Stone Cold

In March 1988 three unarmed members of an IRA active service unit were shot dead by SAS operatives in Gibraltar in a secret operation which became a political "cause celebre". At the funeral for the dead men at the Milltown Cemetery in their native Belfast, Michael Stone threw grenades and fired into the crowd of mourners, killing three men and wounding several others. He was captured, interrogated and confessed to a list of killings which have put him in the Maze Prison under a life sentence. Drawing on his conversations with Stone in prison and a network of informants right across the Irish political spectrum, Martin Dillon presents a portrait of a killer: charming, boastful, meticulous, sentimental and lethal. Dillon investigates his abandonment by his mother, his upbringing by Protestant relatives in Belfast, his wives and friends and his early involvment in street violence leading to his career as a freelance killer associated with many of Ulster's political or para-military organizations. A direct consequence of the Milltown Massacre was the killing of two British soldiers caught up in the funeral cortege for one of the Milltown dead - one of the most brutal instances of mob violence in recent Irish history. In this book Dillon makes a revelation about the two soldiers.