her sister was one of the victims; a cousin then contacted the authorities.
The investigation drew heavy resources but no real suspect for months. Appeals on RTÉ's Crimecall programme helped identify two men who had been burgling homes in the area. In June 1997 they told gardaí they had heard Lyons suggest he was involved in the killings.
Lyons was 23 at the time of the murders. He was the fourth of six children and grew up in Tallaght, in west Dublin. He had what Lally described as a moderate general learning disability; he tested with an IQ of 70 in sixth class. Teachers remembered him as polite and affable and as craving attention, good or bad. He had made up stories before, feigning a heart attack and claiming responsibility for a fire he had not started. By 1997 he was injecting heroin, sleeping rough in the city center and committing crime almost daily to pay for it.
On the morning of July 26, 1997, gardaí found him at a Salvation Army hostel and asked him to come to the Bridewell Garda station. He had been overheard talking at the hostel about "the murders." According to a later Supreme Court judgment, he went voluntarily, was arrested in the course of the day and was questioned in four interviews. By early afternoon he had broken down and said he killed the women; a signed statement of admission came from an interview that ran late into the night. He gave an uncertain account of climbing a wall and entering through a window. He also told gardaí he had thrown a key into a hedge on the way out. A key had been found in a garden near Orchard View some days after the killings, but it turned out to belong to the third resident of the house.
On July 27 he was charged with Mary Callanan's murder and remanded in custody; a second charge for Sylvia Sheils was expected. He repeated his admissions to prison officers, to his family and to his own lawyers. His family never believed him and considered him a fantasist. One of the detectives at the unrecorded interviews had doubts and called him a "Walter Mitty," the Supreme Court later noted, but his concerns were not acted on.
Catherine Doyle was 28 and her husband, Carl Doyle, was 29. They were a Dublin couple who had moved to Caran, Ballintober, near Castlerea in Co Roscommon, under a rural resettlement scheme. They had four children, aged between 2 and 8.
On August 15, 1997, Nash, his partner and their children traveled from Dublin to stay with her sister for two nights. That evening the adults drank and smoked cannabis. According to the account Nash later gave gardaí, he spent about 45 minutes in the toilet, during which he felt a desire to kill come over him like a "cloud." He armed himself in the kitchen with knives and an iron lever used to open the fuel cap of the range cooker.
Carl Doyle had fallen asleep in a chair downstairs. Nash stabbed him in the chest. Upstairs he attacked the two sisters. Catherine Doyle was stabbed 16 times and died of her wounds. Her sister was knocked unconscious, pushed down the stairs and left with a depressed skull fracture; she survived by pretending to be dead and then reached a neighbor's house to raise the alarm. Nash told gardaí that when he was in the garden and could have gone after her, the "cloud" lifted and he wanted only to get away. The Doyles' four children were in the house throughout, as were Nash's own baby daughter and the infant son of his partner. His daughter, then about ten months old, spoke publicly about it as a young woman in 2015.
Nash fled across the fields. He broke into two houses for clothes and a bicycle and cycled toward Castlerea, Dunmore and Tuam. At about 7:30 p.m. on August 16, a Garda patrol car on the Tuam Road at Two Mile Ditch, outside Galway city, saw a man pushing a bicycle who matched the description of a man wanted for a serious assault in Roscommon. One of the gardaí, Caroline McKenna, testified in 2015 that when she asked his name he said he was Nash and told her to stay away or he would kill her. He reached into his pocket for what turned out to be a hammer, dropped the bicycle and ran. A van knocked him down; he got up and smashed its window. He ran into a lane and pulled an elderly woman into her porch before her son pushed him back out onto the street. Garda Gerry Curtain arrested him at 7:45 p.m. and took him to Mill Street Garda station in Galway. A student garda in the car later testified that Curtain struck Nash with a baton during the arrest; Curtain said he did not recall that.
At Mill Street, while being questioned about Roscommon, Nash volunteered that he had also killed the two women at Grangegorman. He signed an admission. He gave details of the injuries that, according to The Irish Times, only the killer would have known, and he drew maps of the area and the scene. On the way to Mountjoy Prison he pointed out the Orchard View house to gardaí. In the weeks after his arrest he also wrote letters; one, sent to his injured partner at Beaumont Hospital with money enclosed, said he "had done it before."
The admission threw the Grangegorman inquiry into confusion. Detectives believed the case was already solved, since Lyons was in custody. On August 15, the day before Nash's arrest, Lyons had told his own lawyer during a prison visit that another man, whom he named, had done the killings while he was present. On August 27 the Garda Commissioner appointed an assistant commissioner, James McHugh, to examine the two conflicting confessions, with Derek Byrne and Martin Donnellan also on the review team. In September 1997 Nash withdrew his admission through his solicitor, describing it as the ramblings of an unstable man and setting out arguments against it in detail. On October 10 the original investigation team sent a file recommending that the charge against Lyons go ahead and that he also be charged with Sylvia Sheils's murder. A review that October could not recommend which confession to believe.
A consultant psychiatrist engaged by the prosecution, Dr Adrian Grounds, raised strong doubts about the reliability of Lyons's admissions in February 1998. After testing, Lyons was found to be in the top 5 percent of the population for suggestibility. On March 25, 1998, McHugh recommended that the charges be dropped, writing that he conscientiously believed Lyons did not commit the murders. On April 29, 1998, the Director of Public Prosecutions directed that the case be discontinued, and the murder charge was formally withdrawn. Lyons had spent about nine months on remand. He did not formally retract his admissions until 1999.
Nash was charged with the murders of Carl and Catherine Doyle and with causing grievous bodily harm to their sister-in-law. He appeared in Galway District Court and was remanded to Dublin; at a brief hearing in September 1997 he consented to a further month on remand and said nothing. In February 1998 the District Court in Galway sent him forward for trial at the Central Criminal Court.
The case was heard by a jury at the Central Criminal Court in October 1998. The Irish Times reported that the jury heard his account of the "cloud" and that he had also admitted the Grangegorman killings. He was convicted of both murders and given two life sentences, with a further term for the grievous bodily harm; the Irish Times later gave that term as 10 years. The 1998 press reports do not state his plea. He has been in custody without a break since his arrest in August 1997.
In 1998 two detectives from Leeds visited him in an Irish prison in connection with the 1996 death of Dorothy Wood, 93, who lived alone in the Fartown area of Huddersfield. British authorities discounted Nash as a suspect in that case, and another man was convicted of it, though that conviction was later overturned.
With Lyons cleared and Nash's admission withdrawn, Grangegorman was left without a prosecution. The two confessions were themselves a serious obstacle. According to the Irish Times timeline published at his 2015 trial, a decision made by the Director of Public Prosecutions in July 1999 to charge Nash was reversed that October. In December 1999 Derek Byrne interviewed Nash at the Bridewell; Nash said he did not trust gardaí and thought it better to stay silent because his words could be distorted, though he said the guards were courteous.
Lyons moved to England. He died of a heroin overdose in Manchester on September 12, 2000, a day after his release from Strangeways Prison, where he had served a short unrelated sentence. He had agreed to cooperate with a new investigation into the murders.
In 2001, while held at Arbour Hill Prison in Dublin, Nash applied for a transfer to a prison in Britain and was refused. The inquest into the two women's deaths opened at the Dublin City Coroner's Court in March 1998 and was adjourned 20 times before resuming in October 2002; Nash refused to attend but his lawyers did. Michael Finucane, the solicitor for Sylvia Sheils's family, repeatedly called for a state inquiry. The Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, at first questioned the need for one, but in March 2002 a Garda working group was set up to examine the affair. In February 2005 a new team of detectives at the Bridewell was brought in to break the deadlock, and the Garda described the inquiry as open and live. That same month the Garda formally apologized to Lyons's family, accepting that he had no involvement in the murders.
In April 2006 the government established a Commission of Investigation into his case, with George Birmingham SC as its sole member. Before the report was published, a draft leaked to the press in August 2006; Stella Nolan learned some details of her sister's death only from a newspaper and was deeply upset. The leak was later traced to Detective Sergeant Robbie McNulty, who had led the questioning of Lyons and believed the draft vindicated him. He was convicted and fined 5,000 euro in July 2009, with a suspended 12-month sentence.
The report, published in September 2006, found that gardaí had not framed Lyons. It concluded that he was a highly suggestible fantasist who picked up details of the crime from the questions put to him and worked them into a false admission, apparently to attract attention. RTÉ News reported that the commission found he had been asked inappropriate questions, that some gardaí doubted his credibility but did not tell the Director of Public Prosecutions, and that the Garda written records of the case were incomplete and possibly misleading. Birmingham described the decision to consult the prosecutor on charging Lyons as "extremely unfortunate" but a proper and conscientious one, the Supreme Court later summarized.
On August 16, 1997, the day after the Roscommon killings, Nash's partner had given a statement to Detective Sergeant Dominic Hayes at Beaumont Hospital and given gardaí permission to search the Clonliffe Road flat. Hayes seized a black pinstriped velvet jacket, two pairs of boots including black leather Caterpillar boots, and a suit, and on August 18 handed them to the State's Forensic Science Laboratory.
A forensic scientist there, Dr Fiona Thornton, examined the jacket by eye and found no bloodstain; she did not use a microscope. A stain on a button of the lower sleeve could not be developed into a DNA profile with the techniques of 1997, when a sample roughly the size of a 50 cent coin was needed. The laboratory kept the button and its thread; the Garda kept the jacket. Detective Garda Dominic Cox, the exhibits officer, held the exhibits at the Bridewell until October 2003, when he handed the keys to Detective Garda Alan Bailey, who later headed the Garda cold case unit.
During a cold case review the jacket went back to the laboratory, now Forensic Science Ireland. The prosecution told the jury in 2015 that new tests in July 2009 produced a "spectacular breakthrough." Scientists described the work in more detail. On September 24, 2009, Dr Brid McBride examined the right sleeve and found a small, hard brown particle inside the seam; a presumptive test gave a faint positive result for blood. On September 29 Dr Linda Williams received threads and buttons from the right cuff and extracted DNA. The threads gave a profile matching Sylvia Sheils, and the particle from the seam gave a profile matching Mary Callanan.
In October 2009, about 12 years after the killings and while still serving life for Roscommon, Nash was charged with the murders of both women.
Nash tried to stop the trial. He went to the High Court seeking to prohibit it, arguing that the delay in charging him, the publicity around the case and the unavailability of witnesses, Lyons among them, created a real risk of an unfair trial. He also sought damages for the delay. The High Court (Mr Justice Moriarty) dismissed the prohibition claim in 2012 and, in a separate judgment, the damages claim. He appealed both.
The Supreme Court decided the prohibition appeal on December 10, 2014, and gave its reasons on January 29, 2015. The five judges held that a breach of the right to a timely trial does not by itself prevent a trial going ahead; there must be some serious factor that outweighs society's interest in a trial, and the court was not persuaded there was one. The trial could proceed. It had already opened.
The trial began at the Central Criminal Court in Dublin in January 2015 before Mr Justice Carroll Moran and a jury. Nash pleaded not guilty. Brendan Grehan SC led the prosecution, with Úna Ní Raifeartaigh SC; Hugh Hartnett SC and Patrick McGrath SC appeared for the defense. It ran for 48 days and heard 71 witnesses.
The prosecution relied on three strands: Nash's admissions in 1997, which it said amounted to 13 separate confessions; the Caterpillar boots, which it said matched bloody prints at the scene; and the DNA on the jacket he wore on the night of the killings. Nash is right-handed, and both profiles came from the right sleeve. Grehan argued that the letter in which Nash withdrew his admission had added details that were not in his original statement, including the number of knives used, which only someone involved could have known. Nash had lived close to Orchard View, Grehan said, and had no one at home with him that night; if he was not the killer, he was the most unfortunate man.
The defense said the 1997 admissions were the product of garda questioning; McGrath called the existence of two independent confessions probably unprecedented in the history of the State. Reports of Nash's position at the time quoted him saying that his mind was disturbed when he made the admissions, that he was surprised they had been taken seriously, and that with enough knowledge he would have confessed to killing the Pope. Lyons's admissions were also put before the jury through the former assistant commissioner James McHugh and the officers who had interviewed him.
The central fight was over contamination. In 1997 the jacket and the heavily bloodstained clothing and bedding from the scene had been examined in the same laboratory room, about six weeks apart. Dr Maureen Smith, a retired forensic scientist, agreed that there had been no written cleaning procedures in 1997 and that exhibits were not then sealed as they moved between stages, but gave her opinion that contamination was not a danger in this case. The defense called Dr Philip Avenele, as The Irish Times spelled his name, a forensic scientist who had worked on the Stephen Lawrence case, who said he would have expected to find more blood on the jacket if it had been present at the killings, and that he could not say whether the DNA was more likely to have been deposited then or during later handling. Grehan told the jury that the defense theory required DNA to have spread around the laboratory like "snow in a blizzard."
The jury of six men and five women began deliberating after the judge's charge in mid-April. On April 20, 2015, after just under four hours, it returned unanimous verdicts of guilty on both counts.
Murder carries a mandatory life sentence in Ireland, and Mr Justice Moran imposed life on each count. Hartnett asked that the sentences be backdated to September 1999, the date of the original direction to charge Nash. The judge refused: the Supreme Court had found, and he also found, that there had been no prosecutorial delay, so backdating would not be appropriate. The sentences ran from that day. He excused the jurors from jury service for life.
Suzanne Nolan, Sylvia Sheils's niece, read the victim impact statement written by her mother, Stella, who was by then 81. It said the murders had affected three families: Sylvia's, Mary's and that of Lyons, the innocent man imprisoned for nine months. "For 18 years, justice has been delayed and justice delayed is justice denied," it read. Stella Nolan wrote that she could forgive the sinner but not the sin, and that her sister's life had been as valuable to her as anyone's is to them. She said outside court that families of murder victims got no help from anyone. Nash sat hunched in the dock, looking down, and was taken away by prison officers.
Nash spent about 15 years at Arbour Hill Prison in Dublin, where his lawyers said he was a trusted prisoner; The Irish Times reported in 2015 that he had six disciplinary actions in nearly two decades. After the 2015 sentence he was sent to Mountjoy and then to Midlands Prison in Portlaoise. He said he was being threatened by other prisoners and asked to go back to Arbour Hill. He refused food from June 9, lost a great deal of weight and was taken to hospital; a psychiatric report said he was suicidal. On August 4, 2015, the President of the High Court, Mr Justice Nicholas Kearns, dismissed his challenge, finding nothing to suggest his life or safety was in imminent danger and that his distress appeared to stem from an adjustment disorder after the Grangegorman verdict.
His damages claim went back to the Supreme Court. In April 2016 his lawyers argued that the delay in charging him had locked him out of applying for parole; they said that had he been tried in 2002, he could already have applied. On October 24, 2016, the Supreme Court, in a judgment by Mr Justice Frank Clarke, dismissed the claim. Damages might in principle be available for breach of the right to a timely trial, the court said, but no culpable delay by the State had been established in this case. It also dismissed the prosecution's cross-appeal against an order giving Nash part of his costs. On July 13, 2017, it refused his application to set that judgment aside, while correcting some factual details about how the jacket and button had been kept.
His appeal against conviction was heard by the Court of Appeal over four days in November 2017. Hartnett called the case unusual and "in some senses extraordinary." The defense argued that the admissions had been made while Nash was in unlawful custody, that the jacket and boots had been unlawfully seized, that the DNA evidence was unreliable because of contamination, and that the judge's charge on Lyons's statements was flawed. On May 8, 2018, Mr Justice Alan Mahon, sitting with Mr Justice John Edwards and Mr Justice Michael White, dismissed the appeal on all grounds. There were "certainly conflicts in the evidence" between the scientists, the court said, but the evidence neither proved nor disproved contamination and was not so weak that the case should have been withdrawn from the jury; the jury had been entitled to conclude that the DNA was on the jacket from the time of the murders. The court called it "an entirely fair trial which produced a verdict well justified by the evidence." On October 24, 2018, the Supreme Court refused him leave to appeal further.
Nash then took his complaint about delay to the European Court of Human Rights, lodging an application on January 4, 2018. The United Kingdom, as his country of citizenship, was invited to comment and declined. A committee of the court unanimously declared the application inadmissible because it had been lodged more than six months after the final Irish decision, the Supreme Court's damages ruling of October 2016; his later application to reopen that ruling did not restart the time limit. The decision was published on April 30, 2020.
In April 2020 Nash was held at Midlands Prison in Portlaoise, serving four life sentences for murder. No later court ruling, Parole Board decision or news report about him had appeared by October 2026. Alan Bailey, the retired detective, said in an interview with YorkshireLive that he could not see how Nash would ever be eligible for parole given his record.
The wrongful charging of Lyons led to the Commission of Investigation and to the Garda's apology to his family, and the Gill Books description of Bailey's book calls it a major miscarriage of justice. In 2015 The Irish Times reported that if Nash's 1997 confession had stood and he had been convicted then, he would by the time of the verdict have been 18 years into a sentence for those killings.
Alan Bailey, who had worked on the original investigation and later led the Garda cold case unit, told the story in The Grangegorman Murders, published by Gill Books in July 2015. In his interview with YorkshireLive, after the European court decision, he said he felt it was closure of a saga that had lasted 23 years. His daughter, raised in Britain by her mother, learned at 14 who her father was; in 2015, at 18, she told an interviewer that she had assumed he was absent or dead, and asked what kind of father would do that to his child.
Proven by final conviction: the murders of Catherine and Carl Doyle and the grievous bodily harm to a third person (1998), and the murders of Sylvia Sheils and Mary Callanan (2015, upheld on appeal).
Contested at trial and on appeal, and resolved against Nash: whether his 1997 admissions were genuine and whether the DNA on the jacket was the result of laboratory contamination. The jury rejected contamination and the Court of Appeal found the verdict well justified.
Cleared: Dean Lyons, who confessed falsely to the Grangegorman murders, had no involvement, as the Garda accepted in 2005 and the Commission of Investigation found in 2006.
Not attributed to Nash: the 1996 killing of Dorothy Wood in Huddersfield. British authorities discounted him.
Details that vary between sources: the spelling of the Grangegorman victims' names (Sheils, Shiels or Shields; Callanan or Callinan); Sylvia Sheils's age (59 in sentencing reports, 60 in trial reports, 58 in one 2006 report); where Nash came from (born in Mayo by most accounts, described as from Leeds or England in others); the date of his arrest (August 16 in 2015 court reports, August 17 in a 1998 report); the term for the grievous bodily harm (10 or 8 years); the month in 1999 of the direction to charge him (September or October, or a July decision reversed in October); the date of the Grangegorman charge (October 10 or 12, 2009); and the date of the DNA breakthrough (July 2009 in the prosecution opening, late September 2009 in the scientists' evidence).
1973: Mark Nash is born in Co Mayo; about a year later his mother takes him to Huddersfield, England.
1990: first conviction in England, for assaulting a young woman in Huddersfield.
1995: moves to Leeds.
October 1996: moves to Dublin with his pregnant partner; their daughter is born in November.
March 6, 1997: attends a table quiz at the GPO wearing a black velvet jacket.
March 7, 1997: Sylvia Sheils and Mary Callanan are found dead at Orchard View, Grangegorman.
April 1997: meets Catherine Doyle's sister in Dublin; they later move in together.
July 26 and 27, 1997: Lyons confesses and is charged with Mary Callanan's murder.
August 15 to 16, 1997: Nash kills Catherine and Carl Doyle at Ballintober, Co Roscommon, and badly injures a third person.
August 16, 1997: arrested outside Galway city; admits the Grangegorman killings at Mill Street Garda station. Gardaí seize his jacket in Dublin.
August 27, 1997: an assistant commissioner is appointed to examine the two confessions.
September 1997: Nash withdraws his Grangegorman admission.
February 1998: sent forward for trial on the Roscommon charges; a psychiatrist questions Lyons's admissions.
April 29, 1998: the charge against Lyons is withdrawn after about nine months on remand.
October 1998: Nash is convicted of the Doyle murders and given two life sentences.
July to October 1999: a decision to charge Nash with the Grangegorman murders is made and then reversed.
September 12, 2000: Lyons dies in Manchester.
2001: Nash's request for a transfer to a British prison is refused.
March 2002: Garda working group set up.
February 2005: new detective team assigned; the Garda apologizes to the Lyons family.
April 2006: Commission of Investigation established under George Birmingham SC; report published September 2006.
2009: DNA of both Grangegorman victims is found on the jacket sleeve.
October 2009: Nash is charged with the Grangegorman murders.
2012: the High Court refuses to stop the trial and dismisses his damages claim.
January 2015: trial opens at the Central Criminal Court; on January 29 the Supreme Court gives reasons for refusing to stop it.
April 20, 2015: jury convicts; two further life sentences, not backdated.
August 4, 2015: High Court refuses his bid to move back to Arbour Hill.
July 2015: Alan Bailey's book The Grangegorman Murders is published.
October 24, 2016: Supreme Court dismisses his damages claim.
November 2017: Court of Appeal hears his conviction appeal.
May 8, 2018: Court of Appeal dismisses the appeal.
October 24, 2018: Supreme Court refuses leave to appeal.
April 30, 2020: European Court of Human Rights decision declaring his application inadmissible is published; he is held at Midlands Prison.
October 19, 2026: no later ruling or report found.