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Crime Story Episode 30: Mark O’Connell

Host: Kathleen Goldhar

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: The following episode contains difficult subject matter. Please take care while listening.

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MARK O’CONNELL: There's a very famous phrase that emerged out of this scandal. The Prime Minister at the time gave a press conference the day after Macarthur's arrest in his attorney general's home, and he described the case as grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented. And that very quickly in the media became an acronym, GUBU. And that's still to this day used as shorthand for anything bizarre and unprecedented or any kind of absurd scandal that happens. People will say, oh, it's GUBU. In fact, when I was in university, there was a bar called GUBU not far from where Macarthur bought the hammer that he used to kill Bridie Gargan. So it's a phrase that's lived and is still alive in Irish culture and politics.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I'm Kathleen Goldhar. This is Crime Story.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Anyone that works in true crime will tell you that they get asked one question above all others: why? Why did they do it? And the truth is it's really so very hard to ever figure that out. We try, we talk to the perpetrators, we ask where society went wrong, and we look for the cracks that people fell into. But no matter how far down the rabbit hole we go, figuring out the exact reason why anyone commits a crime is more likely than not left unanswered. Our interview this week is with a journalist who spent years trying to answer that very question about one man and his baffling crimes. The crimes that Malcolm Macarthur committed in 1982 were as sensational and cinematic as you can get. A man who had been born into generational wealth and privilege kills two strangers and in turn, almost brings down a government. A few years ago, Mark O'Connell got the chance to sit down with Macarthur and ask him over and over again why he did what he did. Whether he got that answer or not, his book, A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention and Murder, is a fascinating exploration of that elusive question.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Your book is fascinating. And Malcolm Macarthur is a fascinating, complex character. So let's start with him. Who is he? Where did he come from? Tell me a bit about his background.

MARK O’CONNELL: Yeah. I mean, Macarthur was in the 1970s and early 1980s, a pretty well-known figure on the social scene in Dublin. He came from a very kind of well-heeled sort of quasi aristocratic background in County Mead, which is just north of Dublin here. And when he was in his mid-twenties, his father died, and he inherited the bulk of the estate and quite a large amount of money, enough to live off in a quite sort of luxurious way for several years, but not enough to live off indefinitely. So in the early 80s, he began to run out of money. And I guess for various reasons, and, you know, I try to dig into this in the book, instead of getting a job, trying to work to make a living, he kind of dug further into his aristocratic kind of upbringing and milieu and decided that, no, this is not what I'm going to do. I don't work for a living. I don't come from that context. So what he decided to do was rob a bank, pull off this kind of absurd bank heist. And so in the summer of 1982, he attempted to sort of get the two things that he needed in which to do it, which is a gun and a car. In the effort to acquire those two things, he very brutally murdered two people, two complete strangers. And it was a real sensation, a real shocking event in Ireland at the time. For about two weeks, there was a very public manhunt, very public investigation, kind of a media frenzy. And when he was finally arrested about two weeks later, he was staying with a friend of his, Patrick Connolly. He was staying in his spare room. And this is the reason, really, why the case became so kind of spectacular and still is talked about to this day.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So who's Patrick Connolly?

MARK O’CONNELL: Patrick Connolly was the attorney general. So the most kind of senior legal official in the country was harbouring, unbeknown to himself, it should be said, he was harbouring the most wanted criminal in the country. So it became this quite absurd political scandal and very nearly brought down the government and, you know, contributed to the fall of the government later that year. So it's a case that's kind of lived in infamy in Irish culture since then. And he was released about 12 years ago now. And he now is completely free, walks at his liberty around Dublin. And that's kind of where I intersected with him.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And so before we get to where you intersected with him, and you intersected with him obviously in more than one way. But we'll get to that. I want to ask you about the actual crimes that he committed. And so the first thing he says to himself is, I need a car. So tell me about how that crime happened in pursuit of a car.

MARK O’CONNELL: I mean, this is really the kind of the most notorious moment of the whole what he calls the criminal episode. It was the hottest day of the year. It was in the middle of a heatwave in Ireland. And he went to the Phoenix Park, which is a huge kind of park within the kind of periphery of the city. And there was a lot of people just hanging out and sunbathing and so on. And he walked through the park until he saw a car with an open door and a woman sunbathing beside it. And he had with him a hammer that he'd got in a hardware store, and a shovel which he had taken with him in case he needed to bury a body. He also had a kind of an improvised fake gun that he had made out of a crossbow that he'd acquired. And he kind of jerry rigged this thing to look, you know, plausibly like a gun. And so he pulled this thing out and told this woman that he was going to take her car. And there was a struggle, and he beat her to death with the hammer and he drove off. I say he beat her to death. It took her four days to die, actually, from her injuries, but he drove off with her in the car. And there was this like really absurd, horrific scene where he drove through the park and there was an ambulance that passed by going in the opposite direction. And because she was a nurse, this woman, Bridie Gargan, she had a sticker on her window. And when the people in the ambulance, driving the ambulance saw the car with the sticker on it, they assumed that this man who was a very well dressed man, very kind of well turned out, they assumed that he was a doctor taking an injured patient to St. James's Hospital, which is just on the other side of the park. And they gave him an escort through the park, drove him through rush hour traffic and got him to the gates of St. James's Hospital. He drove straight on through at the other side, abandoned the car somewhere nearby, and got on a bus and went to Leary, which is a kind of a suburb of Dublin. So the whole thing kind of snowballed from there and became increasingly absurd and violent.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Because he abandoned the car, but she was still in the car, and then she was discovered.

MARK O’CONNELL: That's right. She was discovered not that long later. And she remained alive for about three days and died of her injuries in hospital. But in the meantime, he kept going with the plan, essentially. You know, he didn't let this stop him.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: What did he do?

MARK O’CONNELL: So he had found in the small ads of a farmer's newspaper called the Farmer's Journal, an ad. There was a farmer down in County Offaly, but an hour away from Dublin, who was selling a shotgun, and he agreed to meet with him, went to Offaly to meet with him. There was a scene where he was taken to a field not far from the town by this farmer in order to try out the gun. He tried out the gun, shot it a couple of times. There was apparently a struggle, and he shot Donal Dunne point blank in the face and hid his body in some bushes and stole his car and drove it back to Dublin. Again, abandoned the car. So having committed two very brutal murders, he was back to square one. He was no closer to pulling off this robbery that he'd planned. And then he went to stay with his friend, Patty Connolly, in his apartment. And I guess in a way, that's sort of where I come in. It's one of the sort of entry points I have for this story, because Connolly lived in this quite sort of exclusive apartment complex in a place called Torquay, Bullock Harbour, which is just right by the sea, right by the Irish Sea. And my grandparents lived just right next door to Connolly. So I kind of grew up knowing that this crazy thing had happened in the place where they lived. And, you know, this man, this very famous politician had lived there, and he was, unbeknownst to himself, harbouring a murderer who was subsequently arrested in the house. So yeah, that was kind of the initial point of entry for me into the story such as it is.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And you talk a lot about how much the story gripped you growing up. Can you talk a little bit about some of the things that you thought about as like even a kid knowing this had happened and that your grandparents had this sort of gentle connection to it?

MARK O’CONNELL: Yeah. I mean, you know, I don't want to say that it sort of overshadowed my childhood or that it was an ongoing obsession or anything like that, but it was something that I would think about when I visited them. You know, I remember my father telling me about it. I suppose I was probably eight or nine years old. And, you know, I would imagine these scenes of the arrest and these kind of dramatic, almost sort of action movie type scenes unfolding. And, you know, I don't think there's necessarily a direct connection, but in my mid-twenties, I went back to college and did a PhD on the work of the Irish novelist John Banville and one about probably his most famous book. And certainly, I think his best novel is a book called The Book of Evidence, which is loosely but recognizably based on the Macarthur case. So, you know, I did my PhD on this writer whose great work was a fictionalization of this story that I had this kind of tangential connection to as a child. So those are kind of the two entry points into the story for me. And that sort of prepared the ground for what later became my, I suppose, unhealthy interest with this man, who I would then see, you know, walking around Dublin in the wake of his release.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: What was it about him that really garnered the attention too? Because I appreciate yours, but he became, like you said, I mean, a top writer chose his story to kind of base his fictionalized story around. Tell me what it was about Macarthur and the Irish that kind of kept this fascination going.

MARK O’CONNELL: Yeah, that's a really good and an important question, I think, because he occupies this almost mythic space in Irish culture. And part of that has to do simply with the way that he looks. You know, he does not look, for want of a better term, like the kind of person you would imagine committing such a brutal murder. He looked sort of very much like an academic, and that's sort of how he saw himself, you know, very much an intellectual. Tweed jacket, very fine shirts, bow ties. The bow tie sort of became this iconic symbol of his infamy in a way. And, you know, beyond that, there was his background. He came from a quite wealthy background, but also this connection to a social class that has a very particular place in Irish history and Irish culture, which is the Anglo Irish, the sort of Anglo Irish ascendancy or aristocracy, the descendants of the original, you know, English settlers who came here throughout the period of colonialism and occupied this sort of quasi aristocratic space in Ireland's history. And, you know, they didn't go away after independence. They were sort of sidelined by the culture. But, you know, they still exist and they still live in their big houses, many of them. And they've become more or less integrated into the mainstream of Irish society. But there is a difference. There is a definite sense of class difference and distinction. And Macarthur, in a complicated way, and I get into this in the book. Macarthur kind of struck this chord with Irish people. You know, they recognized him as one of these sort of post-colonial figures. And that, I think, has fed into the fascination with him, this sense of class distinction, of, you know, difference. That's certainly a big part of it. I think the other thing really is that although he was convicted, there was never really a trial. You know, he pleaded guilty to both killings, but there was only, he was only charged for the murder of Bridie Gargan. Because there were no witnesses to the second killing and they had got him on the first one, they decided not to charge him even with the second claim. And the trial itself lasted I think somewhere between five and seven minutes. So there was essentially no trial. There was no evidence heard. He never spoke. There were no victim impact statements. So it was this sense of, coupled with his obvious proximity to power, and this is really another dimension of the fascination. The fact that he was so, seemingly so well connected to the highest levels of Irish government, and the fact that there was no trial to speak of, there persisted throughout the 80s and well beyond, really, this sense that something was not being said, that there was some kind of, maybe some kind of cover up or something like that. But all of these things contributed to a sense of something, something unsaid and something not quite being right. And, you know, Macarthur had never spoken until I got him to sit down and speak to me.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So let's get to that. After 30 years, am I correct, he gets out?

MARK O’CONNELL: 30 years. Yeah.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah. And it took a little bit of courage for you to actually approach him, right? Like there were some false starts.

MARK O’CONNELL: Yeah. You know, you introduced me as a journalist at the beginning of the segment. And, you know, that's certainly not inaccurate way to describe what I am. But I'm not, you know, I'm not a professional journalist. And so I don't have that background and I don't have the, you know, the skills or the kind of mettle of a reporter. So there was an element of sort of naivete in my assuming that I would be able to just stop him on the street and talk to him and get him to open up to me, you know, to the extent that I could write a book. And what I didn't know was that Macarthur had been for many, many years, certainly since his release, a kind of a white whale figure for every Irish journalist and filmmaker and podcaster and documentary maker. And so and they had all tried to speak to him. They'd all tried to get him to talk, and he had always politely rebuffed them for a couple of reasons. The main one of which was that he was on a very strict, he was released under very strict licence conditions, one of which was that he must not speak to, quote unquote, a member of the media. So he was always able to say to people, actually, I can't. I just can’t talk. I could get brought back into prison if I speak to you, so I can't do it. I didn't know that at the time, but I had this sort of weird hunch that because, in a way, because I'm not a journalist, because I come from, I suppose, a kind of a more literary background, and that connection to Trinity College and my PhD on Banville and all these kinds of elements, that I might be able to sort of flatter his intellectual vanity, you know, and present myself as someone other than a crime writer or the sort of tabloid journalists who’d typically approached him in the past. And that is, it seems sort of absurd that it did work out that way, but that did actually, that did actually work.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah. So he agrees because of those reasons. And I guess he could say that he's speaking to an academic as opposed to a journalist.

MARK O’CONNELL: Yeah, there was a certain amount of wiggle room. I mean, I never presented myself as anything other than a writer.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Sure.

MARK O’CONNELL: You know, I described myself as an essayist to him, which is the sort of slightly absurd way of introducing yourself to anyone, particularly a convicted murderer who you want to write about their crimes. But, you know, that actually did kind of work, you know? And it's true. That is, for better or worse, that's how I think of myself rather than as a journalist. So yeah, he was able to kind of… that gave him, I think, enough, as I say, kind of wiggle room that, you know, I'm not an employee of a media company. So within the kind of letter of the law, if not the spirit, he was able to justify to himself, you know, talking to me. And in so many ways, I got lucky because although the lockdown in Dublin made it very difficult to track him down, by the time I did, he was lonely, you know, and he was kind of starved for human company, and he likes to talk. He's, you know, he's a real intellectual, and he likes to sort of vent his ideas and his theories and his historical knowledge and his scientific knowledge and so on. So I think he saw in me someone who was kind of a worthy interlocutor, someone who would, you know, be able to engage him in sort of intellectual conversation. And that was sort of one strand of our relationship as it developed. So yeah, I think in a lot of ways, I was just very lucky.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I want to get into your conversations, obviously, but I do… I was quite struck. I mean, I think it goes a lot towards his personality and who he is. You keep calling him intellectual. Clearly, the man is very bright. He's very well read, but he's not accredited in anything. I mean, he hardly went to school.

MARK O’CONNELL: Yeah, that's right. He passed himself off, I think fairly plausibly in his time before the murders, as, you know, people thought he was a university professor. People thought he was, you know, a professional academic, and he didn't do anything to disabuse people of this notions. I don't quite know whether he really lied about it, but I wouldn't be surprised. But that's why his self-image was very much one of an intellectual. And he, you know, I think in any kind of reasonable definition of the term, he is a very well read man. You know, he doesn't have any post-graduate degrees in his letter. He describes himself as, in various ways, as an independent scholar or an unaffiliated scholar. So yeah, he definitely identifies himself as an intellectual. And before the crimes, he spent an awful lot of time in libraries. He would just… I think this is part of his sort of aristocratic self-conception as well. The way that he talked about it, it was as though, and there's so much self-justification, of course, in this, as with so much else to do with Macarthur, but the way that he talked about it was almost as though to have pursued a career in academia, to have, you know, done a PhD like I did, or to become a professor and to work for a living would be a kind of vulgarity, you know, that it's a much purer and more pleasurable thing just to seek and pursue learning for the sake, for its own sake, and, you know, to publish books or scholarship and so on would be sort of a vulgarity.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Sounds funny, but at the same time, that actually seems to be what motivated the murders.

MARK O’CONNELL: Yeah, he committed those crimes, in a way, purely to continue that life, because he didn't want his time to be drained by working for a living. So the way that I think about the nature of his crimes or his sin is that he stole those two people's time. He took what remained of their lives. He stole their time in this world in order to protect his own time and freedom.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

MARK O’CONNELL: That's the nature of the crime, as far as I see it.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Tell me about those chats you had with him, because they went on for a long time. And you did try to get to get him to at least express to you what was motivating or where it came from. I found that fascinating because he sort of always seemed to go a little bit of a distance. And then he had a real ability to shut off reality. Like how do you describe the chats you had? Because they were incredibly fascinating to me to read.

MARK O’CONNELL: Yeah, comparatively little of our conversations were about the murders themselves. It took a long time for me to get him to that point. I really had to put in a lot of, a lot of hours of lecturing before I got to that point. You know, our relationship was it was a strange one. And these kinds of relationships, I suppose, are always strange by definition. But I wanted something from him, and he knew that. I wanted to try to make him make sense. I wanted to try to make his crimes make sense, to put them in the context of some kind of psychology, to put them in the context of his childhood, to make his motivations somewhat clear. And we did talk a lot about his childhood. That was something that he was happy to talk about. After the murders, after his arrest, it was an awful lot of material in the press about his parents, about his mother and father. His father, by many accounts, was an alcoholic, was violent both towards Malcolm's mother and towards Malcolm himself. And his mother emerged as a kind of a cold, neglectful, quite heartless woman. So these were the kind of visions of his early life that emerged in the media, and he really wanted to push back against that. He really wanted to portray his parents as good people, as decent people, as thoughtful people. And I don't really come down on either side.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah, I was going to ask you where you came down.

MARK O’CONNELL: Yeah. You know, I try to leave that up to the reader to a certain extent. I do feel, and, you know, there are moments where I'm fairly clear about this, that there is an element with Macarthur of, you know, he says that he wants to protect his parents’ reputation, that he feels it's only right that they are portrayed as decent people as he saw them. But I think that for him, if we were to see him as the victim of violence in childhood, as the victim of neglect, as the victim of bad parenting, a tough childhood, that would create a kind of a psychological profile whereby he would become the kind of person who committed murder. He would become someone who almost by a sort of a psychological necessity, would be the kind of unstable person who did these things that he really does not want to be. You know, he admits that he did what he did. He confessed to it. He talks about it, in some ways more or less openly, but he can't deny that he did what he did. But what he doesn't want is to be identified with those crimes, for those crimes to seem as though they emerged out of his psyche, out of his past, out of his childhood. That, he can't tolerate. So there's a real tension there at the centre of the book, because I'm trying to make a case for, you know, these murders didn't happen out of nowhere. There was something that enabled you to do them, and my sense is that it must have its origins in childhood. And he won't tolerate that at all. So that's part of the back and forth, the centre of our relationship and the centre of the book.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Did you ever come to any understanding of why he worked so hard to do that? I mean, I did find that interesting. He really tried to explain. You know, more than once, you talk about him telling you that he's a kind person and a good person, and what he calls the criminal episode was sort of a blip, and then he goes back to being a kind and good person. Did you have any sense later of where that comes from?

MARK O’CONNELL: Yeah. Well, you know, it's absurd in a way.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

MARK O’CONNELL: You know, it's almost comic the way that he talks about it, you know, as though, well, from the year, you know, whenever he was born, 1947 until 1981, it was a perfect flat line on the graph of morality. And then there was, admittedly, there was a huge spike in 1982, and then back to a flat line. So he wants to take a sort of a… it's as though he wants to take a, I’m not sure what the mathematical term is, but, you know, a mean average, as opposed to whatever the opposite is. And you just can’t do that when the spike includes a brutal series of murders. It's just not… it's not meaningful to try and take the kind of bigger picture. So I think he, as I said, you know, he really does not want to be identified with his worst moment. You know, he's making the case that, yes, I committed murders. I don't deny it. But that doesn't mean that I am, in my definition, in myself, a murderer. That's not who I am. Who I am is the guy who is very polite to people and who, you know, as he put it, gives money to the mendicants, gives €5 to the homeless people on the street or whatever. He wants to be identified with his better nature rather than these things which he did. You know, it's as though he's trying to say, well, this was, and he calls it an episode. This is a very charged term throughout the book, the criminal episode, the episode. And I think there's something very telling in that language. And throughout the book and throughout my relationship with Macarthur, I'm always paying very close attention to the language that he uses and what that language is doing, the sort of distancing effect and the kind of compartmentalizing effect of so much of the language that he's using. And I think the term episode is really interesting in that sense, because if you were to take his life as a narrative, that episode is just one chapter, and it can't be taken in isolation. There's so much more to his life story as he wants to tell us.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: But do you believe him? I mean, there's this one line that I sent to my producer. When I read it, it struck me as a great line, is that he is an unreliable narrator at the best of times, and now he is barely a narrator at all. And I know that was at a point where he was having trouble talking to you, but it did strike me that, and you approach us honestly, so this isn't a criticism, but this whole book is trying to figure out who he is through your interviews with him. But it comes down to the fact that a lot of what he tells you, I don't believe. And it sounds like you don't either.

MARK O’CONNELL: I don't believe it either. No. I shouldn't say that I necessarily believe that he's straightforwardly lying to me. I think one of the things that I learned about Macarthur and that still strikes me as very strange and interesting is that he's capable of believing his own version of events, you know? And, you know, I say in the book at a certain point that a lie is more revealing than a mere truth could ever be. And I think that's sort of the heart of the book, that there's a sort of a logic of frustration at play in the book a lot of the time where I'm trying to get to the centre of this labyrinth of a man, and I'm just wandering around in this sort of, to quote Eliot, Wilderness of mirrors. There is a frustration throughout, but actually, that frustration, that constant misdirection is part of what I find so fascinating about this subject. You know, the inability to get to the centre of the man to find a real core of truth, like an emotional truth or factual truth, that to me conceptually is very interesting. So I'm continually kind of energized by the sort of bottomless abyss of just not knowing, of not knowing what the truth is, of not knowing what he really feels, whether he really feels remorse. And in a way, you know, a lot of people have read the book in this way that there's something terrifying, not just about Macarthur’s kind of bottomlessness, but the implication that it's just impossible to truly know the mind of another person. And I think that's sort of what I'm getting at through this relationship and in this book.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Has Macarthur read the book? Do you know how he feels about it?

MARK O’CONNELL: Yeah. I knew that I would have to give him a copy at some point before publication, so I did. He read it a few weeks before the book came out here, and yeah, he was not happy. He was particularly angered by the way in which I pushed back against his story about his childhood and his parents. He felt that I had bought into the kind of what he saw as a misreading by the people who knew his family and who said that his dad was violent and his mother was neglectful and so on. And he also reacted very strongly against the way in which I analyzed his use of language, particularly his use of language around the murders themselves. And there’s a long sequence in the book where he talks about the killing of Bridie Gargan, and he uses this very strange distancing language. He uses, of course, distancing language throughout the book in various ways, but there’s a kind of an eerie absurdity to the way that he talks about the act of killing Bridie Gargan. And he talks about it in almost a medical kind of way. He uses a clinical terminology. He uses the phrase contrecoup, which is this neurological phrase meaning damage to the brain caused by impact upon the inside of the skull. So he uses this term as though Bridie Gargan was killed…

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah, like she killed herself in a way, because her brain reacted to his hits.

MARK O’CONNELL: Right. He's putting the causation at several removes. So what he's doing, whether he realizes it or not, and I don’t think he does realize it, but he's unconsciously saying that what killed her was the impact of her brain on the inside of her skull. And of course, the cause of that was him hitting her in the head with a hammer repeatedly. But he doesn't talk about that. Well, he does, but that's… he immediately slips then into the sort of clinical language, the language of expertise, the language of authority, the language of intellectual authority. And I analyze that in the book and try to think about what that means and what that says about him and his, in a way, incapacity to really countenance his own guilt and his own culpability. And he was… yeah, he was very angered by that. Yeah, he was enraged by it. So.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Like called you up and… was he calling you up and yelling?

MARK O’CONNELL: He's not much of a yeller, but there was… yeah, there was stern words for sure. And it's interesting because, you know, throughout the course of writing this book, one of the strange things was that I found it very difficult. There was this sense of real, you know, cognitive dissonance around how do I square this person, this polite, professorial figure who's, you know, sitting in front of me holding forth on a theory of relativity or, you know, John von Neumann or whatever it might be. How do I square that with this monstrous, violent series of acts that were committed in 1982 by the same person?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: The other interesting thing you talk about, you actually make a point of saying that you're actually not going to dive into the victims’ lives. And that is a trend to say I'm not going to focus on the perpetrator. A lot of times now, they, you know, actively don't even name the perpetrator. Tell me what went into your decision to, one, write a book about a man who killed two people.

MARK O’CONNELL: Yeah.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Giving him a lot of airtime and oxygen and then not spending much time on the people that he's, whose lives he took away.

MARK O’CONNELL: Yeah, I definitely went against the kind of cultural grain there in a big way. You know, I think the first thing to be said is that my initial decision was to write about this man. So I knew that I wanted to write a book about Macarthur, whether that was right or wrong. I was fascinated by the psychology of the perpetrator, you know, and so that was the given from the beginning. But I also thought initially, clearly, the right way to go about this is to give space in the book to the lives of the people who he murdered and to the suffering of the families who have lived with that loss ever since. And, well, a couple of things happened, the first of which was that, you know, I spent quite a long time reaching out to the surviving family members, Bridie Gargan’s sisters and brothers and Donal Dunne’s siblings as well, and none of them got back to me. And I pretty quickly learned that they just don't speak about this anymore. They spent a long time, and I, you know, quote fairly extensively in the book from them, they spent a long time talking to the media about their suffering. And particularly around the periods when Macarthur was up for release, they would be in the media and they would talk about what they'd been through very openly. But they've stopped doing that since he was released. They just don't do it anymore. And, you know, I totally understand that. I would not want to talk to me either, I don't think. You know, there's only so many ways in which you can relive and relitigate your own suffering from 40 years ago. And that sort of caused me to think in a different way about what I was doing, you know, their refusal to speak to me for the book. What right did I have to take the life stories of Bridie Gargan and Donal Dunne and weave them into this narrative about the man who killed them? That seemed to me to be questionable. You know, and I don't necessarily think that how I went about it was the only right way to go about it, but I just had to go with my instinct. And my instinct was that it felt somehow like a transgression against those people to take their stories and put it into the larger sort of container of his story. I just didn't want to do that, and I didn't feel like I had a right to do it. Now, I do give information about their lives, and I do talk about who they were. And I'm, you know, on the page, I grapple with the morality of representation, of choosing to tell the story in the way that I've told it. But I don't make them part of his story because I felt that to subsume their lives into his would be a kind of a, in a way, a form of violence in itself. That was just my instinct as a writer. I, you know, I still stand behind it, and I feel like it was the right thing to do. But I was not confident, actually, when I published the book, that people would read it in that way. You know, I really thought that because as I said, this goes against the, you know, the accepted morality of whatever you want to call it, true crime writing, that I would be potentially, you know, people would read it in bad faith, or they would just think that I’d made a morally catastrophic decision. You know, thankfully, that hasn't been the case. People have read the book on its own terms and have been kind of engaged by this, not just the decision itself, but the way in which I kind of openly grapple with the morality of it myself. So all of that has kind of played into the conversation around the book. And, you know, people have lots of thoughts about it, but luckily, no one has accused me of trampling over the memory of the victims.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Well, I think that openness to that conversation is very honest. I mean, That's the case with so much of what we do in this realm. Do you still think about him?

MARK O’CONNELL: Do I still think about Macarthur?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

MARK O’CONNELL: Yeah, all the time. All the time. Yeah, I do. It's still in some ways, it's still alive for me. This book, this relationship that's at the centre of it, there's something… in a strange way, there's something very open ended about the book, something unresolved, actually. And that's, I think, part of why the reaction to it has been as strong as it is because people, because it's open ended and unresolved, people have their own kind of theories. You know, people have lots of theories about what was going on with him, why he did what he did, what's going on between us. All of these, all of these things are questions that people want to give their own answers to, and that's kept it very much alive. So yeah, it's still… in answer to your question, I still think about him all the time. Yeah.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Well, great. I'm glad you brought us this story because here in North America, we don't know it. So I really do appreciate it. Thank you for joining us.

MARK O’CONNELL: Thank you so much, Kathleen. It was a pleasure.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You've been listening to Crime Story from CBC Podcasts. We drop a new episode every Monday. You can get our next episode a week early on CBC Podcasts’ YouTube channel or by subscribing to the CBC Podcasts’ true crime channel on Apple Podcasts. In addition to Early Access, subscribers to our true crime channel also listen ad free. Crime Story is written and hosted by me. Our producers are Alexis Green and Sarah Claydon. Sound design by Graham MacDonald. Our senior producer is Geoff Turner. Our video producer is Evan Aagaard. Our YouTube producer is Jon Lee. Executive producers are Cesil Fernandes and Chris Oke. Tanya Springer is CBC Podcasts’ senior manager, and Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

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Transcript: Crime Story, Episode 30

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