The first episode of The Killing of Fr Niall Molloy will air tonight on RTE One at 9.35pm.
The two-part documentary will take a look at the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of Fr Niall Molloy at the home of his friends Richard and Teresa Flynn in Offaly in July 1985.
The priest’s battered body was discovered in the master bedroom of his now deceased friends home, Kilcoursey House a 23-room manor.
In the documentary, former state pathologist Professor Jack Crane says he believes the priest was brutally beaten to death and lay dying for hours, meaning he could have been saved.
Initially, it was believed that Fr Molloy died of a heart attack after a fight broke out between him and Richard Flynn.
Dr Crane confirmed he did not die of a heart attack as thought at the time of his death – but rather from his injuries.
Prof Crane said: “There are two things which struck me. First of all, there was the presence of blood within the small air spaces in the lungs.
“This means that there must have been bleeding somewhere around the mouth or nose area and that Fr Molloy was still alive and was bleeding and able to inhale that blood.
“What we are not looking at is someone who has sustained an injury and died rapidly.
"To me, it suggests that there has been a period of survival, perhaps unconscious for maybe a couple of hours.
“That rules out the fact that this is something to do with the heart.”
When gardai and emergency services were called to the scene over six hours after the incident, they found Fr Molloy with head and face injuries and an eight foot long drag mark of blood across the carpet.
Fr Molloy's nephew, who also appears in the documentary, said: "The evidence from the slides is that Niall took hours to die. He did not die suddenly from a heart attack, as we were led to believe.
“It changes the whole scenario in my mind... if Niall is absolutely dead at one in the morning and it took him hours to die, well then he wasn’t assaulted at a quarter to one, he was assaulted a number of hours beforehand.”
Richard Flynn admitted to punching the priest a number of times in the early hours of the morning as they argued about who would go downstairs to get more drinks.
Gardai said the business man was calm and collected when he was first interviewed at 4.45am that day.
His trial for manslaughter, which took place a year later, ended after just four hours when Mr Flynn was acquitted.
Judge Frank Roe had accepted that Fr Molloy could have suffered a heart attack and sustained his head injuries as he hit the floor.
However, an inquest a month later determined that Fr Molloy had died due to his head injuries.
Unfortunately, the inquest findings were too late, and Richard Flynn was already a free man.
Former Garda sergeant Kevin Forde, who was called to the scene, said: "At 3.15am, there was a knock on the door and when I answered it, it was Fr Deignan, the parish priest. He told me that a priest was dead down at Flynn’s house. He said it’s an awful scandal in the parish and, ‘I wonder is there any way that we can keep it quiet?’
“I said, ‘It will have to be investigated anyway’.”
Mr Maher, as well as other members of Fr Molloy’s family, are now calling for a new investigation into the 52-year-old cleric’s death.
