The Protestant boyfriend of a sectarian murder victim, Ms Bernadette Martin, told Belfast Crown Court yesterday that he cradled his dying girlfriend in his arms moments after she was shot in the bedroom of his Aghalee home in Co Armagh in July 1997.
Mr Gordon Green said he and his 18-year-old Catholic girlfriend were asleep in bed when he heard "bangs" and awoke to see a masked man in a balaclava rush from his bedroom. He tried to waken Ms Martin but got no response. He pulled the bedclothes back and found blood on her pillow. Giving evidence at the trial of his 37-year-old neighbour, Mr Trevor McKeown, who denies the murder, Mr Green said he jumped out of bed shouting for his parents to phone for an ambulance. He returned to the bed and "just held Bernie in my arms until the ambulance arrived".
Under cross-examination, Mr Green admitted that two weeks earlier he and Ms Martin has stayed the night in Mr McKeown's Coronation Gardens home and he'd been "perfectly friendly" and had made "no hint or suggestion of sectarian remarks". Mr Green said that a year earlier he was arrested and held for "seven hours and 15 minutes" on suspicion of involvement in the murder of a taxi-driver, Mr Michael McGoldrick, who was shot dead with the pistol later used in the murder of his girlfriend.
Another neighbour, Mr Paul Camlin, also of Coronation Gardens, who claimed he had heard Mr McKeown say he was "going to get" Mr Green, denied he had implicated Mr McKeown to save his own skin. He also denied he'd been a lookout during the shooting and that when released after being questioned for two days he hid the gun in a field, where it was found by police.
The case continues.