Smyth-Campbell, 24, was shot dead in the front passenger seat of a car in west Belfast at a roundabout close to a bus station facing an army post, which protected a local electricity substation, after a night out at a pub.
A senior detective investigating one of Britain's most controversial spy scandals has appealed to both ex-IRA and retired soldiers to help him get the truth about the killing of a young woman during the Troubles.
Jon Boutcher, former chief constable of Bedfordshire, leads Operation Kenova, which is probing the activities of notorious British military intelligence agent Stakeknife, who betrayed the IRA for three decades.
Boutcher is reinvestigating several unsolved murders from the Northern Irish conflict, and has directly appealed to former British soldiers and IRA operatives to pass on any information they have about the 1972 killing of Jean Smyth-Campbell. He believes she was an innocent victim of a random shooting incident during the most violent year of the Troubles, and wishes to bring closure for her family – there have been conflicting allegations over the years that either a local IRA unit or British soldiers fired the shots which killed her.
Boutcher is particularly keen to trace a red-haired girl described by witnesses as helping to put Smyth-Campbell into a taxi, which then took her to hospital.
Smyth-Campbell's sister Margaret McQuillan, 12 at the time of the shooting, also called on people to come forward with…
