'Something's been left there.'

Father Donal Sweeney put down the receiver and walked slowly towards his car. He had already grasped what the IRA's messenger was referring to and his only course was to follow the instruction. Such was one's priestly duty in the parish of Crossmaglen. In a ditch close to the main Concession Road from Dundalk to Castleblayney, and some 500 yards north of the border, was the corpse of a large, wellbuilt man, wearing just a pair of grey slacks and white socks. The hands had been bound in front of the body with blue baling twine and a blood-soaked yellow polyester blanket tied around the head.

Three bullets had been fired from an Armalite at pointblank range into the back and side of the man's head.

Fragments of human skull later found embedded in the bottom of the ditch showed he had been shot after being ordered to kneel at the roadside. The bullet exit wounds had left a gaping hole where the left eye had been; the head, legs and torso showed signs of having been beaten with a heavy blunt object. Father Sweeney anointed the body and said prayers for the dead man.

Two days earlier, at about 11.20pm on 16 July 1989, John McAnulty had been leaving the Rosewood Country Club in Ravensdale after enjoying a drink with his ex-wife when he was pounced on by a group of men dressed in black and wearing balaclavas. A pistol was pointed at Helen McAnulty's head and she was told she would be shot unless she left the car park. Her 48-year-old exhusband used all his six feet three inches and 16 stones to resist being taken away and was only subdued by being beaten on the head with a wooden baton. Mrs McAnulty ran into the country club to raise the alarm only to find that all telephone lines to the building had been cut. When she returned to the car park it was empty apart from McAnulty's bloodstained wedding ring, which had been wrenched off during the struggle and was lying on the tarmac. Within hours, he had been interrogated in a farm outbuilding on the Cooley peninsula, pronounced guilty and sentenced to death."