“Everything I did, I did because Kenzie asked me. I didn’t want to take her life. I’m so sorry, I didn’t know, I’m very sorry.”This is what Lorcan Murphy told a Budapest court two days before he was found guilty for the murder of a US nurse who was visiting Hungary in November 2024.Murphy, a law and marketing graduate and entrepreneur who grew up in south Co Dublin, received a 14-year prison sentence last week for murdering Mackenzie Michalski (31), from Portland, Oregon. The 38-year-old attempted to paint himself as an ordinary guy, a digital nomad travelling around Europe and trying to set up an internet marketing company as a freelancer.It was all an accident, he claimed in his testimony to the court in front of his victim’s grieving family. It all started as an innocent one-night stand, he claimed. They both got drunk and it was Michalski, spending the last night of her holiday in Budapest, who initiated the rough sex, he claimed. At the first hearing of his trial, he claimed the nurse – known to family and friends as “Kenzie” – had asked him to tie her up and choke her.However, as the trial went on, a different picture of Murphy emerged.Mackenzie Michalski, the 31-year-old nurse from Ohio who Lorcan Murphy murdered in Budapest At the second hearing in April, clinical psychiatrists who interviewed and studied Murphy in custody said they found clear signs of irritability, aggression and sexual aberration.They also told the judge that Murphy’s account of the events of the night he met and killed Michalski shouldn’t be taken at face value, as the Dubliner, who admitted drinking 200ml to 500ml of Jameson whiskey and about 10 beers on the night he met Michalski, had a tendency to confabulate, unconsciously filling in gaps in his memory with false memories.The clinical psychiatrists also revealed a serious porn addiction. Murphy told them he watched porn for hours on a daily basis and that he had been masturbating multiple times every day since the age of 15.He was also able to recall the exact number of sexual partners he has had: 61, he claimed – of whom 50 were one-night stands, he said during his psychiatric evaluation.Further revelations about the state of Murphy’s mind and his actions came from a report Hungarian police produced after accessing the Dubliner’s electronic devices shortly after detaining him.According to the report, police discovered “diary-style entries” on the computer covering 2023 and 2024. The last notes on the diary were written on the day Murphy met his victim.[ Was Lorcan Murphy’s addiction to pornography a warning sign?Opens in new window ]The Dubliner was keeping a detailed list rating and ranking countries and cities based on the looks of the girls in each country and their willingness to date. He rated Krakow in Poland and London highest. “Dublin is all right as well,” he noted, but most women he had approached were in relationship so his “success rate” was lower there.He wrote that his goal was to visit different cities, mostly in eastern Europe, to pick up and date women and that he saw approaching random women as a game.“His thoughts constantly revolve around opportunities to meet women,” the police wrote in their report.Murphy also revealed his plans for the future and his goals in life in his diary. He wrote that he wanted to make money from writing in future and planned to hack the computers of authors to steal their material.Lorcan Murphy at his murder trial in Budapest. In 2016 he faced charges of engaging in threatening and abusive behaviour and assault in Dublin but was not convicted of any offence Murphy described himself as “writer” on the public records for a short-lived Dublin 4 consultancy company of which he was a director a decade ago.The company was dissolved in 2018, less than two years after it was incorporated. Murphy listed his address on the company’s records as a house in Donnybrook. His diary also outlined how he hated all his previous full-time jobs. “All I want is to drink coffee, eat brunch, write and pick up girls,” he declared in one of the entries.He admitted, however, that he would have to figure out how to replace these “sources of excitement” that his lifestyle brought when he would have a girlfriend or a family in the future.He had wanted to become a lawyer previously, he wrote in his diary; he had hoped that this way he could become independent and have a pretty girlfriend.In court as Dublin man is found guilty of American nurse’s murder in Budapest Listen | 23:04He referred to women he dated in derogatory terms, including describing them as “whores”, stating they were the reason his efforts to find a girlfriend had been pointless.Murphy also revealed in one of the notes that he was furious with his parents because they would not permit him to have sex in their house.He believed that the fact that he was an aspiring writer, good-looking and funny should be enough for him to get “hot bitches”, according to his diary. He wrote that he wanted to visit places frequented by attractive women, such as drama and dance classes or yoga.However, he wrote that in 2024 he wanted to switch from “daygame” to “bar game” and focus on approaching potential sex partners in bars. The diary also revealed that he kept a count of how many women he had tried to pick up. In an entry dated October 17th, 2024 he wrote that he had spent four nights in Prague and had eight attempts to pick up women, taking his total to 762. He stated that his goal was to approach his 1,000th women within a few days, before leaving Prague for Budapest on his tour of Europe. Before travelling around Europe he said he had worked in property and earned €3,500 a month. Murphy’s family is involved in the property business in Dublin. In an entry in his diary for November 1st, Murphy complained he had been unsuccessful that night because girls in Budapest tend to be in pairs or groups, not alone.[ The ‘rough sex’ defence didn’t work for Lorcan Murphy. He wasn’t the first to try itOpens in new window ]Three days later Murphy approached Michalski, who entered Budapest’s most famous “ruin bar”, Szimpla Kert, alone.Hungarian police also found a “spy pen” in Murphy’s possession. From the “small camera disguised as a pen” police recovered video footage recorded in the city centre of Dublin, likely in the summer of 2020. Officers identified the location based on bus numbers and destinations as well as buildings visible on the footage.The recordings show Murphy approaching 16 young women on the street, trying the same pickup line each time.Murphy had come to the attention of gardaí in Dublin years before these recordings. He was charged but never convicted of any offences in the Republic.The incidents over which he was charged appeared to take place during St Patrick’s Day celebrations 10 years ago. He was accused of engaging in threatening and abusive behaviour and assault – on March 18th, 2016 – outside Bad Bob’s nightclub in Temple Bar and at nearby Essex Street in Dublin city centre.However, the assault charge was withdrawn by the State, meaning that strand of the prosecution was dropped, with no finding of any wrongdoing against Murphy.The charge of threatening and abusive behaviour, which is effectively a disorderly breach of the peace, was dismissed by the courts.At last week’s sentencing in Hungary, Murphy’s lawyers said he was appealing his conviction for the murder of Michalski. The Budapest Court of Appeal is not expected to take up the case before November or December.