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

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Desmond, who was then a barrister , was a member of the local Presbyterian church and a crusading religious group to which he hoped to convert young Scottish RAF technician, Iain Hay Gordon, who would later be blamed for the killing. Gordon spent his first year in a closed ward at Holywell where the medical director Dr Gilbert Smith and his chief nursing officer Donald Gilchrist kept him under close observation.

Together they resolved to pass ‘resolutions of protest’ against the decision to send the ‘notorious killer’ to Antrim. The Blue Tango, though, is not Hay Gordon's story. Nor, intriguingly, does McNamee attempt to answer the question: who killed Patricia Curran? 'Instinct would lead me in a certain direction,' he says, when pressed, 'but I honestly think that what I think is unimportant. It would not be fair to the book. That's not what this story is about. It's more about conjuring up a complex, enclosed world, and the notion that things are grinding ahead on a much bigger scale even as you're engaging with the characters. People demand closure when something like this happens. We see that time and time again. But events are often not cut and dried, or concluded in the ways we demand.'quotehttps://www.bing.com/videos/search? The BBC made two documentaries about the case in 1995. You may already have seen these but here are links to them. Find sources: "Lancelot Curran"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( September 2017) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Armed with that damning document the case went to trial and Lord Chief Justice McDermott found him ‘guilty but insane’. In his acquiescent way Gordon made no attempt to leave until a kind of release in August 1960, after almost eight years in confinement. Brian Faulkner, then Minister of Home Affairs, had him virtually smuggled out of the country booking him on to a plane to Glasgow as John Cameron.

If Gordon had been represented properly the "confession" would not have been admitted as evidence. He withdrew it immediately, explaining to his reluctant defence team that he had been harangued by four policemen for days, ten hours at a stretch. Surely the time has come for the truth of what happened to be told, time for the ghosts of the past to be slain, time to mourn your sister properly, and to remember the fate of Iain Hay Gordon.There is, too, a dreamlike quality to McNamee's prose, a sense of a world gone out of kilter, where everything - the facts, the characters, most notably the young and doomed Patricia herself - is as blurred as dream imagery. From time to time, though, his insistence on imbuing characters, places and events with a portentous aura almost overloads the atmosphere. 'The American thriller genre has a very determinist, post-reformation view of the world,' counters McNamee. 'This notion that your life is laid down in advance and you're impelled towards your doom by fate. And that world view came from right here, from Northern Ireland. It was - and, to a degree, remains - so strong here that at times it seems to be self-fulfilling. If you were to trace Hay Gordon's trajectory it's as if this terrible fate was waiting to envelop this passive, guileless young man.' Except in fiction. And life, as we know, is not like fiction. In the uneasy space between the two, Eoin McNamee has staked a place for himself and his strangely compelling, wilfully ambiguous, almost-true stories. Mr Hay Gordon, who was stationed at a base near the Curran home, had only met the family a handful of times and swears he was nowhere near the house on the night of the murder. But two months later, in January, he was arrested and charged. 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. What draws McNamee to real, rather than made-up, stories; why fictionalise events that, by their notoriety, are already imbued with almost fictive elaboration? 'It's the stories themselves, and the characters, that attract me, rather than the form. Both novels deal with corruption, with how individuals and whole communities or families, are corrupted. All the best noir is about families - dysfunction, incest, skeletons in the closet. I think that's why people are still fascinated with Patricia Curran 50 years on: it's unanswered like a lot of family stuff. I often think that, on an unconscious level, the Curran murder is to Northern Ireland what the Kennedy murder was to America - a country's uneasy dream of itself.'

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Hay Gordon's solicitor, Margot Harvey said she hoped a claim for compensation would be settled speedily in the light of his age and failing health. The debris of this case is scattered throughout his family and his poor mother died bankrupt trying to clear his name." This week we go though the murder, investigation and trial. Next week, we will take the important detail from the appeal hearing. There are many twists and turns in this story. 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 three judges agreed and they ruled the confession was inadmissible, and the case against the by now elderly and frail Iain Hay Gordon collapsed. I never had any doubt I would clear my name. I didn't know when or how but I always believed it would come to pass and I've been vindicated." 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. But the unfortunate Scotsman stayed put, and soon people began to challenge the veracity of the case against him.