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

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My new book Who Killed Patricia Curran? identifies her mother Lady Doris Curran, wife of Northern Ireland high court judge, Lance Curran, as the murderer. Patricia was. 19 years old, in her first year at Queen’s University in Belfast, in November 1952. Seventy years ago around midnight on 12 November 12, 1952, her parents reported that she had failed to return to the family home at Whiteabbey on the northern shore of Belfast Lough. Not long afterwards he body was found in the shrubbery off the avenue which led up the family house. She had been stabbed 37 times.

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. Scapegoat, a BBC Northern Ireland drama about the conviction of Hay Gordon, was broadcast in 2009. [8] Famous Trials [ edit ] 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. The case finally came before the NI Court of Appeal in 2000 and Crown Counsel conceded that the case was less than flimsy.The debris of this case is scattered throughout his family and his poor mother died bankrupt trying to clear his name." Did Doris hold the answers? The mother who was described as “nervy”, as “a cat on a hot tin roof”? The woman who had to climb through a rear bedroom window to access the house while her husband gambled in the Reform club? A paranoid schizophrenic would be capable of murdering a child in the belief that they were someone else, some devil sent to torment then. Delusions of grandeur, paranoia, auditory hallucinations – the symptoms a lunatic’s charter. Years after the murder a massive bloodstain was uncovered on the floor of Patricia’s bedroom. Circumstances pointed to her not being killed at the location where her body was discovered. Was it Doris? The connection in all three books – as with other of McNamee’s novels, including those set during the Troubles – is the miscarriage of justice. The question of how an appeal could be delayed by almost 50 years is something people should be concerned about.” 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.

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. 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. The body was positioned just off the driveway and there was little or no blood on the ground, a few drops at most. Her files and textbooks were placed neatly by her side as were a glove, a Juliet cap, two scarves and a handbag. Despite the wet evening they were all dry and, according to witnesses, Patricia had none of these belongings with her on the bus. Even in his home in Dublin, “it was huge; my parents spoke about it, their friends spoke about it. The Irish Press wasn’t particularly interested in Northern Ireland ... but it still devoted acres of space to it”. Major Sir Lancelot Ernest Curran (8 March 1899 – 20 October 1984 [1]) was a Northern Ireland High Court judge and parliamentarian.Not only did Gordon pose a threat, they suggested that his very presence at the hospital ‘increased the risk of leading other patients towards action more dangerous than those to which they might now be inclined’. It was John’s view that the Currans allowed poor ‘patsy’ Iain Hay Gordon to take the blame for a crime he did not commit. 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 On 12 November 1952 Patricia, aged 19, and a student at Queen's University, Belfast, was murdered. Her body was found in the driveway of the Curran home, Glen House, Whiteabbey, County Antrim. She had been stabbed thirty-seven times. [6]

Furthermore, they decided to write to the Minister of Home Affairs urging him to take ‘immediate action to overcome any legal difficulty preventing the transfer of Gordon to a criminal lunatic unit’. Following his dramatic conversion to Catholicism, Fr Curran moved to South Africa and spent his last years living quietly after an active ministry in the 1960s and 70s for striking against apartheid. 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. Find sources: "Lancelot Curran"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( September 2017) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) I had to make that boy tell me the truth about his private life and most secret thoughts. Only then could I begin to believe him she he began to tell the truth about Patricia Curran. I hated to use what might well seem to be ruthless measures. I was never sorrier for any criminal than for that unhappy, maladjusted youngster. But his mask had to be broken.

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. 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 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. I make this plea to anyone who knows the present whereabouts of Desmond Curran, the only surviving actor of this ghastly tragedy; it’s rumoured that he lives in a monastery somewhere in N Ireland.

They feared that there were no facilities at Holywell to offer ‘adequate protection to those in the neighbourhood who might be endangered by any escape of this patient’. It was quite dark there and I said to Patricia, "Do you mind if I kiss you?" or words to that effect. We stopped walking and stood on the grass verge on the left hand side of the drive. She laid her things on the grass and I think she laid her hat there as well. Before she did this she was not keen on me giving her a kiss, but consented in the end. I kissed her once or twice to begin with and she did not object. She then asked me to continue escorting her up the drive. I did not do so as I found I could not stop kissing her. As I was kissing her, I let my hand slip down her body between her coat and her clothes. Her coat was open and my hand may have touched her breast, but I'm not sure. The Court of three judges ruled that the ‘confession’ was inadmissible; it was the only evidence pointing to Iain Hay Gordon’s guilt. I had to make that boy tell me the truth about his private life and most secret thoughts,” he said. While he accepted that Holywell had been a ‘lunatic asylum’, it had in recent years moved towards becoming a treatment facility.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.