'I WON'T GO TO FUNERAL FOR MICHAEL'

'Tell them I put ashes on my forehead.. I don't f**king care' Kelley says he believes gardai will not charge him with murder

- PAUL HEALY

MURDER suspect Michael Kelley insists he won't attend the funeral of Michael Gaine and says what happened to his friend was "a tragedy".

American Mr Kelley, 53, who admits he was arrested on suspicion of the murder of Co Kerry farmer Mr Gaine, also told us when asked if he was grieving him that he doesn't want to play his emotions out in the public gaze.

"Listen man, I'm a very private person and I'm not, no, I'm not going to get into that in the media you know, that's private," he said.

"You can tell them I put f**king ashes on my forehead, I don't f**king care. You know what I mean, stop, c'mon man, I'm not playing out anything for the public."

Asked how he felt about what had happened to Mr Gaine - a man who took him in and whom he lived and worked with for three years - Mr Kelley said: "Yeah, well I never thought that he would end up that way and it is a tragedy.

I take it as a tragedy." The former US soldier agreed to clarify the last moments he said he saw Mr Gaine on his farmland in Kenmare on the morning of March 20 - the day he disappeared.

The Maine native says he last saw the farmer at around 10am that morning.

"I don't want to get caught out, I think it was the 20th. I'd have to have a calendar in front of me. It was the 10 o'clock hour, at some point in the 10 o'clock hour," Mr Kelley told us.

"He was going to meet a man about a tractor.

He was supposedly coming back that night." BARN He also proposed a theory that whoever killed Mr Gaine did so by using a firearm to direct him to a place in which he was out of sight.