‘I killed a man. I will regret it every day of my life’
Each and every day, there is a moment when Paul Carberry thinks about the man he killed as a teenager and the impact his actions have had on both of their families.
The children’s charity boss was 16 when he stabbed John Murray, 20, to death on a train taking Scottish football fans to London for a match against England at Wembley in May 1979.
Forty-three years on and Carberry has turned his life around as a married father-of-three who, in March, was appointed the chief executive of Action for Children.
Recent reports about the murder conviction have prompted him to speak out about what happened – and the profound impact it has had on his life and work.
When the case once again hit the headlines in May following Carberry’s promotion to become the £154,000-a-year boss of the charity, whose patron is the Princess of Wales, it was suggested that the Royals were unaware of his criminal past.
But as he insists as we sit down for a candid chat at Action for Children’s headquarters in London’s Holborn: “I’ve never tried to hide it. I’ve never spoken in public about it, but I’ve told who needed to know – ministers, government officials, the Royal Foundation, the Charity Commission. The Royals knew before my appointment was made public.
“It’s on my record and it will always be on my record. But I’ve always tried to be respectful. I always knew that someone didn’t have a son because of me. How would my mother feel?”
Clearly nervous and distressed, just at the thought of discussing, in detail, what happened on that tragic summer’s night in 1979. Carberry, 60, could not not look further removed from the events he is describing. Smartly dressed in a shirt and tie, the bespectacled, silver-haired Glaswegian still cannot quite believe it happened.
“Obviously, it’s had a massive impact on my life,” he says. “I mean, it’s something that I regret every day of my life.”
At the time, he was too drunk to remember exactly what had happened. It was only when he was woken up by police that he was told he had taken someone’s life.
Court reports later heard that he was with the Govan Team gang, named after a tough district of his native Glasgow, when he got into a fight with another group of fans.
Carberry had chased Murray and two friends through the crowded train, stabbing and wounding Michael McBain, 22, who was asleep on the floor, before fatally stabbing Murray when a locked door stopped him escaping.
Carberry denied murder, claiming he had confiscated another man’s flick knife and recalled nothing of the attack after being headbutted by Murray during the fray.
But following a trial at Chester Crown Court, he was found guilty in December 1979 and “detained indefinitely at Her Majesty’s pleasure” – the juvenile equivalent of a mandatory life sentence with a minimum tariff set by the trial judge.
One paper reported the case under the headline “Terror on the Tartan Express”.
Carberry recalls: “I was travelling to a football game from Glasgow to London. It was a big deal. Scotland versus England at Wembley. I was travelling with older guys who I would call associates rather than friends from my area. The train was a bit chaotic: a lot of drinking, you can imagine, on an overnight train.
“I was drinking. Drinking heavily. I was only 16. The reports at the time said that it was vodka and beer. There had been other altercations and actually there was an individual in my company who had a knife and I took it off him when I was sober, saying, that’s enough.
“As the night went on, there was an altercation over a female. We rather stupidly tried to get involved in it, tried to stop it and…”
He trails off as the memories become more painful to muster.
“Somebody ran behind me and headbutted me. I don’t really remember an awful lot more after that. The next thing, I woke up. I was back in my seat. The train had stopped and somebody said, ‘Someone’s died’. I’m like, ‘What?’
“The police came on the train with someone from the other group who pointed at me and said, ‘It was him’ and they took me off the train. The next thing I know, I’m in a police cell, I’m being interviewed and before I knew it, I was in custody.”
At that time, was he aware that he had killed someone? “I wasn’t at that point, no. I don’t even remember.”
But he’s not saying he didn’t do it? “I’m not saying that at all, no. I take full responsibility for what I did. I pleaded not guilty to murder at the trial because my QC and my solicitors were saying, ‘If you don’t remember it, you’ve got to plead not guilty’. I said, “If I did this, I never meant it or intended it.”
Carberry later told Chester Crown Court that he had got drunk for the first time in his life on the train and that the trouble started when a girl was slapped, and Murray and his friends accused the fans from Govan of molesting her.
“I apologised, but they would not accept it,” Carberry, 17 at the time, told Judge Emlyn Hooson, insisting he was not a member of the Govan Team gang but had friends who were. “The lad butted me and it just about knocked me out. I don’t remember what happened afterwards.”
The police had intercepted the train at Warrington station and Carberry was taken straight to the nearby Risley Remand Centre, now Risley Prison. A 1988 report from His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons would go on to describe the facility as “barbarous and squalid”.
‘Your world collapses around you’
Recalling what it was like to spend his first night in a prison cell, Carberry says: “Your world collapses around you. It’s hard for it to sink in. I’m clearly ashamed and sorry for what I’ve done, but it was also the terrible impact it had on my parents.”
Carberry was immediately detained in Risley’s hospital unit alongside men of all ages on murder charges. “It was horrible. It was back in the days of having bars on the windows. I think I was probably still in shock that first night. You’re trying to take it all in. But you’re also trying to come to terms with what you’ve done.”
Born in Glasgow in August 1962, the middle of three children, Carberry describes himself as “a typical kid from Govan”, adding: “I was a normal kid who played football. Yes, it was a tough area, but I had a job in the shipyard because I’d done reasonably well at school.
“My headmaster had written to my parents saying, ‘He should come back and do his highers and go to university’. But my parents didn’t work at that time, so nobody in the house was bringing in any money.”
Having grafted all their lives, his father Nicky had to give up work following a series of heart attacks while his mother Maud also suffered from health issues when he was a teenager.
“My mother and father had worked all their days. They were basically good people. They brought us up well, my brother, sister and I. We were well parented, well supported.
“My dad, back in the day, would take me to the library, and I was a good reader, whereas a lot of kids (in my area) really weren’t. At one point at school, I thought I might be a journalist because I was good at English. But I ended up in the shipyards.”
Carberry had not been in any trouble with the law before he boarded the train that Friday night.
‘My mother was destroyed by it’
The hardest thing was the impact that his murder conviction had on both of his parents, particularly his mother.
“We were a close family and my parents were destroyed by it,” he admits. “My mother was destroyed by it. She didn’t come to see me [in prison] as often as my dad. She couldn’t cope with it.
“It was difficult because I was in prison in a different country, so it was always a challenge for people to travel. My parents were very supportive, my friends were very supportive, but my mother had all sorts of depression. You have to live with that as well.”
Did he discuss in detail what he’d done with his father? “We didn’t have those kinds of conversations because my dad was a man’s man. There was no therapy or anything like that back then. You just got on with it.
“Prisons are scary places, but I suppose the thing about the background that I had was that you grew up in a tough area so you were used to rubbing shoulders with pretty hard kids. I played a lot of football, so I captained prison teams. I wasn’t a threat to anybody inside.”
Acknowledging that his was a “tragic case”, the judge recommended the shortest possible prison term, with Carberry serving five-and-a-half years in total, first at Risley and then HMP Aylesbury.
Resolving to make the best of a very bad situation, he signed up for as many classes as possible, learning catering and furniture making. But it was signing up for a braille course after he was moved to Aylesbury which changed the direction of his life completely.
He says: “If you were relatively bright, then you had more chance of getting on the courses, which is obviously not helpful for those kids who have not had as many educational opportunities. So I learned braille and transcribed books for the blind.”
It was one way of coping with the all-consuming guilt: “The hardest part of prison is not that you can’t get out – it’s the guilt. You’re feeling guilty about what you’ve done and what you’d done to your family. It’s something you think about all the time. You try to balance it out with, ‘How can I make amends?’
“You’d see people in prison who’d say ‘I’ll never be back’ and then you see them before you know it and you’re thinking, ‘What a waste’. I was always thinking I don’t want this to happen to any other families.
“What if there were good programmes in the community? Proper alternatives to custody? It’s the same with the young people we work with now. A lot of them, before they get into prison, have been traumatised. They’ve been sexually abused, physically abused. Or been neglected or mistreated.
“There’s a lack of opportunity, they’ve not been parented properly, and then inevitably they’ll end up in these places. I knew that but for me, that didn’t need to be the end of the story.”
Leaving prison with his braille course under his belt, his probation officer helped him to land his first job, back in Glasgow, teaching visually impaired children at an adult training centre.
From there, he moved into volunteer social work when he was given the chance to formally apply to become a social worker, working with youngsters caught up in the criminal justice system.
“They looked at my background with a fine-tooth comb,” he says. “But I think in society there has to be room for forgiveness, for hope and for change. And that’s what we try to do with our young people. That’s fundamental. I was lucky I was surrounded by people who believed in that.”
Carberry joined Action for Children as a children’s services manager in 1994. The charity, which has 7,000 staff and volunteers who operate over 475 services in the UK, supports nearly 700,000 vulnerable children and their families every year.
In 2016, the Princess succeeded Elizabeth II as patron and is in regular contact with Carberry, having risen through the ranks as assistant director for children’s services, Scotland national director and England interim national director before being promoted to chief executive five months ago.
Of Kate, he says: “We’re very delighted to have her as a patron as we were the Queen. It’s great to have her involvement and input into early years and that raises the profile of that issue.”
In 2012, he set up the Serious Organised Crime Service, the first ever taskforce for children involved in organised crime in Glasgow, succeeding in turning many of them around with the help of the police and peer mentors who had lived experience, so could be the positive role model they were longing for.
He says: “Gangs are very good at recruiting young people – you could be violent, you could be entrepreneurial, and they’ll recruit these young people for drug dealing, violence to order, shoplifting to order, and escalate people right through it. And once they’re in, you can’t get them out.
“We’ve seen families chased out of areas, having to leave in the middle of the night because the kids had found themselves in something they can’t get out of. We try to show them another way.
“They were families who had experienced people dying from overdoses, people being murdered, people being in prison for long sentences, but we could always identify somebody in the family who wanted the best for that kid. It could be a grandmother. It could be an uncle who’d spent time in prison. There was always someone who wanted to help break that cycle.”
The programme has since been rolled out across the country and won the European Social Services Overall Excellence Award in 2019.
Describing the pandemic as “the most difficult period in living memory” for Britain’s children, Carberry warns that increased use of devices has not only adversely affected young people’s speech and development, but also put them at increased risk of online exploitation.
“Parents need to be more alive to that,” he says, saying that he is seeing more middle-class children being groomed into county lines drug dealing than ever before.
‘Families need help to build coping mechanisms’
Although he won’t be dragged into the debate over whether middle-class drug users are fuelling a problem that disproportionately affects children from poorer background, he cautions: “What I would say is don’t give cover to people who are involved in organised crime, who are making a living off the backs of the poor; who are buying up our high streets and undercutting legitimate businesses through the money they make through drugs.”
Rather than demonising bad parents, Carberry believes society should play a more supportive role: “I think we’ve lost that sense of community. In the working class area I came from, mums gave each other support. Mental health is a massive problem, exacerbated by lockdown.”
The cost of living crisis has only served to make things worse for parents who are “only just coping”, says Carberry.
“They’re respectable, decent people, holding down two or three jobs, but they can’t afford new shoes for their kids. There’s always been an element of that, but the scale of it now is unprecedented.
“I think people showed remarkable resilience to get through the pandemic. There are families, children and young people who need help to build on that resilience and build coping mechanisms.”
For Carberry, however, there is no escaping the past. Although he has offered to speak to Murray’s family in the past, they have not wanted to engage.
Murray’s sister Elizabeth McLatchie, from New Cumnock, East Ayrshire, later told reporters: “We did hear Mr Carberry was involved with the rehabilitation of young offenders and I remember thinking it’s a pity that nobody rehabilitated him before he did what he did.
“John was only young and I loved him. He was a nice wee boy and went everywhere in his wellies. It was terrible for my mum and dad and they never got over it.”
Nothing will ever make up for what Carberry has done. But he is determined to spend the rest of his life trying.
