The Cold Case Files (4 page)

The premises itself was close to 200 years old and had once been a coach stop and hotel. In decades gone by, people heading between Dublin and the West by horse would stop at ‘The
Anglers’ for a break. The pub was in a quiet location close to the top of Knockmaroon Hill, near the western wall of the Phoenix Park. The pub was just a few miles north of Ballyfermot,
Palmerston and Chapelizod. The O’Byrne family turned ‘The Anglers’ into a major success. Its exterior was characterised by whitewashed walls and neat window boxes. With just a few
cottages along the quiet road which overlooked greenery many hundred feet below, ‘The Anglers’ was a little piece of the countryside on the outskirts of Dublin city. “People came
from Ballyfermot and beyond, Finglas and Cabra, to drink at ‘The Anglers’, it was a little oasis for them,” explains Ger O’Byrne. “It was set out on its own, and
‘The Anglers’ became a place where whole families came, your Granny came with you and the kids came with you. You knew everybody and they all had their favourite seats.”

For the O’Byrne children, there was no better place to grow up. “The whole area at the time, the best way to describe it is like the Dublin version of Walton’s Mountain,”
says Niall. “It was like you went back in time, it was the place that time forgot. From aged four or five we were all running around the bar. We grew up with most of the people in the pub,
they knew us. From about the age of ten we were sorting bottles in the morning and hoovering the lounge at weekends.”

When I interviewed Niall and Ger thirty years after their brother’s murder, we visited The Anglers Rest together. They showed me the door through which the two attackers had burst into
what was then their home. The O’Byrne family left in 1984, just three years after Lorcan’s murder. They simply couldn’t stay where their son, their brother, had been shot down in
such a random and callous manner before their very eyes. Newspapers at the time of the murder referred to the crime as having taken place in the pub itself. While the two raiders were indeed after
the pub takings, they never entered the pub premises; they violated the O’Byrne home upstairs. Eventually the family couldn’t bear to stay. The Anglers Rest was sold and the family left
the pub trade altogether.

John Meredith and his armed colleague wore balaclavas as they approached The Anglers Rest. It was around 11.30 p.m. on Sunday 11 October 1981. They had spent the earlier part of the evening at a
pub on Dublin’s southside. They had been in the company of a couple and another man, but sometime around 10.30 p.m. Meredith and his fellow criminal left the other three and drove from the
Dublin 4 area to Finglas, where they got a shotgun which was hidden in a hedge on River Road. They then drove to The Anglers Rest by going around the Phoenix Park via the North Circular Road,
Conyngham Road and Chapelizod and then driving up Knockmaroon Hill.

They parked Meredith’s car close to the pub and walked up the concrete steps at the side of the premises to enter the upstairs living quarters. The criminals had prepared balaclavas by
tearing off the arms of a jumper which they took from the backseat, and they used a pen knife to make slits for their eyes. Meredith later told detectives that soon after parking the car outside
The Anglers Rest, a yard light had come on which lit up the car park and two people walked by and he had quickly pulled off the balaclava. By the time he was putting it back on and getting out of
the car his accomplice was already out of the car and, armed with the shotgun, heading for the concrete stairs at the side of the premises.

They walked quickly across the veranda to the front door at the side of the building. The two-man gang knew they were entering a home, they knew the pub was the downstairs part of the building,
and the upstairs was a private dwelling. Perhaps they had been watching the patrons leaving the pub. Maybe they had seen the front door of the pub itself being shut. Perhaps they thought they would
just find the O’Byrne family still inside the building upstairs. As the two attackers approached the front door of the O’Byrne family home, Meredith’s accomplice was in front,
carrying a loaded double-barrel shotgun.

Even today, Niall O’Byrne’s recollection of that night is chilling. He relives it often. Niall was on the inside of that front door when Meredith and the gunman burst in. He was only
17 when his brother was murdered.

During the evening Lorcan, Olive, Ger and some friends headed out to another pub for a few hours. They wanted to come back to ‘The Anglers’ when it was quiet to have a bigger party.
When they later got back home to ‘The Anglers’ Lorcan’s mother had made sandwiches and they all headed upstairs to the sitting room for a party. Some friends were there, and some
of the bar staff who were good friends went up too. It was going to be a long night’s celebrating.

As it approached 11.30 p.m. Niall was standing at the front door with two of his friends, Eamonn and Roger. They were all just 17 years old. Eamonn and Roger were in the same school as Niall and
they did some part-time work in the pub. The three teenagers were some distance away from the party itself. The sitting room was at the back of the house. The three friends were sitting on a large
table and chatting away. By 11.30 p.m. it was time for Roger to head home. He said goodbye to his friends and Niall went to open the big hall door to let his friend out. He heard footsteps on the
outside, they seemed to be coming closer and were very quick. And then the whole front door came in on top of Niall and his friends.

At the back of the house, in the sitting room, no-one heard the sound of the raiders breaking through the front door. No-one in the sitting room heard the raiders attacking the three boys at the
front door. Roger jumped across a table, Eamonn turned and ran back into the house. Niall had been closest to the door and so was closest to the raiders as they entered. The gunman hit Niall in the
face with the shotgun and then moved quickly on into the premises. The other raider, who Niall now knows was John Meredith, then subjected Niall to a ferocious attack. “I remember seeing the
balaclavas and being pushed backwards,” he tells me.

The raiders never picked up the cash box; they fled empty-handed. When Niall saw the raiders flee the house, he still didn’t know that one of them had just shot Lorcan at point-blank
range. He had heard a bang but didn’t know his brother was fatally injured. Niall had run after the raiders, making it to the front door where he saw the raiders drive off. Over thirty years
later he has a clear memory of those moments. The two raiders got into Meredith’s car and couldn’t get it started at first. Niall had an interest in cars, and would later be able to
give a very good description to Gardaí. Meredith and the gunman fled in a green Hillman Hunter, a special edition Sunbeam model, it had double headlights with a vinyl roof. It was olive
green, and had alloy wheels.

Niall went back into the house and it was then that he discovered his brother had been shot. “A friend of Lorcan’s who was in the sitting room was a nurse and she was trying to help
Lorcan. We were all put out of the room. Then I saw him being carried out. That’s when I lost the plot.” Garda records show that the alarm was raised by a 999 call made from The Anglers
Rest at 11.36 p.m. that Sunday night. The raiders had entered the building around six minutes earlier. They had been inside the premises just two or three minutes.

Lorcan O’Byrne took the full blast of the shotgun in the left side of his chest. The State Pathologist Dr John Harbison would later determine that Lorcan had been standing about two yards
from the weapon when it was fired. Dr Harbison concluded that the shot was fired either from straight in front of Lorcan or very slightly from his left.

Lorcan lived for just over two hours after he was shot. He was rushed to St Laurence’s Hospital in north Dublin, where the Dublin Metropolitan Court is now located at North Brunswick
Street. Doctors did all they could, but Lorcan’s wound was too severe. His heart couldn’t take it and he passed away from shock and blood-loss at around 2 a.m. At 3.10 a.m.
Lorcan’s brother Ger was brought into the mortuary and in the presence of Sergeant Sean Ferriter and Garda Joseph McKeown, Ger formally identified the body of his 25-year-old brother.

When Meredith and his accomplice drove away from the scene they drove up the hill towards the junction of Knockmaroon Hill and Tower Road. Meredith later told Gardaí that they then drove
the same route back to Finglas as they had earlier taken—driving into Chapelizod and then along Conyngham Road, Infirmary Road, North Circular Road and into Cabra before arriving eventually
at River Road in Finglas. Even today, part of River Road is an isolated unmarked country road. It seemed like a perfect place to hide a weapon. Meredith and the gunman put the shotgun into a
plastic bag and hid it in a dense hedge. It was subsequently found by Detective Garda John Lyons during a planned search following Meredith’s arrest. Gardaí later did a test drive from
The Anglers Rest to River Road, nine and half miles away. It took them twelve and a half minutes.

John Meredith would later tell Gardaí that, having hidden the weapon near Finglas, he dropped his accomplice off at a location and then drove his Hillman Hunter on to Summerhill where he
threw the two balaclavas out the window. He went home to Ballymun but couldn’t sleep. He heard on the 6.30 a.m. radio news about Lorcan’s death. His met his accomplice an hour or two
later and they drove in convoy to Dublin Airport where Meredith effectively abandoned his car. The gunman then dropped Meredith at a pub in Ballyfermot. But as he continued drinking during the day
Meredith became worried that the Airport Police might come across the Hillman Hunter. The next morning, he and his accomplice went and retrieved the car from the airport. They bought petrol, which
they placed in a container, and they drove to an isolated field near Monasterevin in Co. Kildare. Having removed the engine of the car in an effort to hide the identity of the vehicle they then set
the car alight. The men then dumped the engine in the Grand Canal.

In the early hours of the morning of Sunday 12 October word came back to The Anglers Rest from St Laurence’s Hospital that Lorcan had not survived. As Gardaí began the crucial work
of sealing off the premises and taking witness statements, Lorcan’s family were absolutely distraught. The memories of that night have not dimmed with the passage of time. The Gardaí
who were there didn’t know what to say to the family. As one officer broke the news to the O’Byrnes, a number of Gardaí stood with the family and said a decade of the rosary. And
then they began the methodical and necessary process of taking witness statements.

Detective Garda John Fitzpatrick of the Garda Technical Bureau studied the sitting room door where the gunman had burst in. The marks were clearly visible where the gunman had used the weapon to
force open the door. When the shotgun was later recovered from near River Road in Finglas, the detective found paint from the O’Byrnes’ door on the barrel of the shotgun. The weapon
itself was an over and under shotgun—one barrel directly under the other. When officers examined the weapon they found that a degree of force was necessary to fire it.

Within days of Lorcan’s murder, officers began building up a profile of the two-man gang. Intelligence led them to John Meredith, a criminal from Ballyfermot with twelve previous
convictions. His first conviction was in 1973 when he was caught for housebreaking. He also had convictions for obstructing Gardaí and for road traffic offences. He was married with a young
child, and had previously worked as a labourer and a busker. Gardaí were on the lookout for John Meredith. They knew he was originally from Ballyfermot and they carried out enquiries in this
area and in other parts of Dublin. Just before 3 p.m. on Thursday 22 October, Detectives Jerry Nolan and Brian Sherry stopped a brown Rover car at Ballyfermot Road. Meredith was driving the car and
he was immediately arrested. The front seat passenger, a 32-year-old man, was also arrested. He was questioned by detectives investigating Lorcan’s murder and was later released.

When he was taken into custody John Meredith soon made a lengthy statement outlining his involvement in the attempted raid on The Anglers Rest. He told detectives that he and his accomplice
hoped to get about £10,000 from the raid. “On the night of October 11 we decided to rob the pub,” he told Gardaí. “We went to a field in Cabra where we had a gun
hidden and tore up a jumper which was in the car to make hoods.” On Friday 23 October 1981, less than two weeks after the killing, John Meredith was charged at Kilmainham District Court with
the murder of Lorcan O’Byrne. As part of a two-man gang to break into the premises, Meredith was part of a ‘common design’, and although he did not carry the shotgun or fire the
weapon, it was argued that he was partly responsible for the consequences. On 2 February 1982 Meredith pleaded guilty to manslaughter, and this was accepted by the State. Meredith could have got a
maximum sentence of life imprisonment, or a minimum of a suspended sentence. He got six years.