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

Product Information

police procedural, ενώ καί υπερβολικά πολλές λεπτομέρειες για την καθημερινή ζωή των προσώπων που διαδραμάτισαν σημαντικό ρόλο στη δολοφονία της νεαρής κοπέλας - δεν υπάρχει, επίσης, οικονομία στην περιγραφή των γεγονότων, γιατί ο συγγραφέας πλατιάζει σε αρκετά σημεία του βιβλίου με αποτέλεσμα, ίσως, κάποιοι αναγνώστες να δυσφορήσουν. Πέρα από αυτό, δημιουργείται η αίσθηση ότι ο συγγραφέας αποφεύγει τεχνηέντως να μπει στην ουσία των γεγονότων και να αναλύσει ικανοποιητικά την προσωπικότητα των 'σκοτεινών' ηρώων της υπόθεσης, δίνοντας μεγαλύτερη σημασία στην επιφανειακή περιγραφή ασήμαντων λεπτομερειών. While her body had suffered 37 stab wounds there was little blood where she lay suggesting she had been moved from where the killing happened. 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.

It has all the ingredients of an Agatha Christie novel, and the case created a sensation. Down the years it has continued to resonate, with several books and television productions speculating on the identity of the killer. But no matter how hurtful the allegations may have been to Fr Curran, he remained friendly, courteous and good humoured throughout the three days he spent in the company of John Linklater and myself — enjoying meals out with us each night after interviews. During the past week alone, he revealed that he had received no fewer than 50 letters of complaint. 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? On one of those dispiriting trips to visit Iain, Brenda Gordon became friends with the remarkable Dorothy Turtle, an Englishwoman then teaching at the Quaker School in Lisburn. Her mother was a Cronin from Co Kerry. As a student at Cambridge in the 1930s, Dorothy had been invited to join the communist party, but declined. Otherwise her name might now be linked with the spies Burgess and McLean. After becoming a music teacher, she met Henry Turtle, a Quaker, and adopted his religion and in the 1950s husband and wife were teachers in Lisburn. Dorothy befriended Brenda Gordon and helped her on her lonely pilgrimages, putting her up for the night on her trips to Antrim , and visiting Iain during term time when his mother couldn’t get over from Scotland.Dubliner Kieran Fagan has spent years meticulously researching the case and he finally presents his findings this week with the publication of ‘Who Killed Patricia Curran’. 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. The purpose of publishing Who Killed Patrica Curran? on the 70th anniversary of her death is to fill in the gaps in public knowledge of an unloved murder which has perplexed many, and to repair the damage to the victim’s reputation. Too many people believe a garbled version of Patricia’s story in which her alleged promiscuity played a part in her death. In fact the autopsy showed that she died a virgin. Rather than immediately question the family, the RUC launched a murder hunt which saw them take statements from over 40,000 members of the public. Eventually, the finger of suspicion fell on a 20-year-old Glaswegian Iain Hay Gordon, serving with the RAF and stationed in Belfast. A bit of a loner, Gordon was a friend of Desmond Curran, Patricia’s brother. The story that unfolds from here is an indictment as to why we should not have capital punishment. his handwriting was tiny and detailed, and resembled the written manifestation of an arcane practice"....

I used to work quite close to where the action of the novel takes place and had heard about the case from my father. The facts of the case sounded so sensational that the book couldn't miss.. but unfortunately it came as a huge surprise to me to find that much of the writing is downright terrible. My goodness, the author is fond of obscure wordy sort of words and phrases - such as she "raged at him in the darkened house as though the night itself had been rendered violate".... The connection in all three books – as with other of McNamee’s novels, including those set during the Troubles – is the miscarriage of justice. By consent, all statements taken in relation to the murder of Ms Curran were handed over to the court; no oral evidence was heard. The most relevant of these I have included earlier. I omitted the report by Doctor AL Wells, registrar of pathology at the Royal Victoria Hospital, as I felt it would be more helpful in this area of the story.Pretty soon both agreed that no matter how he came to be in their care Gordon was not a lunatic and they had no treatment to offer him. Desmond, her only sibling, was a member of a crusading religious group, Moral Rearmament, into which he tried to recruit Iain Hay Gordon, a rather naive 20-year-old RAF technician, whom he met at the local Presbyterian church.

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. 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.He had been found guilty, but insane, with the suspicions shrouding the Currans continuing apace in 2000 when Gordon was cleared of the murder outright, by an appeal judge. From the outset, the case was shrouded in mystery. Despite the presence of a local police constable,who was on his way to the house following an agitated phone call from the judge's wife, Patricia's body was moved by her father and brother to the nearby house, her legs, already stiff with rigor mortis, jutting grotesquely out of the car. In the hysteria that followed the murder and the attendant rush to find her killer and thus placate public unease, inconsistencies were either ignored or brushed aside: despite the stabbings, there was no blood at the scene; despite rain, her belongings were dry; the family home was not searched until a week later. That kind of started me off on the idea of noir and the idea of predestination which kind of works its way through the book, and the idea of Calvinism where your fate is written before you start out.”