Joseph Huddy began the day in the village of Middle Cloghbrack, also known locally as America, before moving on to Upper Cloghbrack on the southern shore of Lough Mask. The area was densely populated farmland without a defined village centre. Both men were under no illusions about the work: eviction notices in west Ireland in 1882 were inflammatory documents. The previous summer, Charles Boycott had been driven out of nearby Lough Mask House by the non-violent ostracism that gave the word boycott to the English language. When the Huddys had not returned by four in the afternoon, the driver who had been waiting for them drove on to Cornamona and alerted the Royal Irish Constabulary. By the next morning, RIC officers were questioning every adult in Upper Cloghbrack. No one had seen anything. No one had heard anything. The wall of silence that the Land League called for in tenant communities held firm.

Tracing the Huddys' movements, RIC officers reached the yard of one Mathias Kerrigan. There they found physical evidence: a bullet mark on the gable end of Kerrigan's house, bloodstains on the wall, and signs of a struggle in the yard. Kerrigan and his sixteen-year-old son Matthew were taken into custody. For four days, the RIC dug bogland and searched the surrounding mountains. Nothing. The Royal Navy was called in. Forty crewmen of HMS Banterer, then anchored in Galway Bay, sailed up the River Corrib and into Lough Mask. They spent twelve days dragging the lake. John Huddy's body came up first, sewn into a sack. Joseph's followed, his overcoat weighted with a rock. The two had been killed and dumped where their bodies could not easily be found. Both were buried where they came from.

Mathias Kerrigan was held in Galway City Jail for nine months without being charged with anything. In September 1882, he turned approver, meaning he became a state's witness in exchange for his own freedom, and named three men as responsible for the killings: Michael Flynn and Thomas Higgins, both of Middle Cloghbrack, and Patrick Higgins, called Long, of Upper Cloghbrack. All three were arrested and charged. None of them had been linked to the crime by any other evidence the police had developed. The case against them rested almost entirely on Kerrigan's testimony, given after nine months in jail under conditions that historians have since described as coercive.

The defendants came from an Irish-speaking community. The trials were held in Dublin, in English, before juries that were mostly Protestant. The exchanges between Irish-speaking witnesses and defendants were argumentative and confused, with RIC constables providing the translations. The constables had obvious institutional interest in the conviction of the accused. The reliability of the translated testimony was, even at the time, a matter of serious concern. The presiding judge was William O'Brien, a Catholic with a reputation for harshness. The Irish legal historian Maurice Healy, in his 1939 memoir The Old Munster Circuit, called O'Brien a man who worked more injustice in his daily round than the reader would believe possible. Healy was generally proud of the Irish judiciary of his youth. His judgement on O'Brien is the more damning for that. There were four trials. One ended in a hung jury. The other three returned verdicts of guilty. All three men were sentenced to death.

Patrick Higgins, Thomas Higgins, and Michael Flynn were hanged in Galway City Jail in January 1883. Flynn, asserting his innocence to the end, was described by observers as showing remarkable courage on the scaffold. The Huddys, an old bailiff and a teenage boy, had been killed serving eviction notices on a freezing winter day. They were also victims. Their families also grieved. The work of historical empathy is not to choose sides between the dead but to recognise that the Land War created circumstances in which violence and miscarriages of justice both became possible, and in this case both occurred. Descendants of Patrick Higgins, Thomas Higgins, and Michael Flynn have maintained the innocence of the three men for more than a century. The historical novel Part an Irishman by TS Flynn is dedicated to Michael Flynn's memory. The story of the Lough Mask murders is one of the harder cases the Irish Land War produced: a brutal killing followed by trials that did not meet contemporary standards of justice, in a community where almost everyone had reason to grieve and almost no one could trust the system that claimed to deliver justice.