Coniston massacre
On 15 August, dingo trapper Bruce Chapman arrived at Coniston and Murray sent Chapman, Paddy and Alex Wilson and three aboriginal trackers to the soak to find out what happened. The three buried Brooks on the bank of the soak. In the afternoon two Warlpiri, Padygar and Woolingar arrived at Coniston to trade dingo scalps. Believing them to be involved with the murder Paddy arrested them but Woolingar slipped his chains and attempted to escape. Murray fired at Woolingar and he fell with a bullet wound to the head. Stafford then kicked him in the chest breaking a rib. Woolingaar was then chained to a tree for the next 18 hours. The next morning the posse, with Padygar and Woolingar following on foot in chains, set out for the Lander River where they found a camp of 23 Warlpiri at Ngundaru. With the posse encircling the camp, Murray rode in and was surrounded by Aboriginal people yelling, Brisco started shooting with Saxby and Murray joining in. Three men and a woman, Bullfrog's wife Marungali, were killed on the encounter, with another woman dying from her wounds an hour later. A subsequent search of the camp turned up articles belonging to Brooks. Stafford was furious with Murray over the shooting and the next morning returned to Coniston alone.
Maze Prison escape
Escapee Kieran Fleming drowned in the Bannagh River near Kesh in December 1984, while attempting to escape from an ambush by the Special Air Service (SAS) in which fellow IRA member Antoine Mac Giolla Bhrighde was killed. Gerard McDonnell was captured in Glasgow in June 1985 along with four other IRA members, including Brighton bomber Patrick Magee, and convicted of conspiring to cause sixteen explosions across England. Séamus McElwaine was killed by the SAS in Roslea in April 1986, and Kelly and McFarlane were returned to prison in December 1986 after being extradited from the Netherlands where they had been arrested in January 1986, leaving twelve escapees still on the run. Pádraig McKearney was killed by the SAS along with seven other members of the IRA's East Tyrone Brigade in the Loughgall ambush in May 1987, the IRA's biggest single loss of life since the 1920s. In November 1987 Paul Kane and one of the masterminds of the escape, Dermot Finucane – a brother of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane, who would be shot dead by the legal Ulster Defence Association in 1989 – were arrested in Granard, County Longford on extradition warrants issued by the British authorities. Robert Russell was extradited back to Northern Ireland in August 1988 after being captured in Dublin in 1984, and Paul Kane followed in April 1989. In March 1990 the Supreme Court of Ireland in Dublin blocked the extradition of James Pius Clarke and Dermot Finucane on the grounds they "would be probable targets for ill-treatment by prison staff" if they were returned to prison in Northern Ireland.