If Gordon had been represented properly the "confession" would not have been admitted as evidence. He withdrew it immediately, explaining to his reluctant defence team that he had been harangued by four policemen for days, ten hours at a stretch. 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. 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]

The case finally came before the NI Court of Appeal in 2000 and Crown Counsel conceded that the case was less than flimsy. The question of how an appeal could be delayed by almost 50 years is something people should be concerned about.” 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. Rather than immediately question the family, the RUC launched a murder hunt which saw them take statements from over 40,000 members of the public. Eventually, the finger of suspicion fell on a 20-year-old Glaswegian Iain Hay Gordon, serving with the RAF and stationed in Belfast. A bit of a loner, Gordon was a friend of Desmond Curran, Patricia’s brother. The story that unfolds from here is an indictment as to why we should not have capital punishment. And despite the indignities heaped upon him down the years, the Scotsman agreed. Speaking to the Antrim Guardian in 2000 at a press conference in the Glenavna Hotel - the Curran family’s former home - he remained confident that justice would eventually prevail.

Gordon’s lawyers had not allowed him to plead not guilty but had entered a plea of guilty but insane, explaining that there was little hope of anything other than a guilty verdict and that this plea might spare him the gallows. Lord McDermott then proclaimed Gordon guilty but insane of the murder of Patricia Curran, and sentenced him to be detained at her majesty’s pleasure in Holywell mental hospital in Antrim.

The Court of three judges ruled that the ‘confession’ was inadmissible; it was the only evidence pointing to Iain Hay Gordon’s guilt. The roots of that noir was in places like the North and in Scotland, that sort of flinty Calvinism that created that sort of almost baroque – I’m mixing my genres here – baroqueness of noir.” McNamee γοητεύεται από την άλυτη υπόθεση δολοφονίας της δεκαεννιάχρονης Πατρίσια Κάραν το 1952, κοντά στο Μπέλφαστ, και το χρησιμοποιεί ως πηγή έμπνευσης για το συγκεκριμένο μυθιστόρημα που ήταν υποψήφιο στη μακρά λίστα του Man Booker Prize 2001. Gordon was sent to Holywell Hospital in Antrim to serve his time at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. It is telling that during his seven-year stay in Antrim he received no treatment for his imaginary condition. 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.While he accepted that Holywell had been a ‘lunatic asylum’, it had in recent years moved towards becoming a treatment facility.

That kind of started me off on the idea of noir and the idea of predestination which kind of works its way through the book, and the idea of Calvinism where your fate is written before you start out.” The family solicitor, Malcolm Davison, whom Curran rang before speaking to Constable Rutherford, helped them to load the already stiffening body into his car. They took Patricia to the family doctor, Kenneth Wilson, reaching his surgery at 2.20am.The Northern Ireland of 1952 – and Curran’s murder – fits this mould. “Apart from all the other aspects which make people so fascinated about it, it’s that there weren’t any other murders. Murder was very rare in the North,” says McNamee. 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 book also brings to the forefront the pressure that the investigators face while dealing with such crimes, that is the murder of the daughter of a sitting judge who has excellent chances of growth in his career. While one can’t call it corruption, it is definitely a scenario where the police have no autonomy over the investigation and have to go through the motions of investigating within the parameters set by those in power above them. How much of this is fact and how much fiction, one doesn’t know but the tension that it brings to the book is definitely something that makes it an immensely readable one.

And that was cemented when the author travelled to Antrim on a number of occasions to speak with locals who remembered Gordon’s stay in the town. The purpose of publishing Who Killed Patrica Curran? on the 70th anniversary of her death is to fill in the gaps in public knowledge of an unloved murder which has perplexed many, and to repair the damage to the victim’s reputation. Too many people believe a garbled version of Patricia’s story in which her alleged promiscuity played a part in her death. In fact the autopsy showed that she died a virgin. Gordon was charged with the murder of Patricia Curran on 2 March 1953 at the Co Antrim spring assizes before Lord McDermott LCJ (lord chief justice), a close friend of the Curran family, and a jury.What draws McNamee to real, rather than made-up, stories; why fictionalise events that, by their notoriety, are already imbued with almost fictive elaboration? 'It's the stories themselves, and the characters, that attract me, rather than the form. Both novels deal with corruption, with how individuals and whole communities or families, are corrupted. All the best noir is about families - dysfunction, incest, skeletons in the closet. I think that's why people are still fascinated with Patricia Curran 50 years on: it's unanswered like a lot of family stuff. I often think that, on an unconscious level, the Curran murder is to Northern Ireland what the Kennedy murder was to America - a country's uneasy dream of itself.' 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]