Murder of Jean McConville

Jean McConville (née Murray; 7 May 1934 – December 1972) was a woman from Belfast, Northern Ireland, who was kidnapped and murdered by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and secretly buried in County Louth in the Republic of Ireland in 1972 after being accused by the IRA of passing information to British forces.

Jean Murray was born on 7 May 1934 to a Protestant family in East Belfast but converted after marrying Arthur McConville, a Catholic former British Army soldier, with whom she had ten children.

After being intimidated out of a Protestant district by loyalists in 1969, the McConville family moved to West Belfast's Divis Flats in the Lower Falls Road.

Arthur died from cancer in January 1972.

At the time of her death, Jean McConville lived at 1A St Jude's Walk, which was part of the Divis Flats complex.

This was an IRA stronghold, from which attacks were regularly launched against the British Army and Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).

Since the death of her husband, she had been raising their ten children, who were aged between six and twenty.

Their son Robbie was a member of the Official IRA and was interned in Long Kesh at the time of her death.

According to police records, on 29 November 1972 a British Army unit found a distressed woman wandering in the street.

She told them her name was McConville and that she had been attacked and warned to stop informing.

One of McConville's children claimed she was kidnapped the night after this incident, but others gave the date of the kidnapping as 7 December.

On the night of her disappearance, four young women took McConville from her home at gunpoint, and she was driven to an unknown location.

Dolours Price claimed that she was one of those involved in driving her across the border.

McConville was killed by a gunshot to the back of the head; there was no evidence of any other injuries to her body.

Her body was secretly buried across the border on Shelling Hill Beach (also known as Templetown Beach) at the south-eastern tip of the Cooley Peninsula in the north of County Louth, about 50 mi from her home.

The place of her death is uncertain.

Although no group admitted responsibility for her disappearance, there were rumours that the IRA had killed her for being an informer.

The Guardian newspaper said that she was killed because neighbours claimed they saw her helping a badly wounded British soldier outside her home; McConville's children say they recall her helping a wounded British soldier some time before their father died in January 1972.

He defected to the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) in 1974.

In the months leading up to her death, tension and suspicion grew between McConville and her neighbours.

One night shortly before her disappearance, she was allegedly attacked after leaving a bingo hall and warned to stop giving information to the British Army.

The Police Ombudsman found that the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) did not begin to investigate the disappearance properly until 1995.

In 1999, the IRA acknowledged that it had killed McConville and eight others of the "Disappeared".

It claimed she had been passing information about republicans to the British Army in exchange for money and that a transmitter had been found in her flat.

A report by the Police Ombudsman found no evidence for this or other rumours.

Before the Troubles, the IRA had a policy of killing informers within its own ranks.

From the start of the conflict the term informer was also used for civilians who were suspected of providing information on paramilitary organisations to the security forces.

Other Irish republican and loyalist paramilitaries also carried out such killings.

As she was a recently-widowed mother of ten, the McConville killing was particularly controversial.

Her body was not found until 2003, and the crime has not been solved.

In a 2014 interview published in the Sunday Life, former Irish republican Evelyn Gilroy claimed the person who had tended to the soldier was her [Gilroy's] sister.

The IRA did not admit involvement until after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement.

It claimed she was killed because she was passing information about republicans to the British Army.

Former IRA member Brendan Hughes claimed the IRA had searched her flat some time before her death and found a radio transmitter, which they confiscated.

He and other former republicans interrogated her and claimed she admitted the British Army was paying her for information about republicans.

Hughes claims that, because of her circumstances, they let her go with a warning.

However, he claims when the IRA found she had resumed working for the British Army, it decided to "execute" her.

Usually the bodies of informers were left in public as a warning, but the IRA secretly buried McConville, apparently because she was a widowed mother of ten.

The IRA had first done this two months earlier, when it killed and buried two IRA members who were alleged to be working undercover for the British Military Reaction Force (MRF).

After her disappearance, McConville's seven youngest children, including six-year-old twins, survived on their own in the flat, cared for by their 15-year-old sister Helen.