RUC agent led killers behind blasts
A paid agent of the RUC, he was a member of the Ulster Defence Regiment until shortly before the Dublin and Monaghan bombings.
Jackson led a group of vicious killers who, apart from masterminding the 1974 carnage, carried out some of the worst atrocities of the Troubles, including the Miami Showband massacre and the murder of six Catholics in two separate attacks within minutes of each other in 1976. In a revenge attack, the IRA murdered ten workmen in Kingsmill, Co Armagh.
Jackson died, aged 51, of cancer in 1998, and brought to the grave some of the murkiest secrets of the seventies. The loyalist paramilitary, even on his deathbed, denied any involvement in any paramilitary acts.
Many of the others involved in delivering the devices to Dublin and Monaghan are also dead.
Wesley Sommerville, along with Harris Boyle, blew himself up while placing a bomb in the van used by the Miami Showband. Billy Hanna, the main organiser of the Dublin/Monaghan bombings and a UDR captain, was shot dead in 1975, allegedly on the orders of Jackson.
William ‘Frenchie’ Marchant was shot dead by the IRA in 1987. RJ Kerr blew himself in 1997, while attempting to destroy a boat in an insurance scam. Others, including the army intelligence officer who is believed to have lent his expertise to the murderous enterprise, are still alive.
Jackson carried out his first murder in 1973, shooting dead factory worker Patrick Campbell in his Banbridge, Co Down, home. The dead man’s wife picked him out of a line-up and Jackson was charged with murder. But the charges were droppe released and he was released.
It was not until after the Dublin/Monaghan bombings, and the Miami Showband massacre, that Jackson became the undisputed leader of the mid-Ulster UVF, getting rid of Hanna in the process.
In 1977, Jackson is alleged to have shot dead Joe Campbell, a highly respected RUC sergeant in Cushendall who was investigating links between the security forces and paramilitaries.
Mr Campbell’s son, also Joe, confronted Jackson just weeks before the UVF leader died, but he still refused to admit to the murder.
At his trial for the murder of a shopkeeper in Aghohill, near Ballymena in Co Antrim, John Weir, a former RUC member, named Jackson as the actual killer.
