Viva Brighton October 2015 Issue #32

eported, ‘can be used to recover fingerprints from
surfaces on which they are normally obscure’. This
process apparently revealed prints belonging to
Patrick Joseph Magee, who was the subject of an
outstanding arrest warrant over a postal-bombing
campaign in 1979. But where was he?
***
“The press were hounding us for briefings,” Hill
says, and senior politicians showed “a very high
level of interest” in what was going on. “It wasn’t
pressure that we were feeling in the team; we just
got on and did it.” But, of course, Sussex’s Chief
Constable Roger Birch was under pressure.
He was in a difficult position. Though they’d
discovered the real identity of ‘Roy Walsh’ by
January 1985, Birch couldn’t make this information
public. “The feeling was that Magee wasn’t in
this country, and therefore, the whole issue of trying
to find him had to be handled very carefully,”
Hill says. “Had he become aware that he’d become
the main target, he had connections in other parts
of the world, as far as I understand it, so he could
have disappeared.”
Keeping this secret was so important that normal
PCs – even some of the people involved in the
investigation – weren’t told about Magee. “There
may well have been less than 100 people in the
country who knew they were looking for him,”
Parr says. “I’m just picking a number, but it would
have been kept very, very close in the investigations
team, surveillance and intelligence units.”
Yet, somehow, a Daily Mail reporter found out. The
paper planned a front-page story naming Magee,
and contacted Sussex CID chief Jack Reece about it.
‘Jack was horrified’, the journalist later wrote. Reece
had heard, from undercover sources, that IRA
operatives including Magee would soon be coming
back to Britain for another bombing campaign. The
story would have been enough to spook Magee.
The Mail pulled it. Magee came back.
On June 22nd, 1985 – eight months after the
bombing, and at least five months after the manhunt
began – he was spotted at Carlisle station by
undercover operatives.
“I can remember a story about the surveillance
officer quickly going to his partner, grabbing her,
and faking a great big passionate kiss so he could
look over her shoulder without being spotted,”
says Simon Parr. “Surveillance officers will do all
sorts of things to look normal.”
Magee was followed back to a hideout in Glasgow.
A team of armed detectives surrounded the place.
When they knocked on the door, Magee answered.
He and his fellow IRA operatives were caught with
incriminating evidence about plans to bomb various
resorts in South East England.
“Although you’re allowed, I think, a degree of selfsatisfaction,”
Hill says, “that very quickly turns to:
‘Right, now we’ve got the man, we’ve got to prove
it, and get a conviction in court.’”
Interviewed by police, Magee ‘never once replied
or spoke to them,’ the Argus reported. He pleaded
not guilty, but didn’t give evidence at the trial. He
was convicted. Steve Ramsey
With thanks to Simon Parr (who’s now Chief
Constable of Cambridgeshire), Graham Hill (now
working at Victim Support), Albert Mariner (now
running Acorns Camping, based near Angmering),
and Kieran Hughes, author of Terror Attack
Brighton.
Photo courtesy of Peter Chrisp
....35....