With her hair dyed jet black and living in a small bungalow in the relatively upmarket suburb of Pellissier in Bloemfontein, the judicial capital of South Africa, Irish woman Ruth Lawrence must have prayed she’d be impossible to find.
The tattoo artist, originally from Clontarf in Dublin, was working in ink parlours under an assumed name, Ruth Lawless – possibly to do with her lapsed visa.
More likely, however, it was because of a double murder investigation back in Ireland.
For close to eight years she’d been living in South Africa, moving around, picking up work where she could.
But finally in early October 2022 a local elite police force, known as The Hawks, swooped on the house where she was staying and arrested her.
She would finally be extradited back to Dublin a few months later to face trial for her part in the murders of best friends Eoin O’Connor, 32, and Anthony Keegan, 33, who were found buried in a shallow grave with gunshot wounds to both of their heads.
Yesterday, the 45-year-old was found guilty of the men’s murders.
Lawrence fled Ireland shortly after their murders with her South African boyfriend, Neville van der Westhuizen, 40.
With her hair dyed jet black and living in a small bungalow in the relatively upmarket suburb of Pellissier in Bloemfontein, the judicial capital of South Africa, Irish woman Ruth Lawrence must have prayed she’d be impossible to find
Few knew that the kind-hearted church volunteer who helped run a safe house for human trafficking victims in South Africa was a double murder suspect back in Ireland. Pictured: Lawrence following her arrest by police in South Africa in 2022
Lawrence had fled Ireland in 2014 with her South African boyfriend, Neville van der Westhuizen, 40 (pictured) shortly after the murders of best friends Eoin O’Connor, 32, and Anthony Keegan, 33, who were found in a shallow grave
They first went to the UK before making their way to Van der Westhuizen’s home country. However, the pair split up a couple of years later, with Lawrence moving from city to city where she often relied on the services of women’s refugees for shelter and food.
During the trial, the court heard evidence from two pastors who dealt with Lawrence and told how she feared she would become a victim of human trafficking.
Pastor Robert Roger Brazelle works at the Christian Revival Church (CRC) in Pretoria in South Africa and during his testimony he explained that he was living in Bloemfontein in 2006 when he started a ministry with his colleague, Pastor Andre Lombard, who works with human trafficking victims.
‘It’s a very big issue in Pretoria and with the ladies trafficked outside of the borders in South Africa and into different neighbouring countries,’ he said, and he told how he met Lawrence in Pretoria ‘in early May 2016,’ Pastor Brazelle said.
‘I was contacted by someone else to tell me she was in trouble, fearing for her life, fearing she was going to be trafficked.’
After talking to Lawrence, the pastor said she went to stay at a safehouse in Bloemfontein and then returned to Pretoria in April 2017.
By July 2019, Lawrence was helping the pastor ‘with managing and running a safehouse for other victims of human trafficking, caring for them and administering for them’.
And he told how she made ‘a great contribution as a volunteer’.
In April 2014, drug dealer Eoin O’Connor (left) and his friend Anthony Keegan (right) travelled to Ballyjamesduff to collect money from Van der Westhuizen owed to O’Connor’s bosses
His colleague, Pastor Lombard, told the court that Lawrence helped with their ‘feeding scheme’, which deals with about 4,000 people a day.
It would seem, however, that the life Lawrence had led in Ireland had been very different – one that saw her end up in a courtroom pleading not guilty to murdering Anthony Keegan and Eoin O’Connor at an unknown location in Ireland on a date between April 22 and May 26, 2014.
Her former boyfriend, Van der Westhuizen, had been living in Ireland for at least five years when they met around 2010. Renting an apartment in Lakeview, Co. Cavan, he was working in Liffey Meats in nearby Ballyjamesduff, before he moved to Dublin.
While a former girlfriend testified that the South African would sometimes smoke ‘some weed,’ she said he never bought or sold it. However, that changed.
During the complex trial it was revealed how Van der Westhuizen met Jason Symes in around 2009, who’d contacted him to buy his car, which he’d put up for sale.
The two men became friendly, and Jason met his new friend’s girlfriend, Ruth Lawrence, shortly afterwards.
And in turn, he introduced the couple to his daughter, Stacey.
During his evidence Symes, who described himself as a chronic alcoholic, claimed Van der Westhuizen began supplying him with a small amount of ‘cannabis weed’ to sell to other people.
Prosecution lawyers said it appeared that Van der Westhuizen had ‘grappled’ with O’Connor, who was then shot in the head
But he told the court he was a very bad drug dealer, who regularly failed to get paid by his customers, and ran up a €15,000 debt with Van der Westhuizen. The South African man was also in debt, to Dublin-based drug dealers, to the tune of €70,000.
In April 2014, drug dealer Eoin O’Connor and his friend Anthony Keegan travelled to Ballyjamesduff to collect the money owed to O’Connor’s bosses.
During the trial, Jason and Stacey Symes, who are now both in the State witness protection programme, testified that they were told by Lawrence that she had shot O’Connor, but it ‘went wrong,’ so her partner ‘took over,’ and both O’Connor and Keegan were killed.
Prosecution lawyers said it appeared that Van der Westhuizen had ‘grappled’ with O’Connor, who was then shot in the head.
And that while the sequence of the two murders was unclear, it was more likely that Keegan was killed first when he was shot in the back of the head.
The Symeses both claimed to have been terrified of Lawrence and said she carried around ‘a little black gun’ which she would sometimes store down the back of her trousers.
They said they were ordered by the couple to help them clean up the murder scene.
Several weeks later the bodies of the two men were discovered on Inchicup Island on Lough Sheelin.
During the trial, Jason and Stacey Symes, who are now both in the State witness protection programme, testified that they were told by Lawrence (pictured) that she had shot O’Connor, but it ‘went wrong’ so her partner ‘took over,’ and both O’Connor and Keegan were killed
Retired butcher Pat Smith told the trial how he was out fishing in a small boat with a friend, when they took a break to have tea and sandwiches and moved ‘in close’ to the island ‘for cover’.
Mr Smith noticed a ‘dreadful smell coming off the island’ and he was suspicious, as the previous week he’d seen the Garda Water Unit out searching for the ‘two bodies, the missing men’.
When asked if he’d associated the smell with anything, the former butcher replied: ‘Rotten flesh.’ He told how they had to pull the boat away from the shoreline because the stench was so strong.
He alerted the gardaí, who then went to the island with a German Shepherd dog who was trained to use his sense of smell to locate missing people.
The dog’s handler told how after they landed on the island, ‘almost immediately the dog went off in dense undergrowth and gave me an indication, he stared at a particular spot’.
After approaching the area, he could see ‘some sort of covering of plastic or tarpaulin,’ which measured six feet long and around four feet wide, which was all covered over in branches.
When a crime scene officer cut the tarpaulin open, an arm with a bit of clothing fell out.
At their joint funeral in Kilmore West, Dublin, on June 3, 2014, Eoin O’Connor and Anthony Keegan were described as ‘inseparable’.
Ruth Lawrence was found guilty this week of the murders of O’Connor and Keegan
In her eulogy, Anthony’s sister Margaret said that he’d be dearly missed by his friends and family and explained how close the men had been before their deaths.
‘Where do I start about [their] relationship? [Anthony] would text me and tell me he was with his other half, meaning Eoin,’ she explained. ‘They were inseparable; he would say he was his brother from a different mother.
‘Thank you Anthony for being my best friend, a brother, uncle, brother-in-law. We will be lost without you. I just wish we had more time.’
Eoin O’Connor’s brother Ruairi told the congregation he had been the ‘rock’ of their family.
‘He had two beautiful kids that we are going to look after,’ he said. ‘We are going to love for the rest of our days, to make sure that they are going to be OK.’
For several years O’Connor’s mother Jean spoke out publicly, demanding justice for her slain son.
‘Our worlds have been ripped apart and two innocent children have been robbed of a future with a loving father,’ she told the Irish Sun.
‘My son was no major criminal, the only things that he lived for were his family, friends, dogs and for football.
The detached bungalow in South Africa where Irish fugitive Ruth Lawrence, 42, was said to have been arrested by police
‘Eoin never deserved to die like this, he didn’t have a bad bone in his body.’
In a further twist, less than three years after her son’s decomposing body was found, Jean’s brother-in-law Noel ‘Duck Egg’ Kirwan was murdered by the Kinahan cartel after he attended the funeral of Eddie Hutch – the brother of Gerry ‘The Monk’ Hutch.
Kirwan was married to Jean’s sister Rita.
‘Noel was a wonderful man who wasn’t involved in anything,’ Jean insisted. ‘He’s another innocent man who was simply killed because he went to a funeral.
‘He would have done anything for anyone, and he will always be missed.’ Jean O’Connor died in August 2021.
In the meantime, Ruth Lawrence and Neville van der Westhuizen fled Ireland in the days after the murders in 2014.
According to Jason and Stacey Symes’ testimony, they were forced to go with them to stay at a block of flats in London, with someone that Van der Westhuizen knew.
After a couple of weeks, the couple left the UK for South Africa, while Jason and Stacey were dropped off at a homeless shelter. They returned to Ireland after the bodies of the murdered men were discovered in late May 2014.
They later came forward to the gardaí and gave voluntary statements about the alleged involvement of Lawrence and Van der Westhuizen in the killings. Both are now in the State witness protection programme.
It’s believed the couple broke up in South Africa after a couple of years. Lawrence feared for her safety while on her own, and regularly contacted local charities and shelters for help, before ending up splitting her time between working as a tattoo artist and a volunteer with the charity that had assisted her.
Van der Westhuizen’s life took an even darker route.
In March 2020, it emerged that he was standing trial in Durban for the murder of teenager Cody Houghton in the Bluff area on February 24, 2017.
Along with three other men, Van der Westhuizen abducted Cody and his friend after they were wrongly accused of stealing a mobile phone from a tattoo parlour. During his ordeal, the 19-year-old was viciously beaten, forced to drink a cocktail of drugs and threatened with a sword.
Van der Westhuizen broke down in tears after he was handed a 15-year sentence for the ‘culpable homicide, assault and kidnapping’ of his victim.
There is a request from the gardaí to extradite him from South Africa after the Director of Public Prosecutions in Ireland ruled that he should be charged with the double murder of O’Connor and Keegan.
However, he will have to complete a certain amount of his sentence before he can be returned to face charges here.
Arrest warrants for both him and Ruth Lawrence were issued a number of years ago, but the fugitives proved too difficult to locate, until Van der Westhuizen was picked up for murder.
Lawrence’s days as a fugitive on the run finally came to an end after police were tipped off about where she might be staying in the South African capital.
Shortly after she was picked up by the elite unit, The Hawks, a spokesman for the South African Department of Justice confirmed: ‘The minister, Mr Ronald Lamola, has approved extradition.
The paperwork has been signed for formal extradition to take place, and Lawrence will be handed to the Irish police to be returned to Ireland.’
They also explained how her co-accused was in jail and would have to stay there.
‘When he has completed his sentence, then the Interpol extradition warrant against him will be acted upon and an extradition case will be heard,’ they said.
When arrested, Lawrence was reported as putting up ‘no resistance’ and immediately admitting who she was.
Her spell being held at the Bainsvlei Police holding cells clearly had a profound effect on her.
At her first court appearance, she chose not to apply for bail and said she wanted to be extradited to Ireland and would even pay the air fare.
She got her wish in May 2023.
