The Murder of Shirley Finlay In Cold Blood

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find upsetting.

On the afternoon of the 19th of September 2006,

a man returning to his vehicle noticed a blue bundle

lying in the corner of a church car park in Ballymena.

His suspicions were aroused by the solid nature of the item

and his discovery was reported to local police.

Officers arrived on the scene soon after,

and upon examining the contents of the duvet,

discovered that it contained

the naked body of a young woman.

'The Major Investigation Team was requested by Ballymena Police,'

and I attended in and around 6:30PM.

The fact that the body was naked

and that there was some bruising and marks around the neck and face,

made me consider quite obviously,

that this attack may well have been sexually motivated.

The duvet covering the young woman's body

had also been placed inside two black bin bags,

which were removed with care,

in the hope that they may be a valuable source of fingerprints.

'I later learned that

'contained within the duvet was an orange-coloured towel.

'There was also a grey fleece,

'and there was a red-coloured top,'

which had a hood and the number 10 on the back.

I formed an opinion it early on that this was actually a deposition site,

and that potentially, the murder had not occurred at that location.

Having now established that they had a murder case to solve,

police were keen to identify the victim as quickly as possible.

'There was no report of any person missing, and we issued an appeal.'

If anyone knew who this girl might be,

to please contact the police.

RADIO: "92-95FM."

-"And 1341MW."

-"BBC Radio Ulster."

I first heard about the body that had been found in Ballymena

when I was getting ready for work,

and I was listening to the radio.

RADIO: 'It's 8 o'clock. This is the news with Linda Ray.

'A police investigation has been launched

'after a body was found in Ballymena.

'It was discovered in a parking area just off Mount Street.'

REPORTER ON RADIO: 'The woman, who is believed to be in her early 20s,

'was found by an employee of a town centre shop.

'It's been reported that the body was wrapped in a duvet.'

I don't know why,

but I immediately got a very strong sense that it was Shirley.

I obviously was upset,

because people in work were asking me if I was OK,

and I explained then that I thought

this body in Ballymena could be our Shirley.

And they encouraged me to ring the police.

And you really don't want to look stupid.

Hello there, my name is Mary Corry.

My daughter's name is Shirley Finlay.

And I heard the news this morning about you finding a body.

'I think the policeman asked me a question.'

I can't even remember what it was.

I KNEW then. That confirmed it for me.

That it was her.

When we arrived at Foster Greens,

the police liaison officer was there,

and they did begin to tell us

about some of the circumstances of Shirley's murder.

But nothing prepares you for that experience.

Nothing in life.

It's something I would hope I'd never have to do it again.

No-one expects to look at a child

that they've known and loved and reared, to be lying on a slab.

I knew immediately it was her. And all I could say was,

"Oh, my God. Somebody's hurt her. They've hurt her."

And my husband didn't recognise her at all.

All he could see was the injuries. He couldn't see beyond those.

And I had to say to him, "It is her. It is her."

And obviously, both of us got very, very upset

at the thought of how brutally attacked she must have been.

Because her face and her head were quite bruised.

'The post-mortem indicated that Shirley had sustained

'blows and punches to her face,'

particularly the left side of her face.

There was also extensive bruising to her neck,

and grab marks, leaving bruises on both her upper arms.

The marks to her face and head, although they were severe,

they were not life-threatening.

And the bruising around her neck clearly indicated

that she had been grabbed quite ferociously

and died from strangulation.

The funeral of Shirley Finlay has taken place in North Belfast.

The 24-year-old was murdered in Ballymena two weeks ago.

This morning, a priest told mourners

the young women had been brutally murdered

and then dumped like trash.

REPORTER: Among the mourners were members of Shirley's birth family

and her two foster families,

who also spoke during the funeral service.

'We shared everything, we played all day,

'we had our fights like sisters do.

'But no matter what, I always loved you.

'Then one day, you had to leave,

'which was the saddest day of my life.

'Though no matter where you lived,

'you were and always will be my wee sis, Shirley.'

In September 1981, Shirley Finlay was born

in the Royal Maternity Hospital in Belfast.

Her mother had suffered from long-term mental health problems,

so Shirley was placed in the care of foster parents

at just 10 months of age.

'She came and she settled in very well.'

I think Joanne, my daughter,

was delighted there was another girl in the house,

because I have three boys and Joanne.

So for her, it was a sister.

Oh, what's this? THEY SQUEAL

'Shirley was always full of fun as well.

'She had the strangest little giggle of a laugh,'

and many people would often comment about it,

this giggle that she had.

She also had a fantastic imagination,

and sometimes that went against us.

Other times it made us laugh.

She could be great fun,

and she could be a terrible nuisance as well.

When Shirley was growing up,

she began to show some behavioural problems.

At one stage, we had thought about maybe

we would go for adopting Shirley but once those problems...

her behaviour started to cause problems,

we got a bit frightened about that.

She got very bad tempered.

She could be quite explosive

and she would fight with Joanne and the boys over nothing.

And so, along with social services and ourselves,

we began to try and work with what was happening for her.

Shirley left our care about age 11,

and that was an extremely difficult time for all of us.

It had followed many discussions and many meetings

with ourselves and social services,

and eventually it was decided what was best for her and for us.

That she should move to another foster family.

Although Shirley no longer lived with the Corrys,

they stayed in regular contact in the years that followed,

and she was a frequent visitor to the family home.

THEY LAUGH

'They used to go down and collect her every Sunday,

'and bring her up here for Sunday lunch.

'And that continued for quite a while after she moved from here.

'She had a habit of not going to bed too early.

'And we'd be in bed, and I'd say to Jim,

'"Do you smell something burning?"

'And you'd come down,

'and she's stuck something under the grill and had forgot about it.'

Shirley, you've burned the toast! Shirley!

'Also when she stayed,

she used to spend hours in the bathroom.

We used to have to say, because we only had one bathroom,

if you need to use it, use it quick, because Shirley is going in.

Shirley, come on! I have to get to work!

And then when she'd be going home, you'd look in her bag,

and she maybe have toilet rolls and bleach and cleaner.

I'd say to her, "Look, if you want anything, ask."

I don't think she saw it as stealing off you or anything.

I think she wanted to take part of you with her,

and those seemed to be the parts she chose.

KNOCKS ON DOOR

'When Shirley left, we were still very close.

'And then later on in years when I had my own house,

'she would land up with her black bag and stay for a week.'

Maybe two weeks, maybe a month.

It depends how we got on.

What do you think I should do?

If you sit down and just say,

"Look, this is how I'm feeling

"and this is the way it's going to turn out."

'When Shirley came to stay with me, we would have sat up

'talking about me and my problems'

and her and her wee problems.

We confided in each other an awful lot.

Thanks, baby!

I have enough to worry about without worrying about you!

I know! Well, some of the wee lads you went out with, I mean...

'Sometimes we got on really well and she could stay for a month,

'and other times, we would fight like cat and dog.'

One minute she was there, and then the next minute she wasn't.

'Shirley!' >

Shirley! Your breakfast is ready!

You hear me?

KNOCKS ON DOOR

Shirley?

'Whenever Shirley left,

'even if we'd fought or whatever,

'Shirley knew that my door was always open for her.'

No matter what. No matter what.

After leaving the care system,

Shirley moved to Ballymena in 1999,

and quickly befriended Sylvia Clail.

'The first time I met Shirley Finlay, Shirley was 18 years old.'

She was wearing a bright red leather jacket,

and she was very bubbly. Very happy.

THEY CHAT AND LAUGH

'I met Shirley Finlay at age 18 at Millhouse Hostel.

'I knew Shirley about eight years.'

She was very jolly, so she was.

And outgoing. Loved to party.

'She was the life and soul of the party,

'and appeared very confident at face value.'

But to those that did know her,

there was a lot of deeper stuff going on in Shirley's mind

and in her life as well.

FOSTER MOTHER: 'She did talk to me

'about a prescription of antidepressants from her doctor.

'But she never mentioned it again.'

And because I didn't see any obvious change in her,

I don't think at the time I felt great concern about it.

Shirley's friends in Ballymena, however, did notice a change in her

whenever she moved into a flat on her own for the first time.

'I started to notice Shirley doing things that she'd never done.'

She was talking to herself as well.

And that's when I noticed a change in her.

That her mental health started to go down.

Shirley became a familiar face on the streets of Ballymena,

often alone, wrapped in a duvet and consuming alcohol.

You seen her drunk a lot as well.

In the town and that, you know.

She used to sit on the kerbs and drink tins of beer.

She always managed to pick herself back up and get on with life,

and at the age of 23 or 24,

Shirley stopped doing that.

You'd have met her sitting on steps,

talking to herself.

She knew who you were,

but she couldn't recall past memories of things you'd done,

like living in Toronto.

When we used to show her pictures of it and talk to her about it,

she used to cry and get really upset, because she couldn't remember

and couldn't recall being in Toronto and all the time she spent.

Hi, Mum. How are you?

In December 2005, Mary Corry received a phone call from Shirley,

to organise her usual Christmas visit to the family home.

Shirley agreed to call back later to confirm arrangements,

but Mary never heard from her again.

'When she wanted to be with you, she was with you.'

And when she didn't, she wasn't.

So it wasn't surprising that she hadn't been in touch.

Although, I suppose, when I think about it,

the fact that she hadn't been in touch might indicate to me

that definitely she had gone downhill very much

with her mental health.

Because, you know,

obviously she'd isolated herself.

TV REPORT: 'The young women found murdered in Ballymena on Tuesday

'was strangled before her body was dumped

'at the car park in the town's Mount Street.'

Detectives say tracing the last movements of Shirley Finlay

will be vital in catching her killer.

Police say she was a very vulnerable young women,

and her death was brutal and horrific.

She would have been seen around Springwell Street as well.

She was found...

As Shirley's body had been dumped in a public car park,

police believed the murder must have taken place nearby

and focused their investigation in and around the Mount Street area.

Coincidentally, a resident of Hill Street

had been brought into police custody

on the very day that Shirley's body had been discovered.

Nyet.

At the time we were conducting house-to-house enquiries in the Mount Street area.

We discovered that Henryk Gorski, who resided at 5A Hill Street,

in Ballymena was in custody.

Gorski was a 49-year-old Polish national who had worked in meat plants all over Europe.

He arrived in Northern Ireland in September 2005,

and he'd taken up employment working in Ballymena Meats.

During the investigation of Shirley's murder,

Gorski was already in custody for allegedly obtaining money by deception

and threats to kill a fellow Polish national.

When we looked at his background in Poland, we saw that he had criminal convictions,

and these were for burglary, for theft, for assault.

As a result of those enquiries,

we went to Poland and we spoke to members of Henryk Gorski's family.

THE SPEAK POLISH

From that picture we saw that he was a very, very violent man,

that he regularly beat his children and his wife.

Because he was a person of interest,

an interview was conducted in prison with Henryk Gorski.

We've two witness reports, Henryk, stating that Shirley sat there on your doorstep.

HE TRANSLATES INTO POLISH

When repeated to him that a number of witnesses had identified Shirley

as regularly sitting on his doorstep on Hill Street,

he simply maintained his stance that he didn't know and had never seen her.

We have a witness statement here that says that you described

to a colleague how you approached Shirley on one occasion and that she run off.

It says here that you described Miss Finlay as being "mental."

THEY SPEAK POLISH

HE SPEAKS POLISH

-HE TRANSLATES:

-"It's lies."

Having established that Gorski had a history of violence to women,

police were increasingly suspicious of his involvement

in the murder of Shirley Finlay, and looked to forensic results for confirmation.

There had been an extensive amount of material found,

and the first major breakthrough that we had were the two black bin liners

which had covered the upper and lower parts of the duvet.

We were able to identify fingerprints on both bin bags,

which were identified as those belonging to Henryk Gorski.

As a result of this, we obtained warrants

and we conducted a search in the home of Gorski.

We were looking at that time for anything which would link

the duvet, the towel, Shirley's clothing or the bin liners that were recovered

at the deposition site in Mount Street back to the flat in 5A Hill Street.

During their examination of Gorski's flat, forensic officers

discovered a number of fibres from two of the flat's carpets

which matched fibres found on the towel from the deposition site.

Forensic examination of the blue duvet cover that Shirley had been wrapped in

revealed distinctive mud staining, which was quickly traced back to a flat roof

at the rear of Gorski's property.

So what we think happened is that somehow,

either before Shirley was put in the duvet, it was in contact with the flat roof.

Maybe it was out to dry

and it blew onto the roof.

Or that Shirley's body

was in the duvet and made contact with the roof on being moved.

We don't know. Either way, it make contact with both the metal stairs and the roof,

and that would provide a satisfactory explanation for the results that we got.

With the forensic case building,

police were hoping for a confession of guilt from Henryk Gorski.

Did you kill Shirley Finlay, Henryk?

Did you grab her off the street?

HE TRANSLATES Nie!

Did you pull her body into the hallway?

Did you punch her and beat her about the face?

Did you strangle Shirley Finlay, Henryk?

Nie!

-< HE TRANSLATES:

-"No."

Meanwhile, further forensic material retrieved from the duvet cover

was about to become crucial evidence in solving the murder of Shirley Finlay.

The main types of evidence

that we became aware of

early on in the investigation

was the presence of a number of fragments of paint

which had been identified among the debris that was recovered from the duvet cover.

The paint chemistry was very distinctive.

We would normally deal with

household-type paints

and automotive-type paints,

but this was something completely different.

The little fragments of paint themselves were also visually very distinctive.

Most of them were actually C-shaped.

It was my opinion at the time that these fragments were actually

breaking away from the edge of a hole on a metal object.

At that time I was thinking of something like a large, grey-painted colander.

In a bid to find the source of these distinctive paint fragments,

Jim Armstrong went to the home of Henryk Gorski.

In the corridor off the bathroom

there was a satellite dish, a black-coloured satellite dish sitting on the floor.

The satellite dish had hundreds of small holes punched in it

as part of its manufacture, and closer examination of the satellite dish

showed me that there was actually grey paint below the black,

and that the original colour of the satellite dish had been grey,

and that it had been freshly over-painted with black paint.

An examination of the holes on the satellite dish showed that

small, C-shaped fragments of paint were breaking away from the edges of these holes.

Comparison of the grey paint from Mr Gorski's Hoover,

the grey paint on the satellite dish

and the grey paint from the duvet that Finlay had been wrapped in

showed that all three were physically and chemically indistinguishable.

At the point whenever we were able to establish

the paint from the satellite dish matched the paint samples which were found

in the duvet cover, for me, was a eureka moment in the investigation.

Why were your fingerprints on the bin bags, Henryk?

HE TRANSLATES

HE SPEAKS POLISH

"I don't know. I don't really know."

Well, they're your fingerprints. Our forensics have proved that.

We can also link the towel and the duvet back to your flat.

We have a hair sample taken from your carpet had belonged to Shirley Finlay.

We have witness reports stating that Shirley regularly sat on your doorstep.

You've no alibi.

Our evidence suggests that you murdered Shirley Finlay

at your flat in Hill Street and then used the buggy to transport the body

from the exit at the rear of your property to the car park on Mount Street.

HE TRANSLATES

I'm going to ask you one more time. Did you kill Shirley Finlay?

HE TRANSLATES

Nie! Nie! Nie!

Henryk Gorski denied seeing Shirley Finlay on the night of her murder,

but police evidence suggested a different sequence of events.

Are you OK?

-Yeah.

-Do you need help?

-No.

It's OK. I will help you.

No, leave me alone! Leave me alone!

SHE SCREAMS

STRAINING AND CHOKING

Henryk Gorski, I am charging you with the murder of Shirley Finlay

on the 18th of September 2006.

Do you have anything to respond?

Gorski went on trial in April 2009,

and the Crown case ran for a number of weeks before he sacked his legal team.

This resulted in the collapse of the trial.

A second trial was held in September of 2009.

Gorski gave evidence in that trial on this occasion

and he completely denied everything, was very aggressive in relation to

his giving of evidence, which is, to me, reflective of the nature of the man.

'A 52-year-old man has been jailed for life

'for the murder of a woman in Ballymena.'

'This is Shirley Finlay, 24 years old, strangled,

'and her body dumped.'

'Her body was wrapped in a duvet cover and bin bags

'and dumped in a church car park.'

'This was the second trial for Henryk Gorski, a Polish national.

'The first was abandoned when he sacked his legal team.'

'Today the killer, Henryk Gorski, was told he must serve 20 years in jail.'

'A priest told mourners the young woman had been brutally murdered and then dumped...'

'Her death was brutal, her short life, scarred by mental health problems, was lonely.

'Tomorrow would have been her 25th birthday.'

'The jury took two days to return their guilty verdict

'at Antrim Crown Court this afternoon.

'They had heard four weeks of evidence in this,

'the second trial of former meat plant operator, Henryk Gorski.

'The defendant, formerly of Hill Street in Ballymena,

'had maintained an ex-girlfriend had framed him

'for the murder of 24-year-old Shirley Finlay.

'Her foster mother of 11 years wept as the verdict was given.

'Outside, she said she'd attended court for Shirley.'

We do feel a bit guilty that we weren't there for

the last year of her life.

But we've always loved her, and we let her down, I think.

And we have to take responsibility for that,

and that's why we stood by her the last three years to make sure

that that man, Mr Gorski,

justice was done.

When the guilty verdict was read out,

there was a lot of emotion from our side of the courtroom.

There was absolute relief that it was over, as we thought,

and we were absolutely and totally convinced

that Mr Gorski had murdered Shirley.

The nature of the crime that he committed, aggravated by

the fact that Shirley Finlay was a quiet, gentle, vulnerable young woman,

and the fact that he showed no remorse, to me indicates that

a long custodial sentence of 20 years is quite just in the circumstances,

and will make the streets of not only Northern Ireland but indeed Poland,

should he ever return there, a lot safer from this man.

When they give him the 20 years,

I thought, "You know, well, yes, that's as good as we're going to get."

But in reality, he took at least 50 years of our Shirley's life, if not 60, you know?

Who are we to say what Shirley could have made with her life?

But that's the system, and that's where you don't have any control or any say,

and you just have to go with it

and be glad that that man is now in a place where he can't hurt anybody else.

And that's very, very important to us.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd