Kathleen Thompson's family fighting to learn name of soldier who killed her

Kathleen Thompson, was killed by a bullet to the chest, fired by Soldier D, who fired two bullets into the garden of her Rathlin Gardens home in Creggan.

Kathleen died on November 6, 1971 and, on June 29, 2022, at her second inquest, the coroner found Soldier D had been "unjustified" in firing the shots which killed the Derry mother-of-six.

Kathleen’s film in the ‘British Legal Impunity: The stories of women, men and children killed by the British army and RUC’ series was narrated by her son, Ern, who was eight-years-old when his mother was murdered.

Kathleen Thompson's family who are still fighting for justice.

Speaking to Derry Now, Ern’s older brother, Davy, who was 18 at the time, vividly recalled the events of that dreadful night.

“We were in the house watching television. My sister, Minty, happened to look out the window and said, ‘They’re raiding McGlinchey’s’. Joe McGlinchey had been interned, so they were raiding his house,” he said.

“My mother went out to the back yard to bang the bin lid. I was coming out of the house and she was coming back in and I said, ‘Did you rattle the bin lid?’ and she went back out and that was the last time I saw her alive because I went out.

“What happened then was my father was looking for her. He couldn’t get her, so he went over to McGlinchey’s and they said. ‘She’s not here’. He was standing on the wall, it was a low wall, and he looked over the fence and found her lying in the garden.

“I was in my cousin’s house in the Brandywell and a club leader, Frankie Campbell, who used to play for Derry City, came into the house and said to me, ‘You’re wanted in the house’. Did you ever know when somebody is telling you something there is something wrong? I said, ‘Frankie, what’s wrong’ and he said, ‘Davy, your mother’s been shot.’”

Davy remembered being taken home and trying to go into the house.

“We didn’t realise at the time, my mother was still lying on the kitchen floor. I went to go in that direction but somebody stopped me and said ‘Your father is up the stairs’.

“When we were sitting that night, after all the commotion had died down, there was a fella walking about and he just didn’t seem right.

“I asked him who he was and he said he was the press. He asked me where my mother had been shot. He was very nervous. I told him to come in and he went straight up to the corner of the garden where my mother had been shot.

“The next day, we saw the bullet holes but there were no bullets found. We think that fella might have lifted them.”

Heartbreakingly, Davy said after Kathleen’s death, the family used to hear their father, Patrick, crying at night.

Davy said: “It was very sore on him. He worked all his life. He would have come in and left his wage packet on the dresser for my mother, she basically did everything in the house, like every other mother in Derry and Creggan at the time. My father was a welder in Ulster Fertilisers in Lisahally.

“Some of the things that were done to my father by the police were terrible. One time, he was in Belfast taking a relative for a scan in the Royal. Coming home, he was diverted down through Ballymena and he had an accident in the car in Garvagh. This was within a year of my mother’s death.

“The no go area was on, so Patrick McGlinchey across the street came in and said to my father, ‘The police need to speak to you. It is very, very urgent.’

“He thought it was to do with my mother’s case and he went down to the Strand Road barracks and they handed him a summons for the accident.

“That is what they did all the time. About a week before the inquest, in November 1972, the eldest three of us were arrested.

My brother Billy had already been arrested and we didn’t know and then they raided the house and took my brother, Pat, and me.”

At Kathleen’s first inquest, Davy said the officials kept cutting his father off when he tried to speak.

“Then the MP got up and read out all the statements,” said Davy. “It was one of the worst occasions of the whole lot. We were expecting justice here and we got absolutely nothing. Our house was raided continually. We just had to get on with it.

“When I was listening to Dennis Heaney and Tobias Molloy’s families, on Saturday, everything was the same.”
Davy thought his mother’s film was “very good”.

“I was thinking about our story and then you go up and you start hearing other peoples’ stories and they are in exactly the same place, feeling the same hurt. All the families want is the truth.

“We went to my mother’s inquest and all they told us was barefaced lies. That was hard. I want the soldier who shot my mother caught. I know that might never happen but the fact the coroner said it was “unjustified”, I would like him brought before the court and told, ‘You were guilty of killing this woman’.

“We are looking to get his name. We don’t know his name. We just saw him in the court for the first time at the second inquest in 2018. We were the only ones who saw him.

“At that stage he was 74. We were never told his name. We are waiting on the judicial review, which I think is coming in October. I cannot understand why I am not entitled to know the name of the soldier who shot my mother.”
Davy’s mother is constantly in his thoughts.

“She missed so much,” he added poignantly. “We had a great rapport, mammy and the three older ones. The younger ones missed out on that. They lost out.

“The last time the whole family was together was the day Ern made his First Communion. The eight of us were together in St Mary’s.

“Spotlight did a programme years ago about my mother and that was the first time we had ever sat down and talked about it as a family. I was listening to Ern, who was at Holy Child PS at the time, and his only memory of my mother was of him waving to her passing in a bus.

“Our Billy, who was only 15, remembers going into the kitchen that night and my mother was lying on the ground, shot. He saw that.

“Myself and Billy were only ten feet away when Annette McGavigan was shot.”