The family of murdered RUC sergeant Joseph Campbell refused a police funeral. On Monday, February 28 1977, St Mary’s chapel in Cushendall was packed with mourners from across Antrim, but there were no senior police among them.  

“A terrible evil has visited us here,” the Monsignor told his parish, not knowing how carefully the face of that evil would be hidden, or how deep into his community it would reach.

Joe Campbell’s 42-year-old widow Rosemary sat in the front row beside his six eldest children. Philip, four, and Sarah, six, had been sent away to relatives in Derry, too young to see their father buried. He had been 48.

“I was kneeling in the front row watching all these people going to communion, and I was saying to myself, why are all these people here? I couldn’t understand it,” Rosemary says.

“Do you know, I remember what I was wearing when I was taken down to the station to see him. I was wearing pale green trousers and a green blazer. I was wearing sandals with a spongy heel. I had his brains on the soles of those shoes for about six months. I didn’t know what to do with them, so I kept them under my bed.”

Rosemary suspects she was in shock for months after Joe’s murder. She wasn’t asking herself who killed him or why, she was trying to get used to him being dead. She doesn’t remember much of that time at all, but her daughter Rosemary Jr tells her that the day after Joe was killed, she overheard a group of police officers in their hallway asking Rosemary who she thought killed her husband.

“And what did I say?” Rosemary asks.

“You said you thought it was another policeman,” Rosemary Jr replies.  

The RUC had already blamed Republican paramilitaries for the shooting. On the night of his funeral, one police detective even named the gunman, an IRA man, another Campbell from Loughuile.

“They were trying to pretend it was the IRA. Nobody here was convinced by it,” says Cushendall’s GP Dr Alistair McSparran.

Rosemary received a sympathetic visit from Ian Paisley. Paisley had previously said of attacks on Catholic civilians, “Catholic homes caught fire because they were loaded with petrol bombs; Catholic churches were attacked and burned because they were arsenals and priests handed out sub-machine guns to parishioners.” Rosemary received him politely.

“Paisley came and sat on my sofa and talked about the IRA doing it. I just didn’t listen to a word of it,” she says.

The first investigation

Police searched the homes of local people suspected of Republican involvement and several speculative arrests were made, but an examination of the murder scene failed to find any forensic evidence. Nor were there any bullet casings found at the scene, which was unusual as Republican gunmen didn’t tend to collect their spent casings; this was a trait of professional soldiers. Usually, Republican paramilitaries were quick to claim responsibility for their attacks on security forces but there were no statements issued following the murder of Sergeant Campbell, only denials.

In the course of their investigation, police did not collect a single witness statement from Cushendall. They didn’t interview Dr Alastair McSparran, who had treated the dying sergeant at the scene. Nor did they speak with Malachy Delargy, who had found him unconscious at the gates of Cushednall police station.

Delargy was not questioned, but he was followed. Several weeks after Joe was shot, he noticed a car driving close behind him with its lights off. His girlfriend and future wife was sat beside him. In Northern Ireland in 1977, strange cars driving suspiciously on dark country roads at night were not to be ignored.

“I said, ‘Jeez there’s a car up my arse and they’ve no lights on’,” Delargy recalls. “I took off.”

As Delargy entered Cushendall, the car accelerated and attempted to cut him off. He swerved up onto the curb to pass it, braked hard and looked inside. He saw uniformed police.

“They followed me up home. They pushed the door open but I blocked their access. I said, ‘You don’t come in here without a search warrant’. They started giving me abuse. They said to me, ‘What was you at?’ And I said to them, ‘No, what was youse at? Police don’t drive around with no lights on and no sirens and in unmarked cars’.”

Delargy asked for their police identification numbers and told them he planned to report them, but his girlfriend was too shaken to write their numbers down. On another night, a car of police officers followed Delargy back from the beach.

“I think they were scared that I’d seen something. But I hadn’t,” he says.

The Royal Ulster Constabulary was created in 1922, shortly after partition, to police the north. By the 1960s, fewer than 12 per cent of RUC officers were Catholic; by the 1970s, that number had dropped to 7 per cent. In 1977, the RUC was an overwhelmingly Protestant force dealing with a sectarian conflict. The RUC’s Special Branch worked closely with M15 and other intelligence agencies in the UK government’s effort to combat Republican terrorism.   

“After Campbell was shot it was passed around all of us RUC members that Joe Campbell was helping the IRA,” John Weir tells The Currency. Weir was then a sergeant in the RUC Special Patrol Group and active in the leadership of a loyalist paramilitary alliance that would later become known as the Glenanne Gang. 

“I know now that is not correct. I do accept that now, but at the time it was put across by Special Branch men to us so strongly we did tend to believe it.”

Rosemary and her children started being stopped by British soldiers. This hadn’t happened when Joe was alive. They were made to wait on the road while their car was searched and they were questioned about where they had been, who they had seen and what had been discussed. This process could take hours.

On St Patrick’s Day 1977, Rosemary and her son Peter had been driving to join Joe’s brother in Dublin to watch the Railway Cup final when a heavy snow-storm forced them to turn back. They were four miles from Cushendall near Glenariff when they were stopped by an army patrol and ordered out of the car into the blizzard.

“In the boot was a set of children’s encyclopaedias. They took out an encyclopaedia and starting at page 1, they went through the whole book,” Rosemary remembers.

The soldiers also discovered a hurley in the boot, which Rosemary was asked to explain. “It’s a hurling stick,” she said. They found oil in the door lock, which they informed Rosemary was a ‘foreign substance’. The search went on for two hours before she had enough.

“This thing appeared, a page. I said to him, that’s funny because when we have a break-in in Cushendall in a wee shop there would be half a book of pages, and there’s only one for the murder of a policeman.”

Rosemary Campbell

“I said, ‘Shoot me if you like but I’m going home’. I got into the car and I drove off. He thumped the roof as I passed. He still had my driver’s licence. He gave it back to me and said, ‘We have a job to do’. I said, ‘So had my husband a job to do, but he wasn’t allowed to do it’.”

Philip was six when the family were stopped again, driving back from Derry over Slieveanorra mountain during another snowstorm. Again, they were all forced to stand out in the snow despite Rosemary and her eldest daughter Mandy repeatedly telling the soldiers that Philip suffered with asthma and needed to get back inside the car. Philip had an asthma attack that day that nearly killed him.

“As soon as they stopped you, they would be on their walkie talkies and they would know within minutes who you were,” Mandy says. “They wanted to keep us out in the snow. It was malicious.”

Andrew McAlister, of McAlister’s Funeral Directors and McAlister’s Hardware, Homeware, Garden, Giftware and Paint Supplier in Cushendall, has lived in the village all his life. Something fundamental changed in the community when Sergeant Joe Campbell was killed, he says. His uncle Harry describes it as ‘a loss of innocence’.  

“Trust in the RUC in nationalist areas was already low. This just finished it off,” McAlister says.

The change in atmosphere emanated from the barracks that Joe Campbell had run for 15 years. Andrew’s cousin Paul McAlister was a teacher at the village primary school and had to walk past it every morning on his way to school.

“There used to be an RUC guy who came out to point a gun at me when I was coming up the hill with the children. This guy knows I’m doing the same walk every day, and still he pointed his gun at me every day,” McAlister says.

“It was a case of we’re in control here now. Joe Campbell didn’t need to do that. If I’d had a little more bravery, I probably would have written a letter of complaint.”

By late 1979, none of the Republicans that had been arrested or questioned about Joe’s murder had been charged.

“At the beginning, you’ll listen to anything, you’ll nearly believe anything. But once the fuss was over we were convinced something wasn’t right, when I looked back at the phone calls I’d got. And I’d been followed time and time again when I was in the car on my own,” Rosemary says.

Rosemary had heard nothing at all from the police investigating Joe’s murder so she requested a meeting with Kenneth Newman, then Chief Constable of the RUC.

“It was very nice. We had a bit of breakfast at his home,” Rosemary says.

Over the course of breakfast, Rosemary asked what progress was being made with the investigation and Newman asked for the case file to be brought in.

“This thing appeared, a page. I said to him, that’s funny because when we have a break-in in Cushendall in a wee shop there would be half a book of pages, and there’s only one for the murder of a policeman.”

Several decades later, when investigators from the Police Ombudsman’s Office asked Kenneth Newman about Sergeant Campbell’s murder, he told them he had ‘no recollection’ of it. His memory failed him on other sensitive issues too. There were multiple allegations of violent interrogation techniques used by RUC officers at Castlereagh barracks to obtain confessions during his tenure. Newman dismissed these claims as ‘propaganda’ but substantial evidence of their use was later confirmed in separate reports by Amnesty International and Judge Harry Bennett.

“Up until that point, we had always trusted policemen. We thought they were sort of our friends,” Rosemary says.

“But I just didn’t believe them anymore. Actually I didn’t trust anybody anymore.”

The second investigation

Kenneth Newman was knighted for his work with the RUC and in 1980, left Northern Ireland to become Head of the Metropolitan Police in London. He was replaced as Chief Constable by John Hermon. Under significant pressure from Rosemary, Hermon re-opened the case into Joe Campbell’s murder and in June 1980, placed Detective Inspector Alan Simpson with the CID – a specialist unit investigating organised crime and extremism in Northern Ireland – in charge of a fresh investigation. Simpson was assisted by Special Branch Detective Sergeant Denis Murray.

Murray had been attached to Ballymena station for years and had worked closely with Joe Campbell. He knew that before his death, the Cushendall sergeant had serious and deepening concerns about the criminal activities of Murray’s Special Branch colleague Charles McCormick and his informer Anthony O’Doherty. He knew this because Joe had reported them to him.

Over the course of several years, Joe had provided Murray with information about bank robberies, extortion and post office robberies carried out in and around Cushendall all linked to the pair. He had delivered this intelligence to Murray in person, usually over a coffee.  

“Joe Campbell was a gentleman. Up to a certain point he took everyone even McCormick for granted, but it reached a stage there that it became quite obvious that McCormick and O’Doherty were involved in the bank robberies,” Murray explains.

Over time, Murray had also come to know Anthony O’Doherty, whom he describes as ‘a likeable criminal’. Referred to in intelligence documents by his agent code 20/294, Tony O’Doherty was an IRA member. His brother, John Joe O’Doherty, was a leader in the INLA. He was an informer and among his handlers at Special Branch was Detective Sergeant Charlie McCormick. O’Doherty was their most valuable asset.

“McCormick controlled him. Doherty was afraid of McCormick, which I discovered as things progressed,” Murray says.

Intelligence reported to Murray would usually have been written up into an SB50 report and filed at Ballymena Special Branch. But the problem with Joe Campbell’s intelligence is that it concerned a Ballymena Special Branch officer. McCormick and Murray shared the same typist, the same records, the same boss, Detective Inspector Cecil West.

“Cecil was a wee quiet man who Charlie McCormick controlled. He was naive in many respects,” Murray suggests.

Murray also suspected that several of McCormick’s colleagues in the security forces were ‘very much’ aware of what he was up to and may even have been complicit.

“Charlie McCormick controlled the army, and he controlled the people at headquarters. They thought Charlie McCormick was the bee’s knees,” says Murray.

“Charlie McCormick on numerous occasions would have arrived at the office with many an army major trailing behind him with his dog, and McCormick with a briefcase that he couldn’t have got closed filled with papers, and probably a role of 40×40 aerial photos tucked under his arm.”

McCormick was married but had a reputation for womanising; he also liked to gamble. Murray believes it was these peccadilloes that contributed to marital and financial woes that were the primary motivation for his criminality.

“He tried to be a high flyer. He hoodwinked everywhere he went. If it was in a bar, or in a pub, or in a hotel, or in a meeting, or with the army, a major or whoever, he charmed them right along the line.

“But I never showed any dislike towards him in any shape or form. As a matter of fact as things progressed, I made sure that he didn’t get any indicators that I disliked him.”

Murray was as careful with Campbell’s intelligence. He wrote the SB50s about McCormick and O’Doherty as normal but instead of filing them, he took the papers directly to the head of Special Branch in Belfast, Mick Selvin. He met Assistant Chief Constable Slevin at hotels to hand over these documents rather than risk being seen or overheard at headquarters.

“I was assured at various stages of these meetings that this intelligence would not be disseminated anywhere outside the safe in his office,” Murray says.

When Joe Campbell told him that weapons were being shipped into Red Bay in Cushendall and stashed in an arms dump, Murray passed the information on to Slevin in the same way.

“When the arms dump at Red Bay was identified, there was to be surveillance put in on it. That would have been done by the SAS. But when that was being set up for whatever reason these weapons disappeared out of the dump,” he says.

Murray will not discuss who might have removed the weapons from the arms dump, who had stashed them there in the first place or for what purpose.

“Now, I can’t go any further on that one,” he says.

Towards the end of 1976, Murray started to receive information from several sources that Sergeant Campbell was going to be killed. Again, he went directly to Slevin, but was shocked when no action was then taken to safeguard him.

Murray had received threats to his own life. When those had been reported, Slevin had tried to convince him to move out of Ballymena. When he had refused to leave, ‘thousands upon thousands of pounds’ were spent on windows, fences and alarms to protect his home. None of this was done for Joe Campbell.

“I told Joe that he needed to be very careful, but he already suspected that his life was in danger,” Murray says.

“He was a man that would never have physically expressed fear but I have no doubt internally he was afraid.”

Shortly before Joe’s murder, detailed SB50s warning that he was going to be shot were delivered personally by Denis Murray to Mick Slevin at a hotel in Belfast.

“I was assured that this intelligence would be locked in his safe and it wasn’t even going to be disseminated at headquarters, and that was the case until whenever Alan Simpson and I were compiling our report.

“When he went to open his safe to retrieve the intelligence disseminated between us to compile the report, the SP50s weren’t there. They had gone missing from inside Mick Selvin’s safe.”

The trial

Detective Inspector Alan Simpson anticipated that, with his considerable police experience, his principle suspect in the murder of RUC Sergeant Joseph Campbell, Special Branch Detective Sergeant Charles McCormick, would prove difficult to question. And so, he explains in his report, he made the tactical decision to first target his accomplice ‘who would be more susceptible’.

On August 2, 1980, Special Branch agent Anthony O’Doherty was arrested and taken for questioning at Castlereagh Police Station in connection with multiple robberies and the murder of Sergeant Joseph Campbell.

“As part of a planned tactic, the interviewers made no mention of the murder of Sergeant Campbell until O’Doherty’s admission in relation to his many other crimes had been suitably recorded,” the subsequent police report explains. 

In the course of the interview, O’Doherty confessed his involvement to the robberies. But when asked about the murder, he insisted he had played no part in the killing. McCormick had piled pressure on him to shoot the Cushendall sergeant, he admitted, but he had refused and even tried to talk him out of it. On 7^th August 1980, McCormick was arrested.

“A team of interviewers, comprising senior CID officers was then assembled and they began to interrogate McCormick about his alleged involvement in crime. As expected, he brought all his police experience to bear, and denied the accusation, However, even with these denials, it was the assessment of the interviewers that McCormick had been engaged in crime as stated by O’Doherty,” the report states.

Simpson compiled the 432-page case report against McCormick and O’Doherty with Denis Murray’s assistance. It offers substantial detail of their bank robberies, furniture store robberies, post office robberies and blackmail operations. McCormick was accused of setting up attacks on security forces to give O’Doherty more credibility within the paramilitary organisations he was attached to, as well as attacks on other police officers for reasons of personal spite. A section is concerned with the pair’s alleged murder of Sergeant Joseph Campbell.

“It should be understood from the outset that McCormick has consistently denied the charges, and no doubt will continue to do so, and the case against him rests mainly with the corroborated evidence of his accomplice in crime,” the report notes.

On the morning of Monday August 14, 1980, Detective Sergeant Charles McCormick appeared in Belfast Magistrate’s Court charged with the murder of Sergeant Joseph Campbell. O’Doherty was to be tried as his accomplice.

The Campbell family were not present in the court to hear the charges being read because no one had told them the trial was happening. Rosemary Jr had been playing at friend’s house when she happened to hear the news on the radio that a Special Branch man was being tried for the murder of Sergeant Campbell. She rushed home to tell her mother. Rosemary was at the courthouse every subsequent day of the trial.

The account of Joe’s murder presented by the prosecution was based on the statement taken from O’Doherty during his interrogation at Castlereagh Police Station:

O’Doherty reluctantly accompanied McCormick to Cushendall the night that Joe Campbell was murdered, hoping to talk him out of the shooting. They drove in McCormick’s car, a dark brown Toyota Celica, McCormick wearing a green-coloured anorak and armed with a brand new .38 revolver. There was a high-velocity rifle with a telescopic sight on the back seat.

They parked in a remote spot on the outskirts of Cushendall and McCormick again asked O’Doherty to shoot Campbell. O’Doherty again refused. Annoyed, McCormick then got out of the car, armed with both the rifle and his revolver, opened the boot, removed a balaclava, put the balaclava on and headed off down a lane. O’Doherty waited alone in the car for about an hour and a half before hearing one or possibly two shots. Within 15-minutes, McCormick was back at the car. Panting and visibly shaken, he told O’Doherty that would be ‘the end of the bother’.

Randal McDonnell also travelled from Cushendall to the courtroom in Belfast every day of the trial. In addition to being a vet and the owner of Joe Campbell’s favourite bar, the Blue Room, McDonnell was a Justice of the Peace. Joe had made him one. Joe had also encouraged McDonnell to enrol in an external law degree thinking he would enjoy it, which McDonnell did and had. He listened to the prosecution’s case with informed disbelief.

“If I had been a jury, I could not have convicted McCormick of murder,” he told The Currency.

“Forensic evidence, they had none. The bullet had shattered, they had no bullet evidence. There was a gun, which had come from an office in Ballymena police station where it had been lodged for safe keeping by a farmer. How do you get to that? Well the key was kept on a nail beside the door.

“Then there was a certain amount of time spent on rotas. Was McCormick at the station in Ballymena or was he not at the station in Ballymena? They established there was an opportunity. McCormick could have taken this gun; he could have gone to Cushendall.

“And then they finished off with a farmer, the farmer who owned the gun, giving evidence of the kind of wound it gives to a fox that’s shot in the head. That was the whole of the evidence. And this bloody gun was carried into the courtroom every morning in plastic. It was a ridiculous case.”

The prosecution did not mention the SB50 intelligence reports written by Denis Murray confirming Joe Campbell’s awareness of McCormick’s criminality and the existence of an arms dump in Red Bay that had gone missing from the Head of Special Branch’s safe. There was no mention of the missing intelligence documents recording the warnings Murray received that McCormick intended to have Campbell killed.

McCormick was acquitted of murdering Joe Campbell on appeal. The appeal judge ruled that a guilty verdict could not be upheld solely on the testimony of a known criminal and liar, namely O’Doherty. McCormick was convicted of 27 charges including possession of explosives and firearms and armed robbery and served nearly four years in Crumlin Road Gaol.

O’Doherty was convicted of withholding information relating to Sergeant Campbell’s murder and various other criminal charges for which he received an 18-year prison sentence. While at Crumlin Road, he was visited by two UK Home Secretaries. He was released five years later in August 1985 by a Royal Prerogative of Mercy. The Campbell family were not informed of his release or the reason for the royal pardon.

The SB50 intelligence reports that had gone missing from Mick Slevin’s safe were found. They were discovered in the outhouse of an elderly woman named Margaret Given whose home McCormick had lived in, allegedly without invitation, after separating from his wife. Murray cannot explain why the intelligence reports, that could have secured McCormick’s murder conviction, were not presented in court.

After McCormick’s acquittal, Rosemary Campbell was visited at her home by RUC Chief Constable Jack Hermon. She told him of her concern that McCormick’s trial had been corrupted by a wider conspiracy involving police.

“Hermon told Mummy she was listening to too many fairy stories in the Glens. He told her not to worry herself,” Mandy recalls.

And the tragic story of Joe Campbell’s shooting may well have ended here, with the limp result of his murder trial, if it weren’t for two men: John Weir and Anthony O’Doherty.

Anthony O’Doherty

Retired Special Branch detective Denis Murray now lives in Spain where the climate is friendlier. For him, the Joe Campbell case remains one of the greatest injustices of the Troubles.

“What sets it apart from other cases is the total inadequacy of the people who should have taken action and took no action. Slevin was well aware that Joe’s murder was on the cards,” he says.

But Murray entirely rejects Rosemary Campbell’s suspicion that collusion between police and loyalist paramilitaries could have played a role in Joe Campbell’s murder or explain why the justice system has over four decades failed to find his killers.

“How do you find collusion in Joe’s case? It’s pure negligence. Inadequacies in relation to the professionalism and operational knowledge and all the rest of it,” he says.

“Any collusion that McCormick might have had, or his association with the like of Jackson and these boys, I’m not aware of anything like that. I don’t bring collusion into it in any shape or form.”

Tony O’Doherty still lives in Ballymena, a few doors down from Murray’s old house. If he is reluctant to talk about the past, Murray suggests, it’s because he’s still living it.

“He has that much under his belt at this point that he’s still afraid of a knock on his door some night, you know?”

O’Doherty is reluctant to talk about the murder of Sergeant Campbell, but the knock on the door he says he’s worried about is another unwelcome visit from the authorities.

“The police come searching my house for no reason. They came here with dogs, saying the house is booby trapped. One dog was searching for guns, then the next one was searching for drugs.”

The problem for O’Doherty is that his version of the police investigation into Joe Campbell’s murder differs from their own. O’Doherty agrees that he gave a full and honest account of what he knew about the shooting during his interrogation at Castlereagh Police Station, shortly after his arrest on August 9, 1980.

But then, O’Doherty claims, about five months later, a detective came back and told him that his statement needed to be changed.

“He said the first version didn’t suit the bosses so this had to be swapped round this way that way and the other way, you know? Where is the original statement at?”

The Police Ombudsman’s Office would later find that O’Doherty’s original statement was one of several significant documents in the Joe Campbell murder case that has either gone missing or been destroyed. O’Doherty says that his original statement had included his recollection that he and McCormick met another man on the road in Cushendall the night they drove to kill Sergeant Campbell.

“I saw a silhouette, against the skyline, on the road against the hedge.”

In his first interview, O’Doherty claims he also told a detective about weapons being smuggled into Red Bay in Cushendall and stored at an arms dump.  

“He said that’s not his remit at the moment. I’m not saying that he didn’t pass that information on to higher authorities, I’m not sure.”

O’Doherty claims that when a detective returned to the interview room, he wanted any mention of the weapons at Red Bay or the man he had seen on the road removed from the statement.

“He said that he’s under pressure. They wanted to keep it short and simple. It was just two robbers caught alone. Me and McCormick, Campbell got killed, you know?”

O’Doherty doesn’t remember being especially surprised by this unusual request. It was clear to him that the murder of Sergeant Campbell was causing trouble the police could do without.

“He had tears in his eyes and he was distressed,” he claims. “And he says, ‘I wish to fuck I’d never heard tell of this case’. And I knew what he meant. You know? You don’t touch the Special Branch.”

O’Doherty claims he made the changes to his statement, but Joe Campbell’s unsolved murder would refuse to stay silent.

NEXT: “He was killed because of those guns coming in.” Part 3 – Collusion