Prof David Canter is a forensic psychologist who advises police forces on serial murders. In a new documentary examining the disappearance of five boys within a five mile radius in Belfast during the winter of 1969, he says: “was there something going on in the area at the time which brings all these crimes together? Serial predators will seek out an opportunity to abduct vulnerable victims. The context of circumstances in Northern Ireland at the time could have created that kind of opportunity”.
That chilling concept is examined in Des Henderson’s film, Lost Boys: Belfast’s Missing Children, which will premiere in Dublin and Belfast this week.
“During the winter of 1969, young boys started to disappear from the streets of Belfast, never to be seen again. By 1974, as the Troubles were reaching a bloody and vicious peak, five boys in total had vanished within a five-mile radius,” the filmmakers explain.
“Fifty years later, as the disappearances remain unsolved and families continue to search for answers,” Henderson (How to Diffuse a Bomb) “reopens these largely forgotten cold-cases, unearthing disturbing revelations in secret state documents to reveal an extraordinary tale of abuse, murder and potential cover up.”
The film notes that just one of the five boys who disappeared was later found. The badly mutilated and partly burnt body of 11-year-old Brian McDermott had been placed in a sack and dumped in the River Lagan.
Possible links between McDermott’s murder and the appalling sexual abuse of boys at Kincora Boys’ Home in east Belfast were discussed “during a meeting in 1982 between Northern Ireland Secretary of State Jim Prior and the Lord Chancellor and attorney general”.
More than 30 boys were sexually abused by the Kincora housemaster, William McGrath, and others at the notorious home. McGrath was a prominent Loyalist who had founded a paramilitary group. He was also viciously anti-Catholic.
Despite the findings of an inquiry, claims persist that he and others were given cover to molest and sexually abuse boys by the authorities because he was operating as an informer or a British agent.
In addition to Brian McDermott, David Leckey (12) and Jonathan Aven (13) disappeared in September 1969 after mitching off school in east Belfast, while two other boys Thomas Spence (11) and John Rodgers (13) were last seen waiting in November 1974 waiting for a bus that brought the to school.
“Why had their stories not been told? Back in 1974 there was a little bit of coverage about John and Thomas. But when David and Jonathan vanished from the east side of the city five years previously, there was nothing. It wasn’t just that there were no news reports or publicity alerting the public to their disappearance, but the police apparently hadn’t done anything either, ” Henderson told the Irish Times.
“Darren Brown, who was a lodger with the Leckey family, has been making his own inquiries for years. He says the police took a statement after David went missing, called to the house a week later to see if he’d returned and have never been back, in 50 years.” If that’s the case, “that felt really sad and wrong to me,” Henderson says.
In the chaos of the time, missing children may not have seemed a priority, the documentary notes. The four boys had, like many others, mitched off school previously, two were attending a special school outside their local area, three had learning difficulties.
The film recalls the heartbreaking efforts of Alice Rodgers and Anne Spence, mothers to John and Thomas respectively whose voices could be heard calling the names of their sons as they searched for them on the streets of Belfast.
“The film explores every lead to try and find out what may have happened to these young boys. For every stone the team turns over, it becomes clearer that dark forces are at play on an incomprehensible scale,” the filmmakers said.
“Deep state cover-up sounds like the stuff of conspiracy theory, but this investigation poses some troubling questions. The documentary asks if the state knew more than has been revealed, or even worse, if it was complicit in some way.”
The film is billed as “fresh investigative journalism uncovering an extraordinary tale of child disappearances and murder, MI5 interference, witchcraft and potential cover-up”.
Speaking ahead of the premiere, Henderson said: “When we set out to make this documentary, we knew we were dealing with a sensitive subject matter. Little did we know as we started to investigate, we would find such a sinister set of circumstances surrounding the disappearance of five young boys within the same area.
“Due to the nature of the revelations in the documentary; there have been many twists and turns in the completion of the film.
“It has been 50 years since the boys went missing, so we feel like it is now or never for their story to be heard. At the time there was concerningly little media coverage of what had happened, and the boys seemed to disappear from the public’s mind just as quickly as they had from the street.
“It is unlikely that the boys will ever have justice, given how long ago these crimes took place, but the least we can do is try to expose the truth surrounding their disappearance, and who may have been involved.”
Producer Ed Stobart added: “It has taken 5 years of intense investigation to get the film to screen, and along the way we have amassed a huge body of evidence around some of the Troubles’ darkest remaining secrets, many of which extend beyond the cases we set out to investigate.
“From what we have found, especially around the Kincora Boys Home scandal, there is much more to be told about the ‘Dirty War’ than is fully in the public domain. The security services, MI5 in particular, have a lot of questions to answer.
“The suffering experienced by the families of the missing and murdered boys, and all those who were abused on an almost industrial scale in Kincora must have been unimaginable. We hope that this film might aid any process that brings them some measure of justice.”