Ten minutes was all it took for Ashling Murphy’s life to ebb away.
Ten minutes to rob the 23-year-old primary school teacher of her future and change the lives of her parents, siblings and boyfriend forever.
Details of the murder
Because of the Fitbit smartwatch she was wearing, detectives were able to pinpoint the exact timing of the vivacious young woman’s last moments, as she lay bleeding to death on a canal towpath after being stabbed 11 times in the neck.
At 3.21pm her heartbeat suddenly dropped. By 3.31pm it had stopped altogether. She died alone in a muddy, bramble-strewn ditch before paramedics could arrive to save her.
Ashling’s senseless and brutal murder sent shockwaves, not only through the small town of Tullamore, 60 miles west of Dublin, where she was killed, but across Ireland and beyond.
Her mother Kathleen said: ‘She had so much to give to the world.’
After her death on January 12, 2022, the six-year-old pupils she taught at Naomh Colmcille Primary School in nearby Durrow, County Offaly, made a shrine to her in their classroom.
Heartbreaking tributes from her students
It included a cross, a candle and handmade cards with drawings, prayers and heartbreaking tributes saying: ‘I love you Miss Murphy.’
Ashling’s class of 28 children also formed a guard of honour at her funeral, each holding a photograph of their teacher on her graduation day, along with a single red rose.
Violence against women
Those closest to her were naturally devastated, but hundreds of thousands of others also attended vigils in Dublin, Limerick, Cork and other towns across the country in solidarity against such a barbaric crime.
Coming in the wake of the brutal killings of Sarah Everard and Sabina Nessa in London in 2021, campaigners said it was a ‘watershed moment’ for violence against women.
She was killed while exercising
They lamented how a young teacher, just ten months into her career, who dreamed of building her own home with her boyfriend of six years, Ryan Casey, 25, could be so brutally murdered in broad daylight while exercising on a busy canal towpath.
Poignantly, the stretch where Ashling was killed is named Fiona’s Way after another young woman, Fiona Pender, who was 25 and pregnant with her first child when she went missing from Tullamore in 1996 and is presumed murdered.
