Overview
Shergar was not an ordinary horse. In the 1981 Derby at Epsom he came home ten lengths clear of the field, the widest winning margin recorded in Britain's biggest flat race that century, and he took the Irish Derby and the King George in the same season. Michael O'Hehir's call at the Curragh — "It's Shergar first, and the rest are nowhere" — is the line Irish racing still quotes. The Aga Khan turned down American offers and retired him to Ballymany in County Kildare, syndicating him into forty shares at £250,000 each: he kept six, and thirty-four went to other buyers, among them John Magnier, Lord Derby and Sheikh Maktoum Al Maktoum. Shergar covered thirty-five mares in his first season and had a book of around fifty-five waiting for his second.
On the evening of 8 February 1983, men in balaclavas arrived at the head groom's house on the estate, held his family at gunpoint, and made him load the stallion into a horsebox. They drove away. It was the night before Ireland's biggest bloodstock sale at Goffs, when trailer traffic on those roads would attract no attention at all.
The Night at Ballymany
The stud was, by the standards of what it held, barely guarded. RTÉ's account of the case describes security at Ballymany as "non-existent" on the night: no guards on duty, the yard's surveillance cameras faulty, and a five-bar wooden gate with a latch rather than a lock. It was foggy and there was no moon. The Sunday Telegraph, reporting the twenty-fifth anniversary, made the same point by comparison — no electronic gates, no CCTV, no intercom, "even though the horses inside were sometimes worth millions of pounds each".
Shortly after 8.30pm, three masked and armed men pushed past Jim Fitzgerald's son at the door of the groom's house. One of them said, "We have come for Shergar. We want £2 million for him." By the time the horsebox left there were up to eight men on the ground. Fitzgerald, then fifty-three and a father of six, was driven away, made to lie down with his face covered, and put out on a road some miles off with a warning not to go to the police. He walked to the next village and rang his brother.
What happened next mattered more than anyone realised at the time. Fitzgerald telephoned the stud manager, Ghislain Drion. Drion rang Stan Cosgrove, Shergar's vet and himself a shareholder. Cosgrove rang his friend Captain Sean Berry. Berry rang Alan Dukes, the local TD and Minister for Finance, who was due to deliver his first budget the following day. Dukes later told RTÉ he was "a bit taken aback to get a call at that hour of the morning with the story that Shergar had gone missing", and passed it to the Minister for Justice. The Gardaí were not alerted until roughly four in the morning. Eight hours had gone by, and in that time a horsebox could have crossed the country in any direction.
The Ransom
What followed was less a negotiation than a farce, and the shape of it is the best evidence about who was responsible.
Demands were made by telephone for £2 million. The kidnappers appeared not to understand that a syndicated horse has thirty-four shareholders besides the Aga Khan, and that the syndicate had a settled position: paying would put every valuable stallion in Ireland at risk, and they would not do it. The Aga Khan did not control the decision alone, could not be sure the horse would come back if he paid, and said as much.
Communications were chaotic. The gang had given Fitzgerald a code phrase — "King Neptune" — to authenticate later calls. The syndicate brought in the risk consultancy Control Risks, which ran its side of the talks from Paris across four days. On 12 February the thieves said proof had been left at the Rosnaree Hotel; what was collected were Polaroids of Shergar, some showing the horse's head next to a copy of The Irish News dated 11 February — which proved a date, not a living animal. Told that this was not enough, the caller said, "If you're not satisfied, that's it," and the contact stopped for good.
The Belfast Channel
There was a second, stranger line of contact, and it is the best-documented part of the whole affair because one of the men on it has talked about it ever since.
On the Wednesday evening a caller told the BBC newsroom in Belfast that negotiations would be conducted only with three racing journalists from London. The three named were Lord Oaksey of the Daily Telegraph, Peter Campling of the Sun, and Derek Thompson of ITV's racing team. Thompson has described flying into a Belfast airport full of cameras, being called to the hotel phone at the Europa, and hearing a voice give the agreed codeword — "Arkle", after the Irish steeplechaser — and then say, "We are watching you from across the road."
The journalists were driven to an isolated farmhouse thirty miles outside Belfast belonging to the trainer Jeremy Maxwell. Over roughly eight hours Thompson took ten to twelve calls, each opening with a different password, trying to hold each one past the ninety seconds the police said they needed for a trace. The caller hung up at eighty, at eighty-five, never longer. At one in the morning Thompson finally kept a call going for ninety-five seconds, turned to the officer beside him and asked where they were, and was told, in his account, "I'm sorry Mr Thompson but the man who traces the calls went off-shift at midnight."
The talks never got past opening positions: an initial payment of £40,000 on their side, a photograph with a dated newspaper on his. At 06:55 the phone rang once more. Thompson recalls eight words — "The horse has had an accident. He's dead." — and then nothing.
What the Former IRA Members Say
The account most people now work from comes from within the republican movement, principally through Sean O'Callaghan, an IRA member who worked as an informer for the Gardaí and published his book The Informer in 1999.
On that version the operation was an IRA fundraising attempt devised by Kevin Mallon, a senior figure who, O'Callaghan said, hit on the idea while in prison reading the racing pages. O'Callaghan named seven men he said planned and carried out the theft. He wrote that Shergar threw himself into a frenzy, injured a leg and "was killed within days", while the gang kept up the pretence that he was alive. O'Callaghan said Gerry Fitzgerald, one of the alleged team, told him at a meeting in Dublin weeks after the kidnap that the horse had to be killed very quickly because the stallion was out of control.
Derek Thompson has said he found the book persuasive for a reason particular to him: it contained a password that he had never made public.
Nobody has ever been charged. The IRA has never admitted any role. Mallon, approached by The Sunday Telegraph in 2008, refused to discuss the case. Nicky Kehoe, also named in the book, denied any involvement, and said he had not sued because nobody believed O'Callaghan anyway.
The Sunday Telegraph Account
In January 2008 The Sunday Telegraph published an investigation based on a former IRA member speaking through an intermediary, who said that O'Callaghan had not been told the whole story "because the gang was so embarrassed by what happened".
On that account the Army Council sanctioned the kidnap and arranged safe passage to a remote farm near the border, but the vet who had agreed to look after the horse withdrew on the night — his wife, the source said, had found out what he was doing. Four days in, with the syndicate stalling and the country being turned over, the leadership concluded the animal was worthless to them and told the gang to let it go. The source said Mallon judged that impossible under surveillance and ordered the horse shot, and that two handlers killed it with a machine gun in the stable where it was held. Walter Swinburn, who rode Shergar to the Derby, told the paper that "no horse deserves an ending like that", and said he had never accepted the idea that the horse was too hard to handle.
That account rests on a single anonymous source and cannot be checked. What can be said is that it agrees with the observable record on timing — the collapse of contact after four days, the absence of any proof of life, and the fact that a horse of that value could never have been sold, raced or used at stud anywhere in the world without immediate identification.
The Alternatives
The other theories persist because nothing was ever recovered.
One holds that Colonel Gaddafi's Libya financed the kidnapping, or received the horse alive, in exchange for arms to the IRA. Another, floated on television at the time by the racing pundit John McCririck, was that someone with a vendetta against the Aga Khan had taken him. A version involving a New Orleans mafia figure and a soured horse deal circulated for years. There were whispers that Shergar was alive somewhere covering mares whose breeding could never be declared, and periodic excavations that found nothing.
There is also the insurance reading: that the syndicate stood to gain, since Shergar was insured for a substantial sum. The record cuts against it. Only shareholders whose policies carried a theft clause were paid; those insured for mortality alone were not, because no body was ever produced. Stan Cosgrove was one of them, and he was still out of pocket decades later, having also spent tens of thousands of pounds of his own money trying to recover the horse. The syndicate's refusal to pay a ransom also cost them the animal outright, which is a costly way to run a fraud.
The Investigation
The Garda inquiry became notorious in its own right. Chief Superintendent James "Spud" Murphy briefed the press at length, wore a trilby, and followed up contacts from psychics and mediums; his best-remembered line is "A clue? That is something we haven't got." The trainer and pundit Ted Walsh described the nightly television footage of Gardaí looking in car boots and climbing ladders into haylofts and asked how anyone expected to find a stallion up there.
Captain Sean Berry later said there had been two parallel inquiries — detectives from Dublin and the local force in Kildare — that would not share information, and that the Dublin officers told him not to tell Murphy anything. Eight weeks in, Cosgrove was introduced by senior detectives to a man claiming an IRA contact who could produce Shergar for IR£80,000. The money was handed over in what was meant to be a sting, the horse never appeared, and the cash was never recovered. The Garda sergeant involved was later dismissed from the force for breaching regulations; he has maintained his innocence and said that when it went wrong, senior officers denied any connection with the ransom.
Where the Body Might Be
O'Callaghan, The Sunday Telegraph and The Observer have all pointed to the same part of the country: the boggy hill ground around Ballinamore in County Leitrim, and specifically the townland of Aughnasheelin a few miles away. The journalist Kevin O'Connor put it as a bet rather than a fact — that Shergar first met his doom in north Leitrim, and whether he was moved afterwards is anybody's guess. Ballinamore is also where the businessman Don Tidey was found alive after an IRA kidnapping later in 1983, and local people interviewed by the Telegraph in 2008 said they had never heard anyone claim to know where the horse was buried.
Derek Thompson's own belief, which he acknowledges he cannot support with evidence, is that the body went into the sea off the south coast.
The Legacy
No one has ever been charged. No remains have been confirmed. The Aga Khan's syndicate absorbed the loss and the stud continued.
What the case left behind was a lasting change in how valuable bloodstock is kept — security at Irish and British studs was transformed in the following years — and a story that has outgrown the animal at the centre of it. Shergar is now better known for vanishing than for the ten lengths, which is a strange fate for the most emphatic Derby winner on record.