THE EXECUTION, LIFE & TIMES

OF

PATRICK O'DONNELL

   

 

  

 

 

        

  

 

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At last the world is awakening to Patrick O'Donnell, the man who killed the man who killed Frederick Cavendish. The killer of the Phoenix Park Killer. Martyr to Irish Republicans of the time and yet hero to English aristocracy.

Recent factual accounts and commentaries have explored the trial of Patrick O'Donnell but no one until now has explored his entire life.

Read the incredible life story of this remarkable man, creative fiction tied into historical fact, written in a series of 26 letters, apparently smuggled from his death cell in his wife Margaret’s petticoats. Letters lost for 133 years; now found, translated and published in this incredible book

Prepare for a journey like no other, through the mid to late nineteenth century from Ireland to America, Great Britain and South Africa.

From the horrors of Irish Famine and escape on the doomed coffin ship ‘the Carricks’ into the notorious typhus quarantine sheds of Grosse Island and beyond.

When all hope is lost Patrick meets his saviour in the person of Hanora, a damaged and remarkable woman who’s love for the boy is matched by her ruthlessness at any threat to him. Together, on the hillside above Quebec their new life starts.

Their journey to his family in the mine fields of Pennsylvania is interrupted and it is in New York they and Hanora’s daughter build a life.
Tragedy strikes and then war where Patrick finds himself fighting for the slave states; the Confederacy, the wrong side. 

Capture and escape follow and by war’s end there is only one place to go and that is to his family, the O’Donnells at Wiggans Patch in Pennsylvania.

History tells us what probably occurred at the Patch but Patrick tells us in detail exactly how it happened, for he was there that fateful night on the 10th December 1875 when the Pinkertons and Mine Vigilantes fell on the family with murder in mind.

And so his penultimate journey starts with one killing for love and ends with the another killing; the slaying of Carey, the informer, the Irish Invincible, the villain.

Yet this is not the end of the story, Patrick writes his account of his life in his cell and he awaits the noose… but

even he did not foresee what happened next.

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