Disappeared
Who was Jean McConville in Say Nothing? Woman murdered by IRA in Disney+ TV show
Jean’s children were cared for by her 15-year-old daughter for weeks, after she was kidnapped
JEAN McConville was a mother of ten who was abducted and murdered by the IRA in 1972.
Her tragic death will be focused on in a Disney+ series named Say Nothing, which will dramatise her murder which took place during The Troubles.
5
5
A mysterious killing
Jean was born to a Protestant family on May 7, 1934, and grew up in East Belfast.
She later converted to Catholicism when she married Arthur McConville, a Catholic former British Army soldier.
They eventually moved to West Belfast’s Divis Flats in 1969, after being driven out of their Protestant area by loyalists.
Three years after the move, Arthur passed away from cancer in January 1972.
Read More on British TV
After Arthur’s death, tension began to build between Jean and her neighbours and she was allegedly attacked after leaving a bingo hall.
Reportedly, her attackers told her to stop giving information to the British Army.
Jean was later kidnapped by the IRA (Irish Republican Army) who drove her to a remote location, on December 7, 1972.
An IRA member named Delours Price claimed to have been involved in Jean's kidnapping.
Most read in The Sun
Jean was murdered that night when the IRA shot her in the back of the head and hid her body on the border of Shelling Hill Beach.
British newspapers reported that she had been murdered after neighbours saw her helping a wounded British soldier before Arthur’s death.
5
Jean’s children were separated
Jean’s children survived on their own in her flat, cared for by Jean’s 15-year-old daughter Helen.
Three weeks after their mother’s disappearance, a stranger appeared at the flat and gave them Jean’s purse containing 52 pence and her three rings.
The kidnapping became front-page news and the children were placed into local council care, after appearing on the BBC’s Scene Around Six.
One of the children, Billy, was sent to De La Salle Brothers Boys’ Home and, later in life, he opened up about the alleged abuse he faced there.
5
The mystery of Jean’s death is solved
With the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the mystery of Jean’s appearance was finally solved.
A year later, the IRA claimed that they had murdered Jean because she was passing on information about Republicans to the British Army.
They acknowledged that Jean was one of nine people on the list of the “disappeared”, whom they had murdered.
The “disappeared” was a list of people who vanished without a trace during the Troubles.
One member claimed that the IRA had found a radio transmitter in Jean’s flat, which led the group to interrogate her.
He claimed that they let her go, given the difficulty of raising ten children, but decided to execute her when they received information that suggested she was working as an informant again.
In 1999, the IRA confirmed the location of Jean's body but police forces were unable to find it.
In 2003, a storm washed away part of the embankment near Shelling Hill Beach car park which revealed Jean’s body.
The inquest into Jean’s death ruled that she had been the victim of an unlawful killing.
In 2014, the IRA’s former chief of staff, Ivor Bell, was arrested and charged with aiding and abetting Jean’s murder.
Three other people, who would have been teenagers at the time of Jean’s death, were arrested too but all four people were released without charge.
5
Say Nothing
In 2018, a journalist named Patrick Radden Keefe released a book named Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.
He claimed that Delours Price had revealed that Pat McClure, herself, and another volunteer had been present at the murder.
READ MORE SUN STORIES
On November 14, 2024, a Disney+ series based on the book will land on the streaming service.
The nine-part series will dramatise the events of the book, which spent six weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list.
Topics