He firmly believed Patricia had been killed in a fit of rage by her mother Lady Doris Curran and that her husband Sir Lancelot Curran — a senior judge and Unionist MP — led a conspiracy to protect his troubled, distraught wife. In his lurid (ghost written) memoir, Chapstick described his interrogation of Iain Hay Gordon, saying. May the angels lead her into paradise; may the martyrs come to welcome her and take her to the holy city, the new and eternal Jerusalem. If Desmond was keeping a terrible family secret he wasn’t giving much away when I met him in Cape Town.
Patricia Curran passed away in Saint John, Indiana. Patricia Curran (centre) who was brutally murdered in the grounds of the family's Whiteabbey home, Glen House, in November 1952.
He said he felt for years he had been indirectly to blame for his sister’s death.
View the profiles of people named Patricia Curran. What exactly happened to Patricia Curran may never be known with certainty.
I love you. Rigor mortis was present.
“My father was not a narrow kind of unionist,” he said. Loving mother of Karen (James) Gill, Patricia (Dennis) Pizzuto and Charles J. Curran, III.... Get email updates about Patricia Curran delivered directly to your inbox. The tall, distinguished looking silver-haired priest, then 74, was known to his poor parishioners as Isabane — ‘The Lamp’ — a kindly, gentle figure who had passionately opposed apartheid.
What was very clear though was that Desmond Curran was an intelligent, generous, tolerant and intriguing man who was deeply loved by his flock in Khayelitsha, a place he truly loved. His case was heard in the NI Court of Appeal in 2000, during which Counsel for the Crown admitted. He was released on the orders of Brian Faulkner, who required that he return to his native Scotland under an assumed name, which he did. Commentators agree that Iain Hay Gordon was a scapegoat in an establishment cover-up; and that his conviction as ‘guilty but insane’ was a legal manoeuvre to prevent him having the ultimate (capital) punishment being imposed. (Photo: Belfast Telegraph, Patricia Curran at centre). Beloved wife of Charles J. Curran, II for 63 years. Funeral Home Services for Patricia are being provided by Elmwood Chapel. To translate: Capstick gave Iain Hay Gordon the ‘third degree’, questioning him about his sexual fantasies, and playing on Gordon’s fear that his mother might think him a homosexual (a criminal offence in those days); Capstick implanted ideas into Gordon’s head; Iain Hay Gordon was, in the words of a later expert opinion, ‘brainwashed’. Some believe Fr Curran took the secret of who really killed his sister to the grave. He had, it said, ‘blacked out’.
Sunday Life's Stephen Gordon meets Fr Desmond in Cape Town in 2001.
After his retirement, Iain Hay Gordon began a legal process to clear his name. Ireland – a world innovator in deliberative democracy? Patricia had had a gap year, unusually at the time, before starting her Arts degree at QUB. Not being insane, he was given no treatment for this imaginary condition. It was John’s view that the Currans allowed poor ‘patsy’ Iain Hay Gordon to take the blame for a crime he did not commit. John Linklater, who had been part of Iain Hay Gordon’s legal team, had studied thousands of police documents from the case and interviewed numerous surviving witnesses.
He had no TV or radio and his bathroom had an ancient camp toilet. He subsequently spent seven years in a secure facility at Holywell. Only then could I begin to believe him she he began to tell the truth about Patricia Curran.
Desmond on lifting her up thought that she breathed; she was brought by the family solicitor, conveniently on the scene, to the local GP where she was pronounced dead.
Bimpe Archer. Scottish journalist John Linklater and myself travelled to Cape Town in 2001 to interview Desmond about the murder which had been wrongly blamed on a young Scots RAF serviceman called Iain Hay Gordon until his name was finally cleared at Belfast’s High Court in December 2000. Judge Curran was playing poker at the Ulster Reform Club, from where, around 7 pm, he was urgently summoned; Desmond arrived somewhat later. Only after the law was changed could he appeal again. On behalf of Fr. Patricia Curran, centre, in March 1952: “Innocence lost in the noir world of white mischief, corruption and transgressive sex.
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Leaving Crumlin Road Courthouse in March 1953.
The RUC took some 40,000 witness statements, but could not discover the murderer; in desperation they turned to Chief Superintendent John Capstick of Scotland Yard.