Kathleen Chada has spoken out about chilling details of the call from her husband Sanjeev after he murdered their sons Eoghan, 10, and Ruairí, 5, in Ireland in 2013 — as he now makes a parole bid
A courageous mother whose ex-husband drove off with their sons has spoken about the moment he rang and uttered the words: “They are dead in the back.”
Kathleen Chada has shared harrowing details of that devastating phone call — as evil Sanjeev Chada launched an attempt at parole following the brutal murders of his sons, Eoghan and Ruairí, on July 29, 2013, in a failed murder-suicide.
The grief-stricken mum has now disclosed her greatest fear is that Sanjeev will eventually walk free from prison to “finish the job” — which she believes would mean killing her before ending his own life.
She described it as an “insult” that Sanjeev, a man she once loved and believed was her soulmate, would seek his freedom merely 13 years after his appalling crime in Ireland.
Sanjeev, a stay-at-home father living in County Carlow, was meant to take Eoghan, 10, and Ruairí, five, bowling, but instead drove across the country to a remote lane in Ballintubber, County Mayo.
Kathleen frantically attempted to contact him and her loved ones ultimately spent the night in the car.
Yet in the morning, Sanjeev strangled them, put the bodies in the boot, before deliberately crashing into a wall, though he survived.
Kathleen has now told Colette Fitzpatrick on Virgin Media News about the moment Sanjeev telephoned her from an unknown number.
“‘They are dead in the back’ are the words he used,” she said. “They are imprinted on my mind. I answered the phone – it was him.
“I was actually with the detective at the time giving my statement. And I looked at him, he realised, he could tell from me that it was Sanjeev on the line, and my first words were ‘are you okay, where are you?’ He told me there had been a crash and I said ‘are the boys ok’ and he said ‘no, they are dead in the back.’
“And I went… I lost it at that point. The detective took the phone. I know that I screamed. We were in a sunroom off the side of the house and I came back into the sitting room and I just sat on the sofa going, ‘they can’t be’. If he has spoken to me, they are probably stunned if they’re unconscious or whatever, but they couldn’t possibly be dead if he is ok.”
Yet the shattering reality only became clear when the detective returned inside after speaking with officers at the scene.
She recalled: “I could see him coming in the front door and I could tell by his face — and he walked over to me and he shook his head and I knew.”
Kathleen has since faced the Parole Board, telling them it was not sufficient for them to simply know what he did — they needed to understand how he did it.
She went on to describe how what he did to Eoghan was “quite brutal”, with his injuries, including several broken bones, being “catastrophic”.
She said it demonstrated that he had fought with everything he had to shield his younger brother in what must have been an unimaginably terrifying ordeal.
The horrific murders were worlds apart from their previous life, where Kathleen described Sanjeev as the “fun one” while she supported her family with a substantial income.
She believed everything was fine until it emerged that her husband had stolen €56,000 from a local community group to finance his stock market ventures.
Yet despite this revelation, she remained loyal to him, assuring him that they would work through it together.
However, just 10 days later, their sons were killed.
And in another chilling discovery, Kathleen subsequently uncovered an email Sanjeev had sent to himself 18 months before the murders.
In it, he detailed his wish to kill his wife and children.
She said she now worries he will target her once he is freed — but she said she still cannot erase her memories of him.
Describing her complicated emotions, she said: “I can’t undo that part of it. I can’t cut him out of life because he was their father. He was Eoghan and Ruairí’s dad and he was my husband. I loved him. I absolutely loved him. I thought he was my soulmate.
“I thought he was the person I was going to grow old with. I certainly never saw anything like this inside of him. We had, I would have thought, a happy marriage. So all of those things are important.”
In the remarkably honest interview, she added: “I’ve moved away from our house now, I sold it, but I kept a family photograph there for a long time, right up until the time I moved out because we were a happy family.
“And I’ve done a lot of work to know it’s ok to remember that. The memories, and the good memories, and happy memories are what sustain me now going forward because they have to. I don’t have a choice in that.
“But as I say, to cut him out of that would be to cut Eoghan and Ruairí out. They were a part of him, but they’re also a part of me, and I have to remember that as well.”
