Cold-case arrest puts spotlight on brutal gang feud
Gardai hold suspect over links to unsolved murder of couple
THE first arrest in a cold-case murder investigation last week has turned the spotlight back on one of the country’s most dangerous gangs involved in the recent spiralling Drogheda feud.
A chilling double murder, which has left no trace of a young couple, was the prelude to extreme violence between two disputing gangs, culminating in the abduction and dismemberment of 17-year-old Keane Mulready-Woods earlier this year.
Willie Maughan had been close to members of one of these crime groups, who were involved in the murder of drug dealer Benny Whitehouse (36) in September 2014, but, by the following year, cracks began to develop and the gang were fearful that he would go to gardai with information about the gun killing.
The 34-year-old had been living in a caravan in the Gormanston area of Meath with his girlfriend Anastasija Varslavane (20), known as Anna, and the couple were planning to move back to his family home in Tallaght.
Willie’s mother, Helen, was due to collect the couple in Gormanston on the afternoon of Tuesday, April 14, 2015, to bring them home. Willie and Anna never made that journey.
Helen Maughan last spoke to her son at 2.30pm and they got a taxi from Balbriggan to Gormanstown a short time later. However, further calls to Willie went unanswered, with his phone diverting to voicemail. Later that evening they were reported missing to gardai.
It didn’t take long for suspicion to fall on Willie Maughan’s former associates, a drugs gang predominately made up of Traveller criminals spread out across south Louth and the greater Dublin area.
Close associates of the crime group include business partners Cornelius Price (39) and Owen Maguire (36), and the gang is involved in the Drogheda feud which has claimed as many as four lives so far. The double murder of Willie Maughan and Anna Varslavane — who was expecting the couple’s first child
— shocked the nation when it emerged they were tortured and dismembered.
In the past five years, extensive searches have been carried out for the missing couple but no trace of them has ever been found.
The murder inquiry being run by detectives at Ashbourne resulted in the first arrest last Tuesday, when an English national was detained by detectives on suspicion of assisting the killers in cleaning up after the murders.
The 57-year-old, who is originally from the Rochdale area, is suspected of helping destroy evidence impeding the murder investigation. He is closely linked to Price himself, as well as the wider Maguire network, and is one of its more than 30 core associates.
He is also being questioned in relation to firearms and ammunition recovered in Gormanston in separate searches in January and April last year.
In the intervening years, the double murder suspects have also carried out a campaign of intimidation against the Maughan family.
Searches would regularly be carried out at locations between Meath and the capital in the hope of uncovering evidence linked to the disappearance. One search took place in the summer of 2015 along the Devlin River.
For two days, gardai searched along the river and its banks — and for the whole operation, a senior figure within the gang kept watch, telling the searching officers at one point: “You’re looking in the wrong place, they’re not buried there.”
The attacks by the gang continued and in October 2015 a pipe bomb was thrown at the Rathfarnham home belonging to a relative of Willie Maughan while a number of young children were inside.
In August 2016, the criminals showed that even the dead are not exempt from their terror, when the grave of Michael ‘Bobby’ Maughan, a brother of Willie, was dug up in Bohernabreena Cemetery overnight by a number of men.
There was a brief reprieve from the campaign of violence for the Maughan family when Cornelius Price was jailed for three years in February 2017 for driving at a garda at Balbriggan garda station three years earlier.
By the time of his release in May last year, the Drogheda feud was leading to regular petrol bomb and gun attacks, one of them on Price’s business partner, Owen Maguire, which left him paralysed.
It wasn’t long before the feud claimed its first fatality, and on August 27 last year Keith Branagan (29), who was friendly with enemies of the Maguire gang, was shot dead outside a caravan park in Clogherhead.
He was not suspected of being centrally involved in the feud and his killing may have been opportunistic after he was spotted carrying out work on the holiday home.
On November 4, Richie Carberry was gunned down outside his home in Bettystown, Co Meath, in a killing that has links to the feud. The 39-year-old was seen as the Dublin link to the anti-Maguire faction and considered to be directing the gang.
A lull in violence over the Christmas period came to an end in January with the horrific murder and dismemberment of 17-year-old Keane Mulready-Woods. The teenager’s body was cut up and dumped across various parts of Dublin but his torso has never been recovered. A chief suspect in the Mulready-Woods murder, gangland hitman Robbie Lawlor (36), was himself gunned down in Belfast last month.
The Drogheda feud has led to a major policing plan in the Louth town, known as Operation Stratus, aimed at curbing the violence seen in the past two years while investigations are ongoing against the gangs in other Garda divisions.
‘You’re looking in the wrong place, they’re not buried there’