Kieran Fagan is an ex-journalist dwelling in Dublin
My new ebook Who Killed Patricia Curran? identifies her mom Girl Doris Curran, spouse of Northern Eire excessive courtroom decide, Lance Curran, because the assassin. Patricia was. 19 years outdated, in her first yr at Queen’s College in Belfast, in November 1952. Seventy years in the past round midnight on 12 November 12, 1952, her dad and mom reported that she had did not return to the household house at Whiteabbey on the northern shore of Belfast Lough. Not lengthy afterwards he physique was discovered within the shrubbery off the avenue which led up the household home. She had been stabbed 37 instances.
Albert Kennedy, the RUC detective nominally in command of the investigation warned his boss, Sir Richard Pim that he suspected that Lance Curran, a excessive courtroom decide and former Stormont lawyer common, wasn’t telling the reality about his daughter’s actions the night time she died. Within the decide’s account his daughter by no means acquired house that night time. Kennedy suspected that she might have reached house and been murdered there., and the physique positioned within the grounds the place it could appear like she was the sufferer of a random assault by a stranger. This put the wind up the RUC inspector common which is what the chief constable was then known as. He determined that his small power wanted assist with a really delicate investigation and despatched for Scotland Yard. This was in all probability the worst determination of Richard Pim’s profession.
The Metropolitan Police in London despatched one in all its most skilled investigators to assist. Detective Inspector John Capstick turned targeted on a younger Scottish recruit at an air power base in Whiteabbey. On the finish of three days of continuous interrogation Iain Hay Gordon confessed. He was discovered responsible however insane of the homicide of Patricia and that was that. Besides it wasn’t, he was neither responsible nor insane, as an attraction courtroom a lot later accepted. Capstick had bullied and blackmailed him. If he signed the confession, Gordon’s mom wouldn’t discover out that he had been having intercourse with males, Capstick promised.
Gordon stood trial in Belfast in March in 1953. The chief justice Lord McDermott drove the trial at breakneck pace. He had the preparations for the inquiry within the lack of the automotive ferry Princess Victoria coming down the monitor at him. Initially, the defence made job of mentioning that there wasn’t one shred of proof in opposition to Gordon. However then the confession was admitted in proof. The loss of life penalty was now all however inevitable. The prosecution was in bother too. Detective Inspector John Capstick was a free cannon, he couldn’t be put within the witness field with the jury current, something would possibly occur. Beside which it had already grow to be clear that the chaotically disorganised Iain Hay Gordon, the laughingstock of Edenmore RAF base, might by no means have murdered Patricia Curran and cleaned up so professionally afterwards in order that there was no direct proof of his involvement.
By the midpoint of the trial each defence and prosecution got here to an uneasy truce. The defence would settle for that Gordon may need murdered Patricia in the midst of a match, and the prosecution wouldn’t oppose a verdict of responsible however insane. Gordon could be despatched to an asylum and the matter may very well be sorted out away from the eye of the press. The hazard of hanging an harmless man was thus averted.
That hazard was actual. Derek Bentley, a burglar, was hanged in Wandsworth jail a couple of months earlier. An underage confederate of Bentley’s shot a policeman once they had been disturbed throughout a housebreaking. The man who fired the shot was too younger to hold, so Bentley paid the value. Getting again to Gordon, at the least he lived to combat his case. On this respect, the Northern Eire courtroom did higher than the London one. Gordon was launched from Holywell Asylum seven years later following a marketing campaign initiated by his mom, Brenda Gordon supported by a Quaker trainer known as Dorothy Turtle and utilizing authorized ways which owed a lot to an Ulster-born MP for Hornchurch Geoffrey Bing. Two unionist politicians Walter Topping and Brian Faulkner had the braveness to take unpopular selections to permit his launch.
The aim of publishing Who Killed Patrica Curran? on the seventieth anniversary of her loss of life is to fill within the gaps in public information of an unloved homicide which has perplexed many, and to restore the injury to the sufferer’s popularity. Too many individuals imagine a garbled model of Patricia’s story during which her alleged promiscuity performed a component in her loss of life. Actually the post-mortem confirmed that she died a virgin.
Who Killed Patricia Curran? by Kieran Fagan is revealed on Amazon in paperback for £13, and Kindle obtain prices £4.
Editors observe: I do know this story nonetheless fascinates folks at this time. Our late buddy Robert wrote about it again in 2015 After nearly 70 years, the homicide of Patricia Curran casts a protracted shadow and Desmond Curran brother of murdered Patricia Curran reported useless in South Africa…
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