Anastasia Kriegel’s father has described seeing his 14-year-old daughter walking away from their home with one of the boys accused of her murder 20 minutes before her phone tried to call her mother’s workplace, and half an hour before the State believe she was dead.
Patric Kriegel knew that she meant it when she told him that she ‘wouldn’t be long’. She was happy and had ‘a big smile’.
He was giving evidence to the Central Criminal Court yesterday (Wednesday) on the second day of the trial of two teenagers charged with murdering the Kildare schoolgirl.
Mr Kriegel told Brendan Grehan SC, prosecuting, that he looked at his watch as they walked away. It was 5pm. It’s the State’s case that she was dead by 5.32pm, when her phone was last active. The prosecution argues that the boy her father saw had lured her from her home to a dirty, derelict farmhouse, where he watched the other boy sexually assault and murder her.
The two teenagers are charged with murdering Anastasia at Glenwood House, Laraghcon, Clonee Road, Lucan on 14th May last year. The accused, who are both 14, cannot be named because they are minors. They each pleaded not guilty.
Boy A is further charged with Anastasia’s aggravated sexual assault in a manner that involved serious violence to her. He also pleaded not guilty to that count.
Mr Kriegel said that his daughter had begun walking while listening to music in the evenings once they had become brighter. She would never leave the house without her blue headphones and she knew that there was a strict rule not to be out after dark.
“She loved listening to music. She loved walking. Sometimes she’d go for an hour and half,” he recalled. “At that stage, I could know where she was.
"We have an app, Find my iPhone. We could see exactly where she was. But she left the family sharing from the app and then I couldn’t see where she was.”
This inability to see her location was how things stood when she went missing.
He recalled being out in the back garden when he heard the doorbell ring at 4.55pm that day. He heard the door open and made his way to the hall. He hadn’t expected it to be for Ana, as nobody ever called for her. The trial has already heard that she was a loner.
“I did see Ana at the front door talking to somebody but she was whispering,” he said. “I think a lot of teenagers seem to whisper quite a lot.”
He said that she went back upstairs very quickly and came back down with her distinctive black hoodie.
“I said: ‘Ana, you know you are supposed to study’, because she had exams the next week,” he recalled. “She said: ‘Oh, nobody told me that’. I said: ‘Ok, but don’t be long’. She said, ‘No, I won’t be long’ and I believe that she meant it.”
He said that he knew by the way she said these words that she ‘meant exactly that’.
“She gave me a big smile when she left. She was happy,” he said.
“I had forgotten to ask her where she was going,” he explained. “Normally I would ask.”
So he looked out the front window and saw her walking towards the local park with a boy, now known to be Boy B.
He checked his watch and it was five o’clock.
Mr Grehan later showed him a still from CCTV footage, capturing them walking away one minute later. He identified his daughter in the still, walking a number of paces behind Boy B.
“It appears that they’re not talking to each other as well, because of the distance between them,” remarked Mr Kriegel.
The trial continues this (Wednesday) afternoon before Mr Justice Paul McDermott and a jury of eight men and four women.
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