Killers: Murders in Ireland by Stephen Rae Blackwater Press 178pp £9.99
King Scum by Paul Reynolds Gill & Macmillan 224pp £799
Gangland by Paul Williams O'Brien Press 222pp, £7.99
These three books, by three Dublin crime reporters, and released almost simultaneously, are based on material largely drawn from Garda accounts and court evidence. Of the three, Stephen Rae's study of Irish murder cases of the last three decades stands out a work of literature. Despite its rather awkward title and ugly jacket, Killers: Murders in Ireland contains passages that are both shocking and haunting. This book enters realms previously reserved for the eyes of police and forensic people.
Rae's account of ten Irish murders begins with the story of the serial killers John Shaw and Geoffrey Evans, two Lancashire criminals who, like the characters in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, feed off each other's social inadequacies and psychoses, and graduate to murder. On the run from English police after the rape of three girls, they came to Ireland . After a spell in Mountjoy for burglary, they emerged with the shared purpose of abducting, raping and murdering a "bird" every week. They succeeded twice before the Guards got them in Galway.
Shaw and Evans's predation during the summer of 1976 is nightmarish stuff, particularly when recounted in this mix of forensic detail and carefully drawn images of death. There is an account of the discovery of one of the victims, crouched on a lake bed naked and tied with weights, that is almost unbearably poignant.
The story of this State's first modern serial killers comes at a time when the Gardai are again looking for a multiple killer or killers who may have abducted and murdered up to a dozen young women in the past nineteen years.
The second murder case is that of Esther McCann and baby Jessica McCann, who died in a house fire started by McCann's sociopathic husband, Frank, a remarkable, devious figure who preyed on teenage girls as a member of the Irish Amateur Swimming Association.
The case of ten-year-old Bernadette Connolly, waylaid and murdered while cycling to the shops from her home in County Sligo is recounted. The story of the "green van", belonging to Cloonmahon Monastery, which was seen on the road at the time Bernadette disappeared, is characteristic of the time and place; the clergy refused detectives permission to question the brothers, one of whom was the main suspect. The case was unsolved and the hierarchy were openly critical of the detectives' temerity in seeking to question any clergy.
The GUBU ("grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented") murders of nurse Bridie Gargan and farmer Donal Dunne by the madman Malcolm Macarthur is also revisited. The surrounding political madness of the time - summed up in Taoiseach Haughey's deathless choice of adjectives - tends, at a distance, to blur the horrible deaths met by the nurse and the farmer. Macarthur's bludgeoning of Nurse Gargan left her partially conscious, and a young witness recalled her sitting up in the back of her car trying to push her blood-soaked hair back from her forehead. Rae's account contains new detail from Garda files which showed that Macarthur was planning to kill one of his relatives.
Macarthur, Shaw and Evans and Frank McCann currently reside in Arbour Hill Prison - it is hoped, for a very long time.
King Scum and Gangland reflect the current hard-on-crime, hard-on-criminals disposition found in both Government policy and crime reporting in the popular media. Since Veronica Guerin's murder the Republic has taken on some of the hardest attitudes to drugs and crime in Europe. These books tend to reinforce and perpetuate the popular belief that this country has a brave and beleaguered police force battling against rich, vicious "crime lords". This is the world where all professional criminals are evil, where all drug abusers are victims and where the police are always right. Gangland is by the author of Ireland's bestselling non-fiction crime book, The General, the story of the major Dublin criminal, Martin Cahill. This latest book tells the tales of the bit players who surrounded Cahill on the Dublin crime scene, mostly dim-witted, violent people whose careers in crime tended to be short-lived, and inevitably ended in Mountjoy or death. It is a racily written account of the failed lives of men who chose crime as the way to rise out of the Republic's social and economic underclass.
A deeper moral tale underlies Paul Reynolds' King Scum, the story of the brutish heroin dealer, Tony Felloni. In the early 1960s, before Gay Byrne had brought sex to our attention, Felloni preyed on the wave of incredibly innocent country girls who came to seek work in Dublin. Luring them to a tenement off O'Connell Street, he overpowered them, stripped them of their clothes and took lewd pictures, which he then used as blackmail. When he was caught by gardai from Store Street Station and the story emerged in court, it must have scandalised Catholic Ireland. Felloni's molestation of these naive young women may have reinforced the prejudices against the inner city slum dwellers, one of the most neglected sections of Irish society, who have been left to rot by government.
Felloni's career of heroin dealing was largely conducted while he was on prolonged periods of bail. The "king scum" title may be a bit of an exaggeration, but Felloni is certainly one of the worst of the city's many scumbags. As if the community from which he came was not sufficiently benighted, he and his ilk helped spread the heroin epidemic Among the victims were three of Felloni's own children, who are HIV positive and languishing in Mountjoy Prison.
Jim Cusack is the Irish Times Security Correspondent