Some fifteen murders were committed in Ireland in March 1844. Most of those who were killed were men, with eleven of the victims being slain in drunken arguments, sectarian rows or faction fights. Only two of the victims were female: one was a married woman who was kicked to death by her husband; the other was a fourteen-year-old servant girl who was murdered in a vicious attack in her place of employment at Bunagee, a townland beside the small village of Culdaff on the Inishowen peninsula in County Donegal. The murder of young Mary Doherty was extensively, if briefly, covered in the local and national press before the newspapers switched their attention to other stories and her case was quickly forgotten except by people who lived in the immediate vicinity, and even their knowledge of the shocking incident faded and became confused over time, as suggested by modern folklore. When she started to research this murder, Angela Byrne set herself the task of what the book’s main title describes as ‘Finding Mary’, of ‘tell[ing] Mary’s story’ (77). However, the paucity of references to Mary in the extant written records meant that she had to switch her focus and concentrate instead on looking in detail at Mary’s killing and also investigating other characters who featured prominently in the murder case and its aftermath. Three individuals who left a more extensive documentary trail receive particular attention: these are Daniel McKeeny, the man who probably killed Mary Doherty; and a convicted cattle-stealer named Michael Gallagher and his wife, Mary, who tried to secure Michael’s release by falsely claiming that McKeeny had confessed his guilt to him whilst they were incarcerated together in Lifford Gaol. The result is a meticulously researched insight into life in a remote part of County Donegal in the immediate pre-Famine period and into the experiences of individual Irish convicts who were transported to Van Dieman’s Land.

The book’s first chapter examines key aspects of life in Culdaff and the surrounding district in the late 1830s and early 1840s. The picture that emerges is that of a mostly impoverished agricultural community, overwhelmingly Catholic, where Irish was spoken by many of the people but was in steady decline. Although Inishowen was seemingly remote, it was far from being impervious to influences from the outside world, as evidenced for example by the peninsula’s ‘imperial infrastructure’ (29) of coastguard stations, British soldiers, Revenue Police and Irish Constabulary. Members of the last two-named organisations feature prominently in the book’s second and third chapters. Chapter 2, ‘A dreadful crime’, discusses Mary Doherty’s murder and its immediate aftermath. On Sunday 10 March 1844, Mary’s employers, the McKeeny family, went to Mass, leaving their young servant alone in their house. On their return they found Mary’s bloodied body on the kitchen floor: her throat had been cut, her skull fractured and an attempt had been made to burn her remains. A storage chest had been broken open and more than fifty shillings stolen from it. James McKeeny, the head of the family, alerted the authorities and suspicion quickly fell on Daniel McKeeny, James McKeeny’s nephew, who lived nearby and was seen heading towards his uncle’s house when all of the residents except Mary were attending Mass.

Chapter 3, ‘Bringing home the guilt’, describes the ultimately unsuccessful efforts of investigating magistrates and policemen to secure sufficient evidence to bring a murder charge against Daniel McKeeny, despite numerous examples of seemingly damning circumstantial evidence against him. Michael Gallagher’s allegation that Daniel McKeeny had confessed the crime to him when they were both prisoners in Lifford Gaol was examined closely and ultimately rejected by the authorities as a fabrication of Gallagher’s part, a desperate attempt to prevent his sentence of ten years’ transportation from being carried out. Having failed in their efforts to prosecute Daniel McKeeny for Mary Doherty’s murder, in March 1845, the crown prosecutors charged him with the theft some two years previously of a neighbour’s ewe and lamb. Although this case had originally been settled informally between McKeeny and the aggrieved neighbour, Byrne suggests that the case was now resurrected by the authorities, with the co-operation of the injured party and the tacit approval of the local community, in order to ensure that the ‘outcast’ (57) McKeeny was convicted and permanently removed from Culdaff. McKeeny was duly found guilty and sentenced to fifteen years’ transportation. The book’s final chapter gives a detailed account of McKeeny’s time in Lifford Gaol, in Smithfield male convict depot in Dublin, aboard the Ratcliffe prison ship on its voyage to Van Dieman’s Land and, finally, his ill-disciplined record on that island until he eventually absconded, after five previous unsuccessful escape attempts, on 29 June 1853, after which date there is no further mention of him in the penal colony records. The sad tale of Mary Doherty is eloquently written and recommended to readers who are interested in the history of Irish crime and punishment in the nineteenth century.