Woman relives the night she witnessed Glasgow's Ice Cream War murders as a young girl

August 2024 · 6 minute read

When Stella McGuire closes her eyes, she can see the bloodstains on the windowsill of the top-floor flat where an arson attack claimed the lives of six members of the same family, including an 18-month-old baby.

The deaths of the Doyle family in Glasgow’s infamous Ice Cream Wars and the sights and sounds of that night left an indelible mark on the then 12-year-old. Stella, who lived in a flat that faced the Doyles’ home, was woken from her sleep by the frantic shouts for help of the trapped family and she dialled 999.

Now, almost 40 years on, Stella is speaking publicly for the first time about what happened. She gives her harrowing recollection of events in a new two-part BBC Scotland documentary, The Ice Cream Wars, which tells the story of the vicious gang war which tore through Glasgow’s tough housing estates in the early 80s, an ­infamous miscarriage of justice and a crime which remains unsolved.

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Stella, who is still traumatised by the deaths in April 1984, said: “I awakened to shouts of help. I initially didn’t take much notice because it was quite common for families to argue. But the ‘help’ came a lot stronger, a lot louder, more frantic. Then it was more than one person. I opened the window and I shouted, ‘What’s wrong?’ and they shouted ‘Fire. Fire.’”

Stella grew up in a third-floor flat on Milncroft Road, Ruchazie, which looked directly into the bedrooms of the Doyle family’s third-floor flat on Backend Street. After calling 999, she woke her younger sister.

Choking back tears at the memory, she said: “Probably now I regret waking her up, to see what she saw, but I didn’t know. I think I felt afraid at the time. Both me and my sister were kind of shell-shocked. And helpless.

“I saw the window (of the Doyle home) get thrown open and I saw a man climbing up and jump out. There was a lot more commotion – more voices, more screams, more shouting. I did notice that other neighbours were waking up, starting to gather. I was relieved because I felt maybe grown-ups then could take charge.”

Stella said as morning broke over Ruchazie in the hours after the fire, the horror of what had happened became all too clear.

She said: “Most of the windows were smashed. There was evidence of blood running down the windows and down the wall. That (blood) was always there, until we left that house – a constant reminder. That image never left me. Even to this day, I can still see that.”

Initially, Stella didn’t know nine members of the Doyle family had been trapped when the door to their home was doused in petrol and set alight, causing fire to engulf their home. She would later learn James Doyle Sr, 53, died as a result of the blaze, along with his sons James Jr, 23, Andrew, 18, Anthony, 14, and his married daughter Christine Halleron, 25, and her baby son Mark.

Mother Lillian Doyle and her sons Daniel and Stephen, who had jumped from the window of the flat, were all injured but survived. Police would quickly link the fire to organised criminal gangs trying to muscle in on the city’s ice cream trade.

In the early 80s, Glasgow’s sprawling new housing schemes housed hundreds of thousands of people but city planners had left them little or no access to shops, pubs or other facilities. Against this backdrop, ice cream vans thrived, making so much money that they quickly attracted the attention of the city’s gangsters, who used violence to take over the most lucrative routes.

In the weeks before the arson attack, Andrew Doyle, 18, had refused to give up the route he had been given as a new driver for Marchetti Bros, despite gangsters firing a shotgun at his van.

On the day of the Doyles’ joint funeral, hundreds of people lined the streets of Ruchazie as five black hearses passed by on their way to the church service and burial.

Stella said: “It was very busy on the estate – absolutely jam-packed. There were hundreds of people. I went to St Phillips Primary School which was facing the church where the funeral was held. I remember them (our teachers) closing the curtains, for us not to look out the windows.

“Some boys from our school were altar boys. They were telling us that there were only five coffins and that the baby was in the same coffin as his mum.”

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The BBC One Scotland documentary, which airs across two nights starting tomorrow at 9pm, is narrated by Kate Dickie and features contributions from writer Douglas Skelton, crime author Denise Mina and lawyers John Carroll and Aamer Anwar. It includes eyewitness testimony from fireman Hugh McCafferty, who attended the blaze.

Hugh said: “The daughter (Christine) had managed to push her bed across to create a gap and push the child down in there. My colleague found the baby under its mother. He put the oxygen mask on the child and stayed with that child all the way to the hospital.

“He was still alive when he handed him over. When I seen them going away (to hospital) that night – the fathers and the sons – I thought they would survive, albeit they were badly burned.

“You can take quite a bit of burn on your skin but if you have taken super-heated air into your lungs, you actually get worse after the fire and your lungs swell up. That’s why at the time of the fire you can still be alive but two or three days later you might die from it.”

In the months following the murders, seven men appeared in court charged in connection with the deaths of the Doyle family or other crimes related to the Ice Cream Wars. In the end, two – Thomas Campbell and Joe Steele – would be convicted of murder, despite doubts over the strength of the evidence against them.

Over the next two decades, both men fought to keep their case in the public eye, staging hunger strikes and three prison escapes.

In 2004, 20 years after they were convicted, Thomas Campbell and Joe Steele were released from prison, with their conviction declared a miscarriage of justice. To this day, no one has been convicted of the murder of the Doyle family.

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