Black Widow Part 2: The trial of Catherine Nevin and the media sensation that followed

“Everybody was interested in the case, and everybody wanted to know what was happening.”

That’s former RTÉ legal affairs editor Mary Wilson's recollection of reporting live on the Catherine Nevin trial back in 2000, after the violent killing of publican Tom Nevin in March 1996.

“I’d walk from the Four Courts to Tara Street to get a Dart home in the evenings, and people were shouting at me out of car windows and shouting at me from trucks: ‘Any sign of a verdict? What’s going on?’," Wilson says.

The media sensation that accompanied the trial was unlike anything Ireland had seen before. Speaking on the Indo Daily podcast, Wilson remembers someone describing it as like having a novel read aloud to you in court.

And that was before Catherine Nevin herself took to the stand.

“To say she wasn’t a good witness in her own defence is an understatement,” says Wilson. “[It was] all so bizarre that you look back on it and say; ‘What was she thinking?’.”

On the second episode of this two-part Indo Daily special, host Fionnán Sheahan is joined in-studio by Mary Wilson as they look back at how one of the country’s most notorious murder cases gripped the nation, and ask: why do we remain so fascinated with the ‘Black Widow’ today?

This episode of The Indo Daily was first released in March 2026.

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