The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

FOOLS AND HORSES by John Edwards

In 1983, Shergar, winner of the Derby and the world’s most famous racehorse, was kidnapped from a stud farm in Ireland. It was an extraordinary crime, somehow peculiarly Irish, and it was never solved. John Edwards, who covered the story for the Daily Mail in London, recalls the events of that bitterly cold February in Kildare.

Much boredom and routine had now settled around the new life of the great Shergar since they retired him from racing to make a fortune as a sire. One day was the same as another.

If it changed, it was only when he smelled the air and got the scent of another mare in season being brought for him to “cover”. Even then he had to get used to the briefest of affairs-fifteen minutes of passion for £80,000. The mare paid. Or at least the people who owned her did.

Everything had to be right if he was to create a new foal. The weather was part of it. A cold day was not so promising as a warm one.

And 8 February 1983 began with hailstones and an ice-cold wind coming over the empty roll of The Curragh, County Kildare, which is heartland country in the Irish horse business. Sometimes the hail joined up to form a solid block driving through the air. The infra-red lamp above Shergar in his stable at the Ballymany Stud was turned up to throw more heat onto his handsome back. Horse races on television are watched in the distance. There is no indication of size. But a champ like Shergar is huge and stands like a giant with his fine head still almost out of reach when anyone put up a hand to try and smooth his silky cheek.

They let Shergar alone that Wednesday because it froze from dawn to dusk. Even when they took him to the five-acre paddock for a run he galloped over and sheltered under leafless trees watching the hail with those big, dark eyes. “We’ll have him back now,” Liam Foley said to the stable boy, Jim Fitzgerald, who watched him all the time because he was a jewel worth £10 million. The title “stable boy” sticks for life. Jim was a stable boy when he was fourteen. He had just had his fifty-eighth birthday. It was the simplest of jobs and he made just enough to keep himself and his wife Madge and some of his seven children.

Liam was called the Stallion Man, which made him many stripes above a stable boy. He was the boss of Shergar any time business wasn’t involved. The horse was part of his family. He treated him almost as if he was human.

Jim led Shergar clip-clopping back to his very special loose box with his name in brass letters over the door. It was routine for both horse and man. Jim first bolted the door over which Shergar had stuck his head with the shiny white blaze.

Then he locked the main door, which shut the horse off completely. Shergar could only look across the centre aisle into the face of another fine stallion called Nishapour. But they never became friends. They would have fought to the death if they could have got at each other.

Jim Fitzgerald turned and said something to Shergar which he doesn’t remember now. It was probably “settle down now, fellow,” he said later. He tried to dodge the weather when he went to his house in the stud which came with the job. It became dark so early he had everything locked up by four p.m.

No good for going anywhere, Jim said to his wife, so they settled in for what turned out to be the most incredible night ever dreamed of in the history of horse racing.

In twenty-four hours Jim’s name would be in every newspaper in the world. He would be famous for bad reasons, afraid to go out, so shaken he couldn’t talk. It was twenty-four hours in which he would look straight into the barrel of a gun and wait for death.

One of the great stories ever was about to explode around the Ballymany Stud. Shergar, beginning to lower himself into the straw to sleep, was about to become a legend which struck his name into history many more times effectively than sailing home in The Derby with Walter Swinburn aboard.

Ghislain Drion, the stud manager who spoke better French than English, peered through the windscreen wipers of his Nissan Patrol 4WD and was dazzled by his headlights reflecting off the flurries of snow. He parked next to his mansion outside the stud complex and checked the telex for messages from any of the thirty-four people in the Shergar syndicate.

Chief Superintendent James “Jazzer” Murphy of the Kildare County Garda Force went to his house, which was towards Dublin, and was quite relaxed because there was nothing much in his tray.

It had also been an easy day for the chambermaids at the Keadeen Hotel in Newbridge, a mile from the stud, because only nine of the thirty-two rooms were occupied.

A nasty mid-winter night in Kildare couldn’t even get people out to the pubs. The one call made to the local police station was to report a car going off the road. Fog had joined the hail and snow. It was about eight-thirty p.m.

Security cameras couldn’t hunt through the wall of weather. They were faulty anyway. No guards stood at the gate. Only a five-bar gate protected the stud. A kid could open it.

The gate was up the drive off the main road to Dublin. Nobody heard the gate open or saw the black shape of an unlit Granada pulling a horsebox as it turned down the drive into the stud. A van and another car pulled off the road and parked by the gate. The Granada turned inside the stud and the driver stopped the engine when it pointed back to the main road, the classic get away position. The slow turn made a noise when the wheels spread gravel. Jim Fitzgerald thought he heard the sound of a car but he wasn’t in charge of security so didn’t have to react to noises. Not even a knock on the door bothered him. His son Bernard was nearest. When Bernard opened it the silhouette reminded him of a man in police uniform. There was something different, though. He had never seen a policeman in a mask before.

He thought the man said something like: “Is the boss in?” Bernard turned to shout to his father. The blow in the small of his back sent him face down on the floor.

Jim pushed his way towards the door. His first memory was of Bernard on the floor. And then it was the glint of poor light on a pistol barrel pointed at his heart.

Who could these people be? The IRA? Hardly. The IRA didn’t operate much in southern Ireland. They weren’t harried a lot by the authorities. As long as they behaved they were tolerated. Even a murderer was pretty safe when he crossed from the North. That was the way the Dublin Government had quietly decided to play it.

Jim thinks he said: “What do you want us for because we haven’t done anything?” Bernard got up slowly. Madge stood in the kitchen where a peat fire smoked in the grate and terror ran all the way through her.

Other masked men came into the kitchen, maybe as many as eight. Everything seemed to have been spoken by the gunman. “We’ve come for Shergar and we want £2 million for him. Call the police and he’s dead.”

One of the other men took a gun from his pocket. Jim had an escort to Shergar’s stable. He lifted the bolt and heard Shergar move and snort. The smell of warm straw and horses flew out into the night.

The gunman prodded Jim along to Shergar’s loose box which was the furthest from the door. There was some light from the infra-red lamps. Somebody behind him, a different voice this time, told Jim to get some tack and put it on Shergar. So he put a head collar on him and a bridle and bit. He heard straw being picked up and saw it scattered in the back of the horsebox. Jim’s old coat, the one he always left hanging on a hook, was lifted down and he remembers one of the gang putting it on. The coat smelled of Jim. Shergar got a whiff and walked without stress. It was the smell he knew well. The man who put a gun on Jim, first took Ghislain Drion’s private number and told Jim to pass a message that he would be contacted next day.

What Jim saw flashing through his brain now were the words “Kidnap and Ransom”. Jim was frightened into a shiver. He gave Shergar a last pat on his neck. The back of the horsebox banged closed and the bolts went down. If Jim called the police or anybody, the gunman said, he had signed his death warrant. The horsebox went into the night. Jim caught a view of Shergar’s hindquarters. And a wonderful, blue-blood animal, innocent of everything, his fine aristocratic head strapped to a slat of a cheap horsebox, was taken away to begin his final journey.

In days gone by he had gone to Epsom and Ascot in his special box painted in grand colours like a royal coach. A band played for him once.

On that Wednesday night, 8 February 1983 the fog closed in around a miserable-looking shed on wheels and Shergar would have begun to feel the despair, a vet said afterwards.

Three terrorists nudged Jim back to his house and trained a handgun on him as he sat with his family. None of the words spoken for the next three hours were recalled by Jim.

He was full of fear and shook visibly. Exactly after three hours, the kidnappers made to leave Ballymany Stud. They whispered: “Call the police and you all die.”

Jim thought it was all over until one of the men pushed him outside. He was marched to the gate and pressed to the floorboards of the van which had been parked unnoticed for hours.

A knee was in his back holding him down. Jim could never be sure how far they drove but he was completely lost when they kicked him out on a empty piece of road. At least he was still alive, he kept telling himself.

Madge called a friend and stuttered out the story at around midnight. The friend called the police.

Ghislain Drion was an aloof man and mixed little in company which didn’t include titles or the gilded circles of international racehorse owners and breeders. Shergar was going to produce so much money for the syndicate, figures such as £100 million were being mentioned.

Syndicate members like the Aga Khan and Robert Sangster, Sheik Al Maktoum and Stavros Niarchos took special interest in the Ballymany Stud.

When the local cops called on him in the sleepiest hours of the night he said: “What do you mean stolen?” Since he was best in French, the cops had difficulty making their point. Which was when “Jazzer” Murphy was awakened. The name Shergar registered in the brain of “Jazzer” just as if he had been told that somebody had snatched a king or a queen.

The Det. Chief Supt warmed up his car, adjusted his famous trilby hat and toed it to the police station. No case he had handled was so short of clues. Crime: Kidnapping Shergar. Leads: Nil. That was a hell of a way to start the investigation.

Jim Fitzgerald’s head was still so wobbly that what Murphy got out of him was hardly revealing. What stuck there was something Jim remembered about the gang mentioning a ransom of £2 million.

Drion had told the Aga Khan and Robert Sangster, but nobody connected with the syndicate was very open with Murphy. When he drove down to the stud for the second time he noticed a queue of hire cars full of reporters pulling into the Keadeen Hotel.

Murphy was pressed to hold a news conference on the steps of Newbridge garda station. “I really don’t have any news,” he said. “Look, I can’t say it was the IRA or anybody. Nobody’s seen the horse for sixteen hours. He could be anywhere.”

In his mind he suspected somebody had already contacted Drion or another member of the syndicate and discussed a ransom. But he had not been told. Next time he saw Drion he told him it would be the worst thing possible to even think about paying the money.

After four days Murphy was still without a lead. And the trail was stone-cold. The detective couldn’t even pin down positively that a £2 million demand had already been made to the syndicate.

A week went by. Then another week. The investigation was going backwards. The old cop couldn’t entertain the Press with new lines. The story slipped from the front pages and the lead item of TV news shows. Clairvoyants kept troubling him with visons and he followed up one or two. It was that bad. Where WAS Shergar? WHO was holding him?

The incident room had logged reported sightings in Libya, The Channel Islands and almost every county in Ireland.

More and more Murphy figured it must have been the IRA. He worked out that every day they kept the horse away from the stud it would cost the syndicate thousands. They would pay up for sure. In fact they never entertained paying. The Shergar case faded away. It went down as “unsolved”.

Almost a decade afterwards in 1992, the story stirred again. Sean O’Callaghan, an IRA top-gun turned informer, who ran the IRA’s Southern Command, began saying things inside Maghaberry prison, Belfast. He said his duties in 1983 involved high-profile kidnaps to raise funds for arms and expenses. Shergar was the first big one. O’Callaghan said another IRA terrorist, Kevin Mallon, a racing expert, was picked to handle it.

This is how his information became reported: “The horse quickly became distressed. It threw itself into a frenzy. It couldn’t be pacified. It was killed within hours.”

The IRA gang panicked. They dug a huge pit in the wild mountains near Ballinamore, Co. Leitrim, 100 miles from Ballymany. Shergar, his coat still glistening with the sweat of fright, was thrown in the hole and covered. The gorgeous animal, innocent of everything, was dumped like rubbish. His kidnapping and killing were a complete waste. Horses were like children in the policy of the IRA-expendable in pursuit of the cause.

Ballymany had been turned into a kind of Alcatraz. The new security systems were immense. But nobody ever went there without having Shergar’s stall pointed out. And those who worked there said his ghost was still around and they saw him in the paddock almost every day.