The American questioned and arrested in the investigation into the murder of Kerry farmer Michael Gaine has confirmed that he complained to Fiosrú, the Office of the Police Ombudsman, about his treatment by gardaí.
In an extensive interview with The Irish Times, Michael Kelley (53) refused to be drawn on the exact nature of the complaint he lodged against the Garda team investigating the murder of the Kenmare man.
Speaking in Tralee, where he is now living, Mr Kelley said the matter was confidential. However, he said the complaint did not relate to his arrest on May 18th but to a previous interaction with gardaí.
Mr Kelley, who helped Mr Gaine with work on his farm, made a voluntary witness statement to gardaí as part of their missing person’s investigation after Mr Gaine (56) was reported missing on March 21st by his wife, Janice when he failed to return to their home at Carhoomengar East, Kenmare, on March 20th.
“I made the complaint in late March, so, yes, it was before I was arrested and, yes, it related to the gardaí bringing me to Sneem Garda station to make a voluntary witness statement,” said Mr Kelley.
He has yet to receive a reply from Fiosrú, he said.
In response to queries, Fiosrú said it “does not confirm or deny the existence of complaints made by or against individuals. This is to protect the investigative process, and the rights, both of complainants, and those complained against.”
Gardaí upgraded their investigation into Mr Gaine’s disappearance to a murder inquiry on April 29th. On May 16th, a family member found body parts, later identified as belonging to Mr Gaine, while spreading slurry at Mr Gaine’s farm at Carrig East, just off the Ring of Kerry near Moll’s Gap.
Mr Kelley confirmed last month to The Irish Daily Mirror – and later to The Irish Times – that he had been arrested by gardaí and questioned about Mr Gaine’s murder, but he denied any involvement in the killing which shocked people in Kenmare where Mr Gaine was a well-liked member of the community.
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Mr Kelley has said he may be being framed by “people who are involved in organised crime”.
Mr Kelley had been living alone, rent free, for more than two years at the old Gaine family farmhouse at Carrig East in return for carrying out farm work for Mr Gaine, who kept around 40 cows and 500 sheep at his 400-hectare (1,000-acre) hillside landholding.
Approached this week by The Irish Times, Mr Kelley declined to answer questions about the murder investigation, but he agreed to talk about his own life to date and how he came to Ireland from the United States, where he grew up.
A native of Maine in the northeastern US, Mr Kelley said he came to Ireland seeking political asylum, alleging that he had been threatened by the Ku Klux Klan – the racist group that originated in the southern states of the US at the end of the American Civil War – in Maine because he was a Catholic and the Ku Klux Klan was anti-Catholic.
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He alleged they had poisoned and killed his dog, Lyra, a German Shepherd, and that they had shot at him while he was in the woods near his home outside Swanville in Waldo County. Fearing for his life, he said, he made the decision to come to Ireland and seek asylum.
“I arrived in Ireland in 2017, into Dublin Airport and asked for asylum when I came up to immigration desk,” said Mr Kelley.
He said he was subsequently put in contact with an immigration lawyer who in turn consulted a barrister who was an expert in this area.
“The barrister told me that I stood no chance of getting asylum, so I decided then to go underground here in Ireland,” said Mr Kelley.
He also revealed new details about his US military service.
Mr Kelley said he was awarded top grades when he graduated from Belfast High School in Waldo County, Maine, and applied to join the US Rangers, given his interest in strategy and war games as a teenager.
He said he was accepted into US Rangers due to his high grades and passing the physical examination. He entered the Rangers training camp at Fort Benning in Georgia where he completed courses at the infantry and airborne schools.
However, he left the Rangers training centre after he claimed he was asked to sign a document that gave the Rangers indemnity to deploy him on clandestine operations such as covert assassinations.
I just put down my weapon and I took off my uniform and told them I was a conscientious objector
— Michael Kelley
He said he then joined a regular US army unit in around 1990 and was transferred to Germany and the US Air Defence Artillery Unit at Ansbach, some 60 kms from Nuremberg, where he carried out sentry duties on US patriot missiles.
“The good thing about joining the military was that it gave me the opportunity to see Europe because I hadn’t been to Europe before,” he said. “I joined because I wanted to fight against totalitarianism and Stalinism in the USSR and East Germany.”
He said he later decided to become a conscientious objector when he learned of the US attack on Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait City on what became known as the “Highway of Death” in the spring of 1991 when US Marine, US Air Force and US Navy aircraft bombed the convoy.
“These guys had been given a promise of safe passage out of Kuwait back to Iraqi, they had their tanks loaded up on low loaders and do you know what happened? US aeroplanes attacked them with cluster bombs and hundreds of Iraqis were just incinerated,” said Mr Kelley.
“I just put down my weapon and I took off my uniform and told them I was a conscientious objector.”
He said he remained in the US Army for several months afterwards and was assigned to desk duties before he left the military and returned to civilian life.
A US Army spokesman said the army had no record of Mr Kelley serving with it but noted that soldiers’ records are automatically moved to the National Archives and Records Administration when they have left the army for more than 15 years. This agency has been contacted by The Irish Times for details of his military service.
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During the interview, Mr Kelley spoke about his upbringing in Maine with his mother, Janice Kelley, who had attended Martin Luther King’s Jobs and Freedom March to Washington in 1963 when he made his famous “I have a dream” speech.
Mr Kelley, a musician who has busked on the streets of Tralee, also spoke about how his mother had lived in the East Village in New York in the early 1960s and once played guitar with Joan Baez. His mother also saw Bob Dylan and other prominent figures of the US folk boom of the time in the coffee shops of Greenwich Village, he said.
Among the many figures from the counterculture that his mother knew was Walter Bowart, editor of the East Village Other, a radical underground newspaper.
In the interview, Mr Kelley spoke in detail about the writing of Bowart on mind control programmes developed by the Central Intelligence Agency, the US spy agency, and who alleged that it was the CIA that developed the drug LSD and introduced it in the counterculture movement as a means of trying to control people.
On his eight years in Ireland, Mr Kelley said that when he could not secure asylum, he moved to Kerry and began living in the Killarney National Park where he built himself a hut.
They found my camp and told me I had to leave, that I couldn’t live in the national park – they were out shooting deer, and they had guns – so I wasn’t going to argue with them
— Michael Kelley
“I made it from logs and tarpaulin – it was deep in the woods, the other side of the lake and I lived there. I used to go into Killarney every three or four days in the middle of the night to search in dumpsters. You get a lot of food thrown way in a tourist town like Killarney,” he said.
Mr Kelley said he was always conscious of his Irish heritage – “we were an Irish-American family”, he said. He taught himself the tin whistle and later the flute, and began playing Irish airs. He busked around Killarney to make money to support himself.
“I also started doing wood carvings at my camp, from fallen trees; I used to carve a lot from rhododendron,” he said, referring to the woody plant that grows extensively in the Killarney park.
“It’s got a good grain for carving, so I used to sell those wood carvings around town to supplement what I made from busking.”
While he couldn’t give an exact timeline for how long he lived in the park, Mr Kelley said his time there came to an abrupt end when rangers from the National Parks and Wildlife Service happened upon his camp.
“They found my camp and told me I had to leave, that I couldn’t live in the national park – they were out shooting deer, and they had guns – so I wasn’t going to argue with them,” he said.
A National Parks and Wildlife Service source confirmed that park rangers came across Mr Kelley at his camp in the park some years ago and asked him to leave the area, as camping was prohibited in the park, and that he subsequently left.
After an hour-long interview, Mr Kelley politely told The Irish Times he had to leave, ended the conversation and departed, disappearing into the Tralee streets.
