A woman who told a murder trial that she witnessed her boyfriend being stabbed by the accused woman has accepted that there was a "dramatic change" in her memory over the course of a series of statements she made to gardaí about the killing.
Brenda Kane has told the Central Criminal Court that Nicola Brennan came into her bedroom, where Ms Kane was asleep with her boyfriend, Juris Viktorovs.
Ms Kane said she saw Ms Brennan stab Mr Viktorovs while he was rolling a cigarette for Ms Brennan's boyfriend.
Under cross-examination on Monday, Ms Kane denied being violent towards the deceased during previous arguments.
She agreed with Colman Cody SC, defending, that in her first three statements to gardaí she did not mention seeing Ms Brennan stab Mr Viktorovs, saying it was "just so hard to think of anything properly" at the time.
But she insisted: "What I do know is she [the accused] ran into the room anyway and I seen her put the knife into him."
Nicola Brennan (33), of no fixed abode, has pleaded not guilty to the murder of her housemate, Latvian native Juris Viktorovs (36), at Shillelagh, Ballyconnell, Co Wicklow, on February 10th, 2022.
In her first statement to gardaí shortly after Mr Viktorovs died, Ms Kane agreed with Mr Cody that she told detectives she was in bed asleep with Mr Viktorovs having spent the evening drinking cider and sharing whiskey and rum with the various people in the house.
She said Ms Brennan's boyfriend came into the room and asked Mr Viktorovs to roll him a cigarette as Ms Brennan had hidden his tobacco.
She said she then saw Ms Brennan come to the door of the room and heard her say to her boyfriend, "you no go for me now".
Knife
The statement continued: "Then a knife was threw by Nicola, I don't know who she meant to hit, but it hit my boyfriend."
The witness agreed that in a second statement made the following day, she said she did not see Ms Brennan come into the room and could only say that she "saw something coming from the doorway, it looked like it had been thrown, it was dark".
"The light from the television was the only light... I don't know what was thrown but it had to have been Nicola who threw it."
She described seeing a knife in Mr Viktorovs' chest, which he "jiggled" and then removed from his own chest before laying down on the ground near the bed.
Ms Kane agreed with Mr Cody that she did not mention seeing Ms Brennan stab Mr Viktorovs in either of those statements, or in a third statement she gave on February 15th.
During an interview with Det Sgt Peter Woods four days after that, she agreed that she initially told the detective something similar to what was in her previous statements, with no mention of seeing Ms Brennan stabbing Mr Viktorovs.
Later on in that interview, she agreed she gave a "new description" when she said that she saw a knife on the floor near the bed and saw "Nicola running to that side of the bed" and "Nicola just picked up the knife and stabbed him".
She agreed that this was "quite a dramatic change", saying she "needed time to think about this properly".
She said that she remembers "bits" and could recall the accused coming to the side of the bed. "It's all just very vague," she added.
'Block it out'
When Mr Cody asked which account was correct, she said: "I remember Nicola coming into the room. I seen the knife going into Juris, maybe I don't remember bits that were in between. What I do know is she ran into the room anyway and I seen her put the knife into him."
She said she "vaguely" remembers the knife being on the ground and Ms Brennan picking it up, but she added: "I'm not going to say 100 per cent."
When asked why she did not remember that in her first three statements, she said it was "just so hard to think of anything properly" and she was "still grieving after something like that".
"Parts go through your head, but you try to block it out," she added.
She said she remembers "the main part of what happened" and the more she thought about it, the more she remembered. "I'm not going to say something if it is not true," she said.
Ms Kane denied having physical arguments with Mr Viktorovs. She denied breaking a bottle, causing an injury to Mr Viktorov's arm, and denied pouring noodles over him because he had added too much water.
"I never poured it over him, I didn't do anything. I just gave out about it."
She denied breaking Mr Viktorovs' nose after he mistakenly called her by his ex-wife's first name, and said if there were arguments or disputes between them, there was no violence.
When Mr Cody suggested that Ms Brennan had no motive to stab the deceased, the witness replied: "I'm not Nicola Brennan. I don't know why she did what she did."
She also denied that she came home one evening to find Ms Brennan and Mr Viktorovs in bed together. "That never happened," she said.
She denied assaulting her previous partners and said that slash hooks and hammers in her home, that Ms Brennan described as "weapons" when speaking to gardaí, were "just stuff belonging to my father".
Ms Kane agreed that she had given "a number of different versions" of what happened but added: "What I told is the truth."
When Mr Cody put it to the witness that her recollection cannott be relied upon, Mr Justice Paul McDermott did not allow the question because, he said, it was a comment.
The trial continues on Tuesday in front of Mr Justice McDermott and a jury of eight men and four women.
