He Was Suspected of Multiple Killings... Then Died in Garda Custody

[00:00:00]Saturday afternoon, West Dublin. An armed guarder unit is closing in on a single man walking through the Cherry Orchard estate. This isn't a routine call out. It's detectives. It's the armed support unit. It's the public order unit. There's even a guarder helicopter circling overhead. All of that manpower deployed for one man wanted on paper for breaching his bail conditions. 6 hours later, that man is dead in a guarder station cell. His name was Lee Macdonald. By the time he died at just 34 years old, he'd racked up somewhere between 130 and 140 criminal convictions. One of the longest and most violent records Garter in Dublin had ever dealt with. He was also, according to investigators, the prime suspect in at least two killings that were never solved and now never will be. This is the story of how a kid from Balifermut became one of the most feared names in Dublin's underworld and how it all ended before he ever stood trial for the worst of what he was accused of. Lee Macdonald was born on the 25th of June 1991 and raised in Balifermat, a tight-knit workingclass suburb on Dublin's southwest side. It's a community that's given Irish crime reporters plenty of material over the decades. And Macdonald would eventually become one of its most notorious names. Over the years, as his case files piled up in Dublin's courts, more than one judge described his childhood in almost identical terms, difficult and chaotic. Court reporting rarely spells out exactly what that meant in practice. But the pattern that followed is unmistakable. By his mid- teens, Macdonald was already deep into the kind of offending that gets a young man noticed by Garter. Robberies, assaults, the early groundwork of a criminal record that would eventually run past a 100 entries. According to journalists who covered him for years, Macdonald's real entry point into organized crime came as a teenage enforcer. He went to work for an older, well-established gang boss. A man who, for legal reasons, has never been publicly named, who had controlled the drugs trade across large parts of West Dublin for more than two decades. This wasn't a teenager drifting into bad company. This was a teenager being deliberately built into muscle for an existing criminal operation. By March of 2011, Macdonald was 19 and already capable of serious violence. That month, he and a friend were arrested after shots were fired into a house in the Clifton estate in Balifermat. It wasn't an isolated incident. That same year, Guarder linked him to a machete attack at an apartment complex in Cherry Orchard, where a young man was lured to the scene and attacked so viciously that his hand was almost completely severed.

[00:02:39]There's a strange symmetry worth flagging here, even though nobody could have known it at the time. Cherry Orchard is the exact spot where 15 years later, Macdonald would be arrested for the final time in his life. At 19 years old, Lee Macdonald was already someone Guarder considered genuinely dangerous.

[00:02:56]But what happened the following year is what finally caught up with him. On the 21st of January 2012, while out on bail for the Cherry Orchard machete attack, Macdonald and an accomplice broke into a house and beat the homeowner with a metal bar. They stole his car and drove straight to a service station in Baliferat where Macdonald produced a replica firearm, terrorized the shopkeeper, and fled with a hall that amounted to little more than a packet of cigarettes and a pair of sunglasses.

[00:03:25]It's a strange detail to sit with. A man capable of that level of violence, walking away with pocket change, but the crime itself was serious enough to see him sentenced to 9 years for aggravated burglary. For the first time in years, Lee Macdonald was off the streets for a real stretch. He wouldn't stay quiet behind bars, though, not even close.

[00:03:44]Prison didn't calm Macdonald down. If anything, it gave his reputation room to grow. He was involved in repeated violent incidents while serving his sentence, and prison authorities moved him between different facilities multiple times, reportedly for his own safety. At one point, footage emerged of Macdonald tearing the head off a pigeon with his bare hands inside the prison walls, laughing along with other inmates as he did it. Around the same period, photos surfaced on a Facebook page under his online nickname, Mac 10, apparently showing prisoners using drugs behind bars. But the single most consequential thing to come out of McDonald's years in custody wasn't something he did himself.

[00:04:24]It was a letter someone else sent to him. Macdonald had a friend on the outside named Daniel Macdonald from Tala. No relation, just a shared surname. And as it turned out, a shared capacity for extreme violence. In 2012, a bloody feud was playing out across West Dublin, one that Lee Macdonald himself was tied into. That feud claimed an innocent life. 16-year-old Melanie McCarthy Magnamara killed after being caught in the crossfire of a feud shooting. Daniel Macdonald was one of the people responsible for that shooting. And in an almost unbelievable act of carelessness, he wrote to his friend Lee from custody, bragging in the letter about pulling the trigger. That letter never stayed private. It was intercepted, and it became key evidence used to convict Daniel Macdonald of murder. Lee Macdonald was never charged over it himself. But the episode says everything about the world he was operating in. A world where a teenager could be shot dead in crossfire and the man responsible would brag about it in writing to a friend still sitting inside prison walls. If one story turned Lee Macdonald into a household name in Dublin crime circles years before his death, it's this one. In December 2014, Macdonald was being escorted back to prison after a hospital visit for an arm injury. On the way, the prison van pulled in at a chipper in Inchor so the officers could get him some food as he hadn't eaten all day. While one officer went inside to order, Macdonald, whose handcuffs had been left looser than usual, because of his injury, worked his hands free, leaned out through the van's window, and opened the door from the outside. Then he simply ran. He disappeared up the road and vanished into the city. Despite a wide search involving multiple guarder units, he wasn't found for 5 weeks. When he finally was, the moment had an almost cinematic quality to it. two guarder on ordinary foot patrol in Clondulkin spotted him on the street and gave chase through back gardens, over fences, and up onto a flat kitchen roof before finally wrestling him to the ground. By most accounts from the time, Macdonald told the officers he wasn't going back to prison without a fight. He went back anyway. Eventually, Macdonald was released, and it didn't take long before he was back in front of a judge. In November 2020, then 29 years old, he and a co-acused appeared in court charged with breaking into the home of a 73-year-old man in Balifermat at 2:00 in the morning. The victim was described in court as frail and unwell. According to the case put before the judge, one of the two attackers was armed with a knife, the other with a screwdriver.

[00:06:58]Both men were refused bail. It was one more line added to a criminal record that was already extraordinary by almost any standard. But the crime that would come to define the final years of Lee Macdonald's life was still ahead of him.

[00:07:10]On the 24th of June 2022, a well-known gangland figure named Gary Kerry, nicknamed the Canary, was shot multiple times in the car park of the Hilton Hotel in Kilmum. Shortly after finishing a session in the hotel gym near his home, Kerry survived the initial shooting, but spent 6 weeks fighting for his life in hospital before he eventually died of his injuries. It wasn't even the first attempt on his life. He'd already survived two earlier attacks before this one finally succeeded. Garter quickly zeroed in on Lee Macdonald as their prime suspect. By most accounts, Macdonald didn't exactly try to hide it. Sources told journalists he was seen driving a motorized go-kart around Bifirat in the aftermath, openly telling people he was the one behind it.

[00:07:54]When investigators later went through his social media accounts, they allegedly found evidence he had sourced the murder weapon through Facebook. and had arranged a false alibi with a female associate. The working theory was that Kerry had been trying to muscle in on drug operations run by a West Dublin crime network and paid for it with his life. Over time, Garter built what they believed was a strong enough case to send a file to the director of public prosecutions, recommending that Lee Macdonald be formally charged with murder. That charge never came, not because the case collapsed, but because in the end, time simply ran out. It's worth pausing here to note that Macdonald didn't slow down while all of this was unfolding in the background. In 2024, he was jailed again. This time for attacking two guarder in Balifir. By this point, he was one of the most recognizable violent offenders in the city. A man Garter had effectively watched grow up from a teenage gunman into a suspected hitman. Still cycling in and out of custody while investigators quietly built a murder case against him. Nobody involved knew it yet. But 2026 would be his last year alive. On the night of May 30th, 2026, a 31-year-old man named Thomas Griffin, also from Bali Farm, was attacked at the War Memorial Gardens in Island Bridge.

[00:09:13]Guarder believed Lee Macdonald was the man who slashed him, reportedly over nothing more than a small personal debt.

[00:09:19]What happened in the minutes after was desperate. Griffin, already badly injured, jumped into the river Liffey and swam the full width of it in an effort to escape his attacker.

[00:09:29]Eventually reaching the far bank, he was treated at the scene by Dublin Fire Brigade before being rushed to St. James's Hospital. He never recovered. He lost consciousness and died in hospital the following day. Griffin's death wasn't ultimately treated as a murder investigation. since he wasn't believed to have died directly from the knife wounds themselves. Garter continued working to establish the exact medical cause, but Macdonald was already the prime suspect in the attack that set the tragedy in motion, even though he hadn't yet been arrested over it. There's a grim footnote to Thomas Griffin's story that has nothing to do with Lee Macdonald at all. Griffin's own brother, James, had been stabbed to death at an illegal rave back in 2014. A murder that to this day has never been solved. Two brothers, 12 years apart, both victims of West Dublin violence that never reached a courtroom. For Lee Macdonald, the walls were now closing in from two directions at once. An unresolved murder file sitting with the DPP over Gary Kerry and a fresh active Guarder investigation into the death of Thomas Griffin. He had exactly one week left.

[00:10:34]Saturday, June 6th, 2026. Garter moved in on Lee Macdonald in Cherry Orchard, the very same corner of Balifermat, where 15 years earlier his machete victim had nearly lost a hand. This was no quiet pickup. Detectives, the armed support unit, [music] unformed officers, the public order unit, and the Guarder air support helicopter were all part of the operation. Officially, Macdonald was being arrested for breaching his bail conditions on a live case. Investigators believe that in the moments before Garter reached him, Macdonald swallowed a large quantity of drugs, an apparent attempt to hide them from a search. A few hours later, inside the Guarder station, he became seriously unwell.

[00:11:16]Guarder and paramedics on the scene tried to save him. They weren't able to.

[00:11:20]Lee Macdonald was pronounced dead in Garter custody that same day at the age of 34. Because any death in custody in Ireland automatically triggers an independent investigation. The case was immediately referred to the office of the police ombbudsman. His body was sent for a postmortem examination. The man guarder believed had shot Gary Kerry/ Thomas Griffin and built up well over a 100 convictions across two decades of offending was gone without ever facing a jury for any of it. 2 days later, Lee Macdonald was laid to rest. His funeral mass was held at Our Lady of the Assumption Church in Balifermirat followed by burial at Nuland's Cross.

[00:11:59]Mourners described a striking scene outside the church, a gold colored coffin and doves released into the air as it was carried out. His death notice remembered him as a father to his daughter and named a partner and siblings among those left behind.

[00:12:12]Online, his girlfriend posted a tribute describing a side of him the public never saw. someone she described in her own words as soft-hearted underneath everything else. It's a version of Lee Macdonald that sits uneasily next to the rest of this story. And that tension between the man mourned by the people who loved him and the suspect Garter believed was responsible for years of brutal violence is in a lot of ways the whole story in miniature. But his death didn't just close his own chapter. It complicated two separate liveg guarder investigations. Sources have since indicated that McDonald's death has significantly weakened any realistic chance of ever prosecuting someone for Gary K's murder. The case that had been sitting essentially finished on the director of public prosecution's desk when Macdonald died. Whoever GA believed was really responsible for that killing may now never face a courtroom over it.

[00:13:06]As for exactly what killed Lee Macdonald, that question as of the most recent reporting still sits with the police ombudsman and the coroner. No official cause of death has been made public. Lee Macdonald spent almost the entirety of his adult life either behind bars or under active Guarder investigation. He survived a prison escape, a gang feud that claimed a teenager's life. And according to Garter, carried out one of West Dublin's most talked about gangland murders without ever being convicted of it. In the end, it wasn't a rival gang, and it wasn't a guarder bullet that caught up with him. It was a cell inside a guarder station just hours after the last arrest of his life. If you found this story interesting, let us know in the comments what Irish true crime case you'd like covered next. And subscribe for more deep dives into the country's most notorious criminal cases. and I will see you on the next