The MacArthur murder case ... and the detectives who cracked it
Maeve Sheehan’s special report
AFEW weeks ago, retired detective Denis Donegan got a call out of the blue from an old acquaintance — a former prisoner he had investigated many years earlier. “He told me he had been in Shelton Abbey [the open prison] with Malcolm MacArthur,” said Donegan. “And he [MacArthur] was anxious to meet myself and Tony Hickey.”
Donegan was a detective sergeant in the Central Detective Unit and Hickey was a detective sergeant in the murder squad when they arrested MacArthur 38 years ago next month.
Would they meet him, the former prisoner asked?
“I told Tony; he said he’d let me go first!” Donegan laughed.
According to Donegan, he was told that MacArthur is “full of remorse”. The phone call transported him back to the warm summer of 1982, when July ran into August, days ran into night, holidays were suspended and all sense of time was lost in the focus on solving two murders that — unknown to them — would come to define an era.
A young nurse, Bridie Gargan, was abducted and beaten while sunbathing by her car in the Phoenix Park in Dublin. Three days later in Edenderry, Co Offaly, Donal Dunne was shot dead in a bog with his own missing shotgun.
Donegan and Hickey were part of an investigation team that included the former Garda commissioner, Noel Conroy, then a detective inspector, the retired assistant commissioner, John O’Mahony, and his good friend Frank Hand, who would be killed in the line of duty two years later.
It took them 22 days to find the once affluent socialite who had fallen on hard times. The brutality of the crimes he committed were almost overshadowed by the political storm caused by MacArthur’s high-society connections — which included the attorney general and, by remove, Charles Haughey, the then Taoiseach, who famously described the events that unfolded over that summer as “grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented”.
In interviews with the Sunday Independent this weekend, Tony Hickey, John O’Mahony and Denis Donegan revisit an extraordinary investigation that lived up to its Gubu acronym — and for John O’Mahony and Denis Donegan, it is the first time they have spoken publicly about the case.
SUMMER INTERRUPTED
For John O’Mahony it started on a warm Saturday in July 1982. He was doing paperwork in the office with his colleague, Frank Hand, when they were summoned down to Kevin Street garda station for a case conference. He was 25, five years a garda and three months a detective in the Central Detective Unit (CDU).
“We wanted to be detectives. We were learning our trade really, that’s what we were at. We were very active. It was work, work, work — that was it. We just loved it.” A case conference for a serious crime was exactly where they wanted to be that Saturday afternoon, but they had no idea of the intensity and complexity of the case that lay ahead of them.
At least 30 detectives crammed into the room at Kevin Street, he recalled. Jim Brogan, a chief superintendent and late grandfather of the Dublin footballers Alan and Bernard, laid out the facts.
On Thursday afternoon, July 22, 25-year-old Bridie Gargan was sunbathing beside her car in the Phoenix Park. A man attacked her with a hammer and drove off with his fatally injured passenger on the back seat of the car. The best witness they had was a gardener, Paddy Byrne, who saw the suspect hopping from tree to tree and crawling through the grass toward his victim. He had bravely tried to intervene even though the assailant had a gun, though it turned out to be a replica. His description of the man’s dark wavy hair, cravat, and that he was well-dressed and well-spoken was the most vital clue detectives had.
There were others: a bloodied jumper was found over a garden wall that senior officers initially kept to themselves. A shovel wrapped in polythene was left behind at the crime scene.
Given the frenzied nature of the attack, John O’Mahony and Frank Hand were assigned to chase up psychiatric institutions. St Pat’s was their first port of call after the case conference: “Oh, that fellow’s here,” the doctor in charge said on hearing the description. According to O’Mahony, it was an early lesson in circumspection for an eager young detective. The lead turned out to be a dud. “You realise over the years that trails that start out as promising often run cold at the end of the day,” he said.
The next day, the body of Donal Dunne, a farmer and clay pigeon enthusiast, was found in brambles on a bog outside Edenderry. It was Sunday, July 25. The farmer had been shot in the face at point blank range. His family said he had advertised the gun for sale in the classified ads section of a newspaper. He had gone out that day to show it to a man who expressed an interest in buying it. His killer took his gun and escaped in his car.
The garda murder squad now had two violent murders on its hands. Two separate investigations. No suspects. Nothing to link them. Apart from the compellingly similar descriptions of an unusual man reported by witnesses at the crime scenes in two different counties.
Tony Hickey, who joined the investigation in the following days, delved into the witness statements “looking for common denominators”.
Hickey and Joe Shelly called on a witness in a travel office on Dublin’s South Circular Road who had somehow missed news of the murders but recalled a well-spoken man, out of breath and sweating, who called looking for water on the day Bridie Gargan was attacked.
“He treated her like a servant, or she got that impression. He was talking down to her: ‘Get me a taxi. I want to go to Dun Laoghaire’,” said Hickey.
But the man didn’t get a taxi. He jumped on a bus that came to a halt outside the travel office. Detectives traced it to Finglas. There the trail led to the Fingal House pub. The stranger with wavy hair and a cravat had stood out like a sore thumb. A punter watched him dry-shaving his beard off in a bathroom with no mirror and ordering a drink while waiting for a taxi into town. There the trail went cold.
In Edenderry, meanwhile, witnesses reported seeing a man at the canal, inappropriately dressed for the weather. “He arrived by bus the evening before. He had apparently stayed the night on the canal. He bought a Sunday Independent and a carton of milk and sat by the canal,” said Hickey. One witness described him as “bohemian”. Others noticed his accent, good clothes and distinctive leaning gait.
Detectives knew that whoever killed Dunne drove to Dublin afterwards in his car, which was later found abandoned by the Central Bank in Dame Street. A group of Offaly supporters had followed the Offaly reg car through Dublin thinking he too must be going to Croke Park, providing a further description.
Any doubt that the two crimes were linked was dispelled by a fingerprint found on polythene wrapped around the shovel in the Phoenix Park. It matched the print found on the copy of the Sunday Independent plucked by detectives from a dustbin beside a canal bench in Edenderry.
But the trail slowed as dozens of leads had to be followed, hundreds of jobs boxed off and suspects had to be both nominated and eliminated. The initial weeks of the investigation focused north of the city. Clay pigeon shooting enthusiasts had reported a strange man hanging around their grounds in Swords and Ashbourne in north Co Dublin.
John O’Mahony recalled the intensity of the investigation, “the need for thoroughness, for detail and for total commitment. You did not take a day off — even though you were due your days off, you couldn’t take them.” It took O’Mahony and his detective sergeant, Kevin Tunney, a week to corroborate the accounts of a travelling
Bible salesman who had to be ruled out of their inquiries.
Then, in early August, three extraordinary things happened in quick succession that caused the mammoth manhunt to change direction.
On Wednesday, August 4, a former US diplomat called Harry Beiling opened the front door of his grand home overlooking Killiney Bay to a well-dressed, well-spoken man.
Tony Hickey recalled the encounter: “He said to him: ‘You probably don’t remember me but I was at parties in your house. I still remember the view from one of your windows. I have a camera here in the bag and I would like to take a photograph at sunset of the bay’.”
Beiling invited him in. The visitor pulled out a gun and demanded £1,000. Beiling offered to fetch his chequebook, enabling him to escape with his life.
The next day, Pat Fitzgerald, a sergeant on duty at Dun Laoghaire garda station, took a phone call from a man keen to clear up a misunderstanding. That incident at Killiney Hill the previous day, the caller said, was a “prank” that had gone wrong. He had cleared everything up with Harry Beiling.
The sergeant heard classical music playing in the background.
“By the way,” he asked the caller, “what’s your name?” “Malcolm MacArthur.” “Where were you born?” “Gardiner Street,” the caller said.
The call was unusual and given that the Beiling incident was a serious crime, gardai conducted house to house inquiries in Gardiner Street to trace him. But there was nothing to connect this incident to the double murders. Then a senior officer had a hunch.
“Mick Sullivan, a D Super in Dun Laoghaire, rang John Courtney in the incident room. I overheard the conversation because I happened to be sitting beside him,” said Hickey. “The gist of the conversation was: ‘We had an unusual aggravated burglary here and, he said, the more I think about it, the more I think the fella that did it is your man’.”
The third fortuitous event was that a newspaper vendor named John Monks phoned the garda station on August 5 — the same day MacArthur rang the sergeant. Monks had watched a reconstruction of the attack on Bridie Gargan on RTE and recognised the description of the suspect.
John O’Mahony was sent to take his statement on Friday, August 6. Monks sold newspapers from the corner of Marine Road in Dun Laoghaire. Sometime in July he noticed a new customer, a man in his 30s, who was growing a beard. His clothes stood out because they were completely inappropriate for the weather — a dark tweed hat, a beige jumper, with a round neck and patches on the shoulders.
“He saw him almost every day after that, always twice a day,” said O’Mahony. “This was prior to the two murders. He bought two papers, the Irish Times in the morning and in the evening, either the Evening Press or the Herald. On one occasion, the man asked Monks if he could read the adverts in a paper that he hadn’t bought.”
When reading, he pushed his glasses on his head, Monks noticed, which suggested he didn’t need to wear them.
There were a couple of days when the man didn’t show and when he did return, his beard was gone. Monks had seen him as recently as the previous day, withdrawing money in the bank.
Monks’s statement was regarded as critical: the jumper he described matched the beige military sweater thrown into a garden by Bridie Gargan’s killer as he made his escape.
Over the following days, detectives stuck to Monks hoping to catch sight of their elusive suspect. They watched concealed in a van across the street and accompanied Monks around the local pubs by night hoping to spot him. The suspect never showed but the hunt continued all over south Co Dublin.
By the third week of the investigation, the focus was still on north Dublin but across the city, detectives were zoning in on its most affluent neighbourhoods.
A motorist and his passengers reported picking up a man in a cravat hitch-hiking in Killiney on the same day Harry Beiling was held up. The hiker asked them to drop him at Pilot View apartment complex overlooking Bullock Harbour, outside Dalkey. After dropping him off, they were surprised to see him instead walk into Harbour Crescent estate further down the road. Gardai conducted house to house inquiries there.
But on the morning of Thursday, August 12, Tony Hickey and Kevin Tunney decided to swing into Pilot View on “the off chance” of picking up a lead. It was an upmarket estate and Hickey recalled that residents seemed surprised to see them. Armed with a folder of photofits, Tony Hickey recalled, he was directed to a Mr Soloman, who was involved in the residents’ committee and familiar with the comings and goings in the place. Hickey described the suspect to him: well-dressed, cravat, wavy hair. It didn’t ring a bell.
“Then just as I was leaving, he said: ‘Tell me again that description’. I gave the description again. ‘The attorney general lives in the penthouse here and his nephew is staying for the last while and he is very like the description you are giving’,” said Hickey.
Crucially, the “nephew” wore a cravat and Mr Solomon added the detail (which later proved erroneous) that
‘He was seen crawling through the grass toward his victim’
he drove a grey Mini.
“It just didn’t make sense — the attorney general’s nephew?” said Hickey. “It sounded daft but at that stage you had to keep an open mind.”
Hickey recorded the information — outlandish as it seemed — and told the chief superintendent, John Courtney.
CLOSING IN
That afternoon, he and Noel Conroy sat in Dun Laoghaire garda station scrutinising again Harry Beiling’s statement, compelled by his description of the suspect, the gun, the phone call from a MacArthur and the superintendent’s hunch. What threw them was Beiling’s insistence that the weapon was a rifle. “If we were on the right track, it should have been Donal Dunne’s shotgun,” said Hickey. The detectives asked him to come in. “Down he came. He was a tall, well-educated, elegant man,” he said.
The name Malcolm MacArthur meant nothing to Beiling and he was adamant on the rifle. He did not recognise the intruder who claimed to have admired the view while at one of his parties. “I remember we said to Beiling, we were trying to find out who was at the party, was there anybody at the party who would know this man?” Beiling mentioned a friend of his, a woman, who lived on the northside.
By 7pm that evening, she was sitting in Dun Laoghaire garda station with the detectives. “Was there anyone now who would have frequented those parties, who had nice brown wavy hair, wears a cravat, is well-spoken, a ‘lord of the manor type’ fellow?” Hickey recalled asking her. Oh yes, she said, Malcolm. “Malcolm who?”
“Malcolm MacArthur.” At that moment, said Tony
Hickey, the hair stood on the back of his head.
The woman told gardai all she knew about him, how he had lived in Donnybrook with his wife and partner, Brenda Little, about their son, and how he had recently moved the family to Tenerife.
The following morning, Friday, August 13, the detectives had traced the Donnybrook apartment. Denis Donegan was sent to investigate. He intercepted the new tenant, a Malaysian doctor, who got the owner of the property to ring him.
The owner confirmed that a family of three had lived at the apartment. But, he said, it was leased by Patrick Connolly, the attorney general.
According to Donegan, that was the moment the hair stood at the back of his head.
The owner of the apartment was not pleased at the garda’s interest, he said, and said he was a personal friend of Charles Haughey’s. “[I said] if he [Haughey] wants to ring me, I’ ll talk to him. I said give me 24 hours, don’t do anything for 24 hours’ and he said he wouldn’t,” said Donegan.
Suddenly the already grave and sensitive double murder investigation had become an extremely delicate affair.
“Now Paddy Connolly comes into the equation for the second time,” said Hickey. “It would be a monumental disaster if we were on the wrong track but we still had to pursue it.”
Within hours, the most Gubu case in Irish history came to a swift and spectacular head.
Denis Donegan and Tony Hickey were dispatched to Pilot View in an unmarked Renault 4. That they spotted a Mini parked nearby with a gun inside only heightened the tension (it later proved to be another red herring).
With incredible timing, a taxi driver drove into the complex shortly after them. Alarmed to be stopped by two armed detectives, the driver told them he was delivering two hacksaw blades and Perrier water to a well-spoken gent in the penthouse at Carnsore block in Pilot View. The hacksaws, the detectives instantly suspected, were intended to cut the barrels off the shotgun — which, if they were on the right track, belonged to Donal Dunne.
“We knew then he must have had the gun,” said Donegan. “That was a scary moment.”
At that moment, they looked up and saw the distinctive outline of their suspect at the penthouse window. Tony Hickey approached the front door and pressed the intercom. “Parcel for Mr Connolly,” he said.
Almost simultaneously, at 4pm, the State car arrived delivering Paddy Connolly home. By now more than half a dozen armed detectives had moved in on the apartment complex: the chief superintendent Courtney, Conroy, Brian Sherry and Joe Shelly. John O’Mahony and Frank Hand guarded the complex and the still-suspect Mini.
MacArthur didn’t put up much resistance. Surrounded by armed detectives, Paddy Connolly shouted through the locked front door. “He said: ‘Malcolm, the guards are here, you better open the door.’ When it opened, he said, “you’d know straight away, this was the man,” said Tony Hickey. Later Connolly told MacArthur, that whatever he had done, “you’re on your own”. MacArthur delivered up the gun, which was indeed Donal Dunne’s. They had their man.
According to the gardai we spoke to, it was never for a moment suspected that the late Paddy Connolly was anything other than a victim of the affair — connected through his longstanding friendship with Brenda Little, MacArthur’s partner, who introduced them. MacArthur had showed up at his door on August 4 looking for a bed, clean-shaven and claiming to have arrived from Switzerland.
Connolly’s misguided decision to go on holidays as planned, even after he was told that MacArthur was a suspect for double murder, cost him his job. Having gone with the Taoiseach’s blessing, he was summoned to return the next day. The sense of scandal deepened when it emerged that the Sunday before his arrest, MacArthur was in Croke Park with Paddy Connolly and the then Garda commissioner watching an All
Ireland semi-final.
Down at Dun Laoghaire garda station, Tony Hickey and Noel Conroy interviewed MacArthur for two hours. “He was non-committal. His attitude was ‘why are these guys asking me these questions?’,” recalled Hickey. “Anything he did say was quite condescending.” But later that night, he asked to see them and told them: “I want to get my thoughts in chronological order and I’ll tell you everything in the morning.”
He spent the night in a room rather than a cell, guarded by Denis Donegan and
Joe Shelly. MacArthur slept through the night on a mattress. “He woke up at about 6am and he said he wanted to take possession of his faculties and assist us in our work. That was the type of language he used. Later I took his statement and there was 21 pages in it,” said Donegan. His first words were to “affirm that I am responsible for the deaths of nurse Bridie Gargan and Mr Donal Dunne”.
MacArthur did not seek to justify what he had done, according to Donegan. He did not express remorse to the detectives. At one point, he rambled on about the crab nebula and the big bang. “There was no shouting, no raising of voices or anything,” he said. “He was very calm, very calm.”
After appearing in Dun Laoghaire District Court that Saturday afternoon, Denis Donegan and Tony Hickey drove with him to Mountjoy prison. “He was all chat in the car going up to Mountjoy. He was talking about general things. He wanted to know when he would be brought down again, and what court he would be going to.”
Did he seem upset? “Not a bit,” said Donegan.
WHAT MOTIVE?
MacArthur was raised in Meath, and had a privileged but troubled family background. In her sole interview on RTE many years ago, his mother, Irene, described his violent father. MacArthur was suspected of plotting to murder her too. Detectives examined entries in his notebook: “Electric fire with faulty plug attached”, “reading of the will”, “On with the story”.
MacArthur murdered for money. He squandered his £70,000 inheritance. Weeks after moving to Tenerife, he told his partner he was going to Switzerland to sort his finances. He came to Ireland, lodged in a bed and breakfast in Dun Laoghaire and planned a heist. For this, he figured, he needed a car and a gun and set out to rob both, killing two innocent people in the process.
For reasons that were never fully explained, the DPP did not charge MacArthur with Dunne’s murder. He pleaded guilty to murdering Bridie Gargan but no evidence was heard. Since his release from prison in 2012, he has been a low-key presence at book launches and historical talks around the city. He once queued at a book signing given by the former Justice Minister Alan Shatter, a bizarre scene that is a world away from 1982.
Looking back on the case now, Tony Hickey said: “Charles Haughey and Patrick Connolly were victims of circumstance and Bridie Gargan and Donal Dunne were victims of fate. Their families have suffered an incalculable loss but I think their grief was sidelined in all the furore, the political controversy and quite a lot of inaccurate commentary around the case.”
The case has left its mark. “As a young detective it probably went over my head. There are times I sat at my desk as an assistant commissioner, considering a difficulty, and I found myself going back to that case,” said John O’Mahony. “Don’t dismiss, don’t jump to conclusions, don’t assume it’s a wound, put your finger in the wound. The case stayed with me and it’s why I can remember it so well.”
It has stayed with all of them. Perhaps that’s why Denis Donegan has sent a message back to MacArthur via his acquaintance that he and Tony Hickey will meet him. Tony Hickey said he is “curious” and Denis Donegan said he “wants to see what he has to say”. Both seem keen to observe the strange and unusual man they hunted down for the deaths of a young nurse and an innocent farmer, in an investigation that has resonated through the decades. That MacArthur reached out is another twist in a brutal and sensational crime that, even 38 years on remains unprecedented.
The detectives await his reply.
‘We knew he must have had the gun. That was scary’
‘There was no shouting,he was very calm, very calm’