“Is this really happening?” asks Bridie Gargan as a man holds her at gunpoint in a Dublin park one sunny afternoon. The 27-year-old nurse pulled over her car to lie in the grass after a shift at St James’s Hospital. “Yes, it really happens,” the man says and gestures for her to sit in the backseat of her car. He only wants the car, he says, and she has nothing else to fear. But, he adds, “I have to tie you up.” The latter causes Bridie to panic. Afraid that she will scream, the man takes a hammer and hits her head several times with brute force. A gardener who sees it happen approaches the car, after which the man drives away in panic and, after almost hitting an ambulance, leaves the car in an alley, with a seriously injured Bridie in the back. She dies four days later.
Is this a scene from Fargo? No, this is true crime. In the summer of 1982, Bridie Gargan was murdered and a few days later a farmer named Dónal Dunne was found dead in the swamp. The perpetrator of this double murder? The aristocratic Malcolm Macarthur, one socialite coming from a wealthy family and a welcome guest in intellectual circles. At least, he was until he found himself in financial need at the age of 37 and decided to commit an armed robbery for which he had to get a car and a gun. After his attempt to confiscate Bridie’s car failed, he tried to purchase a gun. He found a farmer in Edenderry who was willing to sell him his rifle. Because Macarthur had no money and the transaction did not go very smoothly, he shot the farmer dead in the face with a bullet that Dunne had recently loaded himself.
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The Macarthur affair is now known as one of the most infamous murder cases in recent Irish history. And not just because of the death of two innocent people but also because of an event that happened afterwards. Because after Dunne’s murder, Macarthur fled to the home of his friend Paddy Connolly, who lived in an apartment building on the coast. The unsuspecting Connolly let him stay until Macarthur was arrested there, three weeks later. A spectacular event: not only because the murderer was caught, but also because he apparently managed to hide with Connolly, the Attorney General of Ireland, or the country’s highest legal official who was closely involved in an already controversial government.
Bizarre, grotesque, unbelievable
It is this unlikely story – the then Prime Minister Charles Haughey called the coincidence at the time ‘bizarre, unprecedented, grotesque and unbelievable’ – that the Irish writer and journalist Mark O’Connell published a book about last year that has now been translated into Dutch with the title A trail of violence. A logical choice for those looking for a large audience, true crime is, after all, an extremely popular genre to which many podcasts, TV series and books have been devoted – think Serial, Making a Murderer or the recent Cassandra by Niña Weijers. Moreover, the Irish newspapers at the time were already full of stories about Macarthur and his trial, he featured as a character in the sinister novel The Book of Evidence (1989) by John Banville, his case was described in We Don’t Know Ourselves (2022), the personal history of Ireland, written by Fintan O’Toole, and the BBC now also has a podcast entitled Obscene: The Dublin Scandaldedicated to him.
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Yet O’Connell, whose grandparents lived in the apartment next door to Connolly at the time of Macarthur’s arrest, has written an extremely intriguing book that true crime transcends genre, if not challenges it. For the author, Macarthur was always ‘a flickering presence on the periphery of his life’. But O’Connell became particularly obsessed with the killer after he was released in 2012 after 30 years in prison. Because this older man, with his white hair, tweed jacket and bow tie looking like one of the characters from a Wes Anderson film, was suddenly wandering around town again, walking around the university campus and even being in the audience during a literary evening with John Banville, the writer in whose novel he featured. The latter in particular triggered something in O’Connell. It was, he writes, ‘as if reality itself had applied the somewhat worn postmodern trope in which the writer encounters his own character.’ This fact, that Banville was confronted with his own character, gave him the feeling that ‘a crack had appeared in the thin dividing line between fiction and non-fiction’.
Blind panic
It’s along that crack that A trail of violence balances. Because O’Connell manages to get in touch with Macarthur and gain his trust, allowing him to write ‘the real story’ about this Irish Raskolnikov. But as he does so, he wonders what the role of a writer is about true crime writes. Can you actually identify someone who committed such heinous acts? To what extent does he as a writer not try, like the many gossip columns at the time, to write a ‘coherent narrative’ by attaching importance to Macarthur’s childhood, assuming that it was an unhappy one? Is it ethical to write a book about a murderer who comes to regard him as a friend? And, on a more philosophical level, what can you even learn about another person? Particularly when Macarthur reveals his motives to him, the author’s doubts grow. For example, his account often does not match facts from police reports and Macarthur claims that he committed the murders during ‘a thought disorder’ that arose when he was confronted with the fact that he had lost his inheritance of 70,000 Irish pounds (today around 900,000 euros). ) had chased through. His cruel behavior would have been merely an ‘aberration’: actions performed in blind panic that would have little to do with his ‘true person’. A bizarre statement that makes O’Connell conclude: ‘As soon as I see him [Macarthur, red.] I begin to see, as soon as I get the feeling that I understand him as a subject, he disappears into the darkness and I know no more, and perhaps even less, than when I started.’
New DNA match
Maggie Nelson comes to a similar conclusion The red pieces, the book she published in 2007 and which has now been translated into Dutch. In this ‘autobiography of a legal case’, the American writer, known for genre-transcending books such as: The Argonauts (2015) and Bluets (2009), the case surrounding the unsolved murder of her aunt Jane from 1969. It was assumed that Jane was the victim of a notorious serial killer, but after a DNA match was found in a new suspect in 2004, the case was reopened. It makes Nelson, who is currently working on a book about Jane, decide to describe the events during and surrounding the trial. This, just like with O’Connell, does not result in a story in which she tries to find out ‘the truth’, but ends in all kinds of reflections. For example, she investigates how the trauma of Jane’s murder – she was shot in the head, strangled with pantyhose and laid out in a cemetery – has had an impact on her family. She also writes more broadly about violence against women and reflects on the impact of photography on the viewer – during the process she and her mother are shown images of Jane’s corpse.
Just like A trail of violence it is the contemplative look, which is also reflected in Niña Weijers Cassandra, making the story compelling. Naturally, Nelson wonders about the possible motivations of Gary Earl Leiterman – the man ultimately found guilty of first-degree murder – in killing her aunt. But the closer she wants to get to the truth, the more difficult it proves to put that reality into words. In the Leiterman case there is initially one open murder – or ‘a murder without a story’. But even after his conviction, it remains a mystery to Nelson why this man would have killed Jane. ‘Even if Leiterman were to “tell everything” (…) open murder would probably remain the most accurate charge for me.’
She does not get close to the perpetrator, but that is not her goal, in this book it was ultimately about Jane. But in the end she also has no control over her aunt. “The bullet pierced the bone a long time ago. Now all that’s left is a pile of lead shards, clinking in a glass bottle. There is no gun with a glowing barrel – no hard evidence.”
Her book is rather an attempt to show how grief settles within a family and, perhaps, to get a better grip on death. Because apart from Jane goes The red pieces ultimately also about the loss of her father, the man who sometimes danced around the house dressed strangely, took his daughters on unexpected holiday trips and who, after divorcing her mother, died of a massive heart attack at the age of forty.
An event that has a deep impact on Nelson’s life. Writing turns out to be a way to deal with the bad things in life rather than uncovering the truth. Anyone who writes, Nelson argues, ultimately connects separate events to comfort themselves, but at the same time also creates a ‘trap’: ‘In their zeal to give meaning to nonsensical things, they take [verhalen, red.] resorting to distorting, codifying, criticizing, glorifying, limiting, omitting, betraying, mythologizing and what not.”
And that’s what a book is about true crime ultimately more about the meaning of stories and about that thin dividing line between ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’.
O’Connell ultimately goes one step further in his book (even Truman Capote could have learned something from this meta-level). When, at the end of the book, he visits Macarthur again in his apartment, he wants to give him a definitive explanation about the murders. This culminates in an extremely strange monologue in which Macarthur concludes that he was acting in a fit of narcissistic madness at the time because ‘the aesthetic meaning of his life as a story should not be sullied by making money’. In other words: by aestheticizing his life story – by conceiving it as a story with plot lines, setting and characters – Macarthur tried to mitigate his crimes. It explains why O’Connell attaches so much importance to Bridie Gargan’s question in his book: “Is this really happening?” Because she asked that question to a man who couldn’t handle reality, didn’t even live in it. That makes her death, and that of Dónal Dunne, all the more painful.
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