Man whose two-year inquiry was ended by smear worked on case of Moors Murderers
WHEN John Stalker, Deputy Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, came to Northern Ireland in 1983 he was stepping into a very troubled land.
In the two preceding years a total of 221 people had been killed, 110 of them members of the RUC and Army. The hunger strike in 1981 had inflamed nationalist opinion across the island and the IRA was being flooded with new recruits.
To say that the security forces were being stretched was to put it mildly. There were many areas along the border where police could not operate normally and the border appeared particularly porous to IRA units moving from the Republic and back again.
But it was a particular part of police operations that Stalker had been called into investigate. After the deaths of six men in a five-week period between November 11, 1982 and December 12, shot dead by a specialised RUC squad the Headquarters Mobile Support Unit, there were allegations from the wider nationalist community they had been killed without being given any chance to surrender — that a shoot-tokill policy was in operation.
As to be expected, a policeman called into investigate other policemen caught up in a vicious terrorist campaign was not a popular figure.
Former Sunday Times journalist Chris Ryder, who knew Stalker from a decade earlier in Manchester and who had vast experience of the Northern Ireland conflict, said the Deputy Chief Constable got off on the wrong foot.
He criticised the collating of evidence by police officers, seemingly unaware that it was fatal for members of the RUC to hang around even murder scenes in certain parts of the province in case they also became targets.
Stalker had also wanted to bring the death of a young man shot at close range by a rubber bullet in Belfast under the remit of his investigation, but this was strongly refused by RUC Chief Constable Sir John Hermon.
The six people whose deaths were investigated were Eugene Toman, Sean Burns and Gervaise McKerr, shot dead near a RUC checkpoint near Lurgan; Seamus Grew and Roddy Carroll, INLA members shot dead in similar circumstances, and Michael Tighe, shot dead in a hayshed that had been under observation as an IRA explosives dump. The shed had been bugged but the explosives had been removed and used to kill three policemen — Sir John Hermon heard the massive explosion while on a visit to Portadown.
Stalker spent two years investigating these killings. According to Ryder, he was a solid, honest and dogged investigator, a fact which those who wanted the secrets of these killings to remain hidden may have underestimated. Nearing the end of his investigations he discovered that a tape recording existed of Tighe’s shooting, but in spite of his best efforts the security services would not hand it over.
Instead Stalker became the victim of a smear campaign, accused of associating with a criminal gang in Manchester known as the Quality Street gang led by a notorious criminal Jimmy ‘The Weed’ Donnelly.
A friend of Stalker’s, Kevin Taylor, was also accused of criminal activity, but rigorous investigations cleared both men. Taylor, according to Ryder, may have got £20m compensation (other sources put it at a modest “more than £1m”) for the damage to his business and reputation.
The smear worked and Stalker’s inquiry, which was 90% completed, was dropped.
Another senior police officer, Colin Sampson, was brought in to complete the investigation but none of the reports produced have ever been released.
Investigative website The Detail reported in 2014 that many of the files had been destroyed by the Government or one of its agencies.
Ryder believes that the policy for dealing with terrorists at the time under investigation was ambiguous and some officers may have construed it as permission to shoot to kill.
Stalker remained convinced that some shootings were unjustified, but like so much of what happened in our dirty war, the truth remains elusive.
Born in Manchester, Stalker’s career began in the city as a young cadet but he quickly rose through the ranks, working in CID for 16 years to become a Detective Superintendent.
As a junior detective one of his roles included involvement in the notorious Moors Murders of the 1960s. His job involved developing the photographs and listening to the tape recording made by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley as three-year-old Lesley Ann Downey was sexually tortured and murdered.
In 1978 — aged 38 — he was appointed head of Warwickshire CID, the youngest Detective Chief Superintendent in the country, later becoming Deputy Chief Constable of the Greater Manchester Police in 1984.
He is survived by two daughters after the death of his wife 14 months ago.