This unsettling book revisits and scrutinises three interconnected tales of horror that occurred in Ireland around 50 years ago. In an unfortunate incident in 1971, Una Lynskey, a 19-year-old civil servant was found buried under shrubs along a road in the Dublin Mountains. She had been unaccounted for almost two months since her disappearance after alighting from a bus near her house by Fairyhouse Racecourse.
Not long after Lynskey’s funeral, a shocking episode unfolded in which Marty Kerrigan, a 19-year-old from the same neighbourhood, was kidnapped, murdered and his body discarded near where Lynskey’s body had been earlier discovered, a distance of 40km from their residences. A hasty trial took place where two friends of Kerrigan were convicted for Lynskey’s murder, and three of her relatives were accused of killing Kerrigan. The same all-male Garda team, informally referred to as the murder squad, conducted inquiries into both deaths.
Mick Clifford, a distinguished Irish Examiner journalist, argues that the Lynskey inquiry served as the prototype for the procedures used by the murder squad members, famously referred to as the “heavy gang”. Furthermore, he alleges that this gang utilised unlawful and ruthless techniques, which were condoned by the Garda leadership, the government, and the judiciary.
According to Clifford, the Murder Squad had a backwards approach to their investigations. Instead of gathering evidence and witness statements to construct a coherent story, they created a narrative first and then sought evidence to fit their story. Clifford indicates that the Lynskey case set the stage for the methodology the Heavy Gang would utilise in various cases in the 70s and 80s, famously including the Kerry babies case and the Sallins train robbery investigation.
Last October marked the 52nd anniversary of Lynskey’s vanishing, which prompted the initiation of a fresh cold-case inquiry into the deaths of Lynskey and Kerrigan by the Garda’s serious-crime review unit. Clifford’s comprehensive and well-articulated account detailing the unsolicited encounters, resulting in substantial distress, of numerous families with the heavy gang is expected to be of great assistance with the review.