© Alleycat FilmsWhen the Northern Irish investigative journalist Lyra McKee was cut down by a dissident republican gunman in Derry in April 2019, she had been working on a book about child disappearances during The Troubles.
Having secured a book deal with Faber, she was writing 'The Lost Boys' which examined the disappearance of eight boys in the early years of the Troubles between 1969 and 1975.
Specifically, Lyra McKee was looking at links between their disappearance and the operation of a paedophile ring in the Kincora Boys Home in east Belfast and in other parts of the city.
But she was also probing whether the potential exposure of this ring may have led to the IRA assassination of the Ulster Unionist MP, the Reverend Robert Bradford.
© Alleycat FilmsIn the absence of Lyra, other writers have taken up the baton and examined the suspected links.
One of those is documentary filmmaker Des Henderson whose latest film 'Lost Boys: Belfast's Missing Children' received its world premiere in Belfast last night.
It's a chilling watch.
The film takes as its starting point the disappearance of two West Belfast schoolboys, 11 year old Thomas Spence and 13 year old John Rodgers.
Last seen on the republican Falls Road on November 1974, neither of them boarded the bus they usually caught that took them across the city to their special needs school.
© Alleycat FilmsPuzzled as to how two boys could just vanish with their bodies never recovered, Henderson and criminologist Robert Giles dive into the circumstances of their disappearance and the subsequent police investigation.
Information is scant.
With the Troubles raging on the streets of Belfast, the first newspaper report of Thomas and John's disappearance in 1975 is found by Giles buried as a sidebar story on Page 5 of the Belfast Telegraph just days after they vanished.
Journalist Martin Dillon admits the story was probably relegated because reporters were too busy "ambulance chasing" violent incidents every day involving the IRA, loyalist paramilitaries, the police and the British Army.
Meeting an unnamed, silhouetted police officer who reviewed the files on the investigation into the boys' disappearance, Giles is struck how in archive footage of a BBC news interview with their mothers both women say Royal Ulster Constabulary officers assured them their sons were alive.
© Alleycat FilmsYet there is nothing to indicate what this assurance from the RUC was based on and the unnamed officer is unclear from the files where that belief sprang from.
Noting it's highly unusual in any city for two children to simply disappear from the same place at same time, Henderson and Giles are shocked to discover the same thing happened five years earlier in the east of the city.
Fourteen year old Jonathan Aven, a child from a British military family and 11 year old David Leckey vanished without trace from the loyalist Newtownards Road in September 1969 in eerily similar circumstances after playing truant from school.
In another chilling echo of the west Belfast disappearances, we are told David's mum Annie regularly wandered Belfast docks in the dead of night calling out his name in the hope he might respond.
© Alleycat FilmsFive years later, John Rodgers' mum Alice would do.exactly the same thing on Falls Road - desperately searching for him night after night and calling out his name.
The discovery of the mutilated body of Brian McDermott at the Annadale Embankment of the River Lagan sets the filmmakers off on a theory that British military intelligence may have interfered in investigations into potential links between the five boys' disappearances and the sexual abuse scandal at the Kincora Boys Home which was exposed in 1980 by the Irish Independent newspaper.
Former British military intelligence officer Colin Wallace alleges there was suspicion of witchcraft practices in the murder of Brian McDermott.
He and the investigative reporter Chris Moore steer the film in the direction of the Kincora Boys Home and a ring of paedophiles in the city who abused boys in care.
© Alleycat FilmsIt is noted MI5 had a particular interest in the comings and goings at Kincora which was run by William McGrath, an Orangeman who founded a far right loyalist paramilitary organisation.
Chris Moore notes John McKeague, the head of another loyalist paramilitary group the Red Hand Commando was also a regular visitor to McGrath's home and a known paedophile.
It is alleged a senior MI5 agent often visited the boys home.
However the filmmakers are particularly interested in another associate of McGrath and McKeague's, the late pastor Alan Campbell.
© Alleycat FilmsBy Henderson and Giles' own admission, the theory that the disappearances of the five boys may be linked to Kincora is hypothetical.
There's no clear evidence to confirm the link - although there's no doubt it is a theory worth exploring.
And while the film has the feel of a big screen version of BBC Northern Ireland's weekly investigative reporting show 'Spotlight,' thanks to Henderson's sombre voiceover, it is compellingly stitched together by its editor Declan McCann.
The editor uses archive footage and some impressive nighttime shots of contemporary Belfast by the Director of Photography Brian Martin that could have come straight out of 'Line of Duty'.
Originally 'Lost Boys: Belfast's Missing Children' was commissioned by the BBC, which explains the tone, but the makers ended up clashing with the corporation over the final edit.
© Alleycat FilmsThe big accusation in Henderson's film is that British military intelligence chiefs misled the Historical Institutional Abuse inquiry which looked into Kincora.
This raises questions about whether other probes were undermined.
In a country consumed by scores of terrible stories of loss during the Troubles, the pain of the five families of the disappeared boys still hits home hard in Henderson's documentary.
Led to believe the children might still be alive, there's a sense that the Rodgers, Spence, Aven and Leckey families, in particular, were led down a garden path while those who murdered their loved ones, went about their evil business using the cover of a violent conflict.
The film makes a compelling case for why the disappearances must continue to be looked at, with all theories tested.
It also raises alarming questions as to whether the truth of what really happened will ever come to light.
('Lost Boys: Belfast's Missing Children' received its world premiere at Belfast's Odeon cinema in association with the Docs Ireland festival on September 27, 2023)
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