A Dublin man has been acquitted of murdering Marioara Rostas (18) who was shot four times in the head and dumped in a shallow grave in Wicklow.
It took the jury just under three hours to clear Alan Wilson (35) of New Street Gardens who denied killing the Romanian teenager at a house on Brabazon Street in The Coombe on the 7th or 8th January 2008.
He showed no reaction to the unanimous jury verdict, which came after nearly three hours of deliberations.
During the six week trial, the Central Criminal Court heard Ms Rostas disappeared 18 days after she arrived in Ireland from Romania.
Tragic murder
The teenager was last seen begging at around 2pm on Sunday January 6th at the junction of Lombard Street and Pearse Street behind Trinity College.
Her brother, Dumitru, who was aged 13 at the time, told the Central Criminal Court that she got into a Ford Mondeo as it stopped at traffic lights.
He said the man in the car told him they were going to McDonalds for food and then gave him €10 which he dropped on the ground as he drove off. The Rostas family waited but Marioara never returned.
That evening her father Dumitru went to a garda station to report her missing but he could not make himself understood.
Gardai were only made aware of her disappearance three days later.
Frightened call for Daddy to come get her
There was also evidence that a 'frightened' and crying Ms Rostas spoke by phone to her older brother Alexandru in Romania on January 7th - the day after she went missing.
She told him she was out of town and twice asked for her daddy to come get her. She tried to describe letters on a sign before the phone cut off.
On January 23rd 2012, four years after her disappearance, gardai found the teenager's body wrapped in plastic in a foetal position in a shallow grave in the Wicklow Mountains at Kippure.
They were led there by convicted criminal Fergus O'Hanlon, a controversial state witness who was granted immunity from prosecution. He testified that he helped Wilson dispose of the body.
The jury heard that on January 8th 2008 he returned from the post office to his home on Brabazon Street at around 5pm to find his partner's brother Wilson holding a gun.
He alleged that Wilson showed him the teenager's body lying in an upstairs bedroom and explained to him that she had been a witness. O'Hanlon said he felt sick but he helped his friend to dispose of her remains.
The house at Brabazon Street was the subject of an arson attack several weeks later.
O'Hanlon's evidence was ripped to shreds by the defence who said his version of events was self serving and full of lies.
Despite the murder acquittal Wilson, a father of four, is not a free man
He will return to prison this evening to serve out a seven year sentence for an unrelated meat cleaver attack in Dublin in 2009.
Originally published 15:45
