The killing of Eddie Fullerton: Many unanswered questions
Family demands public inquiry
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The Fullerton family have not received a single piece of
correspondence from the Gardaí in nine years about the killing of
their father
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On 25 May 1991 at 2.30am, a front door in Buncrana, County
Donegal, was sledgehammered down. Two men entered the house and
headed straight upstairs. [They passed five doors on the way,
until they reached the left-hand door at the bottom of the
corridor.] They clearly knew the layout of the house as well as
the occupants.
Eddie Fullerton, Sinn Féin councillor, was in his bed with his
wife. She said that as soon as Eddie heard the noise he was up
out of bed like a whippet. Eddie, at 57, had the body of a
35-year-old, the doctor who subsequently examined his remains
remarked. Broad and strong, the ex-professional boxer had a
stomach for a fight. There was a melee in the tiny, narrow
corridor. Shots were fired. His body took five bullets.
The killers fled the way they had come in - around the back of
the house to a hijacked car in the driveway of an empty house,
vacated only a few weeks previously, when the elderly female
inhabitant had been taken into the care of the health board.
Eddie's daughter and son lived in another two houses in the cul
de sac. The night before the attack, Eddie's daughter had moved
to Derry. She had left the house spic and span. Hours before the
attack it was noticed that the door had been kicked in.
Afterwards, Eddie's son Albert went into the house and discovered
that there were rubber trainer sole marks over the previously
clean floor and cigarette ash, but no butts, on the windowsill.
The killing was claimed by the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF), the
Ulster Defence Association (UDA) by another name. Author and
journalist Seán McPhilemy claims in his book, `The Committee',
that LVF leader Billy Wright, another leading loyalist and a high
ranking RUC officer, were among those who planned Fullerton's
assassination. In the book, a named Derry loyalist also alleges
crown forces involvement. He claims that a four-man gang, led by
a man identified as `BM', were transported in two D-40 Gemini
high-speed rubber dinghies across Lough Foyle to Muff, from where
they were taken in two cars to Fullerton's home on Cockhill Road
in Buncrana.
After the killing, the book alleges, the gang was driven out of
the seaside town at high speed before dumping their weapons and
clothing in a disused farmhouse in Muff, after which the two cars
took different directions - one to North Derry, the other to
Strabane.
The Garda response to this killing is at best questionable in
terms of appropriate police work. The distraught family was not
allowed into the house as Eddie Fullerton lay dead in a pool of
his own blood. This would be understandable were the gardaí
protecting the scene for forensic examination, but the family
insists that instead of combing the house for clues as to the
identity of the killers, the Garda Special Branch used the
opportunity to ransack the Fullerton house and remove any
documents or papers of Eddie's.
The family is fired by huge sense of injustice that the Gardaí,
at the very least, failed to protect a citizen. That same citizen
was an elected representative who had received two death threats
after he was effectively implicated by the Gardaí of involvement
in an IRA intelligence-gathering operation.
I heard this story as I sat in the house where the killing took
place, nearly nine years ago. Albert, Eddie's son, who still
lives in the house, spoke to me about how the family have not
received a single piece of correspondence from the Gardaí in nine
years about the killing of their father.
The family is convinced that Garda ``news management'' had put
Eddie in the frame as the information leak that allowed the IRA
to target UDR man Ian Sproule in Castlederg in 1990. It had been
alleged that information on Sproule's whereabouts and routine had
been passed to the IRA in the council offices in Lifford. Whether
or not this is true is another matter but it was in the public
domain. The Gardaí then stated publicly that they had interviewed
all of the Donegal county councillors and that all of them bar
two had been fully cooperative. At that time there were two Sinn
Féin councillors on Donegal County Council. Just to narrow it
down a bit further, the Gardaí also stated that information on
Sproule had been passed to a journalist at a roadside meeting in
Bridge End, the main route into Inishowen, on the way to Eddie
Fullerton's home.
Not long after this, Eddie Fullerton received a death threat in
the post from the ``Maiden City Action Force''. He did nothing or
said nothing publicly about it. He then received a second threat
and went public with it.
After the second death threat, things around the Fullerton
household became strange. A very fit looking man was observed in
a green boiler suit standing up the field behind the Fullerton
house. Albert one day borrowed his father's car and is convinced
he was followed all the way from Manorcunningham to very close to
the Fullertons' street.
One month before the attack, there was a knock at the door,
Albert recalls, and his dad went to answer it. He came back into
the kitchen and said: ``It's a lad selling cards for cancer
research - do you have 50p?'' Eddie then went out with the money
and came back in looking very angry. When Albert asked what was
the matter Eddie told him that when he went out, instead of
standing at the porch door, the `charity collector' was jumping
down from the stairs inside the house. The family are convinced
that this was intelligence gathering as to whether or not Eddie
had any metal gate security on his stairs.
After this, they knew that the Fullerton house was unprotected.
The attack could now go ahead. Eddie said to Albert that the man
had a County Derry accent. This would tie in with the voices of
the men who commandeered a B&B several miles from the Fullerton
home at the time of the attack. The couple who were taken hostage
in their own home stated that there were ``seven or eight'' masked
people, one of which looked like a female, and that most of them
spoke with South Derry accents. One of them didn't.
The woman of that house is convinced that the voice of the man
giving the orders in the group was the same voice she heard
subsequently from an unmasked man on a television interview -
Billy Wright. The intruders knew the layout of the B&B
intimately. They asked for keys to the car. The man of the house
(who has asked that his name not be used) offered them the keys
to an old blue working van but they told him they wanted the keys
to his new Mitsubishi. This car was only a few weeks old. They
knew that he had a sledgehammer and where it was kept. It was
this sledgehammer that was used for the door of Eddie Fullerton's
house.
The killing was claimed by the UFF as revenge for the killing of
Ian Sproule. The family is convinced that the loyalist killers
had high-level assistance in setting up this well planned
assassination. The level of planning and timing involved was not
the usual hallmark of loyalist killers when they operate
unassisted.
Eddie Fullerton's widow has said that she believes the claims of
collusion between the crown forces and her husband's killers
contained in Sean McPhilemy's book. The book also links
Fullerton's death to his arrest and detention in Strand Road RUC
barracks in Derry a few months before his killing. Mrs Fullerton
is also demanding that all the people implicated in her husband's
killing and named in `The Committee' should be questioned about
their alleged involvement.
Buncrana Sinn Féin Councillor Jim Ferry has called on the
Department of Justice in Dublin to reopen its investigation into
the killing. Particularly, the family wants an inquiry that will
focus on the role the Gardaí played in investigating the killing
and why their version of events does not fit with the facts in
the house.
Firstly, at the top of the narrow stairs there is a hot press.
This was covered in blood. The Gardaí said that this was Eddie's
blood and that he was, therefore, shot at the top of the stairs.
Yet Eddie's body was found around the corner at the end of a very
long corridor. Mrs Fullerton has said that her husband flew out
of the bed and there was a melée outside the bedroom door and
that's where all the shots were fired. The family believes that
one of the killers took a round from either his own gun or the
gun of the other shooter as Eddie Fullerton fought for his life.
Around the corner on the way down the stairs, just before you
reach the hot press, there was a picture hanging which was glass
paned. There was a bloody hand print smudge all the way down it.
Then the smooth, gloss painted hot press doors were covered in
blood. In the porch there was a bit of plaster missing from the
sharp edge of a wall - with human hair stuck in it.
As far as the family are concerned the Gardaí have written a
version of events to explain the bloodstains and where they were
found. Also the story of the first garda on the scene does not
fit as far as the family is concerned. The timings, says Albert,
between getting the call and arriving at the scene do not seem to
fit.
The family has also received information that exactly one week
before the killing the Gardaí received a call at the local
barracks that ``a man had been shot in Cockhill''. This is, of
course, what happened a week later. Was this to test the response
time, or to make a real call a week later seem like another hoax?
The guards have denied to the family that such a call was
received. Again, these are matters that would fall within the
remit of a proper inquiry.
Years after the killing, Albert was taking a short cut around the
back of the house on a disused railway line. It wasn't his normal
route. He tripped on a protrusion in the ground. He looked down
and was surprised to see a basic wooden structure - a platform
near ground level insulated by blue polythene sheeting nailed to
planks of wood. It was the length of a man and you could lay on
it and not get cold from the ground. Albert described it as a
``tree house at ground level''. He got into it and lay down. He was
amazed to discover that he could look straight into the Fullerton
kitchen from this vantage point. Albert said that the timber
looked old and that the polythene looked bleached pale from years
of weathering. He firmly believes that this was an observation
hide used by the people who planned the killing of Eddie
Fullerton but qustions why the Gardaí never found it.
The family told me that a senior Garda source in the county had
told them that they know who killed Eddie Fullerton, where they
lived and where they worked. Despite this, An Garda Síochána has
yet to send a single letter to the Fullerton family about the
murder of their father. Apart from ransacking the house of
Eddie's papers, walking past clues and devising an unlikely
scenario to explain the trail of blood upstairs, the Special
Branch also tried to distract the family from the source of the
murder. They were told very soon afterwards by a Special Branch
detective that ``this looks like it's internal''. He was asking the
family to believe that the IRA had killed Eddie Fullerton. The
Gardaí also said this to Sinn Féin Councillor Jim Ferry.
The killing, of course, was the work of loyalists, but it is
highly unlikely that these loyalists acted alone. This week, I
interviewed two of Eddie's closest friends. Firstly, I spoke with
Liam McElhinney, a Sinn Féin member of Donegal County Council
with Eddie at the time of the killing. Liam says that the lack of
any official recognition of the life of Eddie Fullerton was
shameful. ``If it had have been a member of Fianna Fáil - or any
other party - there would have been bronze statues all over the
county,'' he said. ``There is one small photograph of Eddie in the
council chamber, and I had to fight to get that!''
Liam was the last friend to see Eddie alive. Fullerton had left
Liam's home that night around 11pm. Liam stressed that this must
have been a very well planned attack, as Eddie kept no set
routine, not for any security reasons but just because he was
Eddie. A non-drinker, Eddie would ape the behaviour of guys going
on a bender; just by meeting someone and drinking tea till the
small hours.
Liam recalls that that about a year before Eddie was killed a
cache of British security force documents had been recovered in
Derry in loyalist hands. There were a substantial number of long
range camera shots of leading republicans. There was a picture of
Liam, one of John Davey of Bellaghy and one of Eddie. These three
pictures had been marked out for special attention. Across each
of them had been written ``DEAD AS DOORNAILS''.
Liam wasn't informed of this until after Eddie's death. John
Davey had been killed by pro-British forces in 1989. Liam also
confirmed Eddie's conviction in the weeks leading up to his
killing that he was being followed. Eddie told McElhinney that on
at least two occasions when he was leaving Liam's cottage late at
night he was sure that he was followed to Inishowen from Lifford,
where Liam lives.
other close friend and comrade of Eddie's is Pat Doherty, Sinn
Féin Vice President. Like everyone I spoke to in preparing this
article, the mention of Eddie opened a storeroom of warm memories
of this most charismatic of men and his ways. Then comes the
anger and the purpose. ``Given what we knew then about collusion
and all that we have learned about this British policy in the
succeeding years, it is clear that this was a killing carried out
with a high degree of collusion,'' said Pat. ``There is a pressing
need for an independent public inquiry to ascertain the full
facts. The family also wants a full public inquiry with the
appropriate powers to requisition documents and call witnesses.
They deserve no less. Only in this way will justice be secured
for Eddie Fullerton.''
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