Notorious serial killer was RUC agent

The loyalist paramilitary who shot dead Catholic taxi driver Michael McGoldrick in 1996 was a Crown Force agent, it has been reported.

Clifford McKeown (pictured) was a sectarian serial killer who is accused of being behind at least ten other murders. It has now being widely alleged that he was in the pay of RUC Special Branch for most of his time as a paramilitary.

In 1996, he infamously gunned down an innocent Catholic taxi driver as a “birthday gift” to loyalist paramilitary leader Billy Wright, also known as ‘King Rat’, who broke away from the UVF to form the LVF that year.

In 2003, he was convicted of murdering Catholic taxi driver Michael McGoldrick at the height of the Drumcree stand-off.

Lured to his death at the height of disturbances over the Drumcree marching season, the 31-year-old was shot five times in the head on a rural road outside Lurgan in 1996, leaving behind a still grieving widow and children.

Speaking for the first time to UTV this week, his widow Sadie described him as a very evil man.

Asked if McKeown’s death has given her closure, she replied: ‘’No, I don’t think you ever get closure. It is something that is going to be with me for the rest of my life.”

Their daughter Emma was only seven.

“I was my dad’s shadow, we were very close, she said. “I think it was also strange I don’t remember that I don’t have that, remember that, I don’t have that in my brain anymore, that it has also been taken,” she said.

His son Andrew said he had been “robbed of a father”.

“I was robbed of a relationship with my father. Simple things like watching the football, doing normal stuff that fathers and sons do.”

The UTV report indicated Crown Force sources had confirmed McKeown had been an RUC Special Branch agent for most of his time as a paramilitary - and also linked him directly to the sectarian murder of 18-year-old Bernadette Martin in Aghalee in July 1997 for the first time.

It is also believed McKeown has confessed that he had personally shot dead 20-year-old Gaelic footballer Peadar Fagan in Lurgan in November 1981. He was never charged with the killing.

McKeown is also suspected of being behind the savage beating and stabbing to death of teenagers Andrew Robb and David McIlwaine during a loyalist feud in 2000.

Urgent Appeal