A vast carpet of unfurling grass. This is the Curragh—Gaelic for: place of the running horse. A thousand years ago, kings and chiefs raced chariots here. Now it’s the beating heart of Ireland’s thoroughbred racing industry, the last place you’d peg for the setting of an ill-fated kidnapping.
Over the last weekend in June, the Curragh is home to the Irish Derby, or Darby, as they say here. The best in breed come from all over. But in 1981, it was won by a local – Shergar, born in a nearby stable.
And who knew it at the time, but his saga was barely getting out of the gate.
Derek Thompson (1981 Epsom Derby): Was it easier than you thought it would be?
That’s commentator Derek Thompson asking the question and trying to keep up with Shergar on his way to another winner’s circle.
Jon Wertheim: What was Shergar like up close?
Derek Thompson: He was just a beautiful mover. He had– a white face, which I think endears him to the crowd. You know, you could see him. “Hey, that’s Shergar.” As a commentator you– you look for things like that.
It was Shergar’s overwhelming speed and stride that distinguished him at the 1981 Epsom Derby, England’s equivalent of The Kentucky Derby.
Derek Thompson: The way he won the Derby– that day at Epsom…
Derek Thompson: And he won by 10 lengths. The guy who rode the second horse, he was long-sighted so– and he couldn’t wear his glasses, obviously, when he was riding. So when he passed the post he thought he’d won.
Jon Wertheim: Give us a sense where Shergar ranks historically among thoroughbred racehorses.
Derek Thompson: Probably the best of all time.
Jon Wertheim: You say that as someone who’s seen a lotta racing.
Derek Thompson: I have. And I can tell you. And that’s true.
Jon Wertheim: What does the future typically hold for a horse like Shergar once he’s done racing?
Derek Thompson: Becomes a stallion, all right? And when you become a stallion, you become a very lucky lad.
That is, after getting a hero’s welcome back in County Kildare, Shergar was put out to stud.
The other lucky lad: Shergar’s owner, the late Aga Khan, spiritual leader of the Ismaili Muslims, one of the richest royals in the world. He retired Shergar to Ballymany Stud Farm, hoping to create a dynasty of sorts – syndicating the horse, selling 40 shares for 250,000 pounds each, totaling more than $50 million, in today’s currency.
But fortunes changed on the night of Feb. 8, 1983, when masked men with guns broke into Ballymany and kidnapped Shergar. Belfast-based filmmaker Alison Millar is one of the few people to interview Shergar’s head groom Jim Fitzgerald, who was there that night.
Jon Wertheim: What was your impression of him?
Alison Millar: Oh Jim. My impression was that he was absolutely haunted, traumatized by the whole experience.
Jon Wertheim: Never got over the trauma?
Alison Millar: No. Never.
Before he died, Fitzgerald opened up to Millar, recalling what happened. She showed us the interview from her documentary “Searching for Shergar.”
ALISON MILLAR (in “Searching for Shergar”): Tell me what happened. Can you remember it, Jim?
Jim Fitzgerald (in “Searching for Shergar”: I’ll tell you now.
Jim Fitzgerald (in “Searching for Shergar”): It was in early February. And we were in the sitting room. And the next thing, a knock come at the door and these gangsters come in with guns.
Alison Millar: And they shouted to everyone to get down, get down. And they put his wife and children all down on the floor, and they ordered him by gunpoint to come out and take them down to the stable where Shergar was.
Fitzgerald was bundled into a car, driven about 30 miles from the farm then released while the kidnappers made off with Shergar.
Alison Millar: He had the gun pointed at his head and told to get outta the car and shut up. “Don’t talk about this.”
This forced silence was familiar in Northern Ireland, a hallmark of the IRA, but fairly unusual just two hours south in pastoral Kildare.
Jon Wertheim: All this occurred during the– the context is “The Troubles.” Describe Northern Ireland at the time.
Alison Millar: So at the time whenever Shergar was taken, we’d just come through a period in Northern Ireland, where there’d been– many years of bombings, and shootings, and killings.
The sectarian violence rocked Northern Ireland for almost 30 years, pitting Catholics against Protestants, mostly over questions of British rule. The IRA, the Catholic paramilitary group, raised funds for their campaign through bank and post office robberies, which provokes the question:
Jon Wertheim: What would the IRA want with a horse?
Alison Millar: Well, Shergar wasn’t any horse. He was the most expensive horse in the world. The bank robberies weren’t payin’ off. Someone had come up with the idea of kidnapping Shergar and holdin’ him to ransom.
Jon Wertheim:This is transactional. This isn’t symbolic? This is just pragmatically, “What’s gonna get us a lotta money”?
Alison Millar: They wanted cash for guns.
When police arrived at Ballymany the next morning, there were hardly any clues. The following day brought an unusual call to Derek Thompson, who was working in London.
Derek Thompson: The phone went off at 2 o’clock in the morning. “This is the Press Association in Fleet Street,” which is a main hub of newspapers. “The kidnappers of Shergar want to talk to you.” Said, “What?” “They want you to fly out to– to Belfast in the morning.”
Unlikely hostage negotiators, Thompson and two other horseracing journalists were summoned to Belfast by the kidnappers.
Derek Thompson: We just jumped outta the taxi and looked. And this was the Europa Hotel, the most bombed hotel in Europe. And as soon as I walked in, a voice came over the– hotel intercom– “Phone call for Mr. Thompson.”
A voice on the other end directed Thompson to a farmhouse 30 miles outside Belfast.
Derek Thompson: And it was just amazing for the next 12 hours. We had phone call after phone call.
Jon Wertheim: Did they mention a ransom?
Derek Thompson: They said things like, “We’ve got the horse. We want you to negotiate– a price for the horse–This is what we want. We want the money.”
The Aga Khan’s office received calls too. Ransom demands kept changing: 40,000 pounds one day, 2 million the next. And, three days after the kidnapping, a vague, final call to Derek Thompson’s camp.
Derek Thompson: “The horse has had an accident. He’s dead.” And the phone went dead.
Jon Wertheim: That was the last contact you had with the kidnappers?
Derek Thompson: That’s the last we heard.
With a champion stallion missing, the investigation continued. Police gave daily updates to say…not much.
Reporter: Are you any further ahead than you were yesterday?
Chief Superintendent Jim Murphy: I regret to say that I’m not.
The country became ever more captivated by the deepening mystery. Inevitably, an Irish folk song followed.
Alison Millar (Singing:) “You’ve baffled all the boys in blue.” So– it did become a circus.
The circus included crime-solving clairvoyants.
Alison Millar: People kept turnin’ up goin’, “We’re gonna find the horse.” Like, “Hey, I’m Doris, and Jimmy, and I’m gonna find the horse.” And there was people ringin’ up. The help lines were gettin’ bonkers people sayin’, “Hey, we found the horse.” And it wasn’t. It was, like, this dead sheep.
What happened to Shergar? As the story became an international sensation, theories toggled between the preposterous and the merely unlikely. Stolen to pay off U.S. mafia debt, shipped to Libya for Muammar Qaddafi. All unimaginable ends to an elite stallion from County Kildare, where horses have the right of way. Eighty miles of gallops surrounded by all that unploughed grass, rich in limestone, good for horse bones and fertilized by roaming sheep. In other words: equine heaven.
We met the de facto dean of the Curragh, Richard Brabazon, whose family has trained horses here for generations.
Richard Brabazon: Yeah. That’s meant to be the way of sayin’ hello. You just breathe into their nose, you know? But he’s a particularly friendly horse.
We asked him about Shergar.
Richard Brabazon I mean, no one knows what happened. I think it’s fair to say there was an accident, do you know, and he was killed. The only thing that puzzles me is, it’s a very big operation to take a horse. If you ask me to do it myself, I’d find it hard to cover it up. You know, and say, “How do you deal with a big animal like this?” You know, not easy. I buried a donkey once, and it took me half the day. So…
Donkey notwithstanding, most people here believe the kidnappers couldn’t handle a stallion like Shergar and shot him within a couple of days. That theory was circulated in a 1998 memoir of a former IRA member turned informant, Sean O’Callaghan, now dead. He wrote that the kidnappers drove Shergar to County Leitrim, near the border with Northern Ireland. That’s where we met journalist Tommy Conlon.
Conlon wrote a book about another 1983 kidnapping, this one human, a supermarket executive rescued in the woods here after 23 days in IRA captivity and Conlon says Shergar’s captors would have found a soft landing in Leitrim.
Tommy Conlon: If the local leader here got a phone call saying, “We need to dispose of this horse,” there would’ve been people here to do it. And what’s more, it’s so sparsely populated, so remote that it could be p– it– it would be an ideal place, you would think, to bury a body that you never wanted found.
Conlon led us to boggy terrain where, lore has it, the kidnappers disposed of Shergar’s remains.
Jon Wertheim: Aughnasheela.
Tommy Conlon: Not bad. Aughnasheelin.
Jon Wertheim: Aughnasheelin.
Tommy Conlon: In a winter’s night, in February of 1983– the place would’ve been– would’ve felt almost deserted. And more than likely those who you did meet on the road would say nothing.
Jon Wertheim: Say– say nothing is–
Tommy Conlon: Say nothing and keep saying it.
We did hear whispers, though, from others who’ve looked into the story. About one man in particular: a convicted IRA operative once broken out of prison via helicopter. Kevin Mallon is named in informant Sean O’Callaghan’s book as the ringleader of Shergar’s kidnapping.
Kevin Mallon: Hello?
Jon Wertheim: Kevin Mallon, please.
First we tried calling.
Kevin Mallon: Yeah?
Jon Wertheim: Kevin, it’s Jon Wertheim with 60 Minutes, CBS News in New York. And we’re working on a piece on Shergar… Shergar the horse? And we…(click)
Then we got an address, a seaside house near Dublin.
Jon Wertheim: Hi, I’m looking for Kevin Mallon.
Another phone call:
Jon Wertheim: It’s Jon Wertheim with 60 Minutes. I’m in town and would love to just come up and ask him a few questions about the horse.
Person on phone: I’m sure he wouldn’t know anything about that. No, forget it. Okay.
Jon Wertheim: Well –we’re told he’s one of the last people alive that might help solve the…(click)…mystery.
Some cold cases do eventually thaw…the result of a crisis of conscience or a dying declaration, but in the case of Shergar, sure seems like a long shot.
Alison Millar: I think there’s a massive shame that the IRA took this on, and what was the point of it? It was pointless. The horse is such a symbol of Ireland and, you know, freedom. And its s– its beauty, its wildness, its magic. And there’s a shame that they shot the most famous and killed the most famous horse in the world at that time.
Produced by Nathalie Sommer and Kaylee Tully. Associate producer, Mimi Lamarre. Edited by Matthew Lev.
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