A Soldiers Death.................Murder by Cowards
That Bloody Stretcher!!
It was dark, not raining, at least as far as I can remember, I had been standing around the Ops Room when we got a slidex message in from one of the covert OP's. They had heard shots in a derelict house not far from them. They could not assist who had been shot because they would have compromised themselves. The OC and 2IC, with their escorts, crashed out with the standby platoon. I was in 2IC's crew that night. Really I was in who's ever crew it was that needed me. We drove out of the company base, Mullhouse, and into the Distillery area of Belfast, This was a run down, dirty, almost completely derelict area. Practically all the windows had been blocked up. It was a dull place, terraced houses, corners, back lanes, dark. We stopped in a street, I think it was Arundel Street off Grosvenor Road, opposite what was the Junction of Cullingtree Road that ran through the Falls area.
We then did a brief search of the suspected house that the shots had come from. Eventually we found him. The body. The human being who's life had just been snuffed out. The OC and 2IC walked into a house and came back out shortly afterwards and said there was a body in the passage. Someone, I can not remember now, possibly the OC (he was a good man the OC one of the best) took me to the house entrance and shone his torch to the very end. I looked along the line of the torch. My eyes focused on an empty passageway, you know the long passages you used to get in downstairs terraced houses. The walls had paper hanging off, I seem to remember maybe a door off to the left halfway down and what I imagined was a corner off to the left at the very end, possibly into a living room. The floor was not a floor, just joists running left to right and what looked like a void of darkness beneath them. I took all this in in an instance. Then suddenly I realised I had been looking at the body all the time. I somehow had taken the whole scene in two separate images within my minds eye.
The body was lying at the far end of the passage. I seem to remember crumpled up in a face down position. It was straddled across the end three or four floor joists. It was wearing a pair of green trousers that looked slightly flared at the bottom, brown shoes, brown shoes that looked soldier polished and a car coat, a short mid thigh thing that was brown with cheap vinyl edging. Someone said "He's dead, shot in the head". The torch went out and I backed away from the door and stood by the landrover. A bit shocked.
Then the van arrived. I honestly can't remember if there was a policeman there or not. There probably was, but I just can't recall. The van........that bloody van, black. It was, I am sure a Morris Van, the type that was used extensively by delivery drivers in the last 60's and early 70's. You must remember. The steering wheel was almost forward of the windscreen and parallel to the ground, the engine was between the drivers seat and passengers seat. It has stayed in my mind ever since..........the van and oh yes! that bloody stretcher. The stretcher was white or cream. I was not sure in the darkness, I would say white. What is your idea of a stretcher?. Two wooden poles with canvass stretched between. We have all seen them. Thats my idea of a stretcher. But not this stretcher. Not this Bloody stretcher. It was metal, yes metal. A metal frame, a metal frame that has steel mesh instead of canvass. I looked at it as it was carried past me into the passageway of the house. I knew what I would feel when that bloody stretcher came past the next time. I did feel what I thought I was going to feel. Revulsion, sickness in the pit of my stomach. My God, could they not even take this body away decently on a proper stretcher. Like they would at a road traffic accident. Why not? this was a human being, this was once a living thing. Why on this bloody stretcher?. They opened the back doors of the van and for me, pushed the bloody stretcher in far too fast to be respectful. Like something in the butchers shop, it was a nothing to them, those horrible men who tossed that bloody stretcher into the back of that van. Someone said "Thats another one for the Meat Wagon". Then I understood.............it "was" a piece of meat. They slammed the doors and drove off. Just like that. It was nothing to them just another job...........they had probably got used to it living and working in that horrible place.
After awhile a man in plain clothes walked up to where the OC. 2IC myself and someone else were standing and said "He had been shot twice in the head, once in the back with a trussion at the front and once in the front with a trussion at the back". I pondered what this word trussion was and the OC told me it was where the bullet had stopped but failed to come out..........................simply a lump. We all went back to base................
Later, not much later I had been informed that the body was that of a soldier an ex Royal Green Jacket who had recently married his Belfast girlfriend. He had been in a bar in the Markets area of Belfast and had been kidnapped, taken to the house and shot. But I can't remember his face, perhaps I never actually saw his face. I have seen a photograph of him.
..................all I can remember is that Bloody Stretcher.
His name.................Brian Shaw aged 21
It troubles me that I can not remember the face of this poor soldier who was Murdered.
I have followed the story of the, words fail me here....... person supossedly involved in kidnapping him from the pub in the Markets area.
My God, the press in this country has a lot to answer for .................another story.
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Guildford Four man meets victim's brother |
Hill faces personal convictions of a brother |
One of the Guildford Four meets the brother of a former soldier he was wrongfully convicted of murdering in Belfast in 1975, on the BBC Northern Ireland Spotlight programme, to be broadcast on Tuesday evening.
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| One of the Guildford Four meets the brother of a former soldier he was wrongfully convicted of murdering in Belfast in 1975, on the BBC Northern Ireland Spotlight programme, to be broadcast on Tuesday evening.
In the second part of the Spotlight Special, Paul Hill meets Malcolm Shaw to try to convince him that he did not murder his brother.
Hill, a former west Belfast man, spent 15 years in a British prison after he was wrongfully convicted of bombing pubs at Guildford, Surrey, in 1974, in which five people were killed.
His conviction of involvement in the Guildford bombings was overturned in 1989 when it emerged that Surrey police had invented evidence against him and three others. |
Hill has left behind west Belfast, but not ghosts of his past
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However, while being questioned by Surrey police about Guildford, he also confessed to the murder of Brian Shaw.
Two weeks after marrying a Belfast woman, the ex-soldier was abducted by the IRA in July 1974 and murdered. His body was found in the lower Falls area of Belfast.
Hill's conviction for this murder stood for five years after he was released from prison, until it was declared unsafe and unsatisfactory by the Northern Ireland Appeal Court in 1994.
However, he still faces an uphill struggle to change the views of Brian Shaw's brother, Malcolm.
Hill agreed to a filmed meeting with Mr Shaw in Dublin for the Spotlight programme, to discuss the overturning of the conviction which Mr Shaw has had difficulty coming to terms with.
Now living and moving in Washington's high society circles, Hill is married to Courtney Kennedy, the daughter of the assassinated American Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, and niece of JFK.
'It's a conviction'
Before the meeting took place, Mr Shaw said: " He has got plenty of money now. He could come over, and I will sit down quietly, calmly listen to what he's got to say, but I don't feel he could change my mind. "
In the exchange on the programme Hill addresses Mr Shaw saying: "You firmly believe that I killed your brother?"
Mr Shaw says: " I do. It's a conviction."
Hill answers: "A conviction. My convictions were overturned. I would like to attempt to overturn your convictions."
Mr Shaw, 54, served in Northern Ireland in the early 70s with the 14/20th King's Hussars.
He is now studying to become a Church of England minister, and as part of his training recently spent time offering pastoral care to inmates at Leyhill prison at Wotton-under-Edge in Gloucestershire.
The Shaw conviction cast a long shadow over Hill's name after he was released.
Striking it out, the Court of Appeal in Belfast said it could not "exclude the reasonable possibility" that a revolver had been pointed through Hill's cell door by a Surrey police officer.
The judge said this was a "disgraceful and grossly improper action which clearly constituted the inhuman treatment."
The four members of the Guildford Four were Paul Hill, Gerry Conlon, Carol Richardson and Paddy Armstrong.
Murder convictions against Hill and Armstrong for killing two people in an explosion in a bar in Woolwich in 1975 were also overturned by the Court of Appeal in 1989.
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