The terrifying 58 seconds that netted killer gang €7,000 and left a young family bereft
THE evening of January 25, 2013, started like any other for Adrian Donohoe. He said goodbye to his wife and their two children and set out from Bellurgan for Dundalk garda station.
Shortly after 8pm he took up the regular Friday night duty of providing an armed escort for the credit union takings across the Cooley Peninsula.
Previous robberies meant there was good reason for armed detectives to shadow the money until it was safely deposited in Dundalk.
Adrian’s partner that night was Det Gda Joe Ryan, who at the time was a 20-year veteran of the force.
The two detectives set off in their unmarked patrol car, a Toyota Avensis, with the call sign Papa Bravo 16.
Their first stop was at the Ballymascanlon service station where Det Gda Donohoe bought a packet of peanuts and a bottle of water.
Torrential rain and road closures delayed them getting to Omeath credit union and they called ahead to notify their colleagues.
In the sub-district station at Omeath, gardaí Alan Lynch and Tony Golden, who would lose his life in a shooting two years later, decided to start the escort. They went from Omeath to Carlingford and then on to Cooley. At the last branch, Adrian Donohoe and Joe Ryan arrived to take over from their unarmed colleagues.
As the men were exchanging pleasantries, a gang of four men were gathering at Lordship credit union. All dressed in black and wearing balaclavas, they were dropped on a nearby laneway by a dark coloured Volkswagen Passat at 8.49pm.
Back in Cooley, the convoy left the branch at 9.13pm and headed towards Lordship, arriving at 9.25pm. As was protocol since an armed robbery at the branch 17 months earlier, the staff inside Lordship waited until the armed escort arrived.
Pat Bellew and Bernadette McShane, two volunteers on duty that night, got the signal that the escort was outside and exited the building.
Mr Bellew walked over to his Mazda carrying approximately €7,000 in cash along with cheques. He began reversing out of the parking space. The other cars got ready to leave for AIB in Dundalk, where the takings from the four credit unions were to be deposited.
They never made that journey.
A dark-coloured Passat drove at speed from the Carlingford direction and blocked the entrance with near-perfect timing.
Mary Hanlon would recall seeing what she believed to be a woman with blonde hair and wearing a cap behind the wheel. She initially thought it was a person pulling in to take a phone call.
But at that exact moment four young, athletic men scaled the 1.3m-high rear wall of the credit union.
The first two men, the only raiders carrying firearms, made their way directly to the unmarked garda car.
By this stage Adrian Donohoe had stepped out of the Avensis to assess what was blocking the entrance, unaware of the danger approaching out of his line of sight. Within seconds he would be dead.
One of the raiders, carrying a long-barrelled shotgun, pointed it across the roof of the car directly at the detective’s head and, without warning, pulled the trigger. Det Gda Donohoe didn’t have time to draw his Sig Sauer P226 semiautomatic pistol.
CCTV footage captured the moment the masked killer recoiled back several feet and almost fell to the ground after he discharged the fatal shot.
Ballistics tests would later determine that Det Gda Donohoe was shot from a distance of no more than seven feet, effectively at pointblank range, and died from a penetrating shotgun wound to the right side of his head.
The two gunmen soon trained their weapons on Joe Ryan who was pinned in to his seat.
At this stage the detective believed there had only been a warning shot fired, oblivious to the fact his colleague was lying fatally wounded across from him.
He later told the trial how a raider threatened him: “I’m going to f***ing kill you, I’m going to shoot you. Give us the money.”
Their accomplices ran towards two cars being driven by credit union volunteers.
One of them was Bernadette McShane, an employee of some 25 years, who was in her red Nissan Micra. She thought one man was coming to kill her because she had “seen too much”.
He smashed her car window and shouted at the volunteer: “Give me the money, give me the f***ing money.”
Ms McShane pleaded: “I haven’t got any, somebody else has it.”
She noticed an object in his hand which she described as a walkie-talkie. She also heard a voice, presumably from the transceiver, shout:”Are you right there, lads?” When this call went out, she said, the assailants left immediately and in unison.
A fourth robber had focused his attention on the Mazda being driven by Pat Bellew.
The man smashed the driver-side window with a mallet and later made his way around to the passenger side.
He took the bag containing the €7,000 in cash but, unlike his accomplices, didn’t speak a word.
The only vehicle the gang didn’t target was the one containing the largest sum of money. Mary Hanlon’s Nissan Qashqai held more than €27,000 in cash and €90,000 in cheques but was overlooked as the raiders ran past it to the waiting getaway car. The dark-coloured Passat sped away in convoy with another saloon car at 10.04pm and was later found burnt-out on Cumsons Road, an isolated laneway near Newtonhamilton.
The raid lasted all of 58 seconds and netted the gang €7,000.
The raid had also left a wife without her husband, and two young children without their father.
Emergency services, including gardaí and advanced paramedics, rushed to the scene and the gravity of the situation was immediately apparent.
Some of those first on the scene had worked with Det Gda Donohoe for many years.
Within hours of his murder gardaí had drawn up a shortlist of potential suspects from the area.
The list was compiled by now-retired Detective Inspector Pat Marry, and jotted down on the piece of paper were 12 people with the capability to carry out a robbery with this precision and who would also have no hesitation in using firearms.
The sixth name on that list would later lead gardaí on an international manhunt over the next five years. That name was Aaron Brady.