1998 MURD ER SCANDAL
GLASGOW CRIME STORIES Successful builder had many friends, but even more enemies
MANNY O’Donnell was well known in Glasgow, a successful builder who wore expensive clothes, drove top of the range cars, and was always dripping in jewellery.
The 53-year-old father of two also had influence in high places and secured major contracts at the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the nuclear submarine complex at Coulport on the Clyde.
But he was also known as an outspoken supporter and financial backer of the IRA, even taking a “tax” of £10 a week off each of his workers for the Provos. If they didn’t pay up, they got the sack.
O’Donnell, who had been born in Donegal, Ireland, had also been jailed for six years in the 70s for tax fraud.
Known as The Contractor, he also mixed with some of the most prominent Glasgow gangland figures of the day.
One of his most trusted employees was Mary Ryan, 27, from King’s Park, Glasgow, who helped him develop his pubs and club businesses.
They were regularly seen in each other’s company not just in Glasgow but also on trips to Spain.
Ryan always denied the rumours that she was his lover.
On the night of November 19, 1998, the two of them had met at Tinto Firs Hotel in Fenwick Road, Newlands, on the city’s Southside.
The next day, in a lovers’ lane near East Kilbride, a man walking his dog saw a tarpaulin lying on the ground, covering something.
Curious he looked and found the builder’s body.
When the police examined the victim, they found he had been killed with two point-blank range shotgun blasts to his head and chest.
Once dead, or while dying, his killers then mutilated O’Donnell with 22 separate stab wounds.
The hire car in which he had been travelling was later discovered burnt out in a car park in nearby Newton Mearns. The detectives knew they had a problem with his brutal murder and suspected that he had been lured to his death.
The man had many friends but even more enemies.
Had he been the victim of a honey trap involving his trusted employee?
The police certainly thought so. After a lengthy investigation they arrested Ryan for the murder along with the victim’s personal driver Francis O’Donnell, no relation, and Patrick Devine, Ryan’s boyfriend, who worked as a labourer.
At their trial at the High Court in Glasgow in September 1999, Ryan claimed she and O’Donnell had set off from the Tinto Firs for a meeting at a hotel in the West End of Glasgow.
According to her account, masked men jumped into the car as she was stopped at traffic lights.
They then forced her at gunpoint to drive to the spot in Barbana Road in East Kilbride where O’Donnell was executed.
Ryan claimed she knew nothing about the murder plot and had to beg for her own life before being thrown out the car.
The trial also laid bare the complex business dealings of the victim.
One witness told how he fell out with O’Donnell after they opened a club near Glasgow.
O’Donnell, who lived in Deaconsbank, Glasgow, was supposed to be the director behind the scenes, putting up a third of the cash.
But he never handed over a penny and the witness had to pay almost £50,000 out of his own pocket to have the place refurbished.
Later after returning from holiday, he discovered O’Donnell had changed the locks and had hired a security company man to keep him out.
He then claimed that the club was torched by O’Donnell.
During their investigation, police discovered £20,000 in a safe in O’Donnell’s office and £22,000 under the floorboards at a house in Bearsden.
A further £200,000 was traced to a bank account in Ireland and £500,000 in an account in Jersey.
O’Donnell was also heavily involved in providing ‘’lump’’ labour for the construction industry. He organised squads of labourers, mostly unemployed Irishmen, who got £40 in their hand each day, no questions asked.
He flitted in and out of dozens of sub-contracting companies, using front men to run them.
Then he would declare them bankrupt, owing the VAT man and Inland Revenue fortunes.
It was nothing for him to pocket up to £60,000 in unpaid VAT, which he hid away in various accounts.
One man brought in on a big salary to help run two of his businesses became so alarmed at the crooked dealings he left weeks later.
The trial lasted several weeks, the case against Devine was found not proven but both Francis and Ryan were found guilty and sentenced to a minimum of 15 years.
Judge Lord Penrose said that the murder was an act of “horrendous and extreme violence”.
No-one had claimed that Ryan physically killed O’Donnell.
However, the judge was sending out a message – that luring a man to his murder is just as abhorrent as using violence against him.
No motive for O’Donnell’s murder has ever been revealed but police believe he made dangerous enemies as he tried to expand his business empire.
There were various theories in the underworld as to who set the death squad on him. Given his connections with the IRA, a paramilitary connection could not be ruled out.
When he was laid to rest in Donegal, his coffin was draped with the Irish tricolour.
Another theory was that O’Don
To this day the motive for his murder is still a mystery
nell had stolen £250,000 worth of cocaine from a drug baron and the murder was simple revenge.
Four days before he was lured to his death, respected lawyer Jack Quar was found dead in his office in the centre of Glasgow.
The conclusion was that he had committed suicide.
His last client on the day of his death was O’Donnell.
Seven days earlier, O’Donnell was said to have visited the lawyer at his offices with £100,000 in cash looking for investment advice.
He had also bragged to Ryan he was going to be “the Mr Big’’ in Glasgow crime. Had someone wanted to take him down a peg or two?
Whatever the truth of the motives behind the killing, O’Donnell was careful about his personal security.
He rarely lived in the same place often, spending nights in different hotels, most of them in the Southside.
O’Donnell also had a secret bolthole in the city’s West End.
It was a semi containing only the bare necessities in case he had to run there quickly to hide.
The place was so secret even the closest members of his family had no idea of its existence and only one of his neighbours ever recalled seeing him there.
Francis ferried him about in hire cars to various business meetings.
The cars were changed every fortnight so they would not become familiar to anyone targeting him.
He rarely used his own silver Mercedes with its MoD number plate.
He was always on guard whenever he went into hotels and pubs for business meetings, looking round carefully before entering.
His eyes rarely strayed from the door while he was there.
Francis insisted he always kept his eyes on the rear-view mirror in case they were being tracked.
In 2011, Ryan and Francis both lost an appeal against their convictions at the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh.
Francis, whose case had been referred by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which looks into alleged miscarriages of justice, had earlier been freed from prison.
He was returned to jail following the failed appeal.
Three judges heard that the murder victim ran businesses where wages were paid in cash, gangers employed without proper health and safety and shell companies used to avoid creditors.
To this day the motive for his murder and the identity of the person who ordered it remains a mystery.
Ryan has always maintained her innocence and insists the whole story didn’t emerge at the trial and that if it had her role would have been treated with sympathy.
The appeal judges were not convinced.
They described Ryan’s murderous role as follows: “That common criminal purpose involved her hiring a car, driving the deceased in that car so that he met up with those who intended to kill him, being present whilst the deceased was killed, taking part in the subsequent destruction of the hire car and engaging in an attempt to cover up the circumstances in which the destruction of the car took place.”