TWO NORTH Belfast men convicted of the barbaric and motiveless murder of schoolboy Thomas Devlin have been ordered to spend at least 52 years behind bars between them.
Sentencing Gary Taylor (23) and his accomplice Nigel Brown (26) to life in prison, Mr Justice McLaughlin yesterday told the pair they had launched a “horrifying and brutal attack upon utterly defenceless and harmless boys”.
He ordered that Taylor, Mountcollyer Avenue, serve a minimum of 30 years, and Brown, Whitewell Road, at least 22 years. Neither Brown nor Taylor appeared to show any emotion.
The judge said it was up to the parole commissioners to decide when, or whether, either of the two should be released.
“Their job is to protect the public on a longer-term basis, and it may be that people involved in this type of killing, with the kinds of social attitudes displayed by each of these defendants, may not be released for many years after they have served the tariff period.
“The defendants will simply have to face up to that reality and change or, if they prove incapable of change, face the inevitable consequence.”
At the end of a six-week trial in February, the two were unanimously convicted of murdering Thomas Devlin (15) and trying to murder his friend Jonathan McKee on August 10th, 2005.
The jury heard that Taylor and Brown set out that night intent on attacking anyone they happened to come across on the mainly Catholic, but mixed, Somerton Road.
Within 20 minutes of leaving the Ross House block of flats in Mount Vernon, where the pair lived at the time, they had spotted their victims, Devlin and McKee, and their friend Fintan Maguire, who were walking home from a shop after buying sweets.
In an unprovoked attack, Brown first used his baton to beat McKee around the head and shoulders, while Taylor ran to drag Devlin down from the wall of a school he was trying to scramble over in a desperate bid for sanctuary.
Taylor stabbed the teenager nine times, mainly around his arm and back, causing such massive internal bleeding that he died within minutes.
He then turned his attentions to McKee, stabbing him once in the gut as he went to help his stricken friend.
The jury heard McKee would most probably have suffered the same fate as Devlin if he had not been carrying Thomas’s rucksack, which took the brunt of further blows from the knife. The attackers then casually walked away, leaving a scene of devastation behind them.
Giving evidence, McKee described the attack as “frenzied” and “brutal”, telling the jury: “As it was unprovoked, it was scary how ferociously he was swinging at me, and just sort of how brutal it was more than anything.”
He recalled how, as the attackers walked away, he could hear one of them calling the dog they had with them, shouting “Lulu or something along those lines”. The jury heard that within half an hour of the fatal assault, police had stopped Brown on nearby Fortwilliam Park as he was walking his mother’s dog, which was called Zola.
Mr Justice McLaughlin said it was clear the three friends had been behaving in a “completely law-abiding and carefree manner” when they were attacked with such horrifying brutality.
“It is self-evident that this was a sustained and deliberate attack designed to cause maximum injury, in fact indisputably the intention was to cause the death of Thomas,” said the judge.
There was no evidence on which he could be sure that the attack was motivated by sectarianism, he said, so he was approaching the case on the basis that it had been a motiveless attack.
The judge noted that Brown had 72 previous convictions including entries for attacking police, assaults, criminal damage and possessing weapons and drugs, while Taylor had a “much shorter” record including entries for theft, drugs, assaults and affray.