Freed rapist convicted of murdering pensioner
A farm labourer was today convicted of murdering retired Co Tyrone librarian Attracta Harron.
Trevor Hamilton, 23, killed the pensioner - who vanished on her way home from church - less than four months after completing a rape sentence.
The judge told him he would serve life imprisonment after details of his sex attack were given to the jury – the first time previous convictions were disclosed during a trial in the North.
It took the panel of six men and six women four and a half hours to return a guilty verdict at Dungannon Crown Court after a seven-week trial.
Hamilton showed no emotion in the dock as the guilty verdict was returned, while Mrs Harron's widowed husband Michael and their children simply nodded in agreement.
The mother-of-five was bludgeoned around the head before being buried in a shallow grave dug into a riverbank to the rear of Hamilton’s home at Concess Road, Sion Mills, Co Tyrone.
Her naked body was wrapped in a meal sack for a shroud.
The 65-year-old was a devout Roman Catholic who regularly attended parish church in her home town of Strabane.
Up until her death she had made a daily trek the short distance across the border into Lifford to attend a mass.
On the day she disappeared in December 2003 Hamilton’s Hyundai Lantra car was found on fire outside his home.
DNA tests on blood stains discovered on mats taken from the burned-out car revealed a billion-to-one chance that they belonged to anyone other than Mrs Harron.
Days later, when detectives went to question Hamilton, they discovered clothing, bank receipts, rosary beads and extracts from a prayer book – all belonging to the murder victim – in the ashes of a bonfire lit in his back garden.
Hamilton had been released from a young offenders’ centre less than four months before the murder.
He was sent there after being convicted of raping a 29-year-old woman in February 2000 when he was aged just 17.
For the first time in Northern Ireland legal history details of his conviction for that sex attack were disclosed to the jury, but the judge imposed reporting restrictions until after the trial.
