Anatomy of a Killing

Life and Death on a Divided Island

Ian Cobain

• Publisher: Granta Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781846276415
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Irische Geschichte

"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

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 soli...