Anatomy of a Killing: Life and Death on a Divided Island

By Ian Cobain

“A concise and gripping history of the Troubles, revealing the people behind the pain and violence” from the award-winning investigative journalist (Vice).

On the morning of Saturday 22nd April 1978, members of an Active Service Unit of the IRA hijacked a car and crossed the countryside to the town of Lisburn. Within an hour, they had killed an off-duty policeman in front of his young son.

In Anatomy of a Killing, award-winning journalist Ian Cobain documents the hours leading up to the killing, and the months and years of violence, attrition and rebellion surrounding it. Drawing on interviews with those most closely involved, as well as court files, police notes, military intelligence reports, IRA strategy papers, memoirs and government records, this is a unique perspective on the Troubles, and a revelatory work of investigative journalism.

“As gripping as a thriller, except that this isn’t fiction but cold, spine-tingling reality.” —Daily Mail 

“A remarkable piece of forensic journalism.” —Ed Moloney, author of Voices from the Grave

“Reads like a work of fiction . . . True and harrowing.” —Irish Sunday Independent (Books of the Year)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781846276415

Book preview

Cover: Anatomy of a Killing: Life and Death on a Divided Island by Ian Cobain

‘A remarkable piece of forensic journalism’ Ed Moloney

‘Cobain delves forensically into the murder [and] does a superb job of uncovering the facts, the context and the aftermath … without veering towards either side . . . A compellingly brilliant book’ Dublin Sunday Business Post

‘Though scrupulously even-handed, Cobain doesn’t shy away from telling a good story, using deft lyrical flourishes and narrative teases, he expertly marshals both quotidian detail and the broad social backdrop as he builds up to the shooting itself’ TLS

‘By homing in on one man’s violent death, Ian Cobain tells a riveting and tragic story but, while doing that, he has also written a precise, compelling history of the Troubles. It’s one of the best I've read’ Roddy Doyle

‘His description of the killing is as compelling a piece of non-fiction as I’ve read for a while … This is a useful contribution to our understanding of the conflict in Northern Ireland and an interesting – in places fascinating – read’ Mail on Sunday

‘Anatomy of a Killing is meticulously researched and the results are arresting. For anyone who grew up in the Troubles, this will be a valuable reminder of just how dark a shadow we lived under. For many others, it will be shocking to discover what people in one part of the British Isles had to endure in recent times’ Timothy Phillips

‘A concise and gripping history of the Troubles, revealing the people behind the pain and violence’ Vice

‘A superb piece of journalism that avoids any moralising or analysing from [Cobain’s] own perspective and that has a powerful impact, forcing the reader to consider the humanity of the players but also leaving space for the reader to make the final judgment’ Malachi O’Doherty

‘A compelling narrative account of the human cost of the Conflict . . . This book is both a valuable contribution to preserving the memory of the Conflict and to the continued out-workings of the fragile peace (in) process in this Northern Ireland’ Village Magazine

‘Anatomy of a Killing is a fine book, very much the product of serious research and prodigious analysis’ Fortnight

Ian Cobain

Anatomy

of a Killing

Life and Death on a Divided Island

For Alan Harding and Ian McGinnity,

with thanks for a lifetime of friendship

‘Look at Ireland. There we have the great failure of our history … I am inclined to regard it as the one irreparable disaster of our history; and the ground and cause of it was a failure of historical perception: the refusal to see that time and circumstance had created an Irish mind; to learn the idiom in which that mind of necessity expressed itself; to understand that what we could never remember, Ireland could never forget.’

G. M. Young, Portrait of an Age

‘But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony – Forgive me comrade; how could you be my enemy?’

Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface

A Note on Language

Acronyms and Abbreviations

Map

1. The People

2. The Time

3. The Place

4. The Killing

5. The Consequences

6. The Far Side of Revenge

A Note on Police Interview Records and Other Sources

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Index

Also by Ian Cobain

Copyright

Preface

This is the story of one particular event that took place on 22 April 1978 in the Northern Ireland market town of Lisburn. Early that afternoon an off-duty policeman was shot dead at his home and shortly afterwards six people were arrested, several of them members of an IRA Active Service Unit. The killing was covered by the local press at the time, as were the trial and prosecution of some of those who were arrested. But in this book I wanted to re-examine this single event from the perspective of history. I wanted to explore what forces, ideas and actions caused these people’s lives to intersect on that day – both their personal circumstances and the wider context in Northern Ireland – and to consider the long repercussions of the killing. It was of course a profoundly traumatic event for the family and friends of the dead man. It was also just one of more than 3,700 deaths that occurred in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. But this one act offers us a way to reflect more broadly on this turbulent period: to examine the reasons why some people become involved in political violence, the means by which governments and security forces attempt to overcome those people, and the way in which individuals and communities try to live with the consequences.

A Note on Language

Words are rarely neutral in Northern Ireland. Or, if you prefer, they are rarely neutral in the six counties. So often, the use of one term – Derry, say, rather than Londonderry – appears immediately to place the writer or speaker on one side of the divide, or the other.

Samuel Johnson was doubtless correct when he declared that ‘language is the dress of thought’, and I have thought about these two traditions and attempted to remain sensitive to them, but not hobbled by them. I believe that understanding why so many men went to prison during the Troubles, for example – and attempting to comprehend something of their experiences of incarceration and resistance – is more critical than the question of whether that prison should properly be called Her Majesty’s Prison Maze, or Long Kesh. It was both.

As a consequence, I have employed the term that appeared to me to be most apt within the context in which it is being used. So the north-east corner of the island is at times the north of Ireland, most frequently Northern Ireland, and occasionally Ulster.

This is a book that focuses on the actions of members of the IRA. They will be described as both gunmen and volunteers. They were prosecuted as terrorists. Some members of the IRA were, of course, thugs; some were idealists, dedicated to progressive political change.

They, like the men and women of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the British army, were also husbands and wives and sons and fathers. I have attempted to be fair to all of them. More important to me than the language I have used to describe them is my belief that we should not lose sight of the fact that they were all ordinary men and women.

Acronyms and Abbreviations

ASU – Active Service Unit

BMH – Bureau of Military History, Dublin

CQA – close-quarter assassination

INLA – Irish National Liberation Army

IRA – Irish Republican Army

IWM – Imperial War Museum, London

NAM – National Army Museum, London

NIO – Northern Ireland Office

OIRA – Official Irish Republican Army

PIRA – Provisional Irish Republican Army

PRONI – Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast

Provos – Provisional Irish Republican Army

PSNI – Police Service of Northern Ireland

’Ra – IRA

RIC – Royal Irish Constabulary

RUC – Royal Ulster Constabulary

SAS – Special Air Service

SDLP – Social Democratic and Labour Party

TNA – The National Archives, Kew

UDA – Ulster Defence Association

UDR – Ulster Defence Regiment

UVF – Ulster Volunteer Force

1

The People

In early winter, as a boy, all wrapped up in his mittens and his duffel coat, Millar McAllister could gaze skywards as formations of birds winged their way south, flying first across the flat farmland towards Belfast, and then over the sea; down to France and Spain and who knew where? As he watched, Millar knew that the following spring would bring the thrill of the songs to be heard from the trees and hedgerows around south Antrim. So often, animals are among a child’s first true loves, and encounters with them cast a life-long spell, one that binds the child, and then the adult, to the wider world.

By the time he was a teenager, Millar was learning how to handle racing pigeons, how to gently pick them up and whisper into their ears, hidden below their eyes; before long he would be photographing them, and writing about them too.

Millar had been born in 1942 in one of a row of two-up, two-down terrace houses in Cogry, a tiny village half an hour’s bus ride from Belfast. He was christened Laird Millar, but known always by his middle name. When Millar was born, more than two years into the Second World War, his father Hugh was serving as a corporal in a British army infantry unit, the 45th Regiment of the Reconnaissance Corps, which spent years fighting in the jungles of the Far East.

After the war, Millar’s father worked at the nearby flax-spinning mill, which employed many of the menfolk in Cogry, and several of the women. Within a minute or two of the narrow street of terrace houses at Cogry there were fields and brooks and boreens, and Millar was a country boy at heart. One of his neighbours was a well-known figure in Northern Ireland’s pigeon-racing circles. He would let the boy spend time in his pigeon loft, and after Millar had helped out with a bit of scraping and cleaning, he would be allowed to feed the birds. Millar loved those birds. Before long, he became familiar with the country lanes by training this neighbour’s pigeons from a hamper strapped to the back of his bike. Soon he acquired a few birds of his own.

Millar’s generation did not have the choice that his father’s did, of working for life in the linen industry, which stumbled into steep decline during the post-war years. The mill at Cogry closed just as Millar was leaving school. So, in December 1961, at the age of nineteen, he joined the Royal Ulster Constabulary – the police.

The Troubles in the north of Ireland were barely visible on the horizon, and Millar would not have been taking sides, as such: it was just a good, steady job. Nevertheless, his neighbours in Protestant Cogry may well have approved.

Initially, he served in uniform in north Belfast and at the RUC Barracks at Carryduff, a quiet town in County Down, south of the city. In April 1965, while serving at Carryduff, he married Nita Corry, a farmer’s daughter, in a Baptist church south of Belfast. Millar was twenty-three and Nita was twenty-two. In September the following year the couple’s first son, Mark, was born. In May 1970 Nita gave birth to another boy, Alan.

Millar transferred to the RUC’s administration branch at its headquarters in Knock in east Belfast. He soon wanted another move: through his love of pigeons he had become a skilled photographer, and not long after arriving at Knock he made a successful application to join the RUC’s Photography Branch. Here, his duties including recording scenes of crimes; this was 1971 – two years into the Troubles – and there was no shortage of carnage to be photographed.¹

As his police role became more demanding, pigeons became even more important to him: a source of respite. Sometimes, he confided, when on duty on a Saturday he would find a loft, and wait there, watching for the birds.

By this time, he was breeding and racing his own pigeons. Such was his expertise that since 1968 he had been the Northern Ireland correspondent for the Pigeon Racing News and Gazette, sending monthly reports of racing and breeding news in the province to the magazine’s offices in Weybridge, south-west of London. Those reports appeared under the byline ‘The Copper’. They were not quite anonymous, however: each month, appearing alongside the byline, would be a picture of Millar.

Early in 1977, Millar and Nita and the boys moved from Newtownabbey, north of Belfast, to Lisburn, nine miles southwest of the city, bringing them closer to Nita’s family.

The town of around 70,000 people had witnessed comparatively little violence during the Troubles. There had been a handful of sectarian killings, a number of car-bomb attacks in Bow Street in the town centre – the local paper dubbed it Bomb Alley – and several RUC men from Lisburn had died elsewhere in the province. But by 1977 not a single member of the security forces had lost their life in Lisburn. Many police officers and prison officers had settled in Lisburn. It was a good place for them to raise their families. It seemed not only safe, but impregnable.

Millar, however, had been spotted by the other side. He’d been ‘dicked’, as the security forces in Northern Ireland would say at that time. He’d been clocked by IRA suspects at Castlereagh in east Belfast – a place that the RUC euphemistically referred to as a ‘holding centre’.

Because he had always been in plain clothes they had assumed, incorrectly, that he was a detective with Special Branch, the intelligence-gathering section of the RUC. They had also come to believe – again, incorrectly – that Millar was an Orange-man, a member of the Orange Order, a Protestant fraternal organisation.

In the late 1970s, a seemingly endless stream of men and women accused of terrorist offences – both Republicans and Loyalists – were being brought to Castlereagh, where teams of police interrogators would work around the clock, extracting confessions that could be deployed before the juryless criminal hearings known as Diplock courts. These suspects were routinely denied lawyers. Some were subjected only to threats and a little rough handling. But many say they were treated appallingly, and in time some of their complaints would be confirmed by an Amnesty International investigation and an official inquiry by an English judge.

In the late 1970s, any IRA volunteer who had been interrogated at Castlereagh for any length of time held in his or her heart a particular abhorrence for the police officers who worked there. And Millar had been dicked.

Harry Murray’s early life was not so very different from that of Millar. He too had been born into a working-class Protestant family, in Belfast, in March 1948. His mother Margaret and his father Henry, a labourer, christened him Henry Harrison Murray, but he was always known as Harry.

The family home was a terrace house in Mervue Street in the Tiger’s Bay area of north Belfast. The road rises up a hill, and from the top Harry and his mates could see the docks on one side of the Lagan and the sprawling Harland & Wolff shipyards on the other. It was a close-knit, cousins-around-the-corner, front-door-never-locked kind of place. Many of the houses in Tiger’s Bay had been built for the dockers and the shipbuilders. They were poorly constructed, however, and the area had been truly battered during the Luftwaffe’s air raids of early 1941. When the raids began, local people discovered to their distress that their homes were so flimsy that a single German bomb could bring half a street crashing down. Fires then raged out of control, despite the arrival of fire crews from across the north, and even from across the border in the Republic.

Harry and the other kids of Tiger’s Bay grew up in a landscape that had been shattered and shaped by the violence of this global conflict: bomb sites, neatly piled rubble, terraces that ended abruptly, with the wallpaper still flapping on the final wall, and fireplaces suspended from the first floor of what had become end-of-terrace houses.

Growing up, Harry needed to survive the routine, indigenous violence: the casual slaps and kicks that could be all too common in districts like Tiger’s Bay. He soon learned how to look and sound hard. Although a short youth, he was brawny, and he was proud that he hailed from a neighbourhood with such a tough reputation. In later life, however, friends nicknamed him ‘The Crab’. ‘He might have appeared hard on the outside,’ explains one, ‘but on the inside, he was soft.’

At seventeen, Harry escaped the knocks of north Belfast by joining the Royal Air Force. The RAF was as good as the promises of the advertisements on its recruiting office walls, and posted Harry to exotic foreign climes: in his case it was Aden.

By the time Harry arrived, the British military was steadily losing a desperate and ruthless counter-insurgency campaign. By mid-1967, not long after his arrival, the British were staging a fighting retreat, falling back within an ever-shrinking defensive perimeter, before finally withdrawing from south Arabia in November 1967.

By his own account, Harry did not have a particularly good war. At one point he was disciplined for an ND, as the RAF called it at the time: the negligent discharge of a round from his rifle. Mercifully, the bullet did not hit anyone. The following year Harry was kicked out of the RAF for good. He would later tell friends that he had sold his rifle to one of the insurgents, but escaped arrest for weeks by going into hiding on his RAF base. Today, he does not like to dwell on the particulars of the incident that led to the end of his RAF career. ‘I just couldn’t take orders,’ he says.

Back in north Belfast, Harry was soon embroiled in a few more scrapes, ones that seemed always to involve beer and knuckles. In January 1968, having travelled to Scotland, he appeared at Aberdeen Sheriff Court, where he was fined £30 for breach of the peace and resisting arrest. Nine months later, in Belfast, he was jailed for two months for assault, disorderly behaviour and malicious damage: he had punched a police reservist, a member of a notorious quasi-military force known as the B Specials. ‘I had no idea he was a B Special,’ he says. ‘How could I? I was drunk.’ In 1970 there was another three-month sentence in Belfast for an assault on a police officer. ‘He hit me first. So I hit him back.’

By now, Harry and Millar were following divergent paths. In 1971, as Millar was applying for a transfer to the RUC’s Photography Branch, Harry was working as a steeplejack – not a job for the faint-hearted. He had his arms tattooed with a number of symbols to show that he was a Protestant and a loyal subject of the British Crown. There was a fourth appearance in court that year, when Harry was fined £15 and received a three-month sentence, suspended for two years, for obstructing the military. He cheerfully acknowledges that all these offences ‘were drink-related matters’.²

By this time, he was also dating Kathleen Kelly, a twenty-year-old woman from the Cliftonville area, a few hundred yards from Tiger’s Bay. Kathleen was a worker at the enormous Gallaher’s tobacco factory that towered over north Belfast.

On 2 October that year, Harry and Kathleen were married in a non-religious ceremony at the city Register Office. The witnesses were Harry’s father, by now working as a lorry driver, and Kathleen’s father, Matthew Kelly, a docker.

It was a low-key affair: the city had been engulfed in yet deeper violence following the introduction of internment without trial eight weeks earlier. During the week before the wedding, two men had been killed when an IRA bomb exploded without warning in a Protestant pub in west Belfast; the night before the wedding, a 22-year-old British soldier on patrol in north Belfast, a short walk from the couple’s family homes, had been shot dead by an IRA sniper; and on the night of the wedding, a teenage IRA volunteer from Andersonstown in west Belfast was killed in Lisburn, by his own bomb.

Everyone wished the happy couple the best, but feared the worst: for Harry was a Protestant and Kathleen was a Roman Catholic. Mixed marriages were fraught affairs in 1971. Some Protestants regarded the Provos’ campaign of violence as a Catholic declaration of war. Harry was bullish about crossing the divide, but some couples in mixed marriages had few friends on either side and enemies on both, and even if not to his face, some of Harry’s relatives and friends would inevitably have objected. Furthermore, it was far from clear where the couple could safely live. And it was about to get worse.

The following year, 1972, was undoubtedly the worst year of the Troubles. Almost five hundred people died, half of them civilians. Harry and Kathleen were living in Tiger’s Bay, and this corner of north Belfast had become even more solidly Protestant and Loyalist after the few Catholic families had been driven out. The couple was about to be caught up in yet more violence. One night, Harry travelled across the city to Andersonstown, to have a drink with Kathleen’s father and brother in a couple of bars in the area. ‘In one of them I saw a Protestant man that I knew from prison, drunk, with a couple of Catholics. He was very drunk, and I thought perhaps he hadn’t seen me.’

He had. A couple of days later, two members of the Loyalist paramilitary organisation, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), approached Harry in north Belfast, and said that they had heard he had been going to Catholic churches on Wednesday evenings.

‘I said no, I hadn’t. I didn’t know then that Wednesday night was supposed to be the night that converts went to Catholic churches. A little while later they told me I had been seen in a couple of bars in the Andersonstown Road. I said yes, I was with my brother-in-law and father-in-law, so what? What am I supposed to do?

‘They had a social club around the corner, and they said: Why don’t you come upstairs and we’ll sort it out? I knew they had a kangaroo court planned.’

Harry feared the encounter would end with him being shot dead. There had been an attack on the flat he shared with Kathleen. His anxieties were well grounded: in 1972, week-in, week-out, men, women and children were being killed on lesser suspicion.

‘I said to them: OK, I’ll come and see you. Then I went straight home and said to my wife: Right, we’re going. Now. We moved straight out and we moved in with my mother-in-law.’ That, Harry likes to joke, was the worst part of this entire episode. ‘It was hell, in fact.’ Eventually, the Housing Executive found the couple an end-of-terrace house in the Lenadoon Avenue area of west Belfast. In jarring contrast to the way he and his wife had been driven out of Tiger’s Bay by his ‘own side’, Harry was impressed by the warm reception they received in Lenadoon.

‘I encountered absolutely no hostility in that area, no bigotry at all. Not at that time.’

After moving across the divide, Harry says he could see that Nationalist areas and Unionist areas were policed in an entirely different fashion. In Tiger’s Bay he was accustomed to encounters with RUC officers on the streets. Some of them were aggressive individuals, some of them were reasonable, but most were familiar with the local population. In Nationalist west Belfast, he encountered fewer police officers, and a lot more British soldiers; many of them young, some of them frightened and sullen, others frightened and bullying. All of them gave the impression that they felt they were a long way from home.

Harry found work in local factories. Whenever the work dried up, which it frequently did, he went on the bru, as they say in Belfast – signing on for unemployment benefit. Harry and Kathleen had two boys born in 1972 and 1975, and twins – a boy and a girl – born in May 1976.

Over the years Harry became increasingly sympathetic to the argument that only armed Republicanism could bring the British presence to an end – a presence that he believed at best to be clumsy and, at worst, to amount to an oppressive military occupation. Harry was considering whether to volunteer to join the IRA, and the thought of volunteering appealed to the rebel within him. In time, he would admit that he was desperate to ‘get back at the Prods’ and that he would ‘continue fighting until he was either dead or the war was over’.³ Furthermore, having been exiled not only from his home, but also from the north Belfast neighbourhood where he had grown up and lived among family and friends, while living in Andersonstown he wanted dearly to fit in, to belong.

When he wasn’t working, he spent a little time in the local bars and bookies and – critical to his future trajectory – he started playing football for a local side. Harry was a very good footballer, and a few of the young men with whom he played also enjoyed Gaelic football. Through their shared love of the game Harry came into contact with a number of leading local Republican figures, including a number of senior local Provos.

Harry says that his first act in support of the Provisional IRA was to agree to store weapons in his garden shed. One day, he says, he returned home and, seeing