This week marks the 20th anniversary of the Rising Sun massacre – one of the worst atrocities of the Northern Ireland troubles.
The memorial to the victims of the Greysteel massacre
Seven people died when UFF gunmen opened fire on October 30, 1993 – an eighth died six months later as a result of his injuries.
Patrons in the Rising Sun pub in Greysteel were in jovial mood as they waited for a country and western band to come on stage when two men dressed in boiler suits and balaclavas entered the pub.
One shouted “Trick or Treat” and as one struggled with a jammed pistol, the other walked through the premises, firing an AK-47 rifle.
By the time it was over 45 shots had been fired, seven people lay dead and a further 19 injured in a scene of bloody horror.
The massacre was in revenge for the IRA bombing of a fishmonger’s on Belfast’s Shankill Road a week before, which left nine Protestants dead. It brought to 23 the number of people murdered in possibly the North’s grimmest week as loyalist gunmen went on a killing spree in revenge for the Shankhill bomb.
Speaking at the scene of the shooting, RUC Chief Constable Hugh Annesley said Northern Ireland was “at a crossroads.”
“Is it to be evil and violence or is it to be dialogue and peace?”
The seven who died in the hail of gunfire were:
19-year-old Karen Thompson, from Limavady, who died alongside her 20-year-old boyfriend Steve Mullan, from Greysteel; Joseph McDermott (60), from Greysteel and 81-year-old James Moore whose son owned the bar. The father-of-five was ordering a drink when he was gunned down.
John Moyne, (50), meanwhile, pushed his wife to the floor and died protecting her and 54-year-old John Burns was shot as he walked to the bathroom.
The Protestant father of three children – a 14-year-old daughter and sons aged 16 and 19 – was a former member of the UDR and lived in Eglinton. His wife was badly hurt in the incident.
The seventh person killed was 59-year-old Moira Duddy, who came from Greysteel. Married with six children she was sitting with her husband and two friends but was the only person hit by gunfire.
Speaking after the killings, her husband said: “My good wife, my good wife. We went out on a Saturday night for a wee dance and they blew her to bits. They slaughtered my innocent wife… I’ll never get over it.
“They shot into the wee lounge first. I thought he had finished but he loaded another magazine and the other one with him shot everybody in the big lounge. I saw the gun coming round the corner and then I heard the bangs.
“My wife and friends were on the floor. They blew the legs off her. They shot her through the heart, through the back. Thirty-three years of marriage and it nearly Christmas.”
A retired farmer and former member of the B Specials in Claudy was the eighth Greysteel victim. Samuel Montgomery dropped dead six months after being wounded. Blood clots resulting from his injuries had moved to the 76-year-old’s heart and lungs.
Within two weeks four men were arrested and appeared at Limavady Magistrates Court charged with the murders. Stephen Irwin, Torrens Knight, Jeffrey Deeney and Brian McNeill were jailed for life in February 1995.
Graphic details of the murders emerged at the men’s sentencings.
The court heard Irwin, armed with an AK47 rifle, was first in to the pub. As customers prepared for a Hallowe’en dance, he shouted ”Trick or treat”, then opened fire on a group of women out on a hen night.
Deeney followed, to give Irwin cover, but his gun jammed after he fired just one shot — otherwise the death toll could have been far higher.
Knight, armed with a double-barrelled shotgun, stood guard outside, and McNeill was the getaway driver.
The court was told that after the shootings McNeill drove Irwin and Deeney away in his own Skoda car. Knight drove off in an Opel Kadette, which he unsuccessfully tried to burn, before meeting the other three.
Within an hour of the shootings McNeill, a prime suspect, was under arrest. RUC Chief Constable Sir Hugh Annesley said that was critical to the overall police investigation, which at one stage involved 50 detectives.
One was the head of Special Branch in that region, Detective Chief Superintendent Maurice Neely, who was among 25 key police and military intelligence officers who later died in the Chinook helicopter disaster on the Mull of Kintyre.
Irwin, Knight and Deeney, all hardened members of a unit which the UFF considered its number one outside Belfast, were questioned and eventually charged along with Irwin after what Sir Hugh yesterday described as ”an outstanding piece of investigation”.
The four men pleaded not guilty to all charges when the trial opened on but changed their pleas three days later.
Passing sentencing, Lord Justice Carswell said if the four had contested the charges and been found guilty, he would unhesitatingly have made a recommendation of a minimum period of time they should serve in jail.
The four were also given sentences ranging from 16 to 20 years for attempted murder.
Knight, a roofer from Macosquin, near Coleraine, was given four separate life sentences for his part in a UFF attack seven months earlier in which four Catholic workmen, including an IRA man, were shot dead in Castlerock, Co. Derry.
Deeney, Irwin and McNeill, a shirt-cutter, all lived close to each other in the Waterside area of Derry.
A fifth man, Derek Grieve (35), from Derry, who admitted conspiring to pervert the course of justice by providing Knight with a false alibi on the night of the attack, was given a two-year suspended sentence.
All four have since been released from prison.
