SO far as the world could see Brian and Siobhan Kearney lived an idyllic life with their three-year-old son Daniel. They had a fine home in an attractive estate in the upper middle class suburb of Goatstown in South Dublin.Building work had finished on a new house in the garden which might fetch a tidy rent from tenants. He was a successful electrical contractor with a net income of around $170,000 a year -- and they ran a $3 million hotel on the Spanish sunshine island of Majorca in the Mediterranean.They even spoke of soon realizing their dream of owning a yacht on the Med.So what went wrong? Nobody yet knows for certain.But Brian Kearney two years ago murdered his 38-year-old wife. Despite his attempt to make the crime look like suicide a majority of 11 members of a jury of eight men and four women didn't believe him. They convicted him of murder last week.Kearney, who did not give any evidence in his defense, went to jail for life -- and the guessing game continued as to his precise reason for a murder that has deprived a three-year-old boy of both parents.Despite their apparent wealth, the couple had money troubles with banks advising they had over-borrowed in developing their businesses.Then, according to Siobhan's friends at a trial that gripped the nation, she was planning to leave him. The general consensus is that that's why he plotted to kill her. He feared a separation would force the sale of their home and reduce his ability to repay loans.Kearney murdered his wife, a sister of well-known former Sunday Independent journalist Brighid McLaughlin, on February 28, 2006, his 49th birthday.The jury was told he strangled her, then used a vacuum cleaner flex as a ligature before trying to hoist her over the en-suite door in her bedroom in an attempt to make it look like a suicide.While Kearney was asset-rich with property and business interests worth $7.8 million before tax, he faced $23,500 each month in repayments on the family home which had been re-mortgaged to build the new house next door and to pay for the Hotel Salvia that the couple had purchased in Spain.The prosecution said a separation and Siobhan's plans to move into the new home they had built did not fit Kearney's financial plans. So he killed her.The jury was told that Kearney went into his wife's bedroom and manually strangled her. Then at some stage he used the vacuum cleaner flex as a ligature around her neck.Kearney knew one of Siobhan's six sisters, Niamh, would be arriving to park her car at their home as she did every morning and he could not be found with the body so he left. He locked Siobhan's bedroom door, slipped the key under it and left their three-year-old son in the house.When Niamh could not rouse her sister their father Owen was called. He broke into the bedroom and found his daughter dead on the floor with the purple vacuum cleaner flex around her body.Defense lawyers maintained Siobhan committed suicide and the couple's separation was amicable. The jury, by their verdict, showed they didn't believe that.The jury had also been told that about a month before her death Siobhan started keeping a diary on her solicitor's advice. She had initiated moves towards a legal separation. A friend told the court that she noticed a week before Siobhan's death that she wasn't wearing her wedding ring.By combining State Pathologist Marie Cassidy's evidence on the time of death with the intruder alarm log the prosecution was able to narrow the spectrum of possibilities - either Siobhan killed herself, or she was murdered by her husband.To disprove the suicide theory, the prosecution relied on scientific evidence and testimony showing the plans Siobhan had been putting in place. Apart from instigating moves towards a legal separation, she was working to secure a school place for her son and making arrangements to hand over management of the hotel in Spain.The night before she died, Siobhan sent a chatty e-mail to her sister-in-law, Alessandra Benedetti, saying how excited she was by their impending visit. "Not something someone would write if they were going to kill themselves," prosecutors argued.There was also the testimony of an expert that the vacuum flex would break after five to seven seconds if an object of Siobhan's weight was applied to it.In addition, a key was found on the floor just inside the locked bedroom door by those who arrived that morning. Why, if Siobhan was going to kill herself, would she lock the door, take the key out and throw it on the floor? More plausible, to the prosecution, was that Brian Kearney slipped it under the door after locking it from outside.Moreover, why was there no noose around her neck when her body was found, and why was the flex not tied to any anchor-point in the room. Crude as the attempt to portray the death as a suicide was, it might have succeeded had the flex been strong enough to bear Siobhan's weight.