Locked up for murder: an infamous case and a wrongful conviction

What does a Scottish teacher do when her elder son is convicted of a murder he clearly couldn’t have done and has been sent to a lunatic asylum? Brenda Gordon got on as best she could with her teaching job, looking after her husband and younger son, and making the journey from Clackmannanshire in Scotland to Holywell Asylum near Antrim town to visit Iain. He had been wrongfully convicted of the murder of 19-year-old Patricia Curran in Whiteabbey, Co Antrim, where he had been doing National Service, a compulsory 18-month stint in the British armed forces after the second World War.

On one of those dispiriting trips to visit Iain, Brenda Gordon became friends with the remarkable Dorothy Turtle, an Englishwoman then teaching at the Quaker School in Lisburn. Her mother was a Cronin from Co Kerry. As a student at Cambridge in the 1930s, Dorothy had been invited to join the communist party, but declined. Otherwise her name might now be linked with the spies Burgess and McLean. After becoming a music teacher, she met Henry Turtle, a Quaker, and adopted his religion and in the 1950s husband and wife were teachers in Lisburn. Dorothy befriended Brenda Gordon and helped her on her lonely pilgrimages, putting her up for the night on her trips to Antrim , and visiting Iain during term time when his mother couldn’t get over from Scotland.

While Brenda Gordon was trying to cope with the reality of having a son locked up for murder, Dorothy Turtle began to consider what could be done about getting him released. Gordon was not a murderer. A judge’s daughter had been stabbed 37 times. When the RUC didn’t make an immediate arrest a detective from Scotland Yard was brought in and intimidated a vulnerable young man into confessing, and the whole sorry performance was given credence by a psychiatrist who gave “evidence” of a recovered memory of an event which had not happened. In fairness, that evidence made the guilty but insane verdict possible, and saved Gordon from the hangman’s rope.

This might lead one to conclude that the world is full of bad people and that the northeast corner of this island in the 1950s had its full share. But there were others like Dorothy Turtle. The medical director of Holywell Asylum Dr Gilbert Smith and the chief nursing officer Donald Gilchrist and many members of the staff had not taken long to realise that the young man committed to their care was neither guilty nor insane as the jury verdict had it. After keeping him in under observation in a closed ward for the best part of the year, he functioned as a kind of unpaid groundsman, tending to the open space and gardens on the 100-acre site overlooking Lough Neagh. There’s a significance in the way the local community – Holywell is just two miles from Antrim town – tacitly accepted that Gordon’s presence was not a danger, as he cycled around the neighbourhood on various hospital errands.

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Gordon spent seven years in Holywell. In 1960 a man in a suit from London arrived to visit him. He was told he was free to go home to Scotland and ordered not to discuss the case with anyone there. Much of the credit for his release is due to Dorothy Turtle. Along with a small group of women supporters with Belfast addresses, she persistently lobbied civil servants and ministers to release Gordon. At their urging an independent doctor from England examined the young man and found him sane. Why then was a sane man being detained in a mental asylum? It was a good question.

Having won over the officials, the next step was to get the politicians to take the difficult step to release a man who had been convicted of the murder of the daughter of a judge who had served as a unionist attorney general. For this, Stormont ministers Walter Topping, who began the release process, and Brian Faulkner, who followed it through, deserve honourable mention.

Dorothy and Jack Turtle lived in Northern Ireland from the 1950s to the beginning of the 1970s. They then moved to Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire, where she died in 1986. Her eldest son Henry continued to support Gordon until 2000 when the court of appeal finally set aside his sentence. There is more in my book Who Killed Patricia Curran?, available now from amazon.de in the EU and amazon.co.uk in Northern Ireland.