When I saw Marioara’s body after it lay in shallow Dublin grave I didn’t recognise her… victim’s bro recalls ID horror

THE brother of Marioara Rostas will never forget the moment he saw his sister’s body which had lain in a shallow grave for almost four years.

And Dumitru Jr revealed to The Irish Sun: “I didn’t even realise it was my sister.”

The family insisted on seeing the remains of their girl who was shot four times in the head, wrapped in sheeting and dumped in a grave in the mountains.

Dumitru said: “My mom actually passed out and even for me it was very, very difficult when I saw the body of my sister.

“It was almost destroyed. She had no face anymore.”

Marioara, 18, was begging in Dublin city on January 6, 2008, when a predator drove up and promised to bring her for food, instead subjecting her to a depraved sexual assault, while keeping her locked in a room before murdering her.

The discovery of the teenager’s mummified remains in January 2012 brought to an end one phase of the investigation. And within two-and-a-half years, a man would go on trial for her murder.

The garda probe first honed in on a house on Brabazon Street in the Liberties area of Dublin, which was torched the month after Rostas went missing.

The house was let to Maxine Wilson, a drug addict niece of slain gangster Martin ‘The ­General’ Cahill.

Over the next few years Maxine and her mother Mary Wilson would also become the focus of garda inquiries as the then chief suspect was a criminal associate of theirs.

Maxine’s partner, a hopeless criminal and drug addict called Fergus O’Hanlon, would however prove crucial. On Halloween in 2008, gardai examined the fire damaged house again.

In a first-floor living room they found 22-inch calibre bullets lodged in the wall, five feet above ground.

Having passed through the wallpaper they were embedded in the plaster.
Ballistics would later show it was the same type of bullet used to kill the girl.

One door had a lock on the outside. The landlord told ­Gardai that neither the bullet holes nor the lock were there when he let the house to Maxine Wilson.

Det Inspector Michael Cryan said: “At this stage, unfortunately, I think we had all come to the ­conclusion that she wasn’t going to be coming home.

“After considering the bullet holes in the wall, the information from the two different calls and the alleged links to the car, a decision was made that we would arrest this individual.”

Gardai also lifted the Wilson women and O’Hanlon.

Det Insp Cryan said: “The hope was one of them would tell us where the body was.

“One goal was to recover the remains and give them back to the family so she could have a decent burial, and two was to arrest, charge, and prosecute and hopefully convict the person responsible.”

Maxine eventually admitted ­seeing Marioara at her house on Brabazon Street, while cops began compiling mobile phone data, the then suspect’s number used by Marioara to ring Romania.

Cryan, who was the senior investigating officer in the case, said: “Obviously that was of huge importance. Why would a phone in the Dublin 8 area be ringing the family number in Romania?”

As the investigation went on, a solicitor pal of O’Hanlon’s, Herbert Kilcline, encouraged him to help gardai with their enquiries.

And another woman told gardai: “Maxine and another man brought this girl home and asked to mind her and that one day, they came in from being out and said they were going upstairs.

“Maxine said she heard shots and then found the girl lying up against the wall, that the girl was shot.

“Maxine was crying when she was telling me. She told me someone thought the girl was the devil.

“I asked Maxine, what did you do? And she said, ‘I just went over and was rubbing her hair’.”

The then suspect reportedly began getting suspicious about O’Hanlon and Kilcline’s involvement with the investigation, and spent much of his time increasingly ­paranoid in a bulletproof vest at home, off his head on cocaine.

By early 2011, he allegedly tried to have O’Hanlon murdered.

By July 2011 he’d find himself in jail on another matter, and began making a series of extraordinary phone calls from prison threatening to kill a garda and a journalist who had been writing about him, before announcing he wanted ­Fergus dead.

When gardai played O’Hanlon the tape, he’d seen and heard enough. On December 1, 2011, he offered to bring gardai to Marioara.

Cryan said: “Then the information came to Kevin Street about the plot to kill the journalist, the guard, and the witness, and again, arrests made in relation to that, and we know (the witness) then decided to assist us in recovering the body.

“There was certainly pressure coming on him from members of his family and other associates to do what they kept saying was the right thing, to tell the guards, help the guards recover her.

“Fergus O’Hanlon was a criminal. He was involved in burglaries and robberies and crime, but this was a step way beyond what he had ever been involved in.”

O’Hanlon told gardai he was ordered to help with the disposal of Marioara’s body.

He maintained: “At this point, I wasn’t sure what was going to ­happen, he was behind me with the weapon and I knew there was one in the breech.

“I was afraid to ask anything else. I presumed he wouldn’t want to leave anyone to tell the story and I was afraid he’d kill me.

“At this stage I was getting extremely nervous and I got on to the floor in the car.

“I had to compose myself and hold it together because if I showed any weakness, I was in fear that wherever we were going, I wasn’t going to come back from.”

According to O’Hanlon, once in the forest and when they couldn’t find a bunker, they began digging.

Fergus claimed: “I was thinking to myself that I could end up the same way and end up in the same hole. I was the only witness to this.

“When the hole was dug, the remains were taken out of the bag — he took the body out and just rolled it into the hole.

“The body was in the hole and he started slamming the head of the body with his foot, there was at least five or six slams.”

The men covered the ground in pine needles, and headed back to the city.

On January 9, O’Hanlon met two gardai and headed for a spot at Kippure Forest in the Dublin Mountains. The next day he found what he thought was the spot, and after weeks of intensive searches gardai recovered her remains.

First, they found the bunker which had been dug by the suspect to bury a body.

Five foot wide, three-and-a-half feet deep, he couldn’t find it on the night he buried his victim.

Cryan said: “My own view always was that the hole in the mountains was a pre-dug grave.

“It wasn’t a cache for guns, it was a pre-dug grave, which would indicate the person had planned in their head to kidnap and murder somebody.”

They found her on January 23, wrapped in bin liners and duct tape. Cryan added: “Is relief the wrong word?

“At least we were able to go back to the family and say we found her and able to give the remains back to her and give her a proper, decent, religious burial and they’d have somewhere to go and grieve.”

Fergus O’Hanlon would later give evidence at the murder trial. Granted immunity from prosecution and placed into the Witness Protection Programme, his testimony and performance in court was ­shambolic and was seen by the jury as lacking any credibility.

There was also no DNA evidence linking the suspect to the crime, while the State opted against using phone evidence amid fears the defence could use it to challenge any conviction down the line.

It took less than three hours for the Central Criminal Court jury to find the accused man not guilty of Marioara’s murder. The Rostas ­family had sold anything they had to pay for the funeral.

Dumitru Jr returned to Ireland to work, and has helped to clear their debts.

He said via an interpreter: “I decided to come back here and try to find a job. So I could help them out. so we would get out of debt.”

The family has one photo to remember her by.

Her brother said: “I speak even with my kids. I have three boys and I tell them about Marioara. I think there are still people who still remember but I don’t know.

“If there is anybody who has information that could help and they want to share it, I would be very grateful to them if they did.

“As long as we live she’s not going to be forgotten by us.”