It is now nearly 12 years since the Provisional IRA bombed three pubs in Guildford and Woolwich, killing seven and injuring 92. The three men and a woman who were convicted are now serving the longest jail sentences in Britain. But the case is not closed. They still protest their innocence, the IRA still disowns them and their lawyer is still fighting to free them. A joint inquiry by The Observer and Yorkshire Television has found disturbing evidence that they were the victims of an extraordinary miscarriage of justice.
Brendan Dowd was driving that afternoon, as usual. It was 5.15 when he swung the Avenger into the multi-storey car park and came to a halt. Sitting beside him in the front passenger seat, Joe O’Connell reached down into his duffel bag and pulled out two bundles of gelignite sticks.
While the others waited, Joe tied the loose wires which connected each bundle to a watch, a detonator and a battery, and set the watches for nine o’clock – more than three hours to play with. Then he turned and passed the two primed bombs to two women and a third man sitting in the back. The women tucked the bombs into their handbags.
One then set off with Brendan for the Horse and Groom; the other woman went with Joe and the third man to the Seven Stars. The men knew the way: they had been down twice before, choosing the targets and planning their routes. They had chosen pubs which were used by soldiers and which would soon be especially full as men and women left local barracks for a Saturday night out in Guildford.
Inside the pubs, each team went through the same routine: they bought drinks, played the jukebox and acted casually while the women slipped their loaded handbags under seats, discreetly pulling identical bags from their coat pockets so that they could leave as they had arrived. By 7, they were all-back at the car park.
The two pubs were beginning to fill up as Brendan drove them through the city centre and away up the A3 to London. They did not stop to telephone a warning. By 8.15, they were sitting safely drinking in the Durrall Arms in the Fulham Road.
Just before 9, the bomb in the Horse and Groom exploded, tearing the legs off those standing nearest to it, flinging Private Jimmy Cooper through a window with his jacket and hair on fire, lacerating people throughout the room with flying splinters of wood and glass. Two guardsmen, two young women soldiers and one civilian man were killed.
Police cars, fire engines and ambulances swooped through the city streets. As rescuers scrambled through the wreckage to reach the screaming injured, there was a dull thump from around the corner as the bomb in the Seven Stars exploded.
The landlord of the Seven Stars, Owen O’Brien, had heard of the bomb in the Horse and Groom and had cleared everyone out of his pub. When the second bomb exploded, he and his wife and five staff were the only ones in the building. They fell injured.
At about 9.45, while Brendan and Joe were driving the two women back to their bedsits in north London, news of the first explosion came over the car radio. As the two men drove back to their own flat in Fulham, news of the second bomb followed. They were satisfied.
A few days later, the third man left them, and Brendan and Joe were reinforced with the arrival from Dublin of two new men, Harry Duggan and Eddie Butler. The four of them now set about a sustained campaign of bombing, shooting and kidnapping.
After Guildford – on 5 October 1974 – the whole country was on guard. They could no longer rely on being able to place bombs inside pubs, so they started to throw them through windows instead. Within five weeks of Guildford, they bombed the Victory Club, the Army and Navy Club, Brooke’s Club, Harrow School and the King’s Head near Woolwich Arsenal.
The Woolwich attack, like Guildford, was carefully planned to ensure that it was lethal. They visited the area and spotted the King’s Head as a soldiers’ pub, but when they returned a few weeks later, they found there were not enough soldiers in it and decided to postpone the bombing to the next night, 7 November.
That evening, they left their flat in Fulham and split up – Brendan and Harry went to Earl’s Court to steal a car, Joe and Eddie took the bomb in a duffel bag to Sloane Square, where they sat drinking in a pub next to the Royal Court Theatre. Having stolen a Ford Cortina, Brendan and Harry picked them up and headed south to Woolwich.
Brendan stopped the car outside the King’s Head, and Eddie ran round the side to look through a window. This time, the pub was crowded. “Good – worth doing,” he told the others. Brendan turned the car around, ready for a smooth getaway, while Joe carried the bomb to the pub window and Eddie and Harry, who were armed, stood guard.
This bomb was different from the ones used in Guildford. The 12 sticks of gelignite were taped together with an outer layer of nuts and bolts and an old-fashioned ignition fuse, which would burn for three seconds and then detonate the device. Joe struck a match and lit the fuse.
Inside the pub, soldiers and their friends were drinking, playing darts and listening to the jukebox. The bomb crashed through the window, sat fizzing on the floor for a second and then exploded, hurling the nuts and bolts around the room: a barman and a soldier were killed, 2 were maimed or injured.
In the street, the three IRA men were still running to the car as the bomb exploded. Seconds later they were inside it, and Brendan was driving back to London, careful not to break the speed limit. Along the way they abandoned the car, in case the number had been noted, and travelled back to Fulham by bus and tube. The campaign continued.
This peculiarly detailed account of the work of an IRA Active Service Unit in England is available only because the four men were eventually all caught. In custody, they told their stories. Now, they are serving long sentences in English prisons — but not for the Guildford pub bombs, nor for the attack on the King’s Head in Woolwich.
Four quite different people were jailed for Guildford and Woolwich – four people who, according to that Active Service Unit, had nothing to do with them or with the bombings.
Carole Richardson was 17 in the autumn of 1974. She was living in Kilburn, north London, moving from one squat to another since her stepfather threw her out of the house. She had never been involved in Irish Republicanism or in any other political movement: she had never even been to Northern Ireland.
Still caught up in the tail end of the Sixties, she used to pad around barefoot in cheesecloth skirts, burning joss sticks in her bedroom, smoking marijuana and popping pills. She was almost always stoned. She liked horses and a couple of times she worked as a groom, but in London she was working as a cleaner. She also did a little burgling.
In September – a month before the bombs – she met Paddy Armstrong, then 24, at a party in a squat in Kilburn. She liked him because he was quiet and shy and was also almost always stoned. Sometimes, he did casual work on building sites, but most days he lay around with his friends listening to music, getting stoned and falling asleep.
Paddy had left Belfast for London in December 1973, because he could not cope with the troubles and because his mother could no longer afford to support him. He had never belonged to any Irish Republican group, as intelligence records later confirmed. In London, he led a life which bore no resemblance to the cautious low profile adopted by the real Active Service Unit in Fulham.
While the real ASU used false names and avoided all contact with police or any other authority, Paddy signed on under his real name, got himself arrested for stealing a television set, cheated a drug dealer who then tried to take a hatchet to him, stole food from supermarkets, called in the police to deal with a break-in and was twice picked up in police raids on the squat. He never used a false name.
Apart from Carole, his closest friend in London was Gerry Conlon, then 21. They had been at St Peter’s School together in Belfast and later worked in the same engineering firm. “Me and Paddy could have been brothers,” Gerry said later. “We liked backing horses, we liked drinking, we liked going out pulling birds and we didn’t mind taking a few different tablets.”
Unlike Paddy, Gerry had tried to get involved in the troubles in Belfast and joined the IRA’s junior wing in 1972. But he was expelled after a few months because of his incessant drinking and drug-taking, and he returned to his previous occupation of shoplifting with a professional gang. A few months later, he was beaten up by an IRA discipline squad for being a ‘social nuisance’.
He had only been in London since the summer of 1974, but he had already settled into a steady routine. Living in a Catholic men’s hostel in Kilburn, he worked on building sites and spent the rest of his time thieving, drinking and gambling. Soon after his arrival, he bumped into Paddy outside the Memphis Belle in Kilburn and the two resumed their old friendship.
One weekend, in August 1974, Gerry went to Southampton to visit friends. There, in a pub, he unexpectedly met Paul Hill, another old friend from Belfast, also a former pupil of St Peter’s. Paul was in trouble. although it took him some time to admit it.
Also aged 21, Paul Hill was quicker and brighter than Paddy or Gerry and, out of a mixture of bravado and genuine belief, he had got caught up in the fringes of the IRA in Belfast when he was only 17. His family had sent him to England to keep him out of it, but on return visits he had got involved again.
On one occasion, he had been in a Belfast bar when a former British soldier, Brian Shaw, was kidnapped by the IRA, ‘tried’, and then executed as a British spy. Paul Hill had helped in the abduction and, although he had not personally shot Shaw, he was wanted for the murder by the security forces.
At another time, he had taken an Armalite rifle from an IRA weapons cache. He claimed he had then run into an Army patrol, exchanged shots with them and dumped the gun. But the IRA suspected he had given the gun to the Army and might even be working as an informer.
So when Paul met Gerry Conlon in the pub in Southampton, he was on the run from both sides in Belfast. He was staying in Southampton with his girlfriend, Gina, but he took to staying in the Kilburn hostel with Gerry during the week, working on building sites, drinking with Paddy and Carole and the others in the Kilburn squats, and returning to Southampton for the weekends.
There was no clue, then, that these four misfits were about to be snatched from the familiar ruts of their lives and thrust into a nightmare from which they have never escaped. If the stories they tell are true — and there is evidence to support them — they became the victims of a grotesque miscarriage of justice. Particularly grotesque since there is now evidence to suggest that they may have been set up by the Provisional IRA in Belfast, who tried to dupe the British police at a time when they had little experience of terrorism.
The four of them fell with terrifying ease. Paul, who was always closest to the edge, slipped first and, as he fell, he pulled the others with him. Paul’s problem was his past.
He never told Gerry and Paddy the whole truth about his life in Belfast, but he gave them a carefully edited version of events. Ironically, it appears to have been this sanitised account, designed to protect him, which ultimately landed him and Gerry, Paddy and Carole in prison.
The pieces started to fall into place on 15 October, 10 days after the Guildford bombs, when Gerry Conlon went home to Belfast to visit his family. After a few days, he was visited by two IRA men. Gerry says now: “I’d gone out drinking with my mates, and Paul Hill being in England would have been part of my conversation. That’s why the IRA came to me. They hinted that he had offended them in some way.
“I told them he was working in London and going down to Southampton to visit his girlfriend every weekend. They asked me who his girlfriend was, and I told them.” A few weeks later, Gerry’s idle chatter began a devastating chain reaction.
According to Surrey police, who were still desperately looking for a breakthrough, Army intelligence in Belfast passed on a tip from an informant that Paul Hill had been involved in the Guildford bombings. But the informant’s story was rather strange. It included the detail that Hill had a new tattoo, something which was known to only one person – Paul Hill’s friend in London, Gerry Conlon.
And it contained a twisted version of the execution of Brian Shaw – the same version that Paul had told Gerry and Paddy in London. It appears, therefore, that Gerry’s stories about Paul were relayed to military intelligence. But, more important, it appears that the middle-man who passed on the information added the suggestion that Paul was a Guildford bomber.
This may have been done simply to increase the informant’s fee but it may equally have been deliberate misinformation by the IRA designed to punish Hill and divert attention from the real bombers. There is no doubt about the result: Surrey police started looking for Paul Hill.
On 28 November, they arrested him and his girlfriend, Gina, in Southampton and took them to Guildford police station. There, according to police sources, they interviewed Paul and decided that he knew nothing about the pub bombs but they held him in custody while two RUC officers flew from Belfast to question him about the killing of Brian Shaw. The next day, 29 November, Hill confessed his role in the Shaw murder and was charged.
Surrey police immediately decided that since he was now a self-confessed IRA killer, they would ask him more about the pub bombs. Events began to unfold with great speed. Paul knew that Gina, who was heavily pregnant, was still under arrest. At one point, he says, he caught sight of her sitting alone in an interview room sobbing.
He set out to try and get her released by making a false confession which exonerated her and which was so obviously garbled that it would collapse in court. It may also be – although he denies it – that he was frightened that, to deal with the Shaw murder, the police would send him back to Belfast, where the IRA might punish him, and that he calculated that he was better off alive in a British prison than dead on the streets of Belfast.
He also realised during his interview with the RUC that they had received the distorted version of the Shaw killing which he had given to Gerry and Paddy. He blamed them for getting him into trouble and decided to throw their names into his garbled confession. “I picked names out of the blue,” he says now, “and then it sort of took on its own momentum.”
He talked for four days, rarely telling the same story twice, constantly juggling the details of times and places and people, each new statement contradicting the others. Along the way, he named several completely fictitious people, everyone he could remember in Paddy and Carole’s squat and in another squat nearby, and a few characters from the Catholic hostel where he had been staying, including Gerry.
After two days of his ‘confessions’, the police arrested Gerry in Belfast and flew him back to Guildford. Two days later, they made a sweep of arrests bringing in all the inhabitants of the Kilburn squats, including Paddy and Carole, as well as friends and relatives of Paul and Gerry. What happened during these few days in Guildford police station has now become a minor landmark in British criminology.
Gerry Conlon, Paddy Armstrong and Carole Richardson proceeded to sign confessions which, to this day, they insist were false. Their confessions eventually convicted them, but they also raised such doubts that they ultimately contributed to a complete overhaul of the way suspects are handled in police custody. They appeared to show that, without any malice or dishonesty, police interrogators were liable to record confessions which were completely unreliable. As a result, key features of police procedure have now been changed.
One man who was responsible for making those changes is Barrie Irving, a forensic psychologist who is now director of the Police Foundation. Irving studied the Guildford ‘confessions’ – particularly those of Paddy Armstrong – and submitted expert evidence on false confessions and techniques of interrogation to the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure.
He says: “My conclusions after reading them were that without corroboration a case of this kind is on very dangerous ground. Where there are additional problems about the way in which the interrogation was handled, then one is on more difficult ground still. And the raising of those questions in the Armstrong case led me to spend the next 10 years being concerned about the management of interrogation and about confessions.”
Throughout their interrogation, Gerry and Paddy and Carole were held in isolation without legal advice – a procedure which was common in 1974 and which has since been barred by the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act. Paddy and Carole were suffering from the effects of amphetamines and barbiturates taken shortly before they were arrest. Since then, the Royal Commission has advised that police should not interview a suspect who is intoxicated in any way.
They were interviewed in long sessions, sometimes at night – a practice which was legitimate then but which has since been condemned by the Royal Commission and outlawed by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act.
None of their interviews was tape-recorded. Again, in 1974, that was normal. But it has since been recognised that key details in a statement may be generated by discussion between the policeman the suspect and not by the suspect’s own knowledge of the offence.
In short, the interrogation which took place in Guildford police station, although routine at the time, could not take place today, and the extraordinary ‘confessions’ which resulted would be considered unreliable to be used as evidence. But all these changes came too late for the Guildford Four.
Gerry Conlon soon succumbed. Tired, confused, terrified by what he was hearing that Paul Hill had said about him, he tried to co-operate in any way he thought would please police. He began to sign statements. The details slipped and slid from one interview to the next and none matched any of the accounts given by the others. He named some of same names as Paul and then added some new ones, including his aunt, Annie Maguire, who lived in London In his interviews Hill, too, started to name Aunt Annie along with everyone else.
Paddy and Carole also started to manufacture confessions. They were as scared and muddled as Gerry but, worse, they were full of drugs. A police doctor described Carole as ‘hysterical’. A forensic psychologist, Professor Lionel Haward, who subsequently hypnotised Paddy to test his ‘confession’, concluded that he was ‘an inadequate, passive man caught up in a maelstrom’ and had made a false confession to alleviate his anxiety without confronting the consequences. The consequences followed fast.
Armed with the four confessions, the police charged them with causing explosions and with five murders in Guildford. They also charged Paul and Paddy with two murders in Woolwich. The police then had to deal with all the others who had been named and arrested.
A dozen of them were Kilburn squatters. Some had alibis which destroyed Paul’s account, and they were released. Others, who had kept their heads and refused to make false confessions, were still charged – two men with the Guildford bombs and one man with conspiring to cause explosions in London.
Then there was Gerry’s aunt, Annie Maguire. She, too, was charged with the Guildford murders, although she had made no statement. The police also arrested her husband; her two sons, aged 16 and 13; her lodger; and a neighbour who happened to be in the house when the police came; as well as Gerry Conlon’s father, Giuseppe, who had just arrived from Belfast to talk to his son’s lawyers. All of them were charged with possessing explosives.
And so, in less than a week, Paul’s garbled confessions had set off a catastrophic chain of events which had now pitched 15 people into a nightmare. In Belfast, the Army’s informant was rewarded with £300 for fingering Paul.
In Fulham, the IRA Active Service Unit were amazed to read all this in the papers. As Harry Duggan later recalled: “We didn’t see how innocent people could be convicted. We were sure it was typical police propaganda. We thought it was ridiculous, a joke. They couldn’t convict them of those offences.”
But they could, and did. To begin with, things went badly for the police. Annie Maguire produced a cast-iron alibi and they had to drop the Guildford murder charges. She was charged instead with possessing explosives like the rest of her household. The charges against the three Kilburn men also had to be dropped, either because they had alibis or because there was simply no evidence to justify the charges.
But the Maguire family – parents and two boys – were eventually incarcerated, along with the lodger, the neighbour and Gerry’s father. No explosives were ever found. The only evidence against them was a forensic test which has now been discredited. The case of the ‘Maguire Seven’ has become a cause celebre, and an all-party Parliamentary campaign, led by Lord Fitt, is still trying to clear their names.
For the four who were still charged with the Guildford murders, the best hope of proving that their confessions were false was to find an alibi for the night of the bombings – but that was hard.
Gerry had spent most of the day drinking, falling asleep in the afternoon. He knew he had tried to phone his father at a Belfast club in the evening and had left his hostel number with the doorman; but that was hardly a compelling alibi and, anyway, the doorman had lost the number.
Paddy had spent the evening in the Kilburn squat, ‘dog sitting’ a labrador which he and Carole had taken in, and smoking marijuana. He had got so stoned that he had fallen asleep in the middle of the evening.
Paul had taken an afternoon train from London to Southampton and spent the whole evening with Gina, but he had already destroyed her as an alibi witness when he was making his confessions. Since his main aim was to keep Gina out of trouble, he was afraid that if he told the police he was with her when the bombs were planted, they would charge her as well, so when he finally was allowed to talk to her at Guildford police station, he said, in front of police officers: “Tell them the truth, Gina. Tell them I didn’t get to Southampton until late at night.” And so she did.
Carole had no idea what she had been doing on 5 October. It was just another stoned Saturday as far as she was concerned. She pleaded with the police to get her diary from the squat, but by the time they agreed to fetch it, her friends had burned it. They knew she recorded details of thieving and drug dealing she had done with them, and they were afraid the police would use it against them.
Then, two weeks after she was taken into custody, she had her first lucky break. A trainee teacher in Newcastle, Frank Johnson, walked into his local police station and told them: “They’ve got the wrong person for the Guildford bombs. It can’t have been Carole Richardson, because I was with her all evening.
He made a detailed statement, explaining that he had met Carole and her friend, Lisa, in a pub at 6.30 that evening and had taken them to the South Bank Polytechnic to see a concert by a group called Jack The Lad, who were friends of his. He even had photographs, taken by one of the group, which showed that they were there. But Carole was not released.
Instead, three weeks later, on 19 January, Frank Johnson was arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act and flown from Newcastle to Guildford police station. He was held there for three days. His description of his experience is an echo of those arrested and questioned in December. Isolated, tired and frightened, he soon lost track of his original objective of making an alibi statement. After three days all he wanted was to be released.
“I was confused, didn’t know what was happening,” he says now. “I was willing to say anything. I said: ‘You write what you want. I’ll admit doing the whole thing on my own. You just write it down, give it to me and I will put my name on the end. You don’t even have to read it out to me.'”
But he did not have to admit doing the whole thing. All he had to do was to retract his statement. Not all of it – the photographs proved that he and Carole had been at the concert. But he retracted the first part – that he had met the girls in a pub at 6.30. As soon as he had done this, he was released from custody – an inexplicable development if the police really believed that he had invented his original statement to help the IRA.
Even though the first part of the alibi was now discredited, there were still half a dozen witnesses to the fact that Carole was at the concert from 7.45. The police then set out to show that she could have bombed the pubs and made it back to London by 7.45.
To do this, they had to discard part of her confession in which she said she had bombed both Guildford pubs, and concentrate on the Horse and Groom, where some witnesses said the suspects had left at 6.53. This left 52 minutes to reach the concert – a journey of 29 miles along a single lane road, through 30 mph limits and traffic lights and a swathe of south London.
But using a police car with its siren going, and ignoring the speed limits, the police made it in 48. This left only four minutes to get from the pub in Guildford to the car at the start of the journey, and from the car to the concert in London at the end. It did not allow for the fact that the bombers would have been foolish to break speed limits all the way or that no such driver had been reported that night. Nor could the police explain why Carole had never mentioned this during her days of interrogation. Nor why she had left Paddy with only a dog as an alibi witness instead of taking him to the concert as well. Still, it created doubt.
The four of them had little else to go on. They could point out that there was no corroboration of any kind for their statements – no scientific evidence, not even any identification evidence. Eight witnesses had failed to pick out Carole on identific parades; none of the others was put on any parade at all. None of them matched the police Identikit pictures.
They could also point out that the dozen other Kilburn squatters who had been named in their statements had been released without charge as well as to the endless iconsistencies and contradictions in their own ‘confessions’.
According to the four of them, they left London on the day of the bombings at different time in different cars with different drivers and different combinations of passengers, carrying bombs of different sizes in different types of containers which were primed in different places and taken into the pubs by different people. There more than 100 contradictions. They never told the police anything which turned out to be true which the police did not already know.
But a deeper difficulty undermined their struggle to prove that their confessions were false – the fear and panic about the IRA then sweeping the country, largely because the Fulham Unit was still active.
All through the autumn of 1975, they had continued their campaign with 30 bombings in the London area. After a six-month ceasefire, theyresumed, and the trial of the Guildford Four opened at the Old Bailey in September 1975 in the middle of an IRA blitz, the most intense that London has seen.
Paddy Armstrong’s lawyer, Alastair Logan, recalls the atmosphere: “It was electric. London was more or less under siege. You could have put an Irish mouse in the dock, and they would have convicted it.”
The prejudice extended even into the defence camp. Logan said: “On the first day of the committal, we lawyers had lunch together. I said: “I really think my guy is not guilty.” I thought I was saying something incredibly daring, but they all said the same. It was a great relief to have it out in the open, because it was almost unpatri otic to think that they might not have done it.”
It took five weeks to try the Guildford Four. At the end, the jury accepted that the confessions, although flawed, were genuine and rejected the alibi evidence.
Mr Justice Donaldson sentenced them with a resounding condemnation. Carole Richardson was detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. Gerry Conlon was jailed for life with a recommendation that he serve 30 years. Paddy Armstong got life with a recommendation of a minimum 35 years. Paul Hill got life with a recommendation that it should mean life. They were the longest sentences modern British criminal history.
But that was not the end of it. Seven weeks later, four men were challenged by police as they tried to fire guns through the window of Scotts restaurant in Mayfair. Pursued by the police, they finally took refuge in a flat in nearby Balcombe Street. It was the Fulham Active Service Unit.
The Unit’s personnel had changed slightly: Brendan Dowd had left to take the campaign to Manchester and had been arrested in July in a bloody siege in Liverpool; Joe O’Connell, Eddie Butler and Harry Duggan were still there, with a fourth man, Hugh Doherty.
After a week of high tension, with the four men holding a middle-aged couple hostage in the flat, they surrendered. The next day, Eddie Butler was being interviewed by Supt Peter Imbert. “When did you start bombings and shootings in this country?” he asked.
“My first job,” replied Butler, “you’ve already put someone away for it.” Butler went on to describe how he had taken a .38 and stood guard while a bomb was thrown into the Woolwich pub. In later interviews, O’Connell cofirmed that he had been there, but neither he nor Duggan would go into detail without consulting Brendan Dowd, who was being held elsewhere.
O’Connell also suggested to police that he was involved with Guildford. The Yard ordered an internal review of the Guildford and Woolwich cases, but nothing came of it: no officer went to re-interview the Guildford Four; no member of the Balcombe Street unit was put on an identification parade for either Woolwich or Guildford; none of them was ever asked about these offences again; they were never charged with either offenc, despite their plain admissions to Woolwich.
A forensic scientist, Douglas Higgs, said at their subsequent trial that he had found ‘positive links’ between Woolwich and other bombings committed by the members of the unit that had been trapped in Balcombe Street.
Some 10 months later, the Guildford Four’s lawyer, Alasdair Logan, managed to get access to the four members of the unit and took lengthy statements from Joe O’Connell, Eddie Butler, Harry Duggan and also from Brendan Dowd. The lawyer interviewed them separately under the supervision of a retired Scotland Yard detective.
Brendan and Joe covered the Guildford bombings in intricate detail, describing the bombs, their route to Guildford, their car, the people in the pubs and occasionally providing hitherto unpublished details which turned out to be correct.
All four described the Woolwich bombing with details of their reconnaissance and the attack itself, again providing new detail which proved to be correct. Brendan Dowd, for example, recalled that as he drove away from the bombing, he left the car lights off and was flashed by an oncoming motorist. Logan found an old statement taken from a motorist who recalled flashing the car.
Armed with the statements of the four real IRA men, the Guildford Four appealed. But when the appeal was heard in October 1977, it was emphatically dismissed. The judges accepted that Brendan Dowd and Joe O’Connell had been at Guildford but concluded that they had been working alongside the Guildford Four, even though this produced dozens more inconsistencies in the story.
On Woolwich, the judges let Paddy’s conviction stand because he was only ever alleged to have been involved with the planning, and the new evidence dealt with the execution. They then attacked Brendan Dowd’s account of the bombing because on four points of detail he differed from the other three. Despite overlooking the scores of contradictions in the Guildford Four’s statements, they decided that these four points showed he was lying. Paul Hill, not Brendan Dowd, had been at Woolwich, they said.
Dismissing the appeal, Lord Roskill expressed his view that: “There are no possible grounds for doubting the justice of these four convictions or for ordering retrials.” The Guildford Four went back to prison, where they remain today.
Carole Richardson may be allowed to apply for parole in 1992; Gerry Conlon cannot apply until 2004; Paddy Armstrong cannot apply until 2009. When he jailed them, Mr Justice Donaldson warned them not to expect their parole applications to succeed. Paul Hill is intended to die in prison.
The Fulham Active Service Unit are also serving long sentences – those who were caught. But that night in Guildford, when Brendan and Joe sat in the front of the Avenger, two women and a third man sat in the back seat. They have never been caught. Special Branch and the intelligence services know who they are. Their fingerprints were found in the Fulham Unit’s flats. The man is still active in the Provisional IRA. The two women are both now married and are living with their children in the Irish Republic. They are now the best hope for the Guildford Four.
UPDATE: The three missing members of the IRA unit which bombed the Guildford pubs never did come forward. The Guildford Four were finally cleared and released in 1989, following a dogged campaign by their lawyers, Alastair Logan and Gareth Peirce, aided by Ros Franey and Grant McKee from Yorkshire TV. The Maguire Seven were finally cleared in 1991, having served their full jail sentences although one of them, Gerry Conlon’s father, Giuseppe, died in prison. No police officer, prosecutor or judge was ever punished for their role in the wrongful convictions.