Shirley Finlay's disrupted life and emotional problems made her easy prey for her murderer in Ballymena, writes Susan McKay
Shirley Finlay danced on her own when there was music in the pub. She was 24, small and slim with long blonde hair. She lived alone, too, in a rented flat in Ballymena. She talked to herself, laughing and gesticulating as if in company. The postman would meet her out walking at 6am.
Her neighbours didn't seem to know her name. They heard it first after her body was found in a car park behind a Baptist church in the Co Antrim town. She had been strangled, probably after being raped.
That was three weeks ago. The PSNI has issued leaflets in English, Polish and Lithuanian appealing for information. They still don't know where Shirley was murdered. They don't know where she was or who she was with the night before her body was found, partially clothed and wrapped in a duvet. No one has been arrested.
"I used to see her," says Desmond McClure, a middle-aged man who lives in the small grey block of flats where Shirley lived, overlooking the dual carriageway. "She was always on her own and I felt sorry for her. One day she was sitting on the steps outside Kentucky Fried Chicken. She was drinking a can of beer and her eyes were all red as if she'd been crying. I asked her was she all right. She said yes, she was fine, and she said, 'Thanks for asking'."
Shirley wasn't fine, but when, after she was murdered, police issued a statement describing her as "vulnerable" and "a loner with mental health problems", many people were shocked and even angry. More than 400 people attended her funeral at St Gerard's Church on the slopes of the Cavehill on Belfast's Antrim Road last Saturday.
Father Johnny Doherty read out a newspaper headline: "No one to bury lonely Shirley" it said. "How totally wrong that was," he pointed out. She had been brutally murdered and "dumped like trash", but Shirley had a "beautiful spirit" and an awful lot of people cared for her and loved her, he said.
Shirley was buried in Milltown cemetery beside the mother she never knew. Jean, from a large Falls Road family, gave birth to Shirley in 1981. She wanted to keep her, but Jean had schizophrenia and other problems. The newborn baby was taken into care. Her mother died when Shirley was a young teenager - she wasn't brought to the funeral.
MARY CORRY AND her husband Jim fostered Shirley when she was one, and she lived with them until she was 11. All her life she would know them as mummy and daddy. "I just heard a line on the radio saying that a young woman had been murdered in Ballymena and I had a gut feeling, 'That's our Shirley'," says Mary.
Their daughter, Joanne, remembers the baby's arrival. "Me and my friends were lined up in the street waiting for her," she says. "I had three older brothers and this was to be my wee sis."
The family home, near St Gerard's, is full of photographs of annual summer holidays to a cottage in Wexford, of Shirley stealing blackcurrants from someone's garden, of family weddings and christenings, of Shirley dancing. "She was smiley and happy and she loved dancing and singing and reading," says Joanne.
"We sensed emotional problems from very early on," says Mary. "There was always a sense of unmet need, an invisible cord drawing her elsewhere. You try to create a sense of belonging in fostering, but at the same time, the child is not your child, you didn't carry her in your womb.
"I feel that blood family is hugely important and that this is better appreciated now than it was then," she says. "A lot of children who are brought up in care have attachment issues. Shirley was always looking for something that couldn't be found."
"She was looking for her mother," says Joanne. "She didn't talk about it a lot. It hurt her too much." When she was 11, Shirley began to have behavioural problems and Mary and Jim went to social services for advice. After assessing the situation, the authorities concluded that Shirley should move to another family.
"We regret that we were persuaded to let her go," says Mary. "It broke us. There was a terrible sense of loss for the whole family."
Shirley was fostered by the Brady family in Antrim for several years. Her foster mother, Margaret Brady, chose Emily Dickinson's poem In Vain as a reading at the funeral. That fostering relationship also broke down and Shirley was moved to St Joseph's Training School in Middleton, Co Armagh.
The gifts at Shirley's funeral included a letter she wrote after she left St Malachy's High School in Antrim, thanking a teacher who had been kind to her when she was in trouble. "The things I've taken for granted have turned out to be the most important things in my life," she wrote. "You never know, I could turn out to be a singer or a writer yet. If I want something badly enough, I'll have to work at it."
GINA SHEEHAN WAS at St Joseph's when Shirley arrived. Gina was 13, Shirley 15. "She was a gag - a really good laugh, great fun to be with. It was an all right place. There was a school, four houses, a gym and a swimming pool. There were about 28 of us. The staff was really nice to us."
During this time, Shirley was meant to attend classes at a school of music in Belfast. Mary Corry, who had kept in close contact with her, would go to meet her off the bus in Belfast, but as often as not, Shirley wasn't there.
"She was flighty, easily distracted," says Mary. "She'd have met someone and gone somewhere else." When she was 18, Shirley moved to a supervised Simon community house in Cavehill, north Belfast. "Simon were very good to her," says Mary. Simon accommodates about 150 young women each year, many of them from care backgrounds and lacking the social and personal skills to live independently. Many have missed out on education.
By this time, Shirley was harming herself, cutting her arms. But Gina says it was also a happy time. "We used to get all dressed up and go clubbing to city centre places like the Parliament and Space. Shirley started going with a fellow who also lived at Simon. That lasted a couple of years but Shirley wasn't that interested in boys - she loved her girly nights out."
Michael McCabe met Shirley on a course for young people who had been in care and they became close friends.
"We realised we were distant cousins," he recalls. "We went on residentials and everyone would sit around talking, except Shirley. She used to always ask me about my mum, who isn't well." Once, when she and Gina happened to be on the Falls Road, Shirley brought her to her mother's grave and they left flowers.
"We had all been through hard times in our lives," says Michael. "Social services were always on your back. Any trouble you had they'd take you out of the family and throw you into a home. We would all stick up for each other. Especially for Shirley. She was so small and so loveable."
"I think the move away from the Corry's did her head in," says Gina.
Another youth scheme brought Shirley and a friend for six months to Canada, where she worked as a waitress. Around 2001, she moved to Ballymena, where Gina had been living for a while. After Gina moved back to Belfast, Shirley stayed. She lived for a while in a hostel, then moved in with a woman who had formerly worked in another hostel.
Then she moved into the Ballykeel estate. It is a loyalist area, with a King Billy mural over the shop, which doubles as an off-licence, with red, white and blue kerbstones, and Ulster flags. That didn't bother or interest Shirley. A local community worker insists there is a strong sense of community in the estate, but nobody knew Shirley. "Just to see," says one young woman. "She wasn't all there." Local women say they aren't afraid as a result of Shirley's murder - as if because she was an outsider, there is no menace to them from her killer.
There are plenty of violent men in Ballymena. Women's Aid has a busy refuge in the town. Shirley wasn't known to have a boyfriend. She was easy prey. She may have had a bad experience in Ballymena before. "To me, she was afraid of men," says Michael.
At the car park where bunches of flowers have been laid, young women come and go, smoking. A baby reaches out of a buggy to try to take a teddy bear. "I thought she was a skeghead [ drug addict]," says one woman. "But she didn't deserve this." Another worked with her for a while in a local chicken factory. One says Shirley was "really nice, but you had to make an effort to talk to her".
HER BELFAST FRIENDS insist she wasn't that strange. "Shirley was just Shirley," says another friend, Tina. "She wasn't mental. She didn't care what anyone thought of her. She never put down roots but she had lots of friends. Sometimes she got depressed. She hadn't an easy life. I can't sleep thinking about what she went through before she died."
"I hated her being in Ballymena," says her sister Joanne. "I wanted her to come back to Belfast. She used to land up at my house with her black bag and she'd stay, sometimes for days, sometimes weeks, sometimes months. We'd sit and have a wee carry-out and talk. She helped me through hard times. She had a beautiful voice but she didn't have the confidence to sing in public. She loved The Rose and The Wind Beneath My Wings and Speed of the Sound of Loneliness. This last, a John Prine song, has as its chorus: "So what in the world's come over you/And what in heaven's name have you done/You've broken the speed of the sound of loneliness/ You're out there running just to be on the run."
It suited Shirley. "I used to call her the wee traveller," says Joanne.
She'd turn up and she'd leave, and efforts to contact her often failed. She rarely kept a mobile for long. She wouldn't return calls or respond to messages.
"You had to get used to dealing with Shirley in the present," says Mary Corry. "Actually, because she tended to come to us when she was in trouble, not hearing from her seemed like a sign all was well."
It was more than a year since her friends and family in Belfast had seen Shirley. A lost and fragile soul, it was her tragedy that when she was found, it was by a murderer.