The RUC was furious with the Army, which it considered to have behaved in an irresponsible manner, and RUC press officers hinted to journalists that the Army’s initial version of events was not true. The police backed a move to put the SAS men on trial for murder. So began a remarkable prosecution – the only one in Ulster so far to have involved soldiers from the SAS.
Corporal Bohan and Trooper Temperley, the men who had fired the shots, found themselves standing in the dock in front of Lord Lowry, Ulster’s Chief Justice. The Army was anxious to protect secrets of the SAS operation. Its attempts to prevent the court learning the soldiers’ identities verged on the farcical. At first it would provide only the soldiers’ initials. Then, on their first court appearance, the Army put five other men into the box with them with the idea of confusing people. The judge, finding the idea of seven men standing in the dock throughout the case to be unacceptable, insisted that only the two accused should stay there.
The twenty-eight-year-old Corporal answered for both men’s actions. He said the RUC had told them the weapons had been found by a ten-year-old boy. The soldiers had been sent there to apprehend whoever attempted to recover the weapons but the suspected terrorist had turned and pointed the weapon directly at them, he added.
There was a great deal of discussion during the case about whether the three bullets which had killed John Boyle had been fired from behind, as he stooped to pick up the weapon, or whether the fatal shot had entered the front of his head. If it could be proven that they had come from behind, the SAS Corporal’s version about Boyle turning to face him would have been shown to be untrue. In the end, Lord Lowry accepted evidence that the bullet had entered the front of John Boyle’s head, meaning that he had indeed been looking towards the soldiers when the shot was fired.
But in many other respects the judge cast doubt on the soldier’s statements. Corporal Bohan’s suggestion that the gun had been pointed at him was ‘self-justificatory and, in the context of the Boyle family’s reputation, untrue’. Although the Corporal said the plan was to capture the terrorist he was vague and unsatisfactory when questioned as to the details of the plan.
Lord Lowry pointed out that if the soldiers had inspected the weapon they would have seen that, unloaded, it could pose no threat to them. If Corporal Bohan had thought the deceased was a terrorist, ‘One wonders why he let him get the rifle into his hands, if the rifle might have been loaded.’
The judge said Corporal Bohan was ‘an untrustworthy witness, eager to make unmeritorious points’. He said in his summing-up, ‘Nothing would have been easier with better planning than to capture the deceased alive, always assuming that to be the primary object.’ But the judge, although he said quite plainly that Corporal Bohan had told lies, could not find them guilty of murder. The prosecution was not able to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the soldiers had gone there with the intention of killing whoever came into the field.
The case provided an enormous opportunity for Sinn Fein because it appeared to confirm the view of many Irish people that the SAS were trigger-happy thugs who flouted the law which stipulated that soldiers could use only such force as was reasonable and necessary to prevent a crime. And it wasn’t just committed Provisionals who came away with this impression. The attitude of John Boyle’s father, reflecting on the incident years later in an interview with the Belfast Telegraph, is revealing. He said he did not feel bitterness towards the SAS men because: ‘They were doing their job, which was to kill whoever entered the graveyard. That is what the SAS are employed to do.’
The acquittal of Corporal Bohan and Trooper Temperley, like the case of the SAS men released after crossing the border into the Irish Republic, had a deeply harmful effect on the perception of the Regiment among a broad band of political opinion in Northern Ireland, not just committed republicans. Although the Army had grudgingly accepted that the men should stand trial in the first place, the cases convinced many in the legal establishment that it would be very hard ever to get a conviction against the undercover soldiers since vital facts could be withheld from the court. One barrister, commenting on the judge’s summing-up in the Boyle case, told me: ‘The language he used about Bohan was so derogatory that in any case not involving the Army, I would have thought it virtually impossible not to have had a conviction in that court.’
Bohan and Temperley returned to regimental duty after the trial. Colleagues say the men were changed by the experience and felt deep regret at the teenager’s death. The Army did not regard the Boyle incident as a blemish on the SAS mens’ records. In fact, I was able to establish while researching this book that in 1990 – thirteen years after the death of John Boyle – both Bohan and Temperley were still serving in frontline squadrons of 22 SAS.
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In September 1978 the mistakes continued when the SAS shot dead James Taylor, a Protestant. He had entered a field near Lough Neagh carrying a shotgun, while looking for game. He had no connection with any paramilitary group.
There was a further confrontation between SAS soldiers and a member of the IRA on 24 November 1978. Patrick Duffy, a fifty-year-old auxiliary in the IRA had gone into an unoccupied house in Maureen Avenue, Londonderry.
