What then followed was a grotesque parody of the legal process. The judge refused permission for the RUC to interview his family for four days; and it was only a week after the discovery of her body before the judge permitted the RUC access to the family home. Patricia’s bedroom had been freshly redecorated. 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. A short time later, Chambers also went up the same avenue delivering his papers. There was a rustle of leaves, which was drowned by the noise of a local factory horn that sounded to end the working day at 5.45pm each evening. While returning down the drive, he again heard noise like someone walking on leaves and, frightened, he fled the area. This could have been the reaction of a child to any noise, but does it fit into the events that followed. The suspicion is that the murderer was in fact her mother, Lady Doris Curran, who was committed to a mental institution shortly after her daughter’s death

To say it was improper for a judge, a solicitor and a serving member of the RUC to have risked the destruction of forensic evidence at the crime scene is a rank understatement - it verged on the criminal. This week we go though the murder, investigation and trial. Next week, we will take the important detail from the appeal hearing. There are many twists and turns in this story. Curran presided over the trial of Robert McGladdery for the murder of 19-year-old Pearl Gamble, near Newry, in 1961. McGladdery protested his innocence but was found guilty and hanged at Crumlin Road jail in Belfast on 20 December 1961; it was the last hanging in Northern Ireland. [ citation needed]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.

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

Major Sir Lancelot Ernest Curran (8 March 1899 – 20 October 1984 [1]) was a Northern Ireland High Court judge and parliamentarian. This could have been the end of this story, but Hay Gordon was haunted by what had happened to him, and after 33 years of keeping his job by staying silent he retired in 1993. He would later say that he was looking at the number of miscarriage of justice cases being overturned and felt he was being left behind. According to his statement, Dr Wells arrived at Dr Wilson’s surgery at 5am on 13 November and took charge. The body was almost fully clothed, with the right glove, hat, scarf and shoes missing. He began his examination on arrival and found the entire musculature fixed in rigor mortis. He formed the opinion that death took place in the region of 12 hours earlier. (Did this fit in with the noise that young George Chambers had heard on the evening of the murder?) The story began on a cold, dark night in November 1952, when the young woman's body was discovered lying in the grounds of her family's stately home in Whiteabbey, Co Antrim. Although medical experts found later that she had been dead for more than four hours, the family bundled her corpse, stiff with rigor mortis, into a car and drove to a local doctor. 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.I am not sure if McNamee tried to write without presenting a confirmation bias, but his portrayal of all the characters seemed hyperbolized and almost untruthful. (Maybe not so much as UNTRUTHFUL as it is potentially unfaithful to the actual events that occurred and people that existed. Perhaps that is what makes this a novel versus a non-fiction?) I found myself struggling with the portrayal of the women in the text (Doris Curran, Patricia, Hillary...etc.) because I couldn't help but feel awful that they are representative of damaging and limiting female tropes: the mad woman in the attic/upstairs, the promiscuous young woman who "deserved it", and the innocent friend. Interestingly, I find the representation of homosexuality in this novel to be more forgiving than how McNamee dealt with the women. Sure, there was an injustice (confirmation bias) done in the persecution of Iain Hay Gordon, but there was a kinder representation (and almost acceptance) of this "inappropriate behaviour" (hey, it's Northern Ireland in the 50's) than of women being complex creatures. Maybe this is true of the time, and McNamee wrote from a lot of existing secondary sources, maybe he even had the chance to interview real people for this book... I have no idea, and nor will I ever know. When one googles "Patricia Curran" her FATHER is the top hit. This is where I learned that the rest of McNamee's Blue Trilogy is centered around Judge Curran. Why is he such an attractive figure? One so untouchable and seemingly redeemable in all of this mess? 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. Together they resolved to pass ‘resolutions of protest’ against the decision to send the ‘notorious killer’ to Antrim. A fictionalized account of the trial and execution of McGladdery, Orchid Blue, was written by Eoin McNamee and published in 2010 (McNamee had previously written a Booker Prize-nominated novel, Blue Tango, about the murder of Patricia Curran).

As a writer, he had been thinking about the case for years but he “couldn’t find a way into it”; her photograph, and the discovery that Gordon had whistled a tune, The Blue Tango – which was in the charts at the time – in between interrogations gave him “not just the title of the book, it’s the texture of it, it’s the noir feel of it. Iain is a very frail, vulnerable person, who is not in the best of health, and what happened to him was heinous," she said.The judge refused to allow his clan to be questioned until four days after the murder, and it would be another three days before police were allowed to examine the house.