Research sheds light on GI’s murder of seven-year-old girl in Northern Ireland in 1944

On the afternoon of 25 September 1944, William Harrison, a US soldier stationed in Northern Ireland , visited the cottage of the Wylie family in Killycolpy, County Tyrone, and offered to buy treats for the children. He had visited before and was, if not a friend, at least known to the family. Mary Wylie let him take her seven-year-old daughter, Patricia, better known as Patsy, across the fields to the shops. Even for an era accustomed to war, what happened next was sickening. Harrison raped, beat and strangled Patsy. He left her body behind a haystack and went to the pub. He later confessed and was tried, convicted and executed. The crime entered Northern Ireland folk memory and US military records as a footnote to the second world war , a case that was harrowing but, at least, closed. More than eight decades later however, new research has shed fresh light on the story – and revealed that it did not end when the hangman pulled the lever. Annie Kalotschke, Patsy’s niece, gathered testimonies, mined family lore and combed archives, including the 660-page trial transcript, to piece together a tragedy that still echoes on both sides of the Atlantic. “I’ve been investigating this case, on and off, for 31 years,” Kalotschke said this week from her home in New York. “I decided early on that this horrible story needed to be written down so that the truth can be known to all. …