In Cold Blood

On the last day of 1972, like many other engaged couples round the world, Oliver Boyce, 25, a carpenter, and Bridget Porter, 21, set out to celebrate New Year's Eve together. They never returned to their homes in County Donegal, a few miles from the Northern Ireland border. Around 2 a.m. a local farmer heard about 15 shots and a scream. The couple's bodies were found later side by side in a ditch next to a lonely lane. Boyce had been stabbed in the chest and genitals; he had also been shot once through the head, once through the leg, twice through the chest and several times in the arms. His fiancee had been stabbed in the chest and shot four times in the head. Her brother had difficulty identifying the body.

On the first day of 1973, like many other Ulster workers for whom New Year's Day was not a holiday, Jack Mooney, 31, father of three, headed for the night shift at the Rolls-Royce plant on the outskirts of Belfast. As he and five fellow workers who were riding in a blue Volkswagen pulled into the employees' parking lot, ambushers opened fire. A hail of 20 bullets struck the crammed car. Mooney was killed and two of his colleagues were wounded.

Thus did the old year end and the new year begin for a troubled island--with three cold-blooded murders that underlined a relatively recent, and particularly ugly, trend in the terrorism that has stricken Northern Ireland since 1969. Street riots and open battles have almost disappeared; sniping attacks on British soldiers have eased off; even bombings have diminished, though they still can have horrifying impact. Three days after Christmas, a bomb exploded in a car in the Republic of Ireland border town of Belturbet. The blast killed a girl, 16, who was passing by on a shopping errand, and a boy, 16, who was in a nearby phone booth. But those deaths were accidental. The chilling trend is toward the deliberate killing of often obscure and apparently peaceable citizens.

The victims of these random assassinations accounted for 121 of the 467 violent deaths recorded in Ulster in 1972.

British authorities in Belfast say that the assassinations fall basically into two categories: those motivated by blatant sectarianism--extremist Protestants intent on murdering any available Catholic, and vice versa--and those motivated by revenge against suspected informers. In addition, say Belfast police, some victims have merely been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Of last year's 121 victims, 81 were Catholics, as were Jack Mooney and the engaged couple of Donegal (the first such victims in the Republic of Ireland). But each side has been guilty of particularly gruesome murders, which have overtones of both wartime atrocities and gangland executions.

Body in Freezer. Last month the naked body of a Catholic dairy worker was found in an East Belfast alley with the letters I.R.A. branded on his back. Also in December, a Protestant councilman from Armagh was kidnaped, taken for a ride south of the border, shot in the head, and his body was returned to Northern Ireland; a Catholic butcher was shot in the head and his body dumped in the meat freezer of his shop in Derrylin, County Fermanagh. Five days before Christmas, in apparent retaliation for the killing of a Protestant by an unknown sniper near a Londonderry reservoir, two masked men burst into the Top of the Hill, a Catholic-owned bar in the city's waterside district. They sprayed the room with a submachinegun and a pistol, killing four Catholics and one Protestant.

Authorities trying to investigate the sectarian killings have been frustrated by Mafia-like walls of silence. But the walls may break down as public horror mounts. Last week the Catholic Primate of All Ireland William Cardinal Conway and the leaders of the three major Protestant churches jointly urged all Christians to help "root out this evil and tell the murderers and assassins they are on their own." In Belfast three Protestants were charged with the gunshot murders of three Catholics between August and October. They are among only a handful of defendants to be brought to trial since the wave of assassinations began.

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