Long-service Tamworth solicitor Stephen O'Reilly remembers Duri's Helen Ryan murder case

Still in stage one of his retirement plan, the solicitor has handed over his practice to Duncan Maclean and Associates principal Mark Daly.

“I’ll move down to a premises on Peel Street where I’m going to concentrate wholly and solely on my court work, my criminal practice,” the Bridge Street Lawyers principal said.

“Then I’ll move on to stage two, relocating to Budapest.”

When his daughter lived and worked in Budapest for several years, Mr O’Reilly fell in love with the place and invested in an apartment in the heart of the city, using it as a base to travel around Europe.

Mr O’Reilly was admitted in 1985, and started his career in the local courts, back in those days it was called the Court of Petty Sessions.

As the years passed, the list of cases Mr O’Reilly tackled grew longer and longer and eventually he became tied up in the Helen Ryan hitman murder case – one of the matters that stuck out in his career.

Ryan was jailed for 27 years after she was convicted of hiring a hitman to gun down her estranged grazier husband Jeffrey Ryan in Duri, in October 2009.

Mr O’Reilly was acting in the family law proceedings at the time.

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“The deceased Jeffrey Ryan was a client of mine – they found him deceased out at Duri,” he said.

“I was only acting for him in connection with the family law issues and the financial adjustment we were trying to establish.

“I got a phone call from the police one day saying they’d found him deceased and wanted to talk to me about it – I initially thought it was a situation where he might have taken his own life.

“When I raised that with police they told me it wasn’t the line of inquiry they were pursuing, the immediate suspicion turned, as it often does, to the spouse.”

It was discovered Ryan recruited her mother and sister to arrange a $30,000 contract killing, the Cessnock man convicted of the murder, Kenneth Brooks, was sentenced to 38 years jail.

Mr O’Reilly said the case stood out to him because it’s unusual for the woman to be the perpetrator of such a violent crime.

“It’s usually the other way around, it’s usually the husbands they’re looking for,” he said.

Now Mr O’Reilly is setting his sights on stage two of his retirement plan – to leave law behind for good.

“When I went out on my own it was because it was another challenge, I wanted to do my own thing rather than be responsible for others,” he said.

“But that didn’t last long, because then I grew and slowly employed other solicitors and staff.

“Now I’m ready to go, I was going to take this decision this time last year but the timing wasn’t right – I’m looking forward to downing tools completely in due course and moving on to the next chapter.”

Mr O’Reilly handed over the keys on June 22.