In Memory of Clodagh

The phone rang with the persistence only mothers possess when worry takes root. Clodagh Hawe always answered. Always. But on that August morning in 2016, silence greeted every call to the family home in County Cavan.

When Mary Coll arrived at her daughter's house, everything appeared normal. The car sat in the driveway. The curtains hung perfectly straight. The garden bloomed with late summer flowers. Nothing seemed amiss—until she saw the note taped to the back door.

“Don't come in. Call the guards.”

Inside that pristine home lay the bodies of Clodagh, 39, and her three sons—Liam, 13; Niall, 11; and Ryan, just 6 years old. Their husband and father, respected deputy principal Alan Hawe, had systematically murdered them all before taking his own life.

But this wasn't a story that ended with the crime scene tape.

What the investigators missed would shock a nation. What the family discovered would expose a sophisticated web of coercive control hidden behind the facade of Ireland's most admired family. What appeared to be love had been something far more sinister—a systematic campaign of isolation, surveillance, and psychological abuse that no one recognized until it was too late.

The botched investigation that followed became almost as devastating as the murders themselves. Evidence vanished. Procedures crumbled. A rural police force proved catastrophically unprepared for the complexity of domestic violence disguised as devotion.

From the ashes of this institutional failure rose an unstoppable force: Jacqueline Connolly, Clodagh's sister, who refused to let her family's deaths disappear into bureaucratic silence. Her fight for justice would expose systemic failures, change Irish law, and transform how domestic violence is understood and investigated.

This is the story of how evil can hide behind respectability, how silence enables abuse, and how one woman's determination to honor her sister's memory sparked a revolution in protecting vulnerable families.

Some secrets are so deadly they destroy everything they touch. Others become the foundation for saving lives.

Discover the truth that changed a nation's understanding of domestic violence. Get your copy today and join the fight to break the deadly silence.