The woman who died in a house fire in Connemara on Tuesday morning has been named locally as Sonia "Sunny" Jacobs, who spent five years on death row in the United States.
According to multiple reports, including in Galway Beo and the Irish Times, the blaze broke out near Casla in County Galway at around 6 a.m.
A statement from An Garda Síochána said: “At approximately 6.20 a.m. gardaí and fire services were alerted to a house fire at Gleann Mhic Mhuireann.
“The fire was brought under control by Fire Services and the bodies of a woman aged in her 70s and a man in his 30s were recovered from inside the house.”
The man in his 30s has not yet been named.
Sonia Jacobs spent 16 years in prison in Florida over the murder of two police officers. In 1976 she was in a car with her partner Jeffe Tafero and her two children when they became caught up in the fatal shooting. A third man, who was a backseat passenger in the car, later confessed to the murder.
Jacobs and Tafero were sentenced to death. Tafero was executed in 1990, while Jacobs was released two years later.
It was in 1998, while at an Amnesty International event in Ireland ,that she met Irishman Peter Pringle, who had himself been sentenced to death for the murder of Gardaí John Morley and Henry Byrne during a bank robbery in 1980.
His sentence was later commuted to 40 years in jail. Mr. Pringle was acquitted of the killing in 1995 at the Court of Appeal.
The pair married in 2012 with Mr. Pringle dying in 2023.
The Garda statement added: “The results of the postmortems, along with the findings of the technical examination, will determine the course of the Garda investigation.”
