The full story as to how a jury found Burns and Vial guilty of Sliabh Liag murder

Alan Vial and Nikita Burns had just beaten Robert ‘Robin’ Wilkin’s head in with a rock when they came up with their plan - to cast the body off Sliabh Liag.

They were pulled in on the Roshine Road near Killybegs where they spent about 15 minutes trying to decide what to do. The plan hatched, they sped up the slope towards Sliabh Liag with Robin Wilkin lying dead or dying between them, his head in the back seat and his legs draped across the centre console of the car he’d shared with Vial.

The rock that they had used to bash the 66-year-old’s skull in was sitting on the floor behind Nikita. At Sliabh Liag, a barrier blocked their progress towards the car park nearest the viewing point at the top of the cliffs. Nikita got out, lifted the barrier, and they drove on.

READ NEXT: Nikita Burns and Alan Vial found guilty of murdering Robert Wilkin at Sliabh Liag

Once at the upper carpark, they dragged Mr Wilkin’s body towards the three-foot fence near the edge of the sheer fall to the Atlantic Ocean. They stopped along the way to pick their victim’s pocket of the roughly €1,000 in cash that he had been paid for a paving contract.

They took his watch, neck chain and glasses but thought better of it and threw them as far as they could, but failed to get them over the cliff. They also threw the rock but failed to get it over the edge.

They lifted the body over the fence, and dragged it to the cliff where it rolled, gathered speed and disappeared over the edge.

They came up with a story, in case anyone asked what had happened to Robin. They would say that all three of them went to Sliabh Liag to watch the sunset but Mr Wilkin began sexually assaulting Ms Burns, leading to a fight. Vial would claim he got the better of the older man, punched him in the stomach and left him winded but still very much alive near but not over the cliff edge.

After the lies unravelled before a jury at the Central Criminal Court, Alan Vial took the stand in his own defence. But the jury saw through that too and today convicted him and his co-accused of murder.

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Alan Vial was described by his own senior counsel Shane Costelloe as a sad and pathetic, middle-aged man. He had gone to Australia with his wife but the marriage failed due to his excessive drinking. He came home to live in the unfinished house he had begun building some years earlier at Drumanoo Head in Killybegs. With no plumbing or electricity, Vial relied on his brother Bruce, living up the N56 in Ardara, when he wanted a shower or to wash his clothes.

Alan Vial had a long history of offending both in Australia and Ireland, including various driving offences, drunk driving, possession of drugs and possession of a weapon. He could be belligerent and a nuisance when drunk and was barred from a number of pubs in Donegal.

Just a few months before killing Robert Wilkin, in February 2023, Vial stole his father’s lorry, crossed the border into Northern Ireland to evade a garda pursuit and sped towards Strabane where police stopped him at a checkpoint.

Three months after that, in May, he met Robert Wilkin in a bar. Mr Wilkin was a Tyrone man - six feet tall and weighing about 90 kilos, he had a powerful frame despite his 66 years. He had worked in concrete and paving all his life but he was struggling and had taken to living rough or sleeping in his car. Vial offered to let him stay at his home if Mr Wilkin would help to finish his garden and teach him how to work heavy machinery. For the next month they did “pretty much everything together” Vial would say in his own testimony during the trial. They worked together on Vial’s garden and managed to secure a paving contract worth €9,000. They ate and drank together and, on occasion, they would lose their temper and shout at one another. Others who met them during those weeks noticed that Mr Wilkin would talk down to Vial and one man witnessed him slapping the younger man on the back of the head to get him to shut up.

It was Mr Wilkin who brought Nikita Burns into Vial’s orbit in late May or early June. After a weekend visit, she ended up living at Drumanoo Head and began sleeping with Vial.

Nikita was 16 years younger than Vial and had lived a difficult life. She didn’t finish school, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety, spent time in psychiatric units and sometimes lived on the streets.

In the weeks before the murder, she contacted her brother Ruben, sent him photographs of her with Vial and Mr Wilkin and said she was in a relationship with Vial and was “doing better”. But Ruben became concerned when she told him she was off her medication and appeared to be drinking during the day.

Nikita did her bit on the paving contract that Vial and Mr Wilkins had secured, pushing wheelbarrows filled with concrete and doing odd jobs to speed things along. When the job was done and the money paid, Vial and Mr Wilkin spent €1,000 on a Volkswagen Passat, paid Nikita a small sum and split what was left.

On Saturday June 24, 2023, Vial awoke around noon with Nikita beside him. The house was otherwise empty. According to Vial, they had breakfast, drank six cans of Carlsberg each and walked to the Fleet Inn in Killybegs.

They ordered vodka, Vial mixed his with Lucozade and Nikita mixed hers with white lemonade. CCTV footage showed Robert Wilkin arriving and remonstrating with Vial before the three left and got into the Passat.

They drove to McIntyre’s Bar in Dunkineely where the drinking continued. They hopped from McIntyre’s to McLoughlin’s and finally to Mac’s Bar where they remained until closing time.

As the lights went off and staff began cleaning the pub, Nikita and Mr Wilkin left through a side door but they got split from Vial, who left through the front. When they found one another again, Mr Wilkin was annoyed and blamed Vial for delaying them.

What happened next can only be pieced together from snippets of CCTV, Alan Vial’s unreliable testimony and Nikita Burns’s vague recollections in her garda interviews.

Robert Wilkin drove while Vial, who would normally sit in the front, sat in the back because he knew Mr Wilkin was annoyed with him. “It was pretty quiet, very tense, there was no communication between us,” Vial said.

They were driving towards home in Killybegs on the Roshine Road near a factory building called Atlantic Dawn when Vial claims he broke the silence. The car had begun shaking going up a hill so he told Mr Wilkin to drop down a gear. “Don’t tell me how to drive,” Mr Wilkin replied before pulling in at a factory named EK Marine.

Vial claimed in his testimony that Mr Wilkin turned around in his seat and punched him several times in the face. He said he grabbed Mr Wilkin’s wrists to prevent further blows and as they grappled, Nikita appeared at the front passenger side door and struck Mr Wilkin twice with a rock on the back of the head, causing him to stop breathing.

As Vial told his story, tears flowed down Nikita’s face and her leg trembled while she sat in the dock. When the jury had left the room, she couldn’t contain her anger any longer and she shouted at Vial: “What are you getting out of telling lies, this is my life.”

After the jury returned, Vial claimed that he and Nikita disposed of the body and came up with a “bit of a story” for anyone who might ask what happened to Robin. They would say that they had gone to Sliabh Liag to view the sunset but Mr Wilkin began sexually assaulting Nikita, sparking a fight with Vial. In his garda interviews, Vial said that he got the better of Mr Wilkin, winded him and left him alive and breathing near but not over the edge of the cliff. In his testimony before the court, he accepted that he had lied in his garda interviews but said he did it to protect Ms Burns because he “still had feelings for her”.

The jury clearly rejected Vial’s testimony but the truth of what happened is impossible to know. State Pathologist Dr Margaret Bolster had identified two blows to the back of Mr Wilkin’s head which she said were entirely consistent with having been caused by the rock that was found near Mr Wilkin’s belongings at the top of Sliabh Liag.

But she was unable to identify a cause of death and couldn’t say what other blows had been inflicted on Mr Wilkin before he was put over the cliff. What allowed the jury to reject Vial’s claims is that, having lied repeatedly for 20 hours during his garda interviews, it was clear he had pieced together a new version of events that fit neatly with the pathology evidence. He was, as prosecution senior counsel Bernard Condon said in his closing speech, a cynical liar who had woven a tale based on his knowledge of the book of evidence.

The evidence picked apart Vial’s story so at his trial, he got in the box to try again. However, he again came unstuck when he claimed that the two blows to the back of the head caused Mr Wilkin’s instant death. Ms Burns’s lawyers asked Dr Bolster to be recalled and she told the jury that those two blows would not have killed Mr Wilkin instantly. While they would have knocked him unconscious and caused extensive bleeding, death would mostly likely have taken 15 to 20 minutes, she said.

It was also clear from the amount of blood in the car, spattered on the roof and soaked into the back seat, that Mr Wilkin had bled extensively for a period of time.

There were further reasons for the jury to reject Vial’s claims. After disposing of the body over the cliff, Vial drove to nearby Teelin Pier where he waded into the water to wash the blood from his hands and clothes and threw his bloodstained shirt into the sea. Mr Condon asked the jury to consider whether these were the actions of a man trying to protect Ms Burns or an attempt to destroy evidence of what Vial himself had done.

Why, if Vial was so concerned for Ms Burns, did he not urge her to get in the water to destroy DNA evidence that might link her to the crime?

CCTV from the carpark at Sliabh Liag showed that Vial and Burns returned to the cliff a few hours after the killing and again later in the afternoon. They both admitted that they wanted to see if the body was visible or if anyone had raised the alarm. They left, satisfied that they had successfully disposed of the evidence.

On the day after the killing, the drinking continued and, according to Vial, they bought cannabis which they smoked back at Drumanoo. They had more money now because, before putting him over the cliff, they had taken money from Robin’s wallet - the cash he had been paid for the paving contract. Each one blamed the other for the theft and denied that money was the motive for the killing.

They drove to Bruce Vial’s house where they borrowed a vacuum cleaner and used cleaning sprays in a failed attempt to clean their victim’s blood from the car. When Bruce got the vacuum back, it was full of blood that he mistook for “red wine vomit”.

They drove on and as Vial sped drunkenly along the road at Finntown, about eight miles from Glenties, he crashed off the road into a ditch. When Garda Aaron Meenaghan arrived at the scene, he found Nikita Burns vomiting on the side of the road and drinking from a cider can. Vial was trying to convince a tractor driver to pull the car out of the ditch and became aggressive when the garda told him an ambulance was on the way.

He was “acting unpredictably”, Gda Meenaghan recalled, becoming enraged and pacing up and down the road and seemingly looking for an argument. When backup arrived, Gda Meenaghan arrested Vial for drunk driving but he became so aggressive that the garda had to use pepper spray to subdue him.

Gda Meenaghan also noted blood spatter on the interior roof of the car and cleaning agents in the back seat. He informed Letterkenny Garda Station of what he had seen and they seized the car.

Nikita went to hospital in an ambulance but left a short time later and went in search of Alan Vial. When she realised he was in custody in Letterkenny and due to be charged with drink driving, she went to her friend Chris Quinn’s house nearby where she made the confessions that sparked the garda investigation into Mr Wilkin’s death.

That investigation involved gathering hours of CCTV footage, witness statements and days of interviews with both accused. The Irish Coastguard spent a week searching for the body and specialist abseilers rappelled down the cliff face to recover Mr Wilkin’s jumper and a bloodied blanket.

The trial also heard unique evidence from geologist Dr Sophie O’Connor, who used her expertise to conclude that the bloodied rock found near the top of Sliabh Liag was not natural to that area. She discovered a wall at the scene where Mr Wilkin was assaulted in Roshine which was missing a rock of similar size. When she checked Google Street View, she found the wall had been intact in 2021 and the rock that was now missing was similar to the bloodied rock at Sliabh Liag in shape, size, curvature and surface features including lichen staining.

Following their convictions, Vial and Burns face the mandatory term of life imprisonment for murder. Robert Wilkin's sister, Irene McAleer, attended every day of their trial and will make a statement to the court tomorrow about the impact of her brother's murder.