The mum of two boys murdered by their dad has opened up about her struggle to carry on living after their deaths.
Kathleen Chada revealed she checked herself into St Patrick’s psychiatric hospital, Dublin, in the aftermath of the horrific murders.
Her life was torn apart when Sanjeev Chada abducted and strangled Eoghan, 10, and five-year-old Ruairi in 2013 – days after he was found out for embezzling €56,000.
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He dumped his sons’ bodies in the boot of the car before driving into a wall near Westport in Co Mayo then ringing his wife to tell her: “They’re dead in the back.”
Brave Kathleen has now written her memoir, Everything, detailing her struggle for survival after her beloved boys were taken away from her. She revealed how she checked herself into St Pat’s following her father’s death soon after the tragedy of losing her sons.
She said: “I knew things weren’t right. I went in there to fall apart in a safe place and get put back together again.
“I realised I wasn’t going to fall apart. I knew if I allowed myself to fall apart, to cry, I wouldn’t come out of it again.”
Kathleen, who will launch her book in her native Carlow on Tuesday, said she was “very proud” of it and was “hoping [the] boys are equally”.
Speaking to RTE’s Brendan O’Connor she shared her memories of her sons, describing Eoghan as “a great kid” who was “more mature in a way than his years”.
She added: “Ruairi, we only had five years of him. I didn’t have that opportunity to see that development in him. He was much more confident than Eoghan, but that was because he had his big brother.”
Kathleen revealed she met Sanjeev Chada, who was born in Northern Ireland, while she was working as a nurse in Saudi Arabia.
They originally planned to move to London but settled in Carlow close to her family.
She said: “We got on really well, the only thing we really argued about was religion, but even that wasn’t a major issue.”
While there were no red flags she said with hindsight the decision for Sanjeev to become a stay at home dad may not have been the best idea.
Kathleen said: “I had the better paid job and I loved the work I was doing... it was the right decision at the time.
“Now I look back on it and say ‘if only, if only I’d known what was coming’, you’d make lots of different decisions. It gave him the freedom to trade which essentially was a gambling addiction he had.
“He was very open about the fact that he traded, dabbled in the stock market.
“That was fine, it was a sideline, I’d stand over his shoulder looking at the computer screen not having a clue what he was doing.
“It shocks you after, if only I’d questioned him or been suspicious, but why would you be suspicious? He was my husband, I loved him.”
Chada, who was jailed for life in 2014, told Kathleen he was bringing the boys bowling but instead drove them to Co Mayo and killed them.
He attacked Eoghan first and then took him onto his lap before strangling him. Postmortem results showed Eoghan put up a struggle. Kathleen said Chada seemed to become calm a few days after he was found out for embezzling money from a community group to pay his gambling debts.
She said: “I now look back and I go ‘he had a plan, he knew what he was doing’.
“I do believe he didn’t intend to be around to see what he’d done, he planned to take his own life.”
And she said she was left sickened after finding a suicide note dated 18 months earlier which showed Chada planned to murder her too.
When she asked him through a friend why he hadn’t gone through with it and taken her life too his reply made her feel sick.
She revealed: “He said basically he knew that I’d have fought him, he knew it wasn’t going to be an easy thing to kill me. To know that I lay next to him, I loved him, I lived with him, we were raising two boys together and he wanted to kill me.
“In the early days part of me went ‘why didn’t he take me too?’
“This is not the person that I thought I knew.”
But Kathleen said following years of psychological support she can now remember her sports-mad sons without seeing them in their final moments.
She said: “They had a good life in a loving home.
“What happened to them in their last minutes are just their last minutes, as significant as they are and as enormous as they are, I don’t go there that often.
“I choose to remember the happy life that they had and that we had, I had to do a lot of work with a psychologist to remember that.”
Having divorced Sanjeev from behind bars she revealed why she elected to keep the surname.
She said: “Eoghan and Ruairi were born as Eoghan and Ruairi Chada, not Murphy. That was their identity and I’ve chosen to keep that for them, not for him.
“I don’t forget. I’ve lived with this for 10 years, I’ve worked out ways of being able to manage it.
“They are with me, they’re in my mind and in my heart.
“It was important that I carry on. I have to live, it’s up to me to make that life somewhat meaningful.”
- Everything: Kathleen Chada, a Memoir by Umbrella Publishing is available in all bookshops and on Amazon (priced €15).
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