Will new book finally unmask Patricia Curran's murderer?

SEVEN decades after the brutal murder of Patricia Curran, a devastating new book is poised to lift the lid on a notorious miscarriage of justice - and expose the true killer.

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’.

Subtitled ‘How a Judge, Two Clergymen and Various Policemen Conspired to Frame a Vulnerable Man’, he clearly believes that powerful forces were at play - though armchair detectives will have to buy the book to unravel the full shocking story.

But some facts are beyond dispute.

Former Holywell Hospital patient Iain Hay Gordon died in 2012 an innocent man - but a gravely wronged one.

It is now widely acknowledged that influential figures conspired to make him the scapegoat for murder - and together they robbed him of his youth, his reputation and ultimately his identity.

Like all good murder mysteries, this story begins with a body.

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.

The grim discovery was made by her brother Desmond and he maintained that when he chanced upon her she breathed - despite the fact that she had been stabbed 37 times.

She was brought by the family solicitor, who as luck would have it was on the scene, to the local GP who promptly pronounced her dead. Of that there was no doubt as rigor mortis had already set in.

There were other curious features too. Though it had been raining that evening, her clothes were quite dry. And despite the frenzied nature of the attack, there was little or no blood at the scene.

And it did not end there. The judge did not permit the RUC to interview his family for four days. Indeed it was to be a week until the police were allowed access to the family home - and when they finally got in, they discovered that the 19-year-old victim’s bedroom had been freshly redecorated.

Despite this decidedly odd behaviour, the RUC seemed reluctant to look closer to home for their killer. They took 40,000 witness statements but still the breakthrough eluded them.

In desperation they turned to Chief Superintendent John Capstick of Scotland Yard - and it was he who started building a case against Iain Hay Gordon, a naive and shy Scottish national serviceman.

Capstick’s memoirs later recalled his brutal interrogation of Gordon - though he claimed to have taken no pleasure in getting his ‘confession’.

“I had to make that boy tell me the truth about his private life and most secret thoughts,” he said.

“Only then could I begin to believe him. 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.”

But how? It later emerged that they had played on Gordon’s fear that his mother might think him a homosexual. Ideas were deftly implanted in his head. Effectively he was brainwashed.

Yes, he wrote a confession - but Capstick dictated it.

Armed with that damning document the case went to trial and Lord Chief Justice McDermott found him ‘guilty but insane’.

In truth, he was lucky not to have hanged.

Gordon was sent to Holywell Hospital in Antrim to serve his time at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. It is telling that during his seven-year stay in Antrim he received no treatment for his imaginary condition.

And, initially at least, he received precious little sympathy. Quite the contrary, in fact.

A report from April 1953 - just one month after the Scotsman’s arrival at Holywell - paints a striking picture of a community united against Gordon.

He was the only item on the agenda that month at a special meeting of Antrim Rural Council, with the Town Commissioners in attendance.

Together they resolved to pass ‘resolutions of protest’ against the decision to send the ‘notorious killer’ to Antrim.

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’.

They were responding, they said, to the ‘deepest concern’ of local people.

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’.

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’.

Kenneth Holden, the clerk of council, echoed the ‘strong feeling’ in the district. He added that Holywell shared them too.

They maintained that they did not believe they had the facilities to look after ‘a person of this type’, adding that his admission attached a stigma to people attending the hospital for short-term treatment.

Samuel Fawcett told the meeting that Gordon should be moved to Broadmoor forthwith.

While he accepted that Holywell had been a ‘lunatic asylum’, it had in recent years moved towards becoming a treatment facility.

“Supposing Graham gets freedom, no-one knows how he might use it,” he said.

During the past week alone, he revealed that he had received no fewer than 50 letters of complaint.

“There is not a door in the area around the hospital that is not locked from morning to night,” he added.

“Women will not go out.

“They had each year a number of breakaways coming in or round their fields, but they were only mental cases.”

Send him back across the Irish Sea, he said. The people demand it.

But the unfortunate Scotsman stayed put, and soon people began to challenge the veracity of the case against him.

And that was cemented when the author travelled to Antrim on a number of occasions to speak with locals who remembered Gordon’s stay in the town.

“He was, as the medical director soon discovered, neither guilty nor insane but as the alternative was sending to him a regular prison with all the harshness that involved, it was thought best to let to let him stay there,” Mr Fegan told the Guardian this week.

“Initially local people were hostile to having Gordon, who had been convicted of murdering a young woman, stabbing her 37 times in a frenzy. The danger was that he might escape and murder someone else.

“Protest meetings were held, petitions signed, and the hospital board pleaded to have him sent elsewhere. Back to Scotland, where he came from, perhaps?

“The answer was a firm no. Holywell was a designated centre for the treatment of lunatics, including criminal lunatics.

“And the authorities were proved right, though not in the way they expected.”

Gordon spent his first year in a closed ward at Holywell where the medical director Dr Gilbert Smith and his chief nursing officer Donald Gilchrist kept him under close observation.

“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.

“Nor could could they see in this immature and confused young man any sign of the disciplined criminal mind who had, a jury had found, committed a most horrific assault on a young woman, and managed to conceal every trace of evidence linking him to the crime.

“He was coping reasonably with the trauma of being wrongfully convicted of murder – that was as far as it went.”

Retired Holywell plumber Robert Wilson encountered Gordon on his first days in Holywell.

“I quickly realised that whatever had happened to the poor unfortunate girl, I could not see Gordon as a murderer, nor a lunatic either,” he told the author back in 2019.

“He was not vicious, and the nurses clearly trusted him, and he was always quiet and did what he was told and gave no trouble.

“Over the years I got to like him, and I found him a lovely fellow.”

Gordon was released from the closed ward and was put to work doing odd jobs about the hospital grounds, cutting grass, weeding flowerbeds and generally making himself useful at low skill tasks.

“He appeared resigned to his fate, was not a flight risk and was sent on errands to Antrim town, where many of the locals knew who he was and knew they had nothing to fear from him,” said Mr Fegan.

“Outside Holywell, Gordon’s mother and her friend Dorothy Turtle were campaigning for his release, and this bore fruit in September 1960 when a visitor from the Home Office in London instructed Gordon to go home to Scotland.

“There was a flat for him in Glasgow and a job as a warehouse man. Henceforth he would be known as John Gordon and was forbidden to talk to anyone about what had happened to him.

“Another 40 years would pass before his appeal was heard.”

It is a dark tale of a life stolen, but the author found chinks of light during his frequent visits north of the border.

“When I began to write about the dreadful murder of Patricia Curran, and the injustice to Gordon which followed it , I saw the benefit of the goodwill and common-sense of the people of Antrim,” he said.

“Antrim folk – many with relatives and friends working in Holywell – knew they had nothing to fear from this young man and they allowed him to heal in peace.

“In this I could see clearly see the motto of Holywell Asylum – To Comfort Always – at work.”

In 1960 the day Iain Hay Gordon had been patiently waiting for finally arrived when he was released on the orders of Brian Faulkner.

But because of the conviction he struggled to find work. A book publisher eventually employed him. It was a fresh start, but he was still living under the shadow of murder.

In 1993 Mr Gordon took his redundancy and decided to embark on the long journey to reclaim and restore his name.

The case finally came before the NI Court of Appeal in 2000 and Crown Counsel conceded that the case was less than flimsy.

“Without that confession would the verdict be guilty? The answer is no,” he said.

The three judges agreed and they ruled the confession was inadmissible, and the case against the by now elderly and frail Iain Hay Gordon collapsed.

But if he did not do it, who did?

There have long been rumours of a quarrel with her mother on the evening of Patricia’s death. She had arrived home at 5.30pm. At around 7pm Judge Curran was urgently summoned from the Ulster Reform Club in Belfast city centre where he had been playing poker. Desmond arrived a short time later.

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.

“Had they but known it, the RUC didn’t have very far to look for the real culprit. The outcome was one person died, two other lives were blighted, and Gordon may be said to have been lucky inasmuch as he was not hanged.”

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.

“I’ve always maintained my innocence. I don’t know who killed Patricia Curran, I wasn’t there when it happened, but I made up my mind that however long it would take I would clear my name.

“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.

“The funny thing about this case is that every time we face a set-back someone or something has turned up out of the blue.”

Iain eventually got that wish and got the justice he craved. Now, with Kieran Fagan on the case, it may be Patricia’s turn.

“This story has troubled me since I was an eight-year-old boy in Dublin in 1953 reading the court reports in my father’s Irish Press. I hope I have made some sense of it at last.”

‘Who Killed Patrica Curran?’ is published this week on Kindle - the download costs £4 - and in paperback at £12.