Qualla: Killing of Robert Hamill

Killing of Robert Hamill: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Robert Hamill was 25 years old. He was walking home with friends from a Saturday-night dance at St. Patrick's Hall, in his own town, on the main street, at around 1:30 in the morning of 27 April 1997. At the intersection of Market and Thomas Streets in Portadown, a crowd of around thirty loyalists who had just come off a bus from a nightclub in Banbridge attacked Hamill and his friends. Four officers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, sitting in an armoured Land Rover about twenty feet away, did not get out. Robert Hamill died of a fractured skull eleven days later in hospital. He had four children. He had been on his way home.

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Killing of Robert Hamill: Diane Hamill's Brother

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Robert Hamill grew up in a Catholic family in Portadown, a town his community had lived in for generations. The week of his death was the worst week of his sister Diane's life, and the beginning of a campaign she would still be running more than two decades later. Robert's wife, ...

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Killing of Robert Hamill: Twenty Feet From The Land Rover

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The attack on the night of 27 April 1997 happened on the main shopping street of Portadown. Witnesses described a large group of loyalists kicking and stamping on Robert Hamill's head while he lay on the ground. Joanne Garvin, the wife of one of Hamill's friends, and her sister-i...

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Killing of Robert Hamill: Six Charged, One Convicted

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Six Portadown men were charged with murder in May 1997. By November 1997, charges against five of them had been dropped. The sole man tried, Paul Marc Hobson, was acquitted of murder in 1999 but convicted of unlawful fighting and affray, for which he received a four-year sentence...

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Killing of Robert Hamill: Rosemary Nelson

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Hamill family's solicitor was Rosemary Nelson, a human rights lawyer from Lurgan who had taken on a string of difficult cases related to police conduct in the Drumcree area. She was assassinated by a loyalist car bomb outside her home on 15 March 1999, while the Hamill case w...

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Killing of Robert Hamill: Twenty-Seven Years Later

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 18 April 2024, Robert Cecil Atkinson, by then a former RUC reserve officer, pleaded guilty at Craigavon Crown Court to conspiring to pervert the course of justice in relation to the police investigation into Robert Hamill's killing. He had spent nearly thirty years denying it....

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Killing of Robert Hamill: What Justice Looks Like

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Portadown today is a working town, with a Saturday-morning shopping crowd much like it was in 1997. The intersection of Market and Thomas Streets is still where it was. There is no memorial plaque on the pavement. There does not need to be one; the Hamill family will not let the ...

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