Three distinct but entwined horror stories from Ireland 50 years ago are recalled and re-examined in this disturbing book.
The remains of Una Lynskey, a 19-year-old civil servant, were discovered under bushes by a road in the Dublin Mountains in December 1971. She had gone missing while returning from work nearly two months earlier, after getting off a bus near her home, close to Fairyhouse Racecourse.
Days after her funeral, a 19-year-old close neighbour, Marty Kerrigan, was abducted, killed and dumped close to where Lynskey’s remains had been found, about 40km from their homes. Two of Kerrigan’s friends were promptly tried for Lynskey’s murder, and three of her family were tried for murdering Kerrigan. Both killings had been investigated by the same Garda team, the all-male investigation section known colloquially as the murder squad.
Mick Clifford, the award-winning Irish Examiner journalist, contends that the Lynskey investigation was the blueprint for the modus operandi of the murder-squad men who became known as the “heavy gang”. He also claims that the gang used illegal and brutal practices and that these were endorsed by Garda management, the government and the judiciary.
A novel exploration of the shared Gaelic heritage of Ireland and Scotland
The best crime fiction of 2024: Robert Harris, Jane Casey, Joe Thomas, Kellye Garrett, Stuart Neville and many more
Every Valley: The Story of Handel’s Messiah by Charles King – Not the work of a ‘lone genius’ but a collaborative achievement
Waking up to Christmas
“The Murder Squad put the cart before the horse,” he writes. “Instead of fashioning a narrative from the emerging evidence, primarily witness statements, they decided on the narrative and then went on to build the evidence around that ... They set about creating rather than collecting evidence.” Clifford says that the Lynskey investigation “can be seen as a dry run for the methods the Heavy Gang would deploy in cases throughout the seventies and into the eighties”, notably in the Kerry babies scandal and Sallins train robbery investigation.
The Garda serious-crime review team began a new cold-case investigation of the Lynskey and Kerrigan killings last October, on the 52nd anniversary of Lynskey’s disappearance. Clifford’s meticulously researched and clearly written chronicle of the nightmares endured by several families during and after uninvited dealings with the heavy gang should help the review.
