▶ Watch Video: No body, no arrest: What happened to kidnapped Irish racehorse Shergar? | 60 Minutes
A sports commentator became an unlikely hostage negotiator after a 2 a.m. phone call.
Derek Thompson once stood in the winner’s circle next to a champion racehorse named Shergar, owned by one of the richest royals in the world, who dominated on the tracks in the 1980s. So when the call came in, Thompson flew from London to Belfast, Ireland, then traveled to a farmhouse 30 miles away. For 12 hours, he handled call after call from the kidnappers, thought to be members of the Irish Republican Army, or IRA. Shergar’s owner, the Aga Khan, spiritual leader of the Ismaili Muslims, also received ransom demands, ranging from 40,000 pounds to 2 million.
“‘The horse has had an accident. He’s dead.’ And the phone went dead,” Thompson recalled. “That’s the last we heard.”
More than 40 years later, the mystery of Shergar’s kidnapping remains unsolved.
Who was Shergar?
As someone who’s seen a lot of thoroughbred racing, Thompson ranks Shergar as “probably the best of all time.”
The horse won both the Irish Derby and the Epsom Derby, England’s equivalent of the Kentucky Derby, in 1981.
“And he won by 10 lengths,” Thompson said. “The guy who rode the second horse, he was long-sighted and he couldn’t wear his glasses, obviously, when he was riding. So when he passed the post, he thought he’d won.”
Shergar, with a distinctive white blaze on his face and four white socks, was known for his overwhelming speed and stride.
After a hero’s welcome back in County Kildare, Ireland’s horse country, Shergar was put out to stud at Ballymany Stud Farm. The Aga Khan syndicated Shergar, selling 40 shares in the horse at 250,000 pounds each, totaling more than $50 million, in today’s currency.
The night Shergar was taken
Jim Fitzgerald, Shergar’s late head groom, was there the night the kidnappers showed up. Before his death, Fitzgerald described what happened to Belfast-based filmmaker Alison Millar for her documentary, “Searching for Shergar.”
“My impression was that he was absolutely haunted, traumatized by the whole experience,” Millar said.
She doesn’t believe Fitzgerald ever got over the trauma of what happened on Feb. 8, 1983.
“It was in early February. And we were in the sitting room,” Fitzgerald said in the documentary. “And the next thing, a knock come at the door and these gangsters come in with guns.”
Fitzgerald’s wife and children were in the room. The gunman ordered them to the floor and held Fitzgerald at gunpoint as he took them to Shergar’s stable.
The kidnappers made off with Shergar, and released Fitzgerald about 30 miles away from the farm.
“He had the gun pointed at his head and told to get outta the car and, ‘Shut up. Don’t talk about this,'” Millar said.
Why Shergar was taken
Shergar’s kidnapping happened during “the Troubles“, a violent conflict that terrorized Northern Ireland for decades. Bombings and shootings rocked the country, with Catholics pitted against Protestants, mostly over questions of British rule. The IRA, the Catholic paramilitary group, raised funds for its campaign through bank and post office robberies.
For the IRA, Shergar represented a potential massive source of funds.
“Shergar wasn’t any horse. He was the most expensive horse in the world,” Millar said. “The bank robberies weren’t paying off.”
The IRA wanted cash for guns, according to Millar.
Searching for Shergar
There were hardly any clues when police responded to Shergar’s kidnapping, and they were never able to make an arrest.
The mystery captivated Ireland. A folk song about the search for Shergar came out. Crime-solving clairvoyants got involved.
“The help lines were getting bonkers [with] people saying, ‘Hey, we found the horse.’ And it wasn’t. It was, like, a dead sheep,” Millar said.
Over the weeks and years that followed, theories abounded as the search for Shergar continued. Some suggested he’d been stolen to pay off U.S. mafia debt, while others suggested the stallion had been shipped to Libya for Muammar Qaddafi.
Irish horse racing figures, including trainer Richard Brabazon, still wonder today what happened to Shergar. Brabazon believes there was an accident after Shergar was kidnapped, and that the horse was killed.
“The only thing that puzzles me is, it’s a very big operation to take a horse,” Brabazon said. “If you ask me to do it myself, I’d find it hard to cover it up. You know, and say, ‘How do you deal with a big animal like this?’ You know, not easy. I buried a donkey once, and it took me half the day.”
Many in Ireland’s horse country believe the kidnappers couldn’t handle a stallion like Shergar and likely shot him within a couple of days. The theory was circulated in the 1998 memoir of former IRA member-turned-informant, Sean O’Callaghan, now dead. He wrote that the kidnappers drove Shergar to County Leitrim, near the border with Northern Ireland.
The area would have been ideal for Shergar’s kidnappers to get away with disposing of a body, according to journalist Tommy Conlon, who wrote a book about the IRA kidnapping of supermarket executive Don Tidey.
“If the local leader here got a phone call saying, ‘We need to dispose of this horse,’ there would’ve been people here to do it,” Conlon said. “What’s more, it’s so sparsely populated, so remote that it would be an ideal place, you would think, to bury a body that you never wanted found.”
Lore has it that Shergar’s kidnappers disposed of his remains in the boggy terrain near a town called Aughnasheelin.
O’Callaghan’s book also names Kevin Mallon, a convicted IRA operative who once broke out of prison via helicopter, as the ringleader of Shergar’s kidnapping. 60 Minutes tried unsuccessfully to reach Mallon both over the phone and in person.
It seems likely the mystery will remain unsolved.
“I think there’s a massive shame that the IRA took this on, and what was the point of it? It was pointless,” Millar said. “The horse is such a symbol of Ireland and, you know, freedom, and its beauty, its wildness, its magic. And there’s a shame that they shot the most famous and killed the most famous horse in the world at that time.”
