Brandon Sullivan ✍ The murders of Karen McKeown and William Nixon in 1982 have stuck in my mind ever since I learned about them.
The two victims, completely different from each other except it seems, their membership of the Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist community. In Ms McKeown’s case, her faith was an important part of her life and she worked at a church, teaching children about the bible. I could not find many details about the life of William Nixon, but I do know he was retired, and had no links to the security forces or loyalist paramilitaries. They were murdered in random, sectarian attacks, as were Edward McMaster, Marius O'Neill and Paul McCrory, Michael Fay, and many others of that era, I did not come much closer in finding out who murdered Ms McKeown and Mr Nixon, but I found a chronology of related incidents which I found intriguing. As ever, my hope is that respectful debate will follow.
The Murderer And The Mechanic
1982 was a violent year in Northern Ireland. Whilst the last few years of the 1970s had seen a marked decrease in political murder and violence, the early 1980s were times of extreme political tension and conflict. Republican hunger strikes in 1980 and 1981 had convulsed society, casting a shadow into the next year. The summer of 1982 saw the release of Lennie Murphy, and an attendant increase in murder. The killings continued, some of them linked to Murphy from beyond the grave.
A funeral took place in Belfast in late November 1982 for Michael Fay. The Protestant Action Force had said he was one of three Catholic men who were to die to "avenge Lennie Murphy." The murdered man, a 25-year-old, was buried following a service at St. Colmcille's church. The church was and is a beautiful ornate stone building with an imposing roof and long windows, no doubt built to accommodate the spiritual needs of Catholics from all over Ireland who went to Belfast in search of work at various points, when all of Ireland was under British rule. The church and its parish are in East Belfast, an area synonymous with the pillars of unionism and loyalism. Catholics were in a minority in Belfast in the 1980s, and in fact until a few years ago. In East Belfast, Catholics were a much smaller minority, living amongst, as one Belfast wit put it, "acres of Prods." Fay's workplace was on Gilnahirk Road, close to particularly tough loyalist estates such as the Braniel. It's possible that Michael felt a degree of safety in such a potentially dangerous situation because of his friendly relationships with members of the unionist community. One man with whom Michael socialised was his workmate, Billy Giles. Like Michael, Billy was a mechanic. In the early 1980s, home entertainment had been revolutionised with the advent of video cassettes, and Michael and Billy would have a cup of tea together at Billy's house in Kilmorey Gardens, in the Tullycarnet area of East Belfast, and watch a film, rented from one of the new video libraries which had sprung up.
Michael Fay lived with his family in a house on Brae Grove, Ballygowan, a pleasant street of terraced houses many miles from the paramilitary hotspots of North and West Belfast. His widow had believed he was going to visit their 14-month-old daughter, who was sick in hospital. Instead, on his way there, he was abducted by two armed men who drove him in his car to a garage. One of the armed men was Billy Giles. The garage, in the Tullcarnet area, was rented by Giles and was to be the venue for the sectarian murder of Michael Fay. Giles shot Michael through the head twice, and then, with his accomplice William Wright, placed the dead body into the boot of his car, and left it on Mountregan Avenue, Dundonald. Last seen alive at 15:30 on a Friday, it was one hour short of a full day before the RUC, accompanied by Michael Fay's brother, opened the abandoned car and discovered the murdered man.
The statement released by the organisation responsible for murdering Michael may have claimed it was directly linked to a desire to avenge Lennie Murphy, but it was a very different murder that radicalised Billy Giles, in his own words "turning him into a killer." That murder, of a 20-year-old Sunday School teacher named Karen McKeown, is one of a number that this article will reexamine, identifying a trail of violent actions that claimed innocent lives and ultimately concluded with a suicide, 25 years later.
“Take on a Strandman, and you take on the Strand” – The Catholic Defence League.
In December 1977, Magill published an excellent article written by Kevin Myers about the Short Strand. Among many fascinating observations on the area, he had this to say:
The letters CDL mean little to most people in Belfast. They evoke small response from Strand people when you mention them, but that is not from ignorance. Probably the best equipped and most secret organisation in the Short Strand is the CDL The Catholic Defence League - which does not lose guns or personnel, and waits for the day of the great conflagration. That that conflagration seems to be receding does not seem to lower the CDL's guard. They encourage silence about their existence, but they are there, awaiting the fateful day. While some Strand residents' dream of freedom from the centre to the sea, others remember where they live, in a tiny enclave surrounded by a vast Protestant population.
On the 8th of November, 1979, loyalist gunmen shot dead two Short Strand men, Marius O'Neill and Paul McCrory, both aged 23. In his Magill article, Myers had written that "if you take on a Strandman, be prepared to take on the Strand." Within two hours of the O'Neill and McCrory murders, two members of the CDL had taken weapons from an arms dump, scaled a wall of the Sirocco works nearby, opened up a security guard's hut and shot dead the Protestant civilian Edward McMaster. The CDL members later convicted of involvement in the attack (Noel Halfpenny and James Burns), in keeping with an agreement between the CDL and the IRA, served their jail terms on IRA wings.
Shortly after the Magill article was published, Kevin Myers received a phone call from an IRA member who told him the IRA wanted to talk to him and that he should attend a pub in the Clonard area at a specified time and date. This Myers did, went into a back room and was confronted by a then IRA Belfast Brigade staff member, who later became an elected Sinn Fein representative and a household name. Let's call him P. O'Neill. He informed Myers that his article had damaged "the cause" and demanded to know his source. Myers informed P. O'Neill that "your cause is not my cause" and that, of course, he wouldn't reveal his source. The meeting went on for some time, with Myers describing it as the closest thing to a court martial that he had experienced.
Murder Begets Murder: The Logic of Sectarian Gunmen
On the 24th of September 1982, 28-year-old Stephen Andrew Crowe spent the day drinking in various bars in Sandy Row. Later, he was given a Smith & Wesson revolver supposedly to "store." Instead, Crowe "found himself" in the Short Strand, where he burst into a house at random and shot at a 21-year-old male inhabitant. The man was hit three times, but Crowe missed the man's girlfriend who was sitting with him. The man survived. Crowe later went to the Markets area where he opened fire at a group of people, missing all of them. He was sentenced to 15 years at his trial in 1983, where he was described as an alcoholic who had been drinking since the age of 12. Crowe had previously been charged with armed robbery – using a revolver, and other theft charges.
Crowe was arrested hours after the shootings, remanded, and later tried and convicted. But it appears that for some men with access to guns, the arrest was not enough. The "reprisal" shootings carried out were among the most wanton and vicious of the entire conflict, made even worse by the fact that no convictions followed.
A man, or men, armed with INLA weapons, previously used to attempt to murder a DUP man, Billy Dickinson, just over three weeks earlier, shot dead 68-year-old civilian Billy Nixon and shot and fatally wounded 20-year-old Karen McKeown. The murder of Ms McKeown was particularly squalid and brutal. She walked out of the church where she had been attending a service, was approached from behind and shot in the neck, the gun a matter of inches from her. She survived for three weeks before succumbing to her injuries. As far as I am aware, nobody has ever been arrested for these murders. In all of the killings and events that I have looked into, the absence of information has never been greater. The INLA, for their part, denied any part in the double murder, and said that they did not target people because of their religion but individuals who were behind such sectarian attacks and actively promoted them" were targets (Belfast Telegraph, 01/10/82).
So who killed Karen McKeown and Billy Nixon? An obvious answer is the INLA. After all the weapons were INLA, and they had a unit operating in East Belfast in 1982 who in addition to the attempt on Billy Dickinson, had shot dead the former highly influential loyalist leader, John McKeague.
But could it have been the CDL using INLA guns? Or CDL members who had an affiliation with the INLA? Murdering a female barely out of her teens was unusual, but not entirely unique, to republican paramilitaries. 17-year-old Heather Thompson was shot dead in the mid-1970s. But the IRA hadn't carried out an overtly sectarian murder for some time, and the INLA were still a year away from Darkley. Could it have been a case of men and women from the Strand being attacked, and therefore CDL members attacked men and women from the Protestant community?
One challenge to my theorising that the CDL was involved comes from the then INLA member Gerard Steenson, who was imprisoned on the words of a supergrass. A "comm" he sent to comrades on the outside had this to say about the murderers of Ms McKeown and Mr Nixon:
Do the current INLA L/S (leadership) have the potential to further the movements' aims? No. Even worse, they permit Darkley and murder old men, and Sunday school teachers.
Steenson’s comms from inside prison are highly articulate, the work of man who appears to abhor sectarian murders, and contrary to “Doctor Death” persona in the media, he was a man capable of sober political reflection.
The Aftermath: From Revenge to Ruin
In 1997, the BBC broadcast three seminal series on the Troubles, Provos, Loyalists, and Brits. Groundbreaking at the time, the presenter Peter Taylor interviewed those who had "stained Northern Ireland with blood" with shocking results. An especially memorable interview was with UVF member Billy Giles. As previously discussed, Giles had committed a sectarian murder in 1982, for which he was convicted and served a life sentence. The murder of Michael Fay was condemned in strong terms across the political spectrum, and his funeral was an ecumenical affair, with more than 40 Protestant clergy attending the Catholic service. Amidst the commendable demonstration of faith and unity at the funeral, however, was the haunting sight of the now widowed Mary Fay sobbing "I don't want him to go away."
Again, as we have seen, an organisation calling itself the Protestant Action Force put out a statement claiming they were responsible for killing Michael Fay. But what drove Giles to kill was the murder of Karen McKeown, as he admitted himself in Taylor's documentary. He also said this, about becoming a murderer:
When it happened, it felt to me that, that somebody had reached down inside me and ripped, ripped my insides out. That's what it felt like. It felt as if somebody had just put their hand down in through my head and just ripped the inside out of me, and I was empty - I felt empty.
You hear a bang and it's too late. You hear the bang and that's it. It's too late then, you've went, you've went somewhere you've never been before and it's not a very nice place and you can't, you can't stop it, it's too late then … (1) never felt a whole person again. Never felt, never felt like that again. So I lost something that day I don't think I'll ever get back.
A year after that interview, Billy Giles took his own life. A chain of events that started in 1982 with a drunk, Stephen Crowe, shooting at civilians, ended with deaths, bereaved families, heartbroken partners, and decades in jail.
⏩ Brandon Sullivan is a middle-aged West Belfast émigré. He juggles fatherhood & marriage with working in a policy environment and writing for TPQ about the conflict, films, books, and politics.
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