Guerin, Veronica (1960–1996)

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Guerin, Veronica (1960–1996)

Irish journalist whose articles on organized crime resulted in her assassination. Born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1960; killed in Dublin on June 26, 1996; attended parochial schools in Dublin; married Graham Turley (a builder), in 1985; children: one son, Cathal.

Veronica Guerin, Ireland's leading investigative reporter, was in the middle of an ongoing crusade against the nation's crime lords when she was gunned down, gangland-style, on the afternoon of June 26, 1996, while stopped at a traffic light in the outskirts of Dublin. One of the few Western European journalists ever murdered for her reporting, Guerin was 36 when she died, leaving behind an attentive husband and a cherished seven-year-old son. Police had little doubt that she was killed in retribution for her revealing articles. Sixty detectives were assigned to the case, and Guerin's newspaper offered a large reward for the killers' conviction. Prime minister John Bruton declared the assassination "sinister in the extreme" and recalled members of Parliament from their summer holiday for a special session on organized crime. Police responded with the most comprehensive murder investigation in the history of the country.

Guerin, one of five children, was born in 1960 and raised in Dublin's North Side. Educated in parochial schools, where she excelled in soccer, basketball, and a game called camogie (similar to lacrosse), she ran her own public relations firm for several years before moving into journalism in 1990. She began as a freelancer for Dublin's Sunday Business Post and the Sunday Tribune, then, in 1994, joined the Sunday Independent as an investigative reporter. Almost immediately, her articles on organized crime put her in harm's way. In the fall of 1994, four weeks after her report on the life and death of Dublin godfather Martin Cahill, who was shot in his car, someone fired a bullet into a room of Guerin's house where she was playing with her son. The following January, after she wrote an article implicating a mobster in Cahill's murder, she was confronted at her front door by a masked man who, after first aiming a gun at her head, shot her in the thigh. After the attack, which hospitalized the reporter for several days, the paper provided her with a security system in her home and round-the-clock police protection, but Guerin felt hampered by her constant security escort and dismissed him. Less than a year before her murder, an ex-convict she had met for an interview beat her and later, on the phone, threatened to injure her son and kill her if she wrote about him. Though worried about Cathal, she would not give in. "That's what they want," she said. "Then they'll think that they can just continue doing it to everybody else." Alan Byrne, who was Guerin's news editor at the Tribune, called her a brilliant reporter. "I've never met anybody with a greater ability to get people to talk," he said.

In December 1995, Guerin was in New York for a week to participate in meetings and to receive an International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists. William A. Orme, executive director of the committee, remembered that she hated the spotlight and couldn't understand why she was singled out for this recognition. "In interviews and editorial meetings," he recalled, "she was acutely uncomfortable, though always gracious. A born reporter, she was much more interested in quizzing her fellow award winners about their home countries—Guatemala, Zambia, Russia—than she was in discussing her own case." Orme also said that Guerin's assassination should serve as a reminder of the threats against a free press even in nations that are not undergoing political or civil conflict.

In November 1998, Paul "Hippo" Ward, the man who disposed of the .357 Magnum used to kill Guerin, was sentenced to life in prison. Ward, a former heroin addict, was thought to be a bit player in the slaying. Indictments were expected for others, including Patrick "Dutchy" Holland, Brian "The Tosser" Meehan, and gang leader John Gilligan. Gilligan, a career criminal who tried to pose as a country squire, was the subject of a Guerin exposé.