Who Killed Patricia Curran? : How a Judge, Two Clergymen and Various Policemen Conspired to Frame a Vulnerable Man

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Despite this decidedly odd behaviour, the RUC seemed reluctant to look closer to home for their killer. They took 40,000 witness statements but still the breakthrough eluded them. The Northern Ireland of 1952 – and Curran’s murder – fits this mould. “Apart from all the other aspects which make people so fascinated about it, it’s that there weren’t any other murders. Murder was very rare in the North,” says McNamee. She had 37 stab wounds and must have struggled with her murderer, who would have been drenched in blood, yet her belongings were piled neatly several yards from the body. Further conflicting evidence on Mr Hay Gordon's whereabouts later multiplied the contradictions. He was the only item on the agenda that month at a special meeting of Antrim Rural Council, with the Town Commissioners in attendance.

I was never sorrier for any criminal than for that unhappy, maladjusted youngster. But his mask had to be broken.” By consent, all statements taken in relation to the murder of Ms Curran were handed over to the court; no oral evidence was heard. The most relevant of these I have included earlier. I omitted the report by Doctor AL Wells, registrar of pathology at the Royal Victoria Hospital, as I felt it would be more helpful in this area of the story.Hetty Little was going home from work at about 6pm and had to cross the road at The Glen. She stated that she saw a man coming out of the drive. In an identity parade, she said she thought it was Gordon but could not be positive. Scottish journalist John Linklater and myself travelled to Cape Town in 2001 to interview Desmond about the murder which had been wrongly blamed on a young Scots RAF serviceman called Iain Hay Gordon until his name was finally cleared at Belfast’s High Court in December 2000. And the judge himself? Nine years after his daughter’s death Lance Curran went on to become Ireland’s last hanging judge. In 1961 he convicted Robert McGladdery from Newry and sentenced him to death for the murder of 19-year-old Pearl Gamble. The evidence was circumstantial and McGladdery maintained his innocence but Curran weighed in with a well-timed and cynical steer to the jury and McGladdery was hanged in Crumlin Road gaol that December. That story became Orchid Blue, the second book of an unintended trilogy. During the State of Emergency we led mass funerals and gave evidence against the riot police and the army in the Supreme Court," he said. Antrim folk – many with relatives and friends working in Holywell – knew they had nothing to fear from this young man and they allowed him to heal in peace.

Over the years, the RUC have been criticised for their handling of this inquiry. They had not entered the Curran household in search of evidence because the judge had not allowed them to do so until a week later. A senior RUC officer, County Inspector Kennedy, would later write: “It was decided to pursue all other lines of enquiry before allowing our heads to concentrate on something that would be beyond belief, the fact that the Curran family were lying in an attempt to hide their daughter’s killer.” This could have been the end of this story, but Hay Gordon was haunted by what had happened to him, and after 33 years of keeping his job by staying silent he retired in 1993. He would later say that he was looking at the number of miscarriage of justice cases being overturned and felt he was being left behind. The pair moved the 19-year-old's body to a nearby doctor's house, telling a policeman she was still alive, despite one arm already stiff with rigor mortis. Lancelot and Doris Curran had three children: Michael, Patricia and Desmond. Desmond became a barrister and latterly a Roman Catholic convert and missionary in South Africa. [2] [5] And yet…Patricia…that face looking out from the yellowed newspaper. Innocence lost in the noir world of white mischief, corruption and transgressive sex. Haunted and haunting. As the case against her alleged killer was built, a parallel case seemed to be come into existence against the 19-year-old. That she was wilful, promiscuous, consorted with older men. The sly narrative that takes hold in cases like this, that somehow the victim had brought the whole thing on herself.his handwriting was tiny and detailed, and resembled the written manifestation of an arcane practice".... The two reacted instinctively and gave each other alibis, saying that they were together during that time. Gordon was unique among other ranks in that he had been invited to dinner at The Glen by Desmond, Patricia's brother (after meeting him at church services). To this day, her murder remains officially unsolved. The suspicion is that the murderer was in fact her mother, Lady Doris Curran, who was committed to a mental institution shortly after her daughter’s death. And despite the indignities heaped upon him down the years, the Scotsman agreed. Speaking to the Antrim Guardian in 2000 at a press conference in the Glenavna Hotel - the Curran family’s former home - he remained confident that justice would eventually prevail.

When I began to write about the dreadful murder of Patricia Curran, and the injustice to Gordon which followed it , I saw the benefit of the goodwill and common-sense of the people of Antrim,” he said. I am not sure if McNamee tried to write without presenting a confirmation bias, but his portrayal of all the characters seemed hyperbolized and almost untruthful. (Maybe not so much as UNTRUTHFUL as it is potentially unfaithful to the actual events that occurred and people that existed. Perhaps that is what makes this a novel versus a non-fiction?) I found myself struggling with the portrayal of the women in the text (Doris Curran, Patricia, Hillary...etc.) because I couldn't help but feel awful that they are representative of damaging and limiting female tropes: the mad woman in the attic/upstairs, the promiscuous young woman who "deserved it", and the innocent friend. Interestingly, I find the representation of homosexuality in this novel to be more forgiving than how McNamee dealt with the women. Sure, there was an injustice (confirmation bias) done in the persecution of Iain Hay Gordon, but there was a kinder representation (and almost acceptance) of this "inappropriate behaviour" (hey, it's Northern Ireland in the 50's) than of women being complex creatures. Maybe this is true of the time, and McNamee wrote from a lot of existing secondary sources, maybe he even had the chance to interview real people for this book... I have no idea, and nor will I ever know. When one googles "Patricia Curran" her FATHER is the top hit. This is where I learned that the rest of McNamee's Blue Trilogy is centered around Judge Curran. Why is he such an attractive figure? One so untouchable and seemingly redeemable in all of this mess?The tall, distinguished looking silver-haired priest, then 74, was known to his poor parishioners as Isabane — ‘The Lamp’ — a kindly, gentle figure who had passionately opposed apartheid. The story began on a cold, dark night in November 1952, when the young woman's body was discovered lying in the grounds of her family's stately home in Whiteabbey, Co Antrim. Although medical experts found later that she had been dead for more than four hours, the family bundled her corpse, stiff with rigor mortis, into a car and drove to a local doctor. The brutal murder of the 19-year-old Queen's University student, who was stabbed 37 times in November 1952, has spawned generations of conspiracy theories that her family was behind the killing. Outside Holywell, Gordon’s mother and her friend Dorothy Turtle were campaigning for his release, and this bore fruit in September 1960 when a visitor from the Home Office in London instructed Gordon to go home to Scotland. By the midpoint of the trial both defence and prosecution came to an uneasy truce. The defence would accept that Gordon might have murdered Patricia in the course of a fit, and the prosecution would not oppose a verdict of guilty but insane. Gordon would be sent to an asylum and the matter could be sorted out away from the attention of the press. The danger of hanging an innocent man was thus averted.

When the first policeman, Constable Rutherford, arrived just after 2am he met Judge Curran coming forward in the driveway. As he was about to speak, they heard shouting and both ran towards the source. As they got closer, they saw the light of a torch in the shrubbery just off the drive. As they approached the spot, they found Desmond leaning or kneeling over something on the ground, which as they closed in they realised was Patricia’s body.

Gordon was charged with the murder of Patricia Curran on 2 March 1953 at the Co Antrim spring assizes before Lord McDermott LCJ (lord chief justice), a close friend of the Curran family, and a jury. They had each year a number of breakaways coming in or round their fields, but they were only mental cases.” They lifted Patricia into their car, with the constable’s consent, thinking she may still be alive and took her to the Whiteabbey surgery of Doctor Wilson, the family doctor.