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

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The Curran family never got over the tragedy. Although Lancelot was knighted in 1964, another prominent QC, Richard Ferguson, described him as a cold, aloof figure who carried a tremendous sorrow. Doris Curran, too, was a broken woman after her daughter's death She and her husband died in the 1970s.

Kenneth Holden, the clerk of council, echoed the ‘strong feeling’ in the district. He added that Holywell shared them too. He and his family lived in a house known as The Glen in Whiteabbey, County Antrim, on the north shore of Belfast Lough. The Currans had two children, Desmond, a successful barrister, who was heavily involved in the movement known as Moral Rearmament, and 19-year-old Patricia, who was rather more wayward.During his research, he interviewed many people in the North, including some who remembered the murdered teenager and others who met Gordon after he was sent to the asylum in Antrim town.

Iain Hay Gordon, a young Scottish RAF technician, was later found guilty of the killing, but he was cleared in 2000 after the case against him was exposed as a tissue of lies. Mr Fagan (74) said his book would reveal all when it is published next September. Only then could I begin to believe him. He began to tell the truth about Patricia Curran. I hated to use what might well seem to be ruthless measures. 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.

They maintained that they did not believe they had the facilities to look after ‘a person of this type’, adding that his admission attached a stigma to people attending the hospital for short-term treatment. Eventually he decided that if he co-operated with his interrogators that he would be released. At this stage he would have admitted anything. His confession is a very webby document, filled with gaps, generally incoherent and clearly suggested to him if not actually dictated. This was the main part of the confession: I met Patricia Curran between The Glen and Whiteabbey Post Office. She asked me to escort her to her home up The Glen. I noticed that Patricia was carrying a handbag and something else, I just forget what it was. It appeared to be wrapped up, whatever it was, books or something. At 1.45am, her father, High Court judge Lancelot Curran, phoned the RUC enquiring whether there had been any accident involving a bus; this query drew a negative response. The RUC asked the judge whether he wanted them to call to the house, to which he replied it was not necessary, but five minutes later his distressed wife Doris called the RUC again and requested their presence. While he accepted that Holywell had been a ‘lunatic asylum’, it had in recent years moved towards becoming a treatment facility.

It turned my life upside down," he admitted. "You only pass this way once, you don't get a second bite of the cherry but I refuse to be bitter or have any feelings of vengeance towards the murdered girl's family." Someone once told me that a winner never quits and a quitter never wins and I was determined that I wouldn’t quit until I had cleared my name. To say it was improper for a judge, a solicitor and a serving member of the RUC to have risked the destruction of forensic evidence at the crime scene is a rank understatement - it verged on the criminal. Iain eventually got that wish and got the justice he craved. Now, with Kieran Fagan on the case, it may be Patricia’s turn. Scapegoat, a BBC Northern Ireland drama about the conviction of Hay Gordon, was broadcast in 2009. [8] Famous Trials [ edit ]Fr Desmond Curran - whose sister Patricia was found murdered in 1952 - was buried last Friday in Cape Town's Maitland Cemetery, after passing away the week before at a clerical retirement home in the city. Having previously said he believed Gordon was guilty and that he believed there was an element of “diabolical possession” to the murder, he changed his mind after reading the 2000 Belfast verdict but was resolute that his family had not been involved in the killing or any sort of cover up. According to his statement, Dr Wells arrived at Dr Wilson’s surgery at 5am on 13 November and took charge. The body was almost fully clothed, with the right glove, hat, scarf and shoes missing. He began his examination on arrival and found the entire musculature fixed in rigor mortis. He formed the opinion that death took place in the region of 12 hours earlier. (Did this fit in with the noise that young George Chambers had heard on the evening of the murder?) 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. This story has troubled me since I was an eight-year-old boy in Dublin in 1953 reading the court reports in my father’s Irish Press. I hope I have made some sense of it at last.”

I’ve always maintained my innocence. I don’t know who killed Patricia Curran, I wasn’t there when it happened, but I made up my mind that however long it would take I would clear my name. A short time later, Chambers also went up the same avenue delivering his papers. There was a rustle of leaves, which was drowned by the noise of a local factory horn that sounded to end the working day at 5.45pm each evening. While returning down the drive, he again heard noise like someone walking on leaves and, frightened, he fled the area. This could have been the reaction of a child to any noise, but does it fit into the events that followed. Patricia's father, Lancelot Curran, the local Unionist MP, an eminent judge and a former Stormont attorney general, was a member of Northern Ireland's ruling elite. Her mother, Doris, disapproved of her headstrong daughter's unconventional lifestyle, particularly her relationships with older men, and there had been serious rows when Patricia took a year out between school and starting Queen's University, where she was a first-year student at the time of her death, to drive a van for a builders' firm. The Court of three judges ruled that the ‘confession’ was inadmissible; it was the only evidence pointing to Iain Hay Gordon’s guilt.He was the only item on the agenda that month at a special meeting of Antrim Rural Council, with the Town Commissioners in attendance.