Four decades. Four innocent young women. Four brutal murders.
Lisa Dorrian, Inga Maria Hauser, Arlene Arkinson and Marian Beattie are names that have been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons, and whose lives were each brutally cut short.
Murder In The Badlands, a four part series, forensically rebuilds the timeline of these murders and the investigations that followed. The programmes include contributions from surviving family members, police officers, journalists and criminologists.
The final episode in the series tells the inside story of the murder of Marian Beattie. She had travelled with her brother and friend to attend a charity dance in Aughnacloy in March 1973. Marian’s body was found at the foot of a cliff in a quarry along a narrow country road. Her murder remains unsolved.
The programme includes interviews with Marian’s brother, Isadore Beattie, and her friend Nuala Wilson – both of whom had been with her on the night she disappeared and Marian’s brothers Gerard and Feargal Beattie.
It also includes contributions from Robert Giles, a criminologist who has looked in-depth at the circumstances of Marian’s death, Alan Brecknell from The Finucane Centre and solicitor Darragh Mackin who has been working with the Beattie family.
The preceding episodes in the series examined the cases of Lisa Dorrian, a 25-year-old shop assistant from Bangor, County Down, who was last seen at a party in a caravan park in Ballyhalbert in 2005; Inga Maria Hauser, an18 year old tourist from Munich, whose body was discovered in a remote part of Ballypatrick Forest, Ballycastle, in 1988 and Tyrone teenager, Arlene Arkinson who disappeared in August 1994 after a night out with friends in Bundoran, County Donegal.
These episodes are available on BBC iPlayer.
Murder In The Badlands was made for BBC Northern Ireland by Fine Point Films, in association with Cyprus Avenue Films, with an introduction voiced by Saoirse-Monica Jackson.
Murder In The Badlands
Monday 4 April | 10.35pm
BBC One Northern Ireland
BBC iPlayer
