‘I’m not dying until I hear the truth’: Wife of Patsy Kelly on her near 50 year campaign for justice

For the first time in almost 50 years, Teresa Kelly feels a sense of calm.

It’s the morning after she travelled from her rural Co Tyrone home to Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter, where, in a private room of the NI Police Ombudsman’s offices, she wept listening to the devastating findings of a report into her husband’s abduction and murder in 1974.

The ombudsman’s assessment of the then Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) investigation into Patsy Kelly’s brutal sectarian killing was emphatic: his family had been failed.

Bereft family

The Kellys have invited The Irish Times to their home outside the village of Trillick. The phone does not stop ringing in the kitchen.

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Now 81 years old, Teresa Kelly insists on making us tea and hot scones.

Sitting alongside the mother-of-five is her youngest son, also called Patsy, whom she discovered she was pregnant with in the weeks before the 35-year-old’s body was found by fishermen in Lough Eyes, Co Fermanagh, floating in shallow water.

She becomes emotional reflecting on the events of the previous day following their decades-long search for answers. No one has ever been convicted.

“We had been built up so many times and then got let down a bagful,” she says. “When the ombudsman was reading us the report, it was failing after failing. I wasn’t able to take it all in. Just getting that bit of truth through … it means so much.”

“I’ll not get a chance to read it properly until my son goes home. I’ll read it two and three times.”

The last time Teresa Kelly saw her husband was when he kissed the children goodbye at the gates of their home, before setting off for work less than two miles away at the Corner Bar in Trillick.

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An independent nationalist councillor for Omagh who was passionate about civil rights, Patsy Kelly locked up the pub in the early hours of July 24th, 1974, and was driving home when abducted on a nearby road. A crucifix and memorial plaque now mark the spot where his hair, blood and shirt buttons were found.

When his body was discovered almost three weeks later — it had been weighed down and Teresa was advised not to go to the morgue. “I was desperate to see him,” she says; there were six bullet wounds. A green nylon rope, attached to a 56-pound weight, had been tied around his waist to weigh him down in the lake.

In what the North’s Ombudsman Marie Anderson described as a “wholly inadequate” police probe, it emerged significant forensic evidence was never followed up.

Remote route

Looking up at her husband’s picture on the living room wall — “I talk to him every day,” says Teresa Kelly — she tells me this was the home the couple moved into after they married in 1966. She points to a house across the way on the remote stretch of road surrounded by green fields.

“That house was the school me and Patsy went to as children. We would have walked in our bare feet from the month of May to Golan school,” she says, smiling. “We used to meet at the dances. He was very light-hearted and jolly, he loved life. Jiving was the whole go and he just loved that too.”

Her memories of his disappearance and the months that followed are vivid.

She knew something was “drastically wrong” when he didn’t return home from work. She worked day shifts at the same bar to support their children, who were all under the age of six at the time.

“He drove in and left me back to the house that evening. The children went out giving him hug and kisses, that went on every night,” she recalls.

“I went out to close our gates after midnight and I often do think to myself, ‘I wonder did the car go past with his body in it at the time?’ I always worried that it wasn’t safe for him driving home at night as he carried the box of money from the bar. He’d say, ‘don’t you worry, the only people I’ll stop for are the men in uniform and not for anybody else. I’ll only be stopping when I see a security forces’ red light at a checkpoint’.”

One of the most damning findings of the watchdog report — and one that the family always suspected — was evidence of “collusive behaviours” between some security force members and loyalist paramilitaries.

Rumours began to circulate in the tight-knit nationalist village shortly after the councillor’s abduction that members of the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), a British army unit set up in 1970, had been involved.

The ombudsman found that RUC detectives failed to adequately verify the alibis of UDR members suspected of involvement.

With his hand resting on the 134-page report on an armchair beside his mother, Patsy Kelly says his father was a “decent man” who respected “those in uniform. I may not have met my father but his presence has always been there. There was so much trepidation and not daring to hope about this report as we’ve had so many let downs. It went much further than we expected.

“This report shows it was uniforms ‘plural’ — in terms of the uniforms of the British army and the RUC — that have let us down.”

‘Questioning me’

Teresa Kelly remembers her initial faith in the police investigation, despite an encounter with the first policeman who came to their door.

“I noticed he had a smell of drink on him. He apologised and said he couldn’t face me without having a drink. He started questioning me, asking if it had happened before. He said that people can often turn up across the Border with another woman.

“But I put my trust in them. I remember another police officer telling me, ‘I can guarantee you if we get the body, there’ll be enough evidence and there’ll be a conviction’. When Patsy’s body was found that day, I thought at least they’d be able to do something.”

Her son, who lives in Co Kerry, says it was the local community who “drove the search” for Patsy Kelly’s body.

“The security forces, in terms of the police and at a later stage, army, were if you like, shamed, in having to take part in the search because the community took over.

“My father was a councillor elected to serve the people of this area; people just responded. Those with little money were taking time off work, going days without pay to look for him. They were coming to the local GAA club to donate food. Women were coming to this house making soup and sandwiches.

“There was so much thought of him and so much energy put into finding him, that on the evening of his removal from the morgue to the chapel, the locals refused to leave him. They kept guard overnight before his funeral.”

How did Teresa Kelly cope in those years raising her young family and struggling with her loss?

“Well, I had two choices, either I could lie on in bed and not get up and not face the world or I could get up and face the world and keep going. Thankfully I never had any bitterness and still don’t. Sure where would that get you?”

Her son adds: “I think it’s important to say that during that time period when my mother did interviews with the press, she stated that she prayed for the killers and appealed for absolutely no retaliation. She raised all of us to have no hatred or bitterness. And as well as looking after us, she stepped in to hold my father’s council seat in honour of what he’d started.”

After the murder, a UDR checkpoint was set up directly outside the family home. Teresa Kelly was regularly stopped and had her car searched “inside out” when she drove into the village, even when she was heavily pregnant.

“There were no houses round here at that time, there were no lights on the road. My brother stayed with me until after Patsy was born. My mother wanted my other brothers to stay with me: “I said, ‘no mammy, I’m going to have to do it myself’.

“But, I’ll tell you, I put in many a night standing looking out a window so scared.”.

As a 32-year-old widow, she recalls how she feared for her life after a chilling phone call.

“I was getting the children ready for school. The phone went and this English voice said, ‘how would you like a 10in knife stuck in your back’.” She breaks down and adds, “I was so scared of someone doing this to me. I was afraid for the children.”

Patsy also recalls harassment during his childhood: “The abnormal was normal; we didn’t call it intimidation at the time because that was our normal.”

Over the following decades, the family’s solicitor, the late Pat Fahy, began helping them “dig and dig”:

“He was seeking meetings with the RUC, he was like a dog with a bone, he refused to ever take no for an answer, he would scratch beneath the surface and always test anything he was told by the police,” explains Patsy Kelly.

Holding up a copy of the report, he adds: “So Pat Fahy’s fingerprints are on this. It became a personal crusade.”

Fahy submitted the family’s first complaint to the ombudsman in 2002. A second was forwarded in 2018, resulting in last Wednesday’s report.

The investigative journalism of Anne Cadwallader in the late 1990s and Trevor Birney in the early noughties was also key in “building momentum”, with the case reopened by police in 2003.

Legacy Bill

The mother and son acknowledge that the watchdog investigation could be the last of its kind if a controversial legacy Bill is enacted by the British government, in its attempt to “draw a line under the past” by ending prosecutions and inquests for all Troubles-related crimes.

“It’s frustrating to think that this could be one of the last reports because there’s so many other families, regardless of political persuasion or what community they’re from, who deserve what we have got,” says Patsy Kelly.

The Kellys want a fresh inquest, describing the first one as a “whitewash”. They feel vindicated by the report but say it is the “beginning” of a process.

“I do feel a sense of calm for the first time in … well, it will be 49 years this July. This is the start of closure,” says Teresa.

Looking back, what was it that made them keep going after so many “let-downs”?

“Personally, I wanted to get truth for my mother,” replies Patsy Kelly.

It’s his mother who has the last word: “I used to say to Pat Fahy, ‘I’m not dying until I hear the truth. The children deserve it more than me, it was for their sake.”