Kathleen Chada fears for her life if husband who murdered her sons is released

Vivienne Clarke

“My greatest fear is that he’s going to finish the job,” Kathleen Chada has said of her former husband, Sanjeev Chada, who killed their two sons, Eoghan and Ruairi, in 2013 and is eligible for parole this year.

Kathleen met with the parole board on Tuesday, and she told RTÉ radio’s Today with David McCullagh show that she had felt the board had been respectful and empathetic and she felt “heard.”

It will be 13 years in July since her sons were murdered by their father, and she said it felt like an insult that he was applying for parole.

“I would have assumed he would have simply done his time. I feel it’s an insult to Eoghan and Ruairi. That was something that was a surprise to me, and I found that hard to grapple with.”

While she did not feel he would get parole, “I can’t be absolutely certain. There’s a reason that it’s there. It’s his right to apply for it. I didn’t think he would ever apply.”

It was the lead-up to the parole board hearing that was more difficult than the hearing itself, she said.

“I didn't learn anything new in the process, I suppose I had to face things that I had put to one side, or I was able to box into a corner somewhere, for, you know, over the last number of years.”

It was “triggering” to have to go through the details again of what her boys had gone through in their last moments. The parole board made things as easy as possible, but it was “bonkers” that a hearing could be held at 12 years into a sentence.

“There's a part of me that goes, he's not going to get parole at this stage. I have to assume that, and yet, if I, if I absolutely believe that, then it makes something of a mockery of what we've gone through, or I've gone through.

“There is the possibility, and if it's not this time, you know, it comes around again in two years' time, and two years after that, and so you're on a roller coaster.”

Minimum sentencing before consideration for parole, as exists in other jurisdictions, would have helped, had it been available, she said.

The parole board meeting had been important as it was an opportunity for her to “let them know what he did.

“They needed to know how he did it. They needed to know, because he pled guilty, none of the details are out there, if you like, so I needed them to know what he's capable of.”

From correspondence, she found that he had planned to kill her too. Her fear is that “he’s simply going to finish the job. That was in his mind.”

“While he's in prison, I'm safe. That's the bottom line. I know that I'm safe. I won't feel that if he's released. I can't feel safe if he's out in the public. I can put all of the conditions in place, you know, to keep him away from me, but if he chooses not to do that, how can I ever feel safe?”

Families in her situation had no rights. Sanjeev Chada was allowed to read her submission as to why he should not be released, but she was not allowed to read his submission for parole.

“It's the law, at the moment. You see, what I’ve had realise is, while I am part of the process, and victims are included in the process, that's all we are.

“This process, the parole process, will go on without me. I don't have to be a part of this. So I have no rights, basically.

"That’s hard for all of us, all of victims and the families of victims, because you're in the very beginning of this process, how can I make a meaningful submission when I don't know what's going on in his mind? But I still have to make it, so I have to park that, put that to one side and go, okay, what are the key messages that the parole board need, from my perspective, going forward?”

When asked about the possibility that her former husband had been rehabilitated in prison, Chada responded: “how can you ever rehabilitate somebody like him? Because what he did was so hidden, what he was capable of was so, so hidden.

“We were a normal family, he had the ability to hide so much inside of himself. I know, based on emails that he himself wrote, that his intention was to take my life as well as the boys, and that intention was there about a year, year and a half before he actually did what he did.

“So he lived with me, he slept next to me every night, knowing that somewhere in the back of his mind he wanted to kill me.

"But I never felt threatened, I never felt that there was anything but love there, and so if you can hide something like that, and then to go as far as he did in killing Eoghan and Ruairi then to me he's capable of anything.”