Jasper Kraus’s death was pure clickbait gold. Or rather, chick-bait. When the international press got wind of a man killed by a rooster in Ireland, it was open season on the headlines.

Lurid variations of the ‘crazy chicken kills man’ news alerts lit up phones from Arizona, to New York, to Australia and India. It neatly slotted into the strange but true corners of social media gobbling up clicks and likes.

Funny guys on TikTok chuckled about how ‘hilarious’ the story was. 

“It’s unbelievable how viral it went. Even three or four days ago Fox News had it on,” Jasper’s only daughter, Virginia tells the Irish Examiner.

“The weird thing is, if you go on YouTube and TikTok, and you type in my Dad’s name, you want to see some of the videos they have up. There are people putting their make-up on, doing a full face of make up while reading out the whole inquest. Freaky Friday News. That’s what it’s called. It’s so insensitive,” she says. 

A more recent picture of Jasper Kraus. Picture Virginia Guinan

We are sitting in her home in Roscommon where she has agreed to share her father’s full story, and the tragedy behind Freaky Friday News.

She’s trying to make sense of the media attention while still processing her grief at losing the only parent she loved.

In truth, those headlines give slightly more credit to the rooster than he was due. Already severely weakened from heart failure, renal failure and a diabetic, 67-year-old Jasper didn’t stand a chance when the rooster dug his inch-and-a-half long sharp spur into the back of his left calf, by chance puncturing a vein and causing enough blood loss to stop his heart within minutes.

Virginia arrived on the scene in time to see the paramedics working frantically to save her father. She hadn’t seen so much blood since the stabbing of her baby brother Kevin in 1995. Back then, it was Jasper who sprang into action.

On 21 May it was almost exactly a year to the day since the Dutchman had arrived in Ballinasloe from the Netherlands with his Irish-born wife Anne and their two young children, four-year-old Virginia and one-year-old baby Kevin. Virginia still has memories of their life in The Hague where Jasper worked in a radio station.

“My Dad was a very big music person and I always remember bands and stuff in the house, drum kits and guitars and all sorts. When he worked in the radio station he met a lot of rock bands, interviewing them. He organised concerts and did sound work. He knew the Dutch member of the Eagles. He was happy there,” she says. 

But Anne had been homesick for her native Galway and struggled with her mental health which had seen her hospitalised after Kevin’s birth.

Jasper had spent three years recovering from a cancer diagnosis in 1991. A move to Ireland would be a chance for a new beginning, a “second life” for all of them, as Jasper told the then Connacht Tribune reporter Harry Casey in 1995. 

“I wanted a new start, a second life. It was one of the reasons we came over to Ireland,” he said. 

Jasper Kraus with his daughter Virginia during his cancer treatment. . Picture Virginia Guinan

The Kraus family settled in a rented house at 79 Brackernagh, on the outskirts of Ballinasloe. Jasper got a job as a security guard in Salthill and was working nights.

They started to make friends, to build a new life. Anne’s mental health however, continued to deteriorate. She became suicidal on occasions. In one instance at the end of April 1995, she took a meat knife, placed it against her breast and said she wanted to die.

A change in her medication and attendance at a day care centre led to a brief improvement before another episode where she again told Jasper she wanted to die.

She told her doctor she had difficulty in coping with the children.  

“My mother was even more mentally unstable at the time,” recalls Virginia. “She didn’t have much support from the mental health services here. They kept changing her medications. My father was trying his best to tell them to put her back on what she was on. The reply he got from the doctor, which I read from the inquest, was basically, ‘I’m the doctor. You’re the husband. I decide what happens’. My mother begged to be kept in hospital. She didn’t trust herself. My father cried for help for my mother and it was not there. And they let her home.” 

That fateful Sunday morning in May Jasper was in bed with the flu and Anne was making lunch for the children in the kitchen when the unspeakable happened. For reasons that will never be fully known, Anne stabbed two-year-old Kevin in the chest in front of five-year-old Virginia.

“It was surreal. She actually picked up a knife and stabbed my brother. And I witnessed this. She went and got Dad out of bed. He got injured in the process as well,” says Virginia.

Jasper’s statement read out at his son’s inquest in Gort in 1997 describes how his wife woke him up with a knife in her hand.

“I stabbed Kevin” she said to him. He jumped out of bed and saw blood on the knife. He rushed into the kitchen where he found little Kevin blood-soaked, half on a chair, half on the ground.

He picked him up, put him in the car and drove him straight to Portiuncula Hospital.  

“My son was alive and talked all the way to the hospital. He kept saying ‘Papa, Papa’,” Jasper told the Connacht Tribune.

He handed him over to two nurses and the child lost consciousness. Nurse Ethel Leonard was one of the nurses on duty that day.

She told the inquest that a man burst in at 1.50pm carrying a child whose upper clothes were saturated in blood.

A young medic, Dr Annette Jennings, was one of the doctors who fought in vain to save Kevin’s life that day. Some time later, he was pronounced dead and was baptised by the Hospital chaplain Fr. Costello. 

Virginia with her brother Kevin. 

In the meantime, Virginia was left alone with her mother in the house and witnessed her self-harming.

Her memories of that day are still crystal clear and the trauma and PTSD has never left her. “I had an internal fear of her, I always had as a child growing up. Everyone in my home got injured that day except me. She got injured, my father got injured and Kevin got severely injured. I had a fear, what if I was next?” she says.

The fact that she alone survived unscathed that day strikes her as “unbelievable.” 

Garda Theo Hanley took the call from Jasper at the hospital and was first on the scene at Brackernagh.

He recalled two dogs barking and poignantly, seeing young Virginia standing at the front door.

He went into the kitchen and saw the knife and blood on the floor. Garda Hanley told the inquest that Anne pointed to the floor and said: “there’s the blood.”

She was shivering and stamping her feet. Her hands were shaking. Her left wrist appeared to be slashed.

It is a day the now retired 71-year-old will never forget. “She was in an awful state, the poor woman you’d feel sorry for her,” he tells the Irish Examiner when we meet at the former Kraus family home in Ballinasloe.

The windows of the 1950’s style three-bedroom bungalow are all boarded up, the front garden completely overgrown. It is frozen in time.

Traffic whizzes past on the busy road in front, oblivious to the dark tale of horror seen within its walls almost thirty years ago.

Front page of the Connacht Tribune from Friday June 2, 1995.

Hanley is deeply uncomfortable even speaking about the tragedy to this day. “It would knock the heart out of anyone looking at what happened,” he says.

In his 23 years in the force up to that particular day, he had never encountered anything as sad, despite witnessing the bloody aftermaths of several shootings and murders while he served on the border during the early years of the Troubles. 

“It would bring tears to a stone. It was just terrible, the poor childeen. He was only two years old. ‘Twas just shocking. It shook a lot of the fellas below in the station, so it did,” he says, his voice breaking with emotion.

“You didn’t talk about it. The family had enough to contend with,” he says. 

Surveying the scene that day, Garda Hanley realised that Anne needed medical attention too, so both mother and daughter were brought to the hospital, where Kevin had just been pronounced dead.

“I saw Dad in tears coming down the stairs. I knew something was wrong and I knew my brother was gone then. He was only two. I was five. That was a hard time,” Virginia says. 

Virginia's mother, Anne, was taken first to St. Bridget's Hospital Ballinasloe. The hospital closed in 2013. Picture Gary Strong

Once in the hospital, Anne said she was sorry for what she had done and wanted to know if she would go to jail, the inquest heard.

A heart-breaking scene is painted of the distraught couple. Jasper, even in his deep distress, kissed his wife on the forehead and put his arms around her.

She told him she was sorry for stabbing the child and asked him if he had forgiven her. He told her they would have to be strong and for her to go to the hospital and get better. At 3.45pm Garda Hanley was present when Anne was taken to St Brigid’s Hospital, the then main mental health hospital in East Galway, where she was detained.

In the blink of an eye, Jasper’s family was reduced to two. 

Retired journalist, Ken Kelly, at home in Ballinasloe. Picture Ray Ryan

That same day, local reporter with Galway Bay FM Ken Kelly was driving past the Kraus family home on his way into Ballinasloe when he spotted the Garda squad cars parked outside.

“Being a journalist, my suspicions were raised straight away,” he tells this newspaper. In a bizarre twist, the house was also his childhood home. “It came as a huge shock to me because I knew exactly the spot in the house of where it happened.

“A brother and sister of mine were born in that house. There was quite a friendly atmosphere in the place amongst neighbours, so the shock of this tragedy reverberated completely.

“It was one of those things we did not expect and certainly from our point of view, the Kellys, to say that it happened in our house,” he recalls. “That was an awful tragedy, actually,” he adds.

“But it garnered a lot of support for the father and mother involved. The whole community will tell you their sympathy went out to them; it was such a horrific thing,” he says. 

Far away in The Hague, Jasper’s father took ill when he heard of the death of his little grandson, which featured on Dutch television the same evening.

Jasper’s mother, who had escaped the nazis during World War Two by hiding in a monastery, travelled alone to Ireland for her grandson’s burial.

After the Garda investigation was completed, a file was sent to the then DPP, Eamonn Barnes, who directed that there be no prosecution. At Kevin’s inquest, the then State Pathologist, Dr John Harbison testified that he carried out the post-mortem examination on the toddler on May 22nd1995 and established that he died from bleeding into his chest as a result of a stab wound to his left lung.

The jury returned a verdict in accordance with Dr Harbison’s evidence. The then Coroner for East Galway, Dr Richard Joyce, extended his sympathies to the Kraus family on “this tragic accident.”  

Article from the Connacht Tribune Friday June 2, 1995 - page 11.

The wide-open lowland pastures of The Hague in the Netherlands were the childhood idyll for Jasper, who grew up working with majestic jet black Dutch Friesian horses and professional dressage rides.

The eldest of three children, Jasper bucked the trend from the start – while his younger siblings moved into nine-to-five office jobs Jasper gained his exotic animal licence and literally ran away to join the circus.

He travelled around Europe with the German circuses Circus Busch Roland and Circus Krone.

He would hold up his forearm and regal Virginia with stories of daring-do. Once, a mountain thunderstorm spooked the animals inside the circus ring, including a tiger. Even when the tiger had him pinned against a wall Jasper Kraus stood his ground. 

Men frantically sprayed fire extinguishers at the big cat, allowing Jasper to eventually escape. He survived but would forever bear the scars of the attack on his forearm.

Three lines of tiger claw. 

1979 film Electric Horseman starring Robert Redford and Jane Fonda.

Hollywood beckoned after that and Jasper spent almost a decade working with trick horses on film sets, stunt riding in westerns such as The Electric Horseman starring Robert Redford and Jane Fonda in 1979.

He got married twice and Virginia has a half-brother in Germany, but he never settled down.

He moved on to Belgium, then back to Holland where he met Anne in an Irish pub and that was that. 

Ballinasloe Horse Fair is an annual event and it is one of Europe’s largest and oldest horse fairs, dating back to the 18th century.Picture Hany Marzouk

“Way back the Russians bought horses here. Even last October we had them from Belgium, Germany, the UK and France. It’s one of the biggest in Europe in terms of main quality and trade,” says Ken.

“The horse-trading goes on for the entire week. I remember going to school and the streets of the town were lined with horses.

“It was said that you could walk on the backs of horses the whole way down the three main streets.

“There were thousands of them. The Ballinasloe horse is renowned because it is reared on the land where the limestone is so good.

“We’ve had great showjumpers that were bought in Ballinasloe, at the fair,” he adds. 

Jasper in Ballinasloe in 2000.Picture Ray Ryan

Jasper could appreciate the unique breed of local horses, they reminded him of the Friesian horses of his childhood.

Six months after Kevin’s death, they moved to a house in Hymany Park, a local authority housing estate in Ballinasloe itself. Ken remembers seeing him “up there with two ponies and there was a grazing area close enough to the soccer pitch. I saw these ponies grazing there and no one took any objection to it.”

Jasper found his niche working with anxious or young horses and quickly gained a reputation as a horse whisperer, working in yards all around the midlands and the west.

“In nearly every yard in Ireland or race yard, people around here got Dad to come in to work on horses. He had a very good reputation for problem horses,” says Virginia.

He worked on all levels, from top breed showjumpers to abused rescue horses, breaking in horses and mucking out stables.

Owners knew that by the time Jasper placed his own daughter on a horse, the problem had been solved.  

Jasper in his younger days in The Hague .Picture supplied by Jasper's daughter, Virginia

“He was very gentle and he was good with the horses, his calmness came across to them,” says horse trainer Paraic Geraghty.

Geraghty has worked at the highest echelons of the Irish show jumping world, acting as assistant to chef d’equipe Robert Splaine and then rising to chef d’equipe of the Turkish Show Jumping Team. He remembers Jasper well.  

“He was a really nice guy and he had a lot of trouble in his life. For a man who had gone through so much turmoil in his life he handled it really well. It never showed, it never affected him. He was a really nice person and his daughter was his world really, he was really concerned with looking after her, he used to bring her to the yard from school,” he tells the Irish Examiner at Coilóg Equestrian Centre in Kildare.

“Among the banter of the lads having the craic in the yard, Jasper was 'the voice of reason.' I can still see him now. For what he had gone through in his life, he was an amazing person, when you think back to what he had gone through and how he dealt with it and how he carried on. He didn’t let it drag him down, he was very positive,” he adds.  

Thinking back on it now, Geraghty believes it wasn’t just Jasper healing the horses, they were healing him: “He spent hours upon hours just grooming the horses and brushing them and talking to them and taking them into the paddocks and letting them out, he just seemed to have endless time to be in the company of the horses so maybe that was his way of dealing with the pressure that he was under,” he says. 

Pressures came with being a foreigner in Hymany Park. With not being allowed to visit his son’s grave after relations with his Irish in-laws broke down. “It was (seen as) a shame on my family. That hurt him,” says Virginia.

Tensions arose in their new neighbourhood after swastikas were written on their door. “That was comical because we were Dutch, we weren’t German. Eggs would be thrown at the house, stones at windows,” she says. “Jasper got so sick of it one day he stood out on the road to protect his home while being pelted with bricks, turf, eggs, everything.”

Gardaí attended the scene along with an ambulance, but like with the tiger years previously, Jasper stood his ground. “I remember his neck was swollen but he refused to leave. Obviously the young lads grew up and copped on but it was terrible at first,” she remembers.

Jasper was convicted in 1996 of a breach of the peace and sentenced to three months in prison, which he never served because he successfully appealed the case. 

Article - page 2 of the Connacht Tribune, June 14, 1996 .

Before they left Hymany Park some years later, Jasper attempted to break the world record for the longest time spent continuously on horseback to raise money for Children in Need.

A band played, a famous jockey fired the starting pistol, a priest even blessed the horse and the crowds cheered for Jasper. It was showtime. Every hour he switched to a new horse.

People brought their horses from miles around for him to ride. For 72 hours - three entire days and nights - Jasper rode around the green in Hymany, “living off coffee, cigarettes and rolls” from local bakeries. A doctor ordered him off or have a heart attack before he could beat the 127 hour record.

While he succeeded in raising money for charity, a massive blood clot developed on his leg. It would be beginning of a long litany of health problems, prompting them to move out to the countryside in south Roscommon where he’d have space to continue his work with horses. 

Jasper Kraus, Ballinasloe attempting to break the world horse riding record, riding non stop from the 25th April to 30th AprIl 2000 Picture Andrew Downes

According to Kelly, Jasper and Virginia enjoyed widespread popularity afterwards but the town never forgot the tragedy because Jasper was “a constant reminder of it” with his presence around town and his world record attempts.

“Any time we heard about him it brought back that gruesome thing over 20 years ago. His presence was a reminder of the tragedy that happened. He could be described as a colourful character, but he was a quiet man in his own way. 

“I don’t think he mixed that much and his love of horses, his daughter and himself were very often seen together. He was a placid character. He never had any enemies; he was quite the opposite.

“A lot of people supported him afterwards in many ways. It was his own decision on account of the horses to move out of town,” adds Kelly. 

 “A lot of people lost track of him after he moved out and he didn’t frequent town that much. It was only after his passing that a lot of people learned that he had a miniature zoo out there for want of a better word. That’s what he liked, that’s what he loved. He loved the open countryside; he loved Ireland, and he loved Ballinasloe.” 

The father and daughter duo continued to work with rescue horses for the ISPCA around the west and successfully rehabilitated and rehomed dozens of horses.

Out in Killahornia, Jasper found a place where his spirit could reside in peace with his beloved dogs, poultry and horses.

The arrival of his two granddaughters Josie and Sofie brought a new joy which coexisted alongside Jasper's agonising loss. 

In his final years, illness brought Jasper to death’s door on several occasions. Yet he continued to confound the medics; his terminal cancer went into remission. He beat sepsis. He survived heart and renal failure a month before he died. Jasper was still standing his ground.

A day before he died, on 27th April last year, his 20-year-old Yorkshire terrier Krista had to be put down. Krista was his guardian angel who would lick his face to wake him up whenever his sleep apnoea stopped his breathing.

His home help and friend Emma Corcoran was one of the last people apart from Virginia to speak with Jasper the next day. She found him “inconsolable.”

“He was actually crying in his sleep for the dog, because the dog slept beside him every night for the last twenty years,” she tells the Irish Examiner. “He was one of a kind, we bonded completely over our love for animals. He was a survivor,” she adds. 

Emma and Virginia have concluded that Jasper had gone out the back to look at Krista’s grave when he was attacked from behind by the aggressive rooster he had stopped Virginia from destroying a few months earlier after it attacked her toddler.

He managed to get indoors and say ‘rooster’ before he was quietly stilled forever. GP Dr Annette Jennings pronounced him dead at the scene - the same woman who had fought to save his son’s life 27 years earlier.

She agrees it was a “strange coincidence.” Fatal rooster attacks are so rare less than a handful are recorded in the entire world.

In yet another uncanny twist, in 2019 a town in Arkansas was terrorised by a rogue rooster. That town is called Jasper. 

Jasper's daughter, Virginia Guinan, pictured attending last year's Elphin Agricultural Show.  Picture Andrew Fox

Virginia is now using her unwanted platform to raise awareness of the dangers of poultry and to campaign for state support for families left to clean up the often bloody scenes of sudden deaths.

The state pays for cleaning companies to swoop in and clean crime scenes but there is nothing for either sudden deaths or suicides here.

Sympathetic Gardaí rang around a few companies and got a quote of €1,000 for her after Jasper’s body was removed, but “who has €1,000?” she asks.

Bereaved families are doubly traumatised by having to deal with the often gruesome clean up she believes. 

Virginia had to don her rubber gloves and  use puppy pads to soak up her father’s blood, in between answering the door to early sympathisers.

Twenty eight years ago she watched Jasper get down on his hands and knees to mop up her brother’s blood. She never expected to have to do the same herself. 

“Nothing has changed. That it’s happening is unbelievable. A person can’t grieve. I can just imagine how many people in Ireland to this day have had to clean up after losing a loved one. They’re quiet. You don’t hear from them. They don’t speak out, because they are suffering, getting nightmares daily, flashbacks to …like what I have experienced, getting blood on my hands, of my father, on my shoes, trying to wash it off when I get home. That should not have to happen. No person should ever have to deal with this, and to live with the aftermath of that,” she adds. 

Virginia handled the disposal of the rooster herself and “recycled” him to the ferrets.She has received more online abuse over that, but is unrepentant. She only wishes she did it sooner. “I think it was the best thing I could have done and anyone who says the rooster should be alive, you were not there. You did not go through it. You did not clean up after it and you did not feel the pain that we have felt from the loss.”  

Virginia has only seen her mother twice since Kevin’s death all those years ago. Once as a child, which she describes as “the most terrifying thing” and again at her wedding reception five years ago when she saw a head pop round the door in front of 200 people. “She didn’t really say much to me, I was in shock,” she says. 

Virginia and the African parrot that Jasper owned 

For what she has been through as a child and more recently with Jasper’s shocking death, Virginia speaks with remarkable composure and grace.

She has buried some of his ashes in Kevin’s grave and some at the home he loved in Killahornia.

Her only regret is that she can’t find any videos of her father. But echoes of Jasper remain.

His pet African Grey parrot expertly mimics him calling ‘Gina! Coffee’, even with a Dutch accent.

Sometimes it sounds like Jasper is in the next room. “It’s a comfort,” says Virginia. Jasper, as he was in life, is still extraordinary.