Killer husband rumbled by voicemail and chilling note after brutally murdering wife

Rachel O'Reilly was found brutally beaten to death in what police initially believed was a burglary gone wrong - until information surfaced about her husband Joe O'Reilly

An evil husband left a chilling note in his wife's grave after brutally murdering her.

Mother-of-two Rachel O'Reilly, 30, was harrowingly killed inside her own home in Naul, Ireland, on October 4, 2004, after dropping her kids off at school. Her lifeless body was found in a pool of blood by her devastated mother, Rose Callaly.

Tonight, Channel 5's documentary The Lie: Who Killed Rachel O'Reilly? airs on repeat and looks into the dramatic twists and turns of the police investigation that led to Rachel's husband, Joe O'Reilly, being convicted of her murder in 2007.

Officers initially believed Rachel's case was a burglary gone wrong - but bizarre behaviour from O'Reilly, such as re-enacting the murder to her family and leaving a two-word note on her buried body, drew suspicion.

O'Reilly bludgeoned his wife to death in their bedroom and then staged the scene to look like a burglary and pretended he had been at work. He left frantic messages on Rachel's answerphone in a bid to cover his tracks, then cruelly asked her mother Rose to go to his house, knowing she would find her daughter's body.

What caused concern for Rose was that her son-in-law kept acting strangely in the wake of the murder and repeatedly tried to get her family to listen to the voice message. "He kept asking us if we wanted to hear Rachel's answering machine and he put it on and when it started to play, I think he was trying to make an alibi for himself and we were looking at each other," Rose told The Sun.

"And I remember hearing Rachel's voice. I'm not mad, it's not as if I was hearing voices in my head, but I could hear her over and over again: 'Maam, he done it.' It's extraordinary." Rose had initially felt heartbroken for O'Reilly, but his answerphone insistence and other odd antics drew suspicion, particularly when he attempted to recreate the murder.

The evil killer invited Rose and Rachel's dad Jim to the family home just two weeks after the murder and began to re-enact the crime. "When he was down re-enacting the murder he was saying well he must have hit her like this and hit her like that and look at the splashes on the ceiling," said Jim on the podcast series Shattered Lives.

"He was looking at our faces and he'd say our faces were draining and I think he was getting a kick out of that. When I look back at that, how could you go through all that. It's unbelievable that he re-enacted the murder in front of (us)."

"Apparently when he got to the bathroom he said when he (the killer) got here, he could hear Rachel, and he knew she wasn't dead and he went back and finished her off," said Rose. "And that basically was true. After the inquest and all (it emerged) she hadn't died (straight away)."

Retired detective inspector Pat Marry, who was a detective sergeant stationed in Balbriggan in October 2004 when he got reports of a burglary at a house, was stunned by the "savage, cold" sight he witnessed. "It's highly unusual to see someone in the state I saw Rachel O'Reilly, having been administered such a beating," he told The Irish Mirror.

"The viciousness of the assault was a pure display of hate for this woman. If you hate someone that much you're going to know them. believed she knew who did this to her." The seasoned cop began to suspect O'Reilly when he asked him if Rachel had any enemies and if she might have been having an affair.

He recalled: "He said, 'No neither of us were having an affair'. That sparked with me, why did he say neither of us – I didn't ask about him. Then he looked me in the eye and said he did have an affair. He said, 'It's over now, I don't want anyone to know'."

Mr Marry was also convinced of O'Reilly's guilt and the manner in which he courted the media added to his suspicions, including an appearance on Irish TV. He revealed: "I interviewed the staff of the Late Late, people in the green room. They said he was acting like a man who wasn't in any way grieving.

"The Callalys couldn't look at a cup of tea, they were nervous and upset, and Joe scoffed all the sandwiches and the crisps and drank all the tea. He was on his mobile phone and walking around talking on the phone. They said he wasn't in one bit clued into what was at stake."

There was also a note that was retrieved from Rachel's grave which her husband had thrown into the coffin just before it was covered in earth which read: "I'm sorry." Cell sight analysis from O2, which established that O'Reilly's phone was "pinging" off the mast near his home around the time of the murder, was pivotal to the investigation.

In July 2007, a jury found O'Reilly guilty of murder after hearing extensive phone evidence placing him at the crime scene despite his claim he was working at a depot several miles away.

• The Lie: Who Killed Rachel O'Reilly? airs on repeat on Channel 5 at 10pm tonight.