PJ HOWARD is a respected businessman reputed to be worth more than €12m thanks to his hugely successful property business in Ennis.

He has a sprawling lake-side home called Ballybeg House on the Kildysart Road, which he shared with his beloved Sharon Collins since 1998.

He enjoyed the trappings of wealth including a penthouse apartment in Spain and he also owned an impressive yacht which he kept moored at the resort town of Benalmadena.

The boat is currently for sale with a price tag of €200,000.

His two sons, Robert (29) and Niall (25) worked with him in the family business and had taken over the day-to-day running after their father decided to take a step back due to recurring health problems.

The brothers lived together in Robert's home in Ballaghboy, just outside Ennis town. Their mother, PJ Howard's first wife, had died in 2003. PJ had been in a long-term relationship with a woman named Bernadette Lyons, who died of cancer in 1998. It was some months after her death that he met Sharon Collins, who later came to live with him.

She made no secret of her wish to marry PJ, but he was reluctant to do so for fear of jeopardising his sons' inheritance. A pre-nuptial agreement would have no legal standing in Ireland, so the pair went through an informal commitment ceremony in Italy in 2005. When they returned home, they held a lavish wedding reception for their friends, all the while keeping up the pretence that they were married.

Unknown to PJ, however, Sharon Collins took things a step further by purchasing a marriage certificate online from a Mexican company proxymarriages.com. She then used this to obtain a passport in her new "married" name. This, she may have believed, would be enough to prove that she was PJ's next of kin and therefore entitled to his estate in the event of his death and the deaths of his two sons.

The complicated inheritance laws meant that Robert and Niall were too much of a danger to the success of the plan. They too would have to be killed in order for Sharon Collins to get her hands on the money.

Money was certainly one questionable motive. Interviews with gardai showed Sharon to be hinting obliquely that someone else might have been out to frame her. And while she never stated that she considered Robert Howard as a suspect, she did admit that it was "possible" he would have wanted her out of the way.

The story didn't wash with the prosecution. For all her innocence and demure charm, Sharon Collins would later be proven to be every bit as devious as her description the "devil in the red dress" suggested.

- Aoife Finneran