DELUSIONAL | 

Parents of twisted killer Jozef Puska stand by their son and clain he’s innocent

Brutal killer initially told investigating gardai he had been stabbed in attack

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The parents of twisted killer Jozef Puska are standing by their convicted murderer son – despite his defence being described as ‘nonsense’ by the trial judge.

Justice Tony Hunt described Puska as “evil” after the jury returned their verdict, telling them he was “glad you didn’t waste any more of your valuable time” on the killer’s lies.

But despite the overwhelming evidence presented in the case and the impact of Puska’s claims on Ashling Murphy’s family, his mother and father are continuing to claim he is innocent.

They were approached by this newspaper outside their Crumlin apartment building, a day after a jury had unanimously found Puska (33) guilty of Ashling murder.

“No! No! One hundred per cent no!” Puska’s father responded emphatically – when asked whether the couple now accepted that their son was responsible for the horrific killing of the young school teacher.

Puska’s mother also replied “No, no” to the question.

When the Sunday World attempted to put additional questions to the pair, his father, citing poor English, asked for a telephone number and said a family member would be in contact.

The couple had been present in a packed Courtroom 13 in the Criminal Courts of Justice on Wednesday as the jury, who had listened to three weeks of evidence and deliberated for two hours, returned a unanimous verdict of guilty.

Their son had pleaded not guilty to the murder of Ashling Murphy at Cappincur, Tullamore, Co. Offaly on January 12, 2022.

The teacher had died due to 11 stab wounds to her neck.

A senior investigator later described the case to this paper as ‘one of the most evidentiary strong of contested murder cases’ to go before the court in decades.

But, after the verdict was read out, Puska’s parents seemed surprised and became upset with his father, speaking loudly in Slovak while his wife held up a small cross and shook it.

It had been to their apartment, in a block run for elderly and frail residents in Crumlin, Dublin, that the killer fled on the night of January 12 last year – hours after Ashling’s murder.

It was from there that his efforts to conceal his responsibility for his crime began to unravel.

At about midday on January 13, less than 24 hours after the murder, an ambulance was called to the apartment, with Puska alleging he had been stabbed the previous evening in Blanchardstown.

But gardaí, who were investigating that incident, didn’t believe him and alerted colleagues in Tullamore investigating Ashling’s murder.

On Puska’s hands, gardaí noticed the scratches which looked like briar marks from a hedge and there were similar marks on his head.

Puska underwent surgery on January 13 and later that day, after being told that gardaí had a warrant to seize his belongings and a blood sample, he confessed to killing Ashling, saying “I did it, I murdered, I am the murderer.”

It was to be the first and last time Puska would tell the truth.

He would later resile from his confession and concoct a story, heard for the first time when he testified in court, that he had fought with Ashling’s real killer in a desperate bid to explain his injuries and his DNA found under her fingernails.

That day, as Puska was confessing to the murder, gardaí were already combing through his parents’ apartment building.

Speaking on Friday, a senior citizen resident in the building said the thought Puska had slept there just hours after the killing ‘makes my blood run cold’.

“We only found out he’d been here on the Friday – when the gardaí came and shut the down,” she told the Sunday World.

“

We weren’t allowed leave our apartments for three or four hours … there were gardaí everywhere. I looked and saw them (the forensics) up at the bins going through them.

“The Guards said nothing to us … but someone said later they hadn’t found the murder weapon he’d used to kill Ashling … and that’s what they were looking for.

”

Speaking this week, a senior investigator described the failure to recover the knife as ‘a source of frustration’ but said ultimately Puska’s actions that day had made it almost impossible for a jury to do anything other than convict him.

“If you were to write a handbook and call it: ‘How not to get away with murder!’ then this would be it,” he said.

“There was no one single big mistake … it was everything he did that day from the moment he left his house in Mucklagh with only his bike and his knife … up until the moment of his arrest.

”

Asked if gardaí had ever garnered any insight into a motive, the investigator said: “Maybe in his head, he’d had some kind of falling out with all of womankind, we just don’t know. What we do know is he spent that morning in Tullamore following women around before he came on Ashling… and brutally murdered her.

“He went out looking for a woman to kill… Everybody wants a why. Everybody wants a reason. But sometimes there is no why! Sometimes there is just bad.”