The Mind of a Murderer
The story of Malcolm Macarthur and his murders remains haunting and unsatisfying more than 40 years later
Once again, I am very grateful to you for reading The Debatable Land and more grateful still to those of you who have shared posts here with other people. Special levels of gratitude are, naturally, extended to everyone who has upgraded to a paid subscription.
In the summer of 1982 Patrick Connelly, then serving as attorney-general in Charles Haughey’s government, invited a young man to stay with him at his flat in Dalkey then, as now, one of the smartest Dublin suburbs. The young fellow, who was actually 34 and part-dandy, part-fogey, needed somewhere to stay, he said, while he attended to a number of business matters in the city.
Connolly knew him a little because he was the partner of a woman named Brenda Little who was a friend of Connolly’s. If the arrangement was generous, it would also have passed with neither incident nor notice but for one important detail: Connolly’s guest was a man called Malcolm Macarthur and he was on the run, being soug…