The two men convicted of the murder of schoolboy Thomas Devlin in the North were today ordered to spend at least 52 years behind bars between them.
Ordering that Gary Taylor (23) serves a minimum of 30 years and his accomplice 26-year-old Nigel Brown to serve at least 22 years of their life sentences, Belfast Crown Court judge Mr Justice McLaughlin told the pair they had carried out a “horrifying and brutal attack upon utterly defenceless and harmless boys”.
Neither Brown, wearing a blue and white check shirt, nor Taylor, dressed in a black tracksuit, appeared to show any emotion as the judge announced the minimum sentences each will serve before being considered for release by the Parole Commissioners.
Mr Justice McLaughlin said it was up to the commissioners when, or if, either of the men should be released.
"Their [the parole board] job is to protect the public on a longer term basis, and it may be that people involved in this type of killing, with the kinds of social attitudes displayed by each of these defendants, may not be released for many years after they have serve the tariff period," he said.
“The defendants will simply have to face up to that reality and change or, if they prove incapable of change, face the inevitable consequence.”
At the end of a six week trial last February, the north Belfast men, from Mountcollyer Avenue and the Whitewell Road respectively, were unanimously convicted of murdering 15-year-old Devlin and trying to murder his friend Jonathan McKee on August 10th 2005 in north Belfast.
During the trial the jury, three of whom were present today for the conclusion of the case, heard how Taylor and Brown set out on the night of the murder to attack anyone they happened to come across on the mainly Catholic but mixed Somerton Road.
Within 20 minutes of leaving the Ross House block of flats in Mount vernon where the pair lived at the time, they had spotted Thomas and Jonathan and their friend Fintan Maguire who were walking home from the shop after buying sweets.
Brown first used his baton to beat Jonathan around the head and shoulders while Taylor ran forward to drag Thomas down from the wall of a school he was trying to scramble over.
Lashing out at him with a knife, Taylor stabbed the teenager nine times around mainly his arm and back, causing such massive internal bleeding that he died within minutes. Taylor then attacked Jonathan, stabbing him once in the gut as he went to help his friend.
The jury heard he would most probably have suffered the same fate as Thomas if he had not been carrying Thomas’s rucksack which took the brunt of further blows from the knife.
Giving evidence in the case, Jonathan described the attack as “frenzied” and “brutal,” telling the jury: “As it was unprovoked it was scary how ferociously he was swinging at me and just sort of how brutal it was more than anything.”
He recounted how, when Taylor had finished attacking him, he got up and that was when he spotted Thomas lying across the pavement onto the road with a “vacant” look on his face, adding that when he lifted up his shirt, he saw holes in his back.
As their attackers walked away, Jonathan said he could hear one of them calling the dog they had with them, shouting “Lulu or something along those lines”. The jury heard that within half an hour of the fatal assault, police had stopped Brown on nearby Fortwilliam Park as he was walking his mother’s dog, which was called Zola.
Mr Justice McLaughlin said it was clear the three friends had been behaving in a “completely law abiding and carefree manner” when they were attacked with such horrifying brutality.
“It is self evident that this was a sustained and deliberate attack designed to cause maximum injury, in fact indisputably the intention was to cause the death of Thomas,” said the judge.
It had been previously argued the attack had been motivated by sectarianism but today Mr Justice McLaughlin said there was no evidence on which he could be sure that it was and so he was approaching the case on the basis that it had been a motiveless attack.
He said while there is no doubt both Taylor and Brown “have deeply ingrained, bitter sectarian attitudes towards Catholics”, there was no firm evidence as to the religions of the victims and added that “in many respects it does not matter”.
Mr Justice McLaughlin told the court the murder was aggravated by the fact that Thomas was a child, had suffered multiple and extensive injuries before his death and by the fact the pair had also tried to kill Jonathan.
“It was a striking feature of this case that none of the usual motivating factors appeared to be present because there was no prelude to this attack, no exchange between the attackers and their victims, no attempt at or suggestion of robbery and no sectarian remark was made,” he said.
The judge said he was satisfied the three victims had not been identified in advance as they just happpened to be in the area at the time “and they presented as available victims because their attackers happened to be there at the time”.
The fact that Taylor had already armed himself with a knife and Brown with a piece of wood, said Mr Justice McLaughlin was another factor which made the offences all the worse.
The only mitigating feature in relation to Taylor, said the judge, was his age in that he was four days short of his 19th birthday when he knifed Thomas to death.
He said it was obvious that Taylor ahd come from a home where all the meaningful relationships he should have had with his parents “have been fractured” and told the court the killer’s position could best be summarised by the fact that, two years before the murder, his mother and siblings had moved to South Africa without telling him they were going.
In relation to Brown the judhge said it was also clear he had had a “very disturbing upbringing”, had been subjected to beating and brutality by his soldier father which had left him emotionally damaged and had suffered a “very considerable number” of psychiatric episodes between 1999 and 2008, all against the backdrop of addictions to illicit and prescription drugs.
Brown had a total of 72 convictions including entries for attacking police, assaults, criminal damage and possessing weapons and drugs while Taylor had a “much shorter” record including entries for theft, drugs, assaults and affray.