Murder In An Irish Town

“I can take her finishing with me”, John Gallagher told a relative just two days before he was to shoot Anne Gillespie and her mother dead.

“It’s the other thing I can’t take”.
The conversation happened at about 4.30am on Friday, September 16th, 1988, as Gallagher was being processed for admission as a voluntary patient to St. Conal’s mental hospital, Letterkenny.
The “other thing”, he explained, was the thought of her going out with other men.
It wasn’t that he was a jealous person, in the conventional sense of the word. It was far more than that. For three and a half years his relationship with Anne had been his sole source of self-esteem, the one thing which, in his own mind, had given him status with the people he moved among.
And now that the relationship was drifting away from him, he was inflamed with sexual jealousy. He couldn’t take it.

John Gallagher, a pudgy-faced 22-year-old van-driver, one of a family of nine from the border village of Lifford in Co. Donegal, had for a long time assumed that he would one day walk up the aisle with Anne Gillespie. It had come as a shock to him, the previous weekend, after an incident at Jackson’s Hotel, to realise that Anne wanted to end their relationship.
She’d been telling friends for months that she wanted out, or at least wanted a looser arrangement, that she believed she was too young – still at school and barely 18 – to make a life-time commitment. And, anyway, she didn’t feel a life-time’s commitment to John Gallagher. “She couldn’t find a right time to tell him,” a school friend recalls, “she knew there’d be a terrible scene.”
But what happened at Jackson’s and the following day left her with little option but to stiffen her resolve.
The two of them, along with Anne’s mother, Annie, and many of their neighbours from the Donegal Road vicinity in Ballybofey, had been to Jackson’s Hotel the previous Saturday for a wedding. By all accounts, the party went well. A photograph taken at the time shows Anne and Annie comfortable with one another as always, and plainly at ease. But shortly after the picture was taken Anne was asked out to dance by a neighbour, a fellow she’d known all her life, and she danced with him.
Her class teacher at St. Columba’s College, Stranorlar, recalls Anne’s description the following Thursday morning of how Gallagher had reacted: “When the dance was over John followed her back to her seat and reprimanded her… He told her that if he ever saw her so much as look at anyone else, never mind dance with them, he would fix her. He said he’d knock her down with his car and leave her crippled for life”.
Later, outside the hotel as guests were leaving, Gallagher leapt from his car, waving a knife and attacked the man that Anne had danced with. He came off worse in the ensuing melee and returned to the car with a cut arm. Then, as Anne described it afterwards, he sawed at the wound to make himself bleed more profusely, and held her down in the passenger seat, and dripped blood onto her face and hair.
Before he let her out of the car back at her home, Anne told him that she never wanted to see
him again.
The following day Gallagher called at Anne’s, pleading that “it must have been the drink”, promising never to behave that way again, offering to travel to a friary at Rossnowlagh to “take the pledge”, begging her to come for a drive and talk things over. Anne said “no”, she had to visit her grandmother who’d fallen and broken a hip the previous day. Gallagher offered to drive her the few miles to her grandmother’s home outside Stranorlar, Ballybofey’s “twin town”.
When Anne got into the car, Gallagher drove off at speed in the opposite direction, towards Barnesmore Gap and Donegal Town. Describing the incident, she would tell her teacher that he had touched a hundred miles an hour in his Fiesta XR2 and driven directly at an on-coming lorry which had to swerve off the road; that he stopped and threatened that he’d either kill them both or kill himself if she didn’t promise to resume their relationship; that she’d agreed to this, “to appease him”, that he’d then turned and driven back towards Ballybofey/Stranorlar.
As they drove along a narrow laneway, Gallagher swerved towards two young girls, Anne’s cousins, who had also been visiting their injured grandmother, so that they had to fling themselves into the ditch for safety. He later pulled into a side road, stopped, and told Anne that he knew she wasn’t serious about being his girlfriend again and that he “wouldn’t be made a fool of”.
The teacher recalls Anne’s account: “He said, ‘It doesn’t do to cross a fellow’. Anne then said that he put his hands on her throat and strangled her until she passed out. She actually thought she had died… Anne said she was terrified of Gallagher and was certain he would kill her.”
The teacher immediately approached the principal of St. Columba’s, a nun, telling her that, “I felt this pupil was in terrible danger and that I wanted police protection for her. I reiterated several times that I felt the situation was very grave”.
The teacher describes her reaction four days later to the news that Anne was dead: “On Monday morning when I arrived at work (the school principal) called me to the office. I had not heard that morning’s news broadcast. She told me that Anne Gillespie was dead – that Gallagher had been released from St. Conal’s and had followed her to Sligo and had killed both her and her mother.
“I was extremely upset and angry and stated that I felt the whole situation had been badly mis-handled and that it was a national scandal that a child should appeal to the authorities for help on Thursday morning and end up bullied, raped, terrorised and murdered over the next three days”.

When John Gallagher was tried, at the Central Criminal Court in July 1989, for the murder of Anne Gillespie, there was no reference to an alleged rape, and little mention of the incidents the teacher had in mind, of Anne being “bullied” and “terrorised”. On the second day of proceedings, prosecution and defence lawyers announced there was no dispute between them as to how Anne and Annie had been killed, that the only issue to be decided concerned Gallagher’s state of mind at the time.
Gallagher killed Anne and Annie at about 9.25pm on Sunday evening, September 18, 1988, in the car park of Sligo General Hospital. They’d been visiting Anne’s grandmother who had been moved to Sligo the previous Monday for treatment of her broken hip. They’d made the 80-minute journey somewhat cramped in a Renault 21 driven by Annie’s brother-in-law, along with his wife and three children – aged 14, 11 and 10 – and Annie’s mentally handicapped sister.
The party was fitting itself into the car to go home when one of the children called, “Mammy, there’s John Gallagher, and he has a gun”.
The three children and their mother ran stumbling, screaming, back towards the hospital, leaving Anne, Annie, and Annie’s sister in the back seat, and the driver sitting half into his seat, the driver’s door still open, as John Gallagher approached from behind, carrying a .22 semi-automatic rifle with a telescopic sight, holding it hip-high, right hand at the trigger, left hand on the barrel, aiming towards the car. He called: “Anne, get out of the car, I want you.”
Anne and Annie threw their arms around one another. Anne shouted, “Mammy, mammy, he’s going to kill me”.
Gallagher moved to the right-side rear door and tried to open it, still aiming the gun into the car. The door was locked. He stepped back and, putting the gun to his shoulder, swung rightwards and fired a shot, apparently at a lamp standard illuminating the car-park. He then turned and pointed the gun at the driver, who had stepped out of the car, aiming at his chest through the telescopic sight at a distance of a few yards. The driver recalls that, “He seemed completely calm, not in the least bit nervous”.
“You did me no favour this morning”, said Gallagher, and pulled the trigger. There was a click. Gallagher pumped the gun to put a bullet in the breech, stepped back, hesitated, turned to his left and fired a shot into the tyre of the right-side rear wheel. There was a loud hiss as air escaped under pressure. He turned back to the driver: “I’m giving you a chance to run, you’d better fucking take it”.
He moved a further step back, then a step to the left, which brought him to the centre of the rear of the car. He leaned forward, the butt of the rifle pressed into his right shoulder, aiming through the telescopic sight, his left-hand steadying the barrel pointed slightly downwards, the muzzle almost touching the rear windscreen, and fired a shot. The windscreen shattered, there was a scream, then Annie called out: “You’ve shot Anne”. The driver fled in terror towards the hospital shouting for somebody to get the Gardaí. He heard further shots as he ran.
Anne was shot three times in the neck, the entrance wounds in a line below her right ear-lobe, once in the face near her nose, and once in her left thigh. Annie was shot in the face, the bullet entering her nose and traveling upwards through her skull, and in
the right-hand by the bullet which had entered Anne’s thigh.
Anne had fallen sidewards, her shattered head on Annie’s lap. Annie’s left arm cradled her daughter’s shoulder, her right-hand reaching across her body to rest on her thigh, the way a mother might hug a tired child to sleep towards the end of a long journey.
Immediately he finished shooting, Gallagher jumped into his Fiesta and drove out of the hospital car-park. A few moments later, two Garda squad-cars arrived at the hospital. About five minutes after the shooting, the Communications Room at Sligo was told from the scene that two people had been shot dead and that the presumed culprit had fled in a white Fiesta and was likely headed for Donegal along the N15.
Just before 10pm, Gallagher crashed through a Garda check-point at Ballyshannon. Twelve miles further on, he slewed to a halt a hundred yards short of a second check-point at Donegal Town, reversed onto a garage forecourt and sped back towards Ballyshannon. Two armed detectives, one a sergeant, gave chase in a patrol car. About a mile along the road, Gallagher turned right onto a side-road leading to St. Ernan’s Pier. The Garda car closed on him, traveling at speeds up to 100 miles an hour, but was unable to overtake on the narrow carriageway.
Gallagher brought his car to a halt by the pier, broadside-on in the middle of the road, facing onto the pier, engine still running, headlights blazing. The Garda car stopped 30 yards short, both headlights and a roof-mounted spotlight shining on the Fiesta. The two detectives got out and took up firing positions with Uzi sub-machine guns. As they did, Gallagher half-emerged from the car, carrying
a hand-held spotlight which he in turn shone on
the Gardaí.
Ignoring calls to “put your hands in the air”. Gallagher then reached with one had into the back seat of the Escort and lifted out the rifle. For a moment he hesitated, crouched by the open driver’s door as the Gardaí flanked the patrol car 20 yards away with guns trained on him, the entire scene brilliantly lit.
The detective sergeant raised his sub-machine gun and fired two shots over Gallagher’s head. Gallagher dropped his spotlight and moved as if to bring his rifle into a firing position. The sergeant fired two more shots, shouting: “The next one will be through your head”. Gallagher lowered himself back into the car, holding the rifle out away from him in his right hand, then dropping the gun onto the road as he revved the engine for twenty seconds or so, all the time looking directly at the Gardaí as, after a moment, they moved forward, guns still at the ready.
Before they reached him, he screeched off suddenly at high speed and drove the car off the end of the pier. It somersaulted and landed on its roof, then glided out a few yards before submerging in five feet of water around 25 yards from the end of the pier, only the tyres of its rear wheels showing above the surface.
The detective sergeant and one of a number of other Gardaí who now arrived stripped to their underclothes and swam out to the car. They discovered that Gallagher had handcuffed himself to the steering wheel, but managed nonetheless to manouvre him so that his head was above water.
He wasn’t breathing and there was no sign of a heart-beat.
One Garda pumped his stomach while the other delivered a series of “pre-cordial thumps” to Gallagher’s breast-bone while a nurse who had arrived on the pier in an ambulance shouted instructions. Gallagher revived, was freed with wire-cutters, and taken in the ambulance back to Sligo Hospital, driving in past the now roped-off area where Anne and Annie Gillespie still lay, huddled together, dead, in the back seat of the car.

During the trial, considerable attention was focussed on John Gallagher’s behaviour immediately after the killings. Defence counsel described in detail how he had crashed through the Garda check-point, hand-cuffed himself to the steering-wheel, driven into the sea, been rescued and revived. Was that, he invited the jury to consider, the action of a sane man? And there was other evidence presented to suggest that Gallagher was an immature man of weak personality and erratic judgement and behavior.
Whether the evidence provided a basis for a plea of “guilty but insane” was a matter of dispute between psychiatrists at the trial. One consultant at the General Mental Hospital, Dundrum, testified that Gallagher’s judgement and emotional control had been “gravely impaired” at the time of the killings. He agreed that slimming tablets, which defense counsel told him Gallagher had been taking in “massive doses”, could produce psychosis and delusions of persecution, irritability, over-activity and loss of judgement.
However, another consultant at Dundrum told the court that while Gallagher “was under a lot
of pressure and may have been under the
influence of tablets”, he could “find no evidence of mental illness”.
Friends and relatives of the dead woman who listened to the evidence in court found it frustratingly inexact. They were also concerned about the weight given to the supposed influence on Gallagher’s behavior of slimming pills. The suggestion that Gallagher had been taking such pulls in “massive doses” was not contradicted during he trial, and the judge, in his summing up, told the jury as a fact that, under the influence of the pills, Gallagher had lost six stone in under three months.
Friends and relatives of the Gillespies who had been in contact with Gallagher in the relevant period treat this suggestion with derision.
Gallagher was found “guilty but insane” by 10 votes to two.

It was a verdict about which many people in the Ballybofey/Stranorlar area felt extremely unhappy at the time, bitter even – and that feeling of deep unease persists, even now. While the matter of slimming pills, and a number of other specific aspects of the trial, loom large in their complaints, there is something deeper troubling them too, a feeling, vaguely expressed but nonetheless intense, that, somehow, Anne and Annie Gillespie were belittled in the process. It’s not an indication of hatred, or of thirst for revenge, but a feeling of pain that small value has been put on the lives of people whom they loved.
In many ways, there was nothing out of the ordinary about Anne and Annie Gillespie, although Annie had shouldered in her time more than her fair share of grief. She’d been married twice, first to a man from a farming background who had died from injuries he had received years earlier in a road accident, then to Tommy Gillespie, a ganger with Donegal County Council, who died from a heart attack just over a year after their marriage. Anne was three months old at the time. Anne and Annie then moved into the two-bedroomed house on the Donegal Road on the outskirts of Ballybofey, where they were to live for the rest of their lives.
Annie was one of a close-knit family of 11 from Cooladawson, about three miles outside Ballybofey. So while she and Anne lived a fairly self-contained life at Donegal Road it was amidst a large, extended family scattered around the district. It would have been a rare day they had no family visitors.
Annie worked for a time in a sweet factory in Lifford, about 10 miles away, then as a cleaner for a doctor and others around Ballybofey. She wasn’t well-off, but was secure enough for her and Anne’s life-style.
She was handsome, quiet-spoken, even-tempered. Nobody who knew her can remember her ever, in any way, causing harm to anybody else. She was never in anybody’s debt. “If you gave her a lift, she’d leave round a packet of cigarettes or something the next day”, recalls a relative. “If you protested she’d say ‘Ah now, petrol costs money’”.
She was a particular favorite with the horde of nieces and nephews who were constant callers. “What I remember most about my aunt Annie”, says a niece, “is apple cakes and sandwiches. She made terrific corned-beef sandwiches”.
Among the items recorded as being in her handbag when she died were three packets of crisps, bought in advance for the children on the journey home.
She was very house-proud. “It was like a doll’s house when you went in”, says a school-friend of Anne’s, “always spic and span, with crocheted doilies and little vases everywhere, and pictures with little gilded frames”.
She tended the small garden at the front of the house, and took great pleasure in her roses. She was punctilious about her religious duty. The idea of missing Sunday Mass simply wouldn’t have occurred to her. She took no interest in politics, didn’t like to miss Glenroe, occasionally went to bingo at the Isaac Butt Hall in Ballybofey. Most of all she seems to have lived for Anne. From the time she was a toddler, Anne was always impeccably turned out and the sense of style and colour co-ordination was to stay with her through the rest of her short life.
The two went shopping and to Mass together, regularly travelled out, sometimes on bicycles, to Cooladawson on Sundays to visit Annie’s mother. For a number of years, they took a week’s summer holiday together in a caravan owned by an in-law at Rossnowlagh, on Donegal’s Atlantic coast. “Anne was her shining joy”, says a neighbour.
Having been one another’s main company for so long, Anne and Annie sometimes seemed as much best friends as daughter and mother. “You wouldn’t think of criticising Anne to Annie, or the other way round”, says a relative. “Neither of them would hear a word against the other”.
As the only child of a widowed mother, Anne, inevitably, had been regarded with some tenderness by those around her, an experience from which she seems to have emerged remarkably “unspoiled”. In her pre-teens, as a neighbour put it, “she had a bit of the tomboy in her”.
A little later she developed an interest in the usual things – clothes, pop singers, discos and the like. She had a record-player in her bedroom where friends recall her listening to “middle-of-the-road music, early seventies stuff, anything in between Kylie Minogue and The Cure”.
As she entered her teens Anne developed into a striking young woman, as impressive, it seems, for her personality as for her looks. She was one of a well-defined group of four friends at St. Columba’s, a mixed school, now with around a thousand pupils drawn from the Ballybofey/Stranorlar/Castlefin area of Donegal.
Says a teacher: “Sometimes you see a group in school who stand out as a special group of friends, who do everything together, so that you never see one without the other. This was a beautiful, smiling bunch”.
The four girls weren’t obsessive about academic achievement, far from it. “They’d tend to be the last into the class, and when they’d sit together they’d chatter. I’d say to them, ‘Look, you know you’ll distract one another if you sit together, why don’t you separate?’. And they would for a day or two. Then I’d look down and there they’d all be again, all together, laughing and whispering”.
They talked about boys, passed one another giggly, adolescent notes. Most lunchtimes they spent in a local café, Pat’s Pantry, eating plates of chips or tea and scones and exchanging banter with acquaintances.
Anne, was, by common consent, one of the best-looking girls in the school. She was of average height, maybe five-four, with what would conventionally be called a “great figure”. She had a smooth, strong, distinctively Irish face, with dark eyes and a luxuriant mass of deep-red hair tumbling down around her neck. Nobody failed to notice her hair.
“Everybody knew who she was when she was killed”, says one acquaintance. “If they didn’t know her by name they knew her as ‘the girl with the red hair’”.
She’s remembered at St. Columba’s, too, for her perfect copper-plate writing and a natural talent for design. While her school-work was competent rather than brilliant, it was always beautifully presented.
She had passed her Leaving Certificate comfortably in the summer of ‘88 and started a secretarial course. She worked some evenings in a local shop, and occasionally as a waitress at Jackson’s for weddings and weekend functions.
“I don’t think she had a clear idea what she wanted to do”, says a teacher. “She’d have done well at anything involving dealing with people”.
“Anne and her mother were really very content together”, says a neighbour. “I remember the last time I saw the two of them, walking along the road, arms linked”.
Of course, they constituted an unusual family unit for Ballybofey, for Ireland, two women together, no man about the house. In some ways it was almost an idyllic existence – but one that could not have lasted indefinitely. No one, however, could have imagined that it would be shattered with such savagery…

Anne Gillespie met John Gallagher when she went with a crowd to a disco at the Inter Counties Hotel in Lifford when she was going on 15. He was four years older. The following evening he called for her to Donegal Road in a car. He was to be her first and only steady boyfriend.
John Gallagher was the third youngest, and the youngest boy, in a family of four boys and five girls. His father was a tough-minded, hard-working man who had built up a business as a general dealer and builder’s supplier and by the sixties had become a well-established, substantial figure in Lifford. John’s mother was originally from Brocagh, farther west in Donegal.
By 1988 all six of John’s older sisters and brothers were married, five of them living in the vicinity. Only John and his two younger sisters were left with their parents at home. The family was worried about John.
He’s remembered from his early days at the Coneyburrow Road national school as a slow learner with a quick temper – but not as a “problem”. It was after his accident in June 1979, a fortnight after his 14th birthday, that he began to give serious cause for concern.
He was the front-seat passenger in a van driven by a brother when it crashed in Castlederg in Tyrone. John suffered a broken leg, bad cuts to his face and head-injuries. He was rushed to Altnagelvin Hospital in Derry in a British Army helicopter. The “mercy flight” prompted considerable publicity at the time. He was detained at Altnagelvin for seven weeks and attended specialists in Derry and Belfast for two years afterwards. Psychological effects lingered, too, and he was treated by a psychiatrist for some time.
Inevitably, in the circumstances, the family was “soft” about John. One of the psychiatrists told the trial jury that following the accident “the accused man’s family appeared to grow lax in their attitude to his behavior and were inclined to give him whatever he wanted”.
Before the accident he had had difficulty with reading and writing. Now he was effectively unable to read or write it all. His behavior in class became petulant and disruptive, and he was transferred to a technical school in nearby Raphoe. Things didn’t work out there either. He tended to pick quarrels – not necessarily physical fights – and to take a truculent attitude to teachers.
Classmates regarded him as boastful and sarcastic in conversation. Says one: “Maybe it was his way of handling the fact that he wasn’t able for the school-work. He’d jeer at you if you were praised by a teacher. He wasn’t in any group. I don’t think he had close friends at the school”.
After a meeting between his parents and teachers he left school before his 15th birthday and went to work for his father, for a regular wage, mending punctures in the yard and doing odd jobs. By his 17th birthday he was able to buy his first car. He loved driving cars. Asked about him today, people in Lifford mention first – not as an affectionate memory – the way he used to “roar” around their town. When he was 19 he received £16,000 compensation for the accident, which helped him graduate to faster vehicles.
He drank too much, favoring vodka and coke, and had a couple of petty convictions, for malicious damage and assault. But a Garda report prepared for his trial described him as, from their point of view, “generally well-behaved”.
Meeting Anne changed his life. From the outset, even for an immature 18-year-old enraptured in first-love, he was unusually attentive, calling at her home virtually every night. His maternal grandmother lived nearby, and he was soon something of a fixture in the area. He and Anne would occasionally go to dances or discos at Pharoah’s in Jackson’s, or the Limelite in Glenties, sometimes as far away as the GAA club in Omagh. Frequently they’d just sit in and watch television.
He would regularly meet her from school in his car, which was something of a feather in the cap of a young one.
Within a short time he was occasionally staying overnight: Anne would sleep in with Annie. Less than a year after they met he had his own key to the front-door. He began taking responsibility for domestic chores: it was John who would do wall-papering, put up shelves, do the driving on Sunday outings, whatever. He involved himself in “family” discussions or decisions.
Relatives say now that Annie was uneasy about the relationship from an early stage, but that, “She trusted Anne totally and wouldn’t stand in her way. And nobody else was going to intervene from outside”.
It might have been different, some say now, if Anne had had an older brother: if there had been a man about the house, John Gallagher would never have achieved the role he was able to acquire. In effect, he became the man about the house.
Says an uncle of Anne’s: “He had the run of the house, then he was starting to rule their lives. He was talking about building a house behind Annie’s for him and Anne to live in. Anne would be vague about it, try to turn it into a bit of a joke. Annie would say nothing. But he went on as if he took it
for granted.”

He talked to acquaintances in enthusiastic terms about his and Annie’s future life together, boasting that he had “the best-looking girl in Donegal signed up...”.
The Gallagher family, understandably, were well-pleased that John had found a context in which he seemed confident and socially self-assured, and which promised stability for the future: he had “settled”.
Anne, however hadn’t taken it as read that her future was settled. Her friends say that while she certainly saw herself as “John Gallagher’s girl”, she didn’t talk life-time commitment or marriage: and, indeed, in the last year of her life she began voicing disquiet.
She told one friend that she “wanted some space of her own”. And a workmate she confided in says: “She wanted a looser relationship. She felt hemmed in at not being able to dance with other fellows, even, because John wouldn’t like it”.
As she reached her 18th birthday and had passed her Leaving, Anne’s horizons were widening. She talked to one friend about Green Cards and Donnelly Visas and the possibility of working in the United States. It was idle conversation, not practical planning. But it’s notable that the potential stumbling-block she mentioned in relation to the idea had to do with her leaving Annie alone – not John Gallagher.
At the same time, Gallagher’s possessiveness towards her seemed to intensify. A friend recalls: “Some nights when she was working in the shop from seven to ten, he’d sit outside in the car the whole time, waiting for her to finish”.
She was hurt when he went to the Michael Jackson concert in Cork in late July 1988 in a party which included other girls, leaving her behind. For the first time, according to relatives, she was openly angry. “If I did that to him he’d go mad”. They began having rows, culminating at the incident at Jacksons’s. The writing was on the wall for the relationship - but ominously John Gallagher desperately wanted to turn the clock back, to revive the fantasy of future happiness together that he’d created.

In the days immediately after the row at the wedding and the “strangling” in the car, Gallagher made a number of efforts to persuade Anne to have him back. He called at her home on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. He bought her a watch to replace the one he’d broken while struggling with her on the Sunday. He repeatedly promised to mend his ways. Anne was non-committal when speaking to him, but made it clear to her friends that she wanted a clean break.
On Wednesday evening she told Annie she was frightened. She couldn’t find a way of ending the relationship and feared that Gallagher might come to the house after school the next day. Annie was scheduled to visit her mother in Sligo, so Anne would be alone. Annie told her to talk to a teacher the next morning, ask for advice.
The class teacher advised Anne to phone Gallagher’s parents and explain her dilemma, which she did in her lunch break. She told her teacher that John’s mother had appeared sympathetic, but that his father had seemed upset that she wanted to end the relationship.
The teacher recalls: “She was terrified in case John would be angry if he heard she had contacted his mother. We discussed the possibility of getting her away to a safe place... Anne was willing to leave Ballybofey for a while but was afraid John would hassle her mother. I told her it sounded like police protection was the only real answer, and she agreed”.
The teacher then asked Anne whether she really believed that Gallagher would kill her, given that he could scarcely hope to get away with it. “I asked her to consider this question very carefully, to take five minutes.”
“When I returned five minutes later, she said that she had no doubt that Gallagher would kill her. She felt he had already made up his mind. She said: ‘Miss, if I am not given some form of protection, by next week you’ll be singing at my funeral’”.
As a result of her teacher’s approach to the school authorities, Anne was given a lift to Donegal Road by a nun after school, the idea being that she would stay with her next door neighbours until her mother arrived home from Sligo at tea-time. However, after being dropped off by the nun, Anne discovered that her neighbour wasn’t home. She went into her own house. John Gallagher arrived a few minutes later, letting himself in with his own key.
About 40 minutes later a man working in a garage across the road heard a woman’s screams. “I saw John Gallagher’s car across the road with Anne hanging out of it. Her head and shoulders were lying out the passenger door. He seemed to have her legs trapped inside. He was trying to pull her in and close the door, she was writhing and struggling to get away. You could see it wasn’t an ordinary row. She was fighting for her life”.
The man recalls running across the road, grabbing Anne by the shoulders and “roaring” at Gallagher to let her go. Gallagher released her and drove off.
A woman working in an office alongside took Anne in and tried to comfort and calm her. “I remember looking at her sitting there, shaking with sobs and running her fingers through her hair over and over again. She looked very young.”
“I put my arms around her and hugged her and tried to tell her it would be alright. But she said: ‘No, he’ll kill me. Even if I move away from here he’ll come after me and find me’”.
A few minutes later a sister of Gallagher’s arrived in the office to tell Anne that John was in his grandmother’s a short distance away: would she not come and talk with him.
Gallagher’s father, and then his mother, phoned the office with the same request.
Gallagher then reappeared in the forecourt outside the office in his Fiesta. He revved the car and drove it towards the office’s full-length plate glass window, stopping just short. He repeated this manouvre a number of times. Then he came into the office.
“He was completely calm and very self-possessed”, says the woman who had been comforting Anne. “He ordered me out of my own office - and I went. Then his sister came back and went into the office too. They were talking to Anne. I couldn’t hear everything from outside, but I heard Anne saying ‘No’ over and over again. She was still extremely distressed. I heard her begging John Gallagher to give her back the key of her house, and him saying, ‘No’”.
The owner of the business then arrived, at which point Gallagher and his sister left.

For the rest of that Thursday evening there was chaotic coming and going in Donegal Road, around Anne and Annie’s house, their next-door neighbour’s, a local doctor’s and the nearby home of a Garda sergeant. Among those involved were Anne and Annie and various of their relatives, John Gallagher and another of his sisters, nuns from St. Columba’s, Gardaí, neighbours. There was argument and some recrimination, and discussion about what Anne should do.
Eventually, with Annie’s encouragement, and at the firm insistence of a woman neighbour who accompanied her, Anne visited a local doctor who prescribed the “morning after” pill.
John Gallagher arrived at the house, asking to see Anne. Anne was next door, now being urged by her neighbour to go to the Garda station and make a complaint. She was unwilling to come out while Gallagher was in the vicinity. After angry exchanges with relatives of Anne and Annie, Gallagher left. Later, beginning near midnight, Anne made a statement to a Garda sergeant in the sitting room of her home, in the presence of one of the nuns, while friends and relatives waited in the kitchen. She told that Gallagher had followed her into the house that afternoon: “I told him I needed a break and he told me he would never give me one. I then came into the sitting-room and sat on the sofa. He knelt in front of me and said something like, ‘I am going to have sex with you’. I said ‘no’ and was crying... I said, ‘What are you doing to me?’. He was angry looking... grabbed me by the two elbows and pulled me to the ground. John was on top of me... my skirt up around my hips. He kept coming at me... my head under the arm-chair nearest the door. I don’t know how far it was in... had a hold of my nose... hand over
my mouth...’”.
Meanwhile Gardaí and a doctor had been called to Gallagher’s home in Lifford, where John was threatening members of his family. He fled when Gardaí arrived, reached Lifford Bridge and threatened to jump into the Foyle if he wasn’t taken to Ballybofey to talk to Anne. The Gardaí on the spot – unaware of the allegation of rape – conveyed him to Ballybofey, with - in a bizarre twist - Gallagher driving the
Garda car.
Shortly after she’d signed the statement alleging rape, a Garda called at Anne’s house saying that John Gallagher was outside and wanted a word with her. Anne refused and the Garda left.
Gallagher was driven back to Lifford by the Gardaí, where he again took up position on the bridge. This time, Gardaí and his family persuaded him to come down and go into St Conal’s in Letterkenny for treatment. He was admitted as a voluntary patient at 5am. Ballybofey Gardaí arranged that his clothes be ‘impounded’ for forensic examination.
Later that morning a Garda sergeant and a ban Garda from Letterkenny visited Anne. They told her that Gallagher was in St Conal’s. The ban Garda explained the procedure which would now have to be followed, and described the medical examination which would be involved, in processing her complaint. Anne told them she wanted to abandon the complaint. She explained to family and friends that she felt safe now, enormously relieved that Gallagher was in St Conal’s. Moreover, she feared she would be ‘shamed’ if the case went to court.
Later in the day she visited the home of the Garda sergeant who lived nearby, asking how long Gallagher would be detained at St Conal’s, repeating that she was “terrified”, asking whether she could be told in advance of any plans for his release. The sergeant promised to speak with staff at St Conal’s after the weekend and to keep her informed.
He told her he thought she was wrong to have withdrawn the complaint of rape, that she could still reinstate it. Anne referred to media coverage of the way victims could be abused by lawyers in rape cases, and said that she felt much safer now, anyway, with Gallagher out of the way.
During the day, Gardaí at Ballybofey, following standard procedure, phoned the Gallagher home in Lifford to say that John’s clothes were no longer ‘detained’, the rape allegation having been withdrawn. At 7.45pm that evening, John was released into the custody of his father and sister, against medical advice.
The following Saturday, a relative of Anne’s on her way to mass saw Gallagher’s car headed in the direction of Donegal Road. When Ballybofey Gardaí were contacted, they pointed out, accurately, that there was no “live” complaint against him and that, officially, there was little they could do.
Nevertheless, when Gallagher turned up at Anne’s door later that evening the “local” sergeant gave him an unofficial and forthright warning-off. Gallagher said that he hadn’t meant to hurt anyone, and left.
Gallagher spent most of Sunday trying to make contact with Anne. He phoned one of her uncles twice in the morning, asking him to intercede, and was brusquely rebuffed. He arrived three times at the home of other relatives who were unaware of the events of the previous day. Two made trips to Donegal Road and spoke to Anne on his behalf. He called with a priest to ask for advice and was helped to make a “love-tape”, which one of Anne’s relatives brought to her at home, Gallagher waiting outside in his car.
“I have a prayer in my hand to St. Jude, St. Jude for hopeless cases. Please Anne, just for friend’s sake, even a phone call...” Anne listened to the tape and said, “No, take it back, he would be the same as ever in a couple of months”. The message was passed to Gallagher in the car outside: “Look, John, she doesn’t want anything to do with you anymore, you’ll just have to accept that”.
Throughout the day, Anne and Annie had been very aware of John’s “presence”. Apart from the callers on his behalf, he had repeatedly driven up and down Donegal Road past the house. On a visit to the local shops, the one she occasionally worked in, where John Gallagher had sat outside for hours, waiting, Anne had been so afraid that she’d run home without buying what she’d come for. Annie came along for the items later. A woman she spoke to recalls: “She said, ‘I’m scared he’ll do something to himself. How could we ever face the Gallaghers of Lifford if something happened to him?’”.
John Gallagher dropped the man who’d brought the tape to Anne off home in Stranorlar some time after six o’clock. He drove to Lifford, collected the rifle from behind the wardrobe in his father’s bedroom, and set off to find Anne...

There’ll be relatives and friends of Anne and Annie in the High Court in Dublin this Friday, July 26th, when lawyers for John Gallagher will ask for an order compelling the government to establish a forum to decide whether he is sane or insane now: the point being that, whatever about his state of mind at the time he killed the two women, if he can’t be shown to be suffering from insanity now, there’s no legal basis for detaining him.
The relatives and friends are aware that they have no, as the phrase goes, locus standi in the matter. But still, they feel that by their presence they will be, again, giving witness to the importance of Anne and Annie’s lives.
And they will, implicitly at least, be challenging conventional notions of what’s sane, and what’s not, in and about the society we live in.
The legalities can be, must be, left to the courts. But it is possible to say that in terms of social morality John Gallagher’s “madness” consisted in an extreme intensification of attitudes and assumptions which are by no means unusual in Irish society and which are discernible in reactions to Anne Gillespie’s desperate pleas for help in the days before her death.
Anne and Annie didn’t add up to a traditional family unit. That gave at least one nun in St Columba’s an opening to suggest - within hours of Anne signing a pitifully detailed complaint that she had been raped – that they were a “funny family” anyway, with a “strange history of relationships”.
The same nun was of the opinion that John Gallagher’s family had been “very good to the Gillespies”, had contributed to the household and had been “led to believe” he would be marrying Anne, and had good ground therefore for annoyance that she now wanted free from him.
It’s not, of course, that the woman in question had any personal responsibility, direct or indirect, for what happened at Sligo. And there’s something unfair about highlighting even a unnamed individual’s remarks in the aftermath of a tragedy which she couldn’t have foreseen. But what’s relevant, and important, is that she, a fair representative of conventional, established morality in Ballybofey/Straborlar and beyond, was calmly thinking thoughts which simultaneously raged in John Gallagher’s mind as he drove through Donegal, headed for Sligo.
One of Anne’s “beautiful smiling bunch” of girlfriends from school shrugs her shoulders now and says, “He just couldn’t accept that she had the right to her own life. That’s all there is to it”.