A court in Ireland found Henry McGowan of New York not guilty by reason of insanity on Thursday for the death of his father at a luxury hotel in November 2024.
The so-called special verdict, reached by a jury of six men and six women, came swiftly, after just one hour and 23 minutes of deliberations.
Mr. McGowan was embraced by family members in the courtroom following the verdict’s announcement.
Mr. McGowan will return to Dublin’s Central Mental Hospital, where he will be held while he continues to undergo treatment. Next week, the judge could order that he remain there.
The verdict marked an end to a yearslong trans-Atlantic crisis that demonstrated — at times, in painstaking, torturous detail — how difficult it can be to prevent a violent mental health crisis. The death of John McGowan, 66, at the hands of his son was preceded by dire warnings and pleas for help from the McGowan family, who were frantically trying to have Henry hospitalized in Ireland in the hours before he murdered his father.
“We see a pattern of a family’s concern, of a father’s concern,” a defense lawyer told the court on Thursday.
Judge Paul McDermott expressed condolences to the family and commended them for the “extreme care” they had taken and “trying to do the right thing” in seeking to care for Mr. McGowan, even after the crime.
Mr. McGowan, prosecutors said, beat and strangled his father on Nov. 12, 2024, at a luxury hotel while in the midst of a psychotic episode. At the time, he believed he was a prophet or a superhero and that his father was an impostor who was part of an evil conspiracy.
“All the stars had aligned,” he later told a psychiatrist of the killing. “It was ordained.”
It took days for Mr. McGowan to understand the gravity of what had occurred, a court psychiatrist testified on Thursday. The realization came only after intensive treatment with antipsychotic medication, which eventually lifted his delusions. In recent weeks, he has since struggled to recount the killing, overcome with emotion.
Dressed in a dark suit, Henry McGowan sat stoically as the verdict was read in court. He showed little emotion during the proceedings, but looked down when officials described the details of his father’s death.
Jurors heard three days of testimony in which police officials and two independent, court-appointed psychiatrists described the rapid deterioration of a bright, but troubled young man, and his family’s repeated, doomed efforts to save him.
“This is a case where the evidence is effectively all one way,” a prosecutor told the jury in closing arguments.
Unlike in the United States, where insanity pleas are available to almost any defendant in almost all jurisdictions, insanity defenses in Irish courts are rare, and only available if all parties agree the defendant could qualify. Known as a “special verdict,” prosectors and defense lawyers must agree that sufficient evidence exists to exercise such a plea.
To decide on such a verdict, a jury must unanimously conclude that a defendant was undergoing serious mental distress and either did not know what he was doing, did not believe it was wrong, or was unable to stop himself.
In Mr. McGowan’s case, prosecutors, defense lawyers, two separate court-appointed psychiatrists and finally the jury said that he overwhelmingly met the criteria.
“It is an awful case,” said Judge McDermott in directing the jury. “It’s a shocking case.”
Central to the trial’s conclusion were the ill-fated actions of a devoted father whose last act was to try to save his son. In a litany of examples, lawyers said, it was perhaps the most clear evidence of just how far Mr. McGowan’s family went to try to save him from himself.
“It’s a tragedy that John McGowan, who came on a mission of mercy to help his son, ended up dying,” a prosecutor said on Thursday.
As details of the case have unspooled in the press, the idyllic setting of the killing — Ballyfin Demesne, a five-star luxury resort and playground of Ireland’s visiting elite — has generated salacious headlines. But lawyers said on Thursday that John McGowan showed a primal, paternal instinct by taking his son there. At Ballyfin — isolated, guarded by gates and wide, sparse countryside — a desperate father perhaps believed that he could keep his son safe, for one more night.
“Will you make me one promise,” John McGowan pleaded to his son in the back of a taxi, on their final, shared journey to the hotel, according to testimony. “That you will not run away tonight?”
A few hours later, John McGowan was dead. Police officers at the scene arrived to find his son in the hotel library, staring at the fire.
