Jozef Puska, a 33-year-old man, has been found guilty of murdering Ashling Murphy last year. After pleading not guilty in court in Dublin, the jury reached a unanimous decision.
After the verdict, the judge declared, “We have evil in this courtroom,” adding, “There will be a day of reckoning for Puska.”
Ashling Murphy was a 23-year-old primary school teacher. She was murdered on the banks of the Grand Canal in the Cappincur area of Tullamore in Ireland, at approximately 4 pm on Wednesday, 12 January last year.
During the trial, jurors heard that Puska had stabbed Murphy in the neck 11 times after attacking her randomly while she was out for a run.
Jozef Puska was arrested several days later on 18 January, and appeared in court the following evening, heckled by crowds of mourners as he approached the building.
A second man in his 30s was also arrested in connection with Ashling's murder, but was later released without charge.
Ashling Murphy's death sparked further outcry at male violence against women, and questioning what is being done to protect women. Many have focused on the fact she was out for a run in daylight, an activity many women like to do to keep fit but are feeling increasingly unsafe to do so.
Activist Laura Bates wrote an emotional response to this, pointing out that focusing on this is a complicated form of victim blaming.
“I understand why people are posting ‘she was going for a run’. I get why ‘she was just walking home’ and ‘she did all the right things’ trended after Sarah Everard died,” she posted.
"I know it comes from a place of grief and rage. But it doesn’t matter what they were doing. When we say ‘she was just doing this’ or ‘she was just doing that’, it suggests that the case wouldn’t have been quite so awful or tragic if she had been doing something else.
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"Like if she was walking down an alleyway at 2am, or going to meet her married lover or a sex work client or if she was drunk or she had taken drugs… like it would be a little bit less awful in those circumstances. And it devalues women’s lives. It plays into this insidious narrative of the perfect victim who deserves our sympathy and our grief because she did absolutely everything right.
"She didn’t deserve it. Of course she fucking didn’t. But when we say that, no matter how unintentional, there’s a tiny, unsaid implication that some women do deserve it.
“A tiny reinforcement of the rules that bind us so tightly we can’t breathe, because if we step outside of them we know people will think we deserved our own deaths. A tiny little dehumanisation on top of a million other tiny cuts. It doesn’t matter what she was doing. It doesn’t matter. She shouldn’t be dead.”
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Frank Kelly, a former principal of Durrow National School where Ashling worked, told The Irish Times: “She was a shining light as a teacher, the children in her class adored her. Her word was gold, they worshipped the ground she walked on.”
"She was an absolute gem. She came to the school as a substitute teacher in March 2021 and was then put on a fixed term position from September.
“Ashling was very musical, she had recently bought a set of uilleann pipes and was going to learn how to play them, they are a very difficult instrument to master, but no obstacle was too big for her."
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The allegations against Chris Noth show that #MeToo is far from over.
Many have also pointed out that the canal along which Ashling was jogging was named after Fiona Pender, a 25-year-old woman who disappeared in the area in 1996 while heavily pregnant.
“The cyclical nature of violence against women,” tweeted journalist Rossalyn Warren.
Our thoughts are with Ashling's family at this incredibly sad time.
