Soller hotel owner murder trial opens

PALMA
THE parents of Siobhan Kearney, the Irishwoman who ran the Hotel Salvia in Soller, gave evidence at the opening of the murder trial of their son-in-law yesterday in the Central Criminal Court in Dublin.

Brian Kearney (50) is charged with murdering his wife at their home in south Dublin in February 2006.
The court heard that 38-year-old Siobhan Kearney - who along with her husband opened the Hotel Salvia in Soller in 2003 - was found dead in a locked bedroom of their home in Goatstown by her father on the morning of February 28, 2006.

There was a vacuum cleaner flex under her body and she had ligature marks around her neck.
A postmortem revealed she had been strangled with the flex.
Her son Daniel, who was three at the time, was found in the downstairs living room.
The trial finally opened yesterday after the initial jury was discharged last week owing to the fact that one of them had worked for a company that had installed an alarm in the Kearney's Dublin home.

Yesterday evidence began in the case after a new jury of eight women and four men was sworn in.
The trial, is expected to last four weeks and has elicited huge interest in Ireland.
Siobhan and Brian Kearney opened the doors of the luxury six-bedroom Hotel Salvia in March 2003.
It quickly garnered rave reviews, in no small part to Siobhan's cooking.
The Kerry-born 38-year-old had trained as a chef in Dublin's most prestigious hotel, the Shelbourne.
But despite a successful career in Ireland she dreamed of buying a property abroad. She first came to Majorca with her husband Brian, an electrical contractor and the owner of a music store, when she was pregnant with her son Daniel.

The couple fell in love with the place and were soon looking to buy somewhere on the Island.
They came across the 200-year-old townhouse called the Casa Salvia in Soller.
Once it opened its doors in 2003, the hotel got a reputation for its weekend parties, held together by a large fridge stocked with drinks by the pool and Siobhan's skills with a barbeque. The couple spent the next three years between Ireland and Spain, running the hotel in Soller during the summer and returning home to Dublin for the winter. However, at the time of her death in February 2006, Siobhan was planning to move to Majorca full-time.

Siobhan came from a large family left shattered by her death.
During her funeral service in March 2006, one of her sisters, Ann Marie told mourners that: “Everything about Siobhan was big and beautiful. We had the most amazing bond and that will never be broken.” “There's always going to be a glass of wine on the table for Siobhan.” Another sister, Brighid McLaughlin, a high-profile journalist in Ireland, spearheaded efforts, along with the rest of the McLaughlin family, to make sure that Siobhan's killer was caught.

Ten months after her death the family held a candlelit vigil outside Siobhan's home in south Dublin.
Another of Siobhan's sisters, Aisling, made an appeal for the killer to give himself up. “There is a large gaping hole in the side of the family which we will never heal,” she said. “We are praying for the perpetrator of this horrendous crime.”