Dan Lawton's ABOVE THE GROUND: A True Story of The Troubles in Northern Ireland delves into the gripping realm of true crime, Irish history, prison escape, and the remarkable redemption of an unjustly accused man entangled in the complexities of an IRA murder. This photo gallery complements the absorbing account.
Ireland.
Kevin’s fellow Maze escapees Joe Corey, Pádraig McKearney, Seamus Clarke, Gerard P. “Blute” McDonnell, Pól Brennan, and Jimmy Smyth. (Northern Ireland Prison Service)
Former mother-and-baby home, Kinturk convent, Castlepollard, Co. Westmeath, Ireland, photographed in 2016. Birthplace of Kevin Barry Artt. (Dan Lawton)
A big day in the case of Kevin Barry Artt at the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal, March 5, 2020. Pictured from left to right, on the bench, are Justices Bernard McCloskey, Ben Stephens, and Adrian Colton. Pictured from behind, from left to right, are solicitor Andrew Moriarty and barrister Fiona Doherty, QC. (Dan Lawton)
A happy day on the courthouse steps at 450 Golden Gate Avenue in San Francisco, on October 16, 1998, the day of the release from jail of Maze escapees ordered by Judge Legge the day before. Pictured from left to right are attorneys Jim Larson and Gil Eisenberg, Maze escapees Terry Kirby, Kevin Barry Artt, and Pól Brennan, and attorney James J. Brosnahan. (Polaris Images)
Police photograph of Albert Miles at 8 Evelyn Gardens, Belfast, November 26, 1978. (Royal Ulster Constabulary)
IRA volunteer, traitor, and British informant Maurice Gilvarry.
Peter Heathwood at home in Killough, Northern Ireland, on October 22, 2019. (Dan Lawton)
Peter Heathwood at home in Killough, Northern Ireland, on October 22, 2019. (Dan Lawton)
Watercolor of Kevin Barry Artt’s holding cell at Castlereagh Holding Centre, Belfast, as it looked in 1981. (Kevin Barry Artt 1996)
Mugshot of Kevin Barry Artt, taken at the Maze shortly after his arrival on August 5, 1983. (Northern Ireland Prison Service via Press Association)
On the run and living underground in San Francisco in 1985, with his beard and hair dyed jet black, trying to stay incognito, Kevin felt like a kind of poor man’s James Bond. (Kevin Barry Artt 1985)
Kevin Barry Artt and his American lawyer, James J. Brosnahan, at Brosnahan’s office at Morrison & Foerster in San Francisco in 1996. (Michael Brennan)
Sir John William Basil Kelly, the British judge who presided over the Irish Trial of the Century in 1982 and 1983. He sentenced the defendants to a cumulative total of 4,022 years in prison. Soon afterward, he traveled to London, where Queen Elizabeth II knighted him at Buckingham Palace. (Alamy)
Kevin Barry Artt arriving on a San Francisco Municipal Railway cable car, downtown San Francisco, California, in 1996, for a meeting with his American lawyers. (Michael Brennan)
Medical student and IRA volunteer Kevin Barry, the namesake of Kevin Barry Artt, in 1918. At age 18, after a trial by a British court-martial at which he refused to recognize the legitimacy of the court, Barry was hanged at Mountjoy Jail in Dublin.
The main gate and Tally Lodge of the Maze, where guards and escaping Republican prisoners brawled during the escape on September 25, 1983.
Kevin Barry Artt, then employed as a truck driver and laborer by Robert Hart Memorials, built the gravesite and placed the stones at the resting place of Albert Miles at Carnmoney Cemetery in Newtownabbey, County Antrim, about seven miles outside Belfast. (Dan Lawton)
Florence and Albert Miles, on holiday in 1976 in Godalming, Surrey, England. (Alan Miles)
During 1982 and 1983, Kevin and his co-defendants traversed this tunnel twice a day, crossing under the street from Crumlin Road Jail to the Crumlin Road Courthouse and back again, each court day for nine consecutive months. (Dan Lawton)
