THE real story of the murdered mother-of-three, Valerie French from Leap, has been told by her brother in a new book.
In June 2019, Valerie (42) was murdered by her husband James Kilroy at their home near Westport, while her three young sons lay in bed.
Kilroy was jailed for life in July 2024 after a jury rejected his claim that he was insane when he killed his wife, but he has since been granted legal aid to appeal his conviction.
Valerie’s brother David said he and the family had been silenced for five years, until after the verdict was passed.
Initially he started to write things down, he said, ‘just to make sense of what was happening,’ and by the time the verdict was announced, he said he had a manuscript ready to go, describing it as a ‘relief’ to be finally able to put out Valerie’s story.
‘I wanted Valerie’s story to be told, the correct story, and I hope she’d agree with me as she wasn’t one to suffer in silence, and she wouldn’t want to be just another statistic,’ said David.
In the book, For Valerie, David remembers his sister as a vibrant, creative young woman who lived life to the full.
‘She was very capable, and that came across particularly in her work as an occupational therapist. She was also really creative and painted murals on the front and back of their home, made baskets from willows, and enjoyed gardening,’ he said. In a nod to his sister’s lifestyle, he said the family intend to plant more forestry on their farm in Leap, in her memory.
He’s also campaigning to change the law in his sister’s name, and hopes that ‘Valerie’s Law’ will strip someone convicted of intentionally killing their children’s other parent of guardianship rights.
He wants Ireland to take the same stance as the UK, where people who have killed their partners are unable to have parental rights to their surviving children.
The book focuses on this issue which said ‘drives more trauma into the victim of the family.’
‘Killing a mother is child abuse, and that must be recognised,’ he said.
He wants to ‘call out a system that doesn’t recognise that wife killing is a thing’ describing the law in this space as ‘an absurdity.’
He said it’s on the programme for government to have the law changed: ‘I am hopeful this will happen and I’m realistic that it will take years, but it would be something positive to take from this and would mean that other families wouldn’t have this eating away at them: the fact that the system denies this kind of crime even happens,’ he said.
Valerie and her cousin Kevin Hosford at Ballyrisode beach.Sadly, it’s not something his late mother, also called Valerie, will see: ‘She had been in perfect health, a spritely woman, but she died five months after the murder from a stroke and I don’t think that’s unrelated.’
Valerie’s three boys are doing well, said David.
Their mother was the third woman to lose her life at the hands of a partner in Ireland that year, and David said he knows that lots of other brothers and sisters will have similar stories to tell.
‘I’m hoping the nightmare situation we found ourselves in, will be lessened for others, because there will be others, by what I’m campaigning for,’ he said
For Valerie is available in bookshops now, and will be officially launched at the Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre in Skibbereen on Friday, May 23rd at 6.30pm.
