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

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A pile of her belongings 10 yards away were dry despite the fact it had been raining most of the night, her wristwatch broken, suggesting, a fight, but neither the missing hands nor broken glass found at the scene. 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. 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.

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Armed with that damning document the case went to trial and Lord Chief Justice McDermott found him ‘guilty but insane’. On 12 November 1952 Patricia, aged 19, and a student at Queen's University, Belfast, was murdered. Her body was found in the driveway of the Curran home, Glen House, Whiteabbey, County Antrim. She had been stabbed thirty-seven times. [6] I had to make that boy tell me the truth about his private life and most secret thoughts. Only then could I begin to believe him she 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. 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

This is one of the multiple tragedies of this case, he says, for the Currans, for Gordon and his family, and “the tragedy of a legal system that knew at the time of the trial, in 1953 eminent lawyers knew this was a bad verdict and it took nearly 50 years to remedy”.

The Blue Tango, though, is not Hay Gordon's story. Nor, intriguingly, does McNamee attempt to answer the question: who killed Patricia Curran? 'Instinct would lead me in a certain direction,' he says, when pressed, 'but I honestly think that what I think is unimportant. It would not be fair to the book. That's not what this story is about. It's more about conjuring up a complex, enclosed world, and the notion that things are grinding ahead on a much bigger scale even as you're engaging with the characters. People demand closure when something like this happens. We see that time and time again. But events are often not cut and dried, or concluded in the ways we demand.' 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. Others, including Linklater, have suggested Lady Doris Curran, who disapproved of her daughter's unorthodox, albeit relatively tame teenage lifestyle may have been the killer. Last year, following Hay Gordon's pardon, Desmond, 74, condemned the 'highly imaginative theories... that we were somehow involved in the murder, or were taking part in a cover-up'. He also rebutted suggestions that Patricia had been promiscuous. 'I owe it to my sister... to remind everyone that the post mortem... revealed that she died a virgin. It seems she probably died in defence of her virginity.' 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. 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.

I never had any doubt I would clear my name. I didn't know when or how but I always believed it would come to pass and I've been vindicated." 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.

At this point, Malcolm Davison (a friend and the family’s solicitor) and his wife arrived. They had been told by Judge Curran that Patricia had not returned home and that the family was going out to search for her.

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 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.