I’ve carried ghost of Mooney on my back
IT TOOK the death of his wife almost 10 years ago to help Hugh Collins make sense of his own life – the waste of his best years in prison and the burden of murder on his shoulders.
He married Caroline McNairn, one of Scotland’s best artists, in 1993, just a few months after emerging from jail 16 years into a life sentence for killing rival Willie Mooney in a knife fight.
When Hugh was interviewed, he was often asked if he was sorry, and until Caroline died was reluctant to give strangers a glimpse into his head.
Asked now, he said: “Of course I’m sorry for what I did. The second I looked in his eyes and saw he was dying, I felt like a monster. I’ve carried the ghost of Willie Mooney on my back every day since.”
Hugh is one of the best examples of rehabilitation Scotland has seen. He was once out of control, his notoriety for violence grew in jail for his persistent attacks on warders.
His hatred of authority, forged in borstal then hardened by the brutal and violent regime he endured, saw him try to kill three prison officers within months of his murder conviction.
He became known as Scotland’s most dangerous prisoner, spent months in isolation, sometimes in cages not cells, and for a while he was beaten unconscious daily.
The effects of those beatings seem clear now as he speaks slowly, slurring some of his words, and his memory is not what it was.
He credits Caroline with his salvation but he knows the transformation started earlier when the authorities, unable to break him with brutality, moved him to Barlinnie’s now long defunct Special Unit.
Treating Hugh like a human being, introducing him to art and placing trust in him worked.
He says: “I don’t talk often about my past but when I do the one thing I’d like people to take from it is that brutality never worked.
“I was a monster being punished by monsters. I thought it was the norm until they put me in the unit. Suddenly I was being treated like a human being and I started to act like one.
“I’ve been out for nearly 30 years and never caused any bother. Before the unit, even I would never have predicted that change.”
Hugh’s eyes still fill with tears when he talks about the loss of Caroline in September 2010, just four months after they learned she had cervical cancer.
He struggled to cope with grief, not helped by the suddenness of her death. Cruelly for Hugh, she died while he had taken a few minutes to go for coffee.
He said: “I held her in my arms, knowing she was dead, and those minutes brought home some hard truths. I knew how devastated I felt, and I remembered that I had done that to a family many years ago. I’d taken the life of a young man and destroyed his family, and more than 30 years later, I finally understood what that sort of pain felt like.”
He felt an overwhelming desire to lie down and die to be with Caroline and insists he would not have survived had it not been for his “big, daft dug”.
Hugh added: “When I got out of jail after the lifer, people wanted me to apologise for what I’d done and I didn’t want to seem weak. I didn’t want to be bullied and I maybe came across as arrogant or unfeeling. But the truth is I was overwhelmed. What words can you find that are adequate when you’ve ended someone’s life? “After Caroline’s death I really understood that sorrow and could express
it.”
The second I saw he was dying, I felt like a monster
HUGH COLLINS ON KIILLING WILLIE MOONEY