Killer allowed strike again?’
To end a 43-year-old mystery
decided to look for somewhere to stop so I could calm her down. I saw the layby so I turned in. I was going about 50-60mph and I saw the passenger door open. When I stopped she wasn’t there.
“I reversed the car. There was a wobble of the steering wheel as if I had run over something.
“I got out and she was lying under the wheel. I felt for a heartbeat but I couldn’t feel anything.
“I panicked and tried to get help by radio but there was too much static.
“I lifted her up and put her over the wall but I thought I heard her moan so I left her on a grass verge. She was dead when I left her. I wouldn’t have left her if she had been alive.
“One of her shoes was still in the car so I threw it out over Pilsworth near Heywood.
“The journey was innocent and I intended to take her home. I didn’t mean her any harm. I was afraid of the consequences and this is why I didn’t come to the police station.”
Later that month all charges against O’Hara were dropped when the prosecution offered no evidence during a hearing at Rochdale magistrates’ court.
The prosecuting solicitor told the court he was acting on the advice of the Director of Public Prosecutions.
O’Hara, the court heard, had served with the Royal Green Jackets in Belfast for two years, but in 1972 was discharged for disobeying orders after refusing to go back for a fourth tour of duty.
He returned to Ireland, the court heard, but lived in constant fear of the IRA, by whom he had twice been threatened because of his Army background, so moved back to England in 1973, settling in Rochdale.
At some point in the years following Sharon’s death O’Hara once again returned to Ireland.
In September 1980 he met Deborah Robinson, a secretary from south Belfast, as she waited for a bus home at Parnell Square in Dublin, following a blind date in the city.
O’Hara lured Deborah back to the factory where he worked and then raped and strangled her to death.
The next day he drove 30 miles outside Dublin to dump the body in a ditch near Clane in Co Kildare.
O’Hara confessed to the killing but denied raping Deborah. That was a lie. He claimed he got angry when Deborah told him she “felt nothing” after they had sex.
O’Hara was sentenced to life in jail 1982 and eventually served 25 years behind bars, becoming one of Ireland’s most notorious and longest-serving prisoners.
On his release O’Hara again made the headlines when he married a Presbyterian deaconess who runs a hospital ministry.
At the time the Belfast Telegraph reported he had also been jailed for two years in December 1975 when he admitted attempting to rob a young woman he gave a lift to near Newry in Northern Ireland. Police investigating the Deborah Robinson murder also discovered that O’Hara had been given a suspended sentence at Winchester in Hampshire for housebreaking and assaulting a 15-year-old girl.
Two years ago O’Hara was jailed again after breaching the terms of the licence under which he was released from prison.
A file on the Sharon Sparks case is held by the National Archives, but it is not due to be made public until 2054.
The secrecy surrounding the file and O’Hara’s links to the IRA and Northern Ireland mean Tanya suspects the file could hold vital information on what happened to her sister and why O’Hara walked free.
But both Tanya and our sister paper the M.E.N. have had requests for the file to be released turned down on the grounds that it contains ‘sensitive personal information of a number of identified individuals assumed to be still living, including financial information, unsubstantiated allegations, and details of the personal lives of named individuals’ and that the release of the information would be ‘unfair and risk causing damage and distress’.
A spokesman for the National Archives said: “The National Archives can confirm the file DPP 2/5534 is currently closed under Section 38(1)(a) and Section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act. Section 38(1)(a) exempts information from disclosure if that disclosure would, or would be likely to, endanger the physical or mental health of any individual. Section 40(2) exempts personal information about a ‘third party’ (someone other than the requester), if revealing it would breach the terms of the Data Protection Act (DPA) 1998. The DPA prevents personal information from release if it would be unfair or at odds with the reason why it was collected, or where the subject had officially served notice that releasing it would cause them damage or distress.”