Jean Murray was born on 7 May 1934 to a Protestant family in East Belfast but converted after marrying Arthur McConville, a Catholic former British Army soldier,[9] with whom she had ten children.
After being intimidated out of a Protestant district by loyalists in 1969, the McConville family moved to West Belfast's Divis Flats in the Lower Falls Road.
[2] At the time of her death, Jean McConville lived at 1A St Jude's Walk, which was part of the Divis Flats complex.
[13] One night shortly before her disappearance, she was allegedly attacked after leaving a bingo hall and warned to stop giving information to the British Army.
[21] Usually the bodies of informers were left in public as a warning, but the IRA secretly buried McConville, apparently because she was a widowed mother of ten.
[22][23] After her disappearance, McConville's seven youngest children, including six-year-old twins, survived on their own in the flat, cared for by their 15-year-old sister Helen.
[13] On 16 January 1973, the story of the abduction appeared on the front page of the Belfast Telegraph, under the headline "Snatched mother missing a month".
[27] As a result, the RUC refused to accept that McConville was missing, preferring to believe an anonymous tip that she had absconded with a British soldier.
[24] In 1999, the IRA gave information on the whereabouts of her body in the region of County Louth, at the south-eastern tip of the Cooley Peninsula, in the Republic of Ireland.
[28] This prompted a prolonged search, co-ordinated by the Garda Síochána, the Republic of Ireland's police force, but no body was found.
On the night of 26 August 2003, a storm washed away part of the embankment supporting the west side of Shelling Hill Beach car park, near the site of previous searches.
[30] McConville's body was positively identified and subsequently reburied beside her husband Arthur in Holy Trinity Graveyard in Lisburn.
[34] Journalist Ed Moloney called for the British Government to release war diaries relating to the Divis Flats area at the time.
War diaries are usually released under the thirty-year rule, but those relating to Divis at the time of McConville's death are embargoed for almost ninety years.
[13] In January 2005, Sinn Féin party chairman Mitchel McLaughlin claimed that the killing of McConville was not a crime, saying that she had been executed as a spy in a war situation.
[36] This prompted Irish journalist Fintan O'Toole to write a rebuttal, arguing that the abduction and extrajudicial killing of McConville was clearly a "war crime by all accepted national and international standards".
[38] In August 2006, the Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), Sir Hugh Orde, stated that he was not hopeful anyone would be brought to justice over the murder, saying "[in] any case of that age, it is highly unlikely that a successful prosecution could be mounted.
They saw Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams as a traitor for negotiating the agreement and persuading the IRA to end its campaign.
[15] Former republican prisoner Evelyn Gilroy, who lived near McConville, claimed Adams was an IRA commander and the only person who could have ordered the killing.
[51][52] Following Bell's arrest in March, there was media speculation that police would want to question Gerry Adams due to the claims made by Hughes and Price.
"[58] In a later interview on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, Michael stated that he knew the names of those who had abducted and killed his mother, but that: "I wouldn't tell the police [PSNI].
"[59] Journalist Patrick Radden Keefe's 2018 book Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland focuses on the history of the Troubles starting from McConville's death.
"[64] On 4 December 2024, Marian Price announced, through her solicitor, that she would be taking legal action against Disney+ over the series depicting her killing Jean McConville.