KAREN Walsh appeared to have it all.
Finally a mother in her early forties, she was one half of a Dublin power couple and a successful businesswoman in her own right.
Walsh had grown up in a middle-class Galway family in a family of high achievers where education was a priority.
The 48-year-old's father was a primary school principal who taught in a Loughrea school until his retirement and, as a teenager, Walsh attended Salthill Secondary School in Galway city before completing a degree in biochemistry in NUI Galway.
In a surprise twist, she opted to train as a beautician after leaving college, however, after finishing the course she travelled to England and completed a pharmacy degree in the University of Sunderland.
Walsh's siblings were also hard workers. Her brother Barry studied medicine and went on to work in London while her sister Sally has been a GP in the west of Ireland.
Another sister Elaine studied clinical psychology while a third Geraldine opted to become a teacher and now works in the midlands.
Walsh herself married Richard Durkin, a high-profile Dublin executive, who was appointed by former health minister Mary Harney to the council of the Pharmaceutical Society of Ireland (PSI), the regulatory body for pharmacists.
The couple wed in 2004 and had a son, James, two years later.
Mr Durkin, a tax consultant, auditor, chartered accountant and financial adviser by trade, was partner at Devaney and Durkin, a firm providing specialist advice to businesses and entrepreneurs.
Originally from Sligo, he was also a co-director, along with his wife, of Kaww Limited, a chemists' dispensing business which traded as George's Street pharmacy on upmarket South Great George's Street.
The couple moved in the highest echelons of Dublin society.
Mr Durkin's appointment saw him work alongside Noreen O'Sullivan, assistant commissioner of An Garda Siochana on the PSI where he was to represent the public interest.
From Monday to Friday, they lived in Dublin's plush Berkley Court Hotel, taking advantage of the Celtic tiger's property boom to rent out the home they owned in the city.
Walsh was keeping a firm hold on the illusion of youth with regular botox visits to Dublin's exclusive Blackrock Clinic - an anti-aging treatment she had been routinely undergoing for 12 years.
In 2007, the couple bought a five-bedroom property on Dublin Road in Newry for £400,000, as a "holiday house for relaxation".
At that point they seemed the poster family for a resurgent Ireland, prosperous and enjoying life on both sides of the border.
But all was not what it seemed and Walsh's carefully constructed facade was about to implode with tragic consequences for her gentle new elderly neighbour, Maire Rankin.
The word which comes up again and again, speaking to people who came into Karen Walsh's orbit, is "enigma".
An apparently doting mother, yet she spent Christmas Eve downing neat vodka and rowing bitterly with her toddler son's father.
She was a so-called "socialite", but rarely left her Newry home, appearing to prefer to drink alone. A health care professional who left a pet dog to starve while she went on a week-long drinking binge. A `caring neighbour' whose visits to the pensioner living next door made the woman so uneasy she had arranged to call a friend each time Walsh called round.
Walsh had a disturbing history in Newry before she ever moved to Dublin Road.
After completing her pharmacy degree at Sunderland College, she had moved to Camlough, a south Armagh village just five miles from Newry, to do her "pre reg" - a type of on the job training.
At some stage before her marriage to Mr Durkin she embarked on a relationship with a Newry man. It was an ill-fated affair, apparently conducted in the face of opposition from her boyfriend's family.
Walsh also lived in Cloghgue Heights - less than a mile along the Dublin Road from her later family home. By then she had acquired a reputation for heavy drinking and erratic behaviour.
Tales of horror from neighbours form that period include their distress when it became clear that one of Walsh's notorious drinking binges, on which she would disappear regularly, had seen her abandon her little Jack Russell, locked in the house for more than a week with no food or water.
They pushed food through the letterbox for the pitiful animal, eventually calling the police when it became clear she was not returning.
The animal was eventually taken away from Walsh by the authorities.
"I heard when she left Dublin, everyone in the street had a party," one of her Dublin Road neighbours said.
Maire Rankin, a compassionate and motherly pensioner enjoying a lively retirement surrounded by children, grandchildren and friends, was of the few people to actually meet Walsh face to face.
While Mr Durkin was friendly and visible going in and out of his property, it was almost as if his wife was a ghost.
"I've lived here for 30 years and I never saw her," said one woman who lived just a few doors along the row of granite terraces from Walsh at the time of the murder.
"You would expect to see her some time. I think she may only have been up here four or five times in the year (sic) they had the house."
"She's a mystery, an enigma," agreed one man who also lived nearby.
"You would never have seen her in any of the bars or in the hotel. She seemed to just drink at home. And she must have been a big drinker. I'm a drinker and if I had a litre of neat vodka I'd be on my head."
Walsh claimed she had called round for a cosy chat with Mrs Rankin on Christmas Eve 2008 and drank her way companionably through a litre bottle of vodka perched on her bed.
It is a claim all those who knew the 81-year-old regarded as preposterous.
"If (Maire) called on Christmas to drop off something and I poured her a tiny thimble of liqueur it would be left there when she went," a neighbour said after the 2011 trial.
"Maire did not drink anything but tea."
"Maire was frightened of her," another insisted at the time.
"She had an arrangement that she would call another neighbour of ours every time (Walsh) came round. I don't know why she would see someone she was frightened of, but that was Maire. I think she was impressed that he was a tax consultant.
"She was always polite. But being too polite can get you killed."
Mrs Rankin had even bought a present for Walsh's young son, then just two years old.
No one knows what triggered Walsh's murderous rage.
By April 2009, even though police had their woman and prosecutors were confident enough to proceed with a murder charge, they were still baffled as to the motive.
In court, during the cross examination of Walsh, their only suggestion was that she was angered after Mrs Rankin had confronted her for "ruining your life" and she "didn't want this old lady telling you how to live your life".
Of course, the common denominator was drink. It was always drink with Walsh.
But if the murder of Mrs Rankin was frenzied, the clean-up was cold and clinical.
First she used the octogenarian's treasured family crucifix to violate her fragile body in order to make it look as the murder had been carried out by a male after a sex attack
In the days after she would talk about suspicious "Eastern Europeans" hanging around, who no one else remembered.
The scene in and around the body had also cleaned before she left and Mrs Rankin's brother-in-law discovered the body on Christmas morning.
Her behaviour that day was also odd.
Everyone in the terrace had gathered in one of the neighbours' houses when word came through.
Everyone except Karen Walsh and her husband.
"I thought it was strange," said one former neighbour.
"The night before was the only time I had seen her and it was through the window in Maire's where she seemed to be fixing something in the window.
"Everything was lit up, beautifully decorated, but she pulled the blind. And I thought, I wonder why you would do that."
After she was charged there were accusations of Walsh asking about extensive plastic surgery to disguise her looks and seeking a fake passport - prompting fears she was planning to flee to start again somewhere else.
While on bail in 2009, Walsh was re-arrested after the PSNI became concerned she was planning to surgically change her appearance and flee Ireland on false passport.
Gardai had been contacted by a cosmetic surgeon in Dublin over a bounced cheque.
With the conviction, Walsh's perfect life lay in ruins - her "holiday home" let out, her fancy pharmacy in Dublin closed down, her licence revoked, her reputation destroyed. Her self-destruction complete.
However, ever the queen of reinvention, she attempted one more roll of the dice, launching an appeal against her conviction and in so doing again showing her callous disregard for the devastation of Maire Rankin's grieving family.
With today's ruling she has no choice by to finally face her fate. And her demons.
