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

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During the State of Emergency we led mass funerals and gave evidence against the riot police and the army in the Supreme Court," he said. 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”. Patricia Curran was the daughter of a High Court Judge - Lord Justice Curran - and there has always been speculation one of the Curran family either committed the murder or that they helped cover it up.

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. 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 book also brings to the forefront the pressure that the investigators face while dealing with such crimes, that is the murder of the daughter of a sitting judge who has excellent chances of growth in his career. While one can’t call it corruption, it is definitely a scenario where the police have no autonomy over the investigation and have to go through the motions of investigating within the parameters set by those in power above them. How much of this is fact and how much fiction, one doesn’t know but the tension that it brings to the book is definitely something that makes it an immensely readable one.Gordon’s lawyers had not allowed him to plead not guilty but had entered a plea of guilty but insane, explaining that there was little hope of anything other than a guilty verdict and that this plea might spare him the gallows. Lord McDermott then proclaimed Gordon guilty but insane of the murder of Patricia Curran, and sentenced him to be detained at her majesty’s pleasure in Holywell mental hospital in Antrim. The body was discovered 260 yards up the drive and had been dragged through the shrubbery to its resting place. These are the most important extracts from Dr Wells’s statement.

In the early hours of November 12 1952 judge’s daughter Patricia Curran was found just off the drive to her family home at The Glen in Whiteabbey.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. 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.