The bare facts of his life are outlined thus: RUC, Protestant, 36, married, two children. In Lost Lives, the vast book of historical record that chronologically documents every death in the Troubles, Millar McAllister is listed as victim number 2,017. The stranger ran to a waiting car, the boy’s cries echoing in his head, They stared at each other for a long moment until the boy started screaming.
In the silence that followed, the killer noticed McAllister’s seven-year-old son, Alan, standing just inside the kitchen door, frozen to the spot. He was shot three times at close range, twice in the chest and the third time, as he was lying on the ground, in the head. Up until 1977, as Ian Cobain puts it, “not a single member of the security forces had lost their life in Lisburn”.Īll that would change on the morning of Saturday, 22 April 1978, when Millar McAllister, a police photographer, opened the back door of his home in Woodland Park, having glimpsed a figure moving in his back garden. Predominantly Protestant and home to many members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), it had for the most part escaped the violence that had ravaged other parts of the province. The town of Lisburn, near Belfast, was not such a place. In certain parts of Northern Ireland in the late 1970s, a stranger arriving at the door could provoke panic, even terror.
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