Shankill Butchers
The Shankill Butchers were an Ulster loyalist paramilitary gang – many of whom were members of the Ulster Volunteer Force – that was active between 1975 and 1982 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It was based in the Shankill area and was responsible for the deaths of at least 23 people, most of whom were killed in sectarian attacks.
The gang kidnapped, tortured and murdered random civilians suspected of being Catholics; each was beaten ferociously and had their throat slashed with a butcher's knife. Some were also tortured and attacked with a hatchet. The gang also killed six Ulster Protestants over personal disputes and two other Protestants mistaken for Catholics.
Most of the gang were eventually caught and, in February 1979, received the longest combined prison sentences in United Kingdom legal history. However, gang leader Lenny Murphy and his two chief "lieutenants" escaped prosecution. Murphy was killed in November 1982 by the Provisional IRA, likely acting with the assistance of loyalist paramilitaries who perceived him as a threat. The Butchers brought a new level of paramilitary violence to a country already hardened by death and destruction. The judge who oversaw the 1979 trial described their crimes as "a lasting monument to blind sectarian bigotry".
Timeline
Background
Much of what is known about the Butchers comes from Martin Dillon's The Shankill Butchers: A Case Study of Mass Murder. In compiling this detailed work, Dillon was reportedly given unlimited access to the case files of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, who eventually caught the gang. The commander of the Shankill Butchers was Lenny Murphy. Murphy was the youngest of three sons of Joyce and William Murphy from the loyalist Shankill Road area of Belfast. At school, he was a known bully and would threaten other boys with a knife or with retribution from his two older brothers. Soon after leaving school at 16, he joined the UVF. Murphy often attended the trials of people accused of paramilitary crimes to become well acquainted with the laws of evidence and police procedure.On 28 September 1972, Murphy shot and killed William Edward "Ted" Pavis at his home in East Belfast. Pavis was a Protestant whom the UVF accused of selling weapons to the Provisional Irish Republican Army. Murphy and an accomplice, Mervyn Connor, were arrested and held on remand in Belfast's Crumlin Road prison. After a visit by police to Connor, fellow inmates suspected that he might cut a deal with the authorities. On 22 April 1973, Connor died by ingesting a large dose of cyanide. Before he died, he wrote a confession to the Pavis murder, reportedly under duress from Murphy. Murphy was brought to trial for the Pavis murder in June 1973. The court heard evidence from two witnesses who had seen Murphy pull the trigger and had later picked him out of an identification parade. The jury acquitted him due in part to Murphy's disruption of the line-up. Murphy's freedom was short-lived as he was re-arrested immediately for a number of escape attempts and imprisoned, then interned, for three years.
Formation
In May 1975, Murphy was released from prison, where he had married Margaret Gillespie. During his imprisonment, a daughter had been born to the couple. He spent much of his time frequenting pubs on the Shankill Road, assembling a paramilitary team that would enable him to act with some freedom from the UVF leadership. Murphy's inner circle consisted of two people whom Dillon was unable to name for legal reasons but whom he called Murphy's "personal friends". These were a "Mr. A" and John Murphy, one of Lenny Murphy's brothers. Further down the chain of command were Lenny Murphy's "sergeants" William Moore and Bobby "Basher" Bates, a UVF member and former prisoner.Moore, formerly a worker in a meat-processing factory, had stolen several large knives and meat-cleavers from his old workplace, tools that would later be used in more murders. Another prominent figure was Sam McAllister, who used his physical presence to intimidate others. On 2 October 1975, the gang raided a drinks premises in nearby Millfield. On finding that its four employees were Catholics, Murphy shot three of them dead and ordered an accomplice to kill the fourth. By then, Murphy was using the upper floor of the Brown Bear pub at the corner of Mountjoy Street and the Shankill Road near his home as an occasional meeting-place for his unit.
Cut-throat killings
On 24–25 November 1975, using the city's sectarian geography to identify likely targets, Murphy roamed the areas nearest the Catholic New Lodge in the hope of finding someone likely to be Catholic to abduct. Francis Crossin, a Catholic man and father of two, was walking down Library Street towards the city centre at approximately 12:40 when four of the Butchers, in Moore's taxi, spotted him. As the taxi pulled alongside Crossin, Murphy jumped out and hit him on the right side of the head with a wheel brace to disorient him. He was dragged into the taxi by Benjamin Edwards and Archie Waller, two of Murphy's gang. As the taxi returned to the safety of the nearby Shankill area, Crossin suffered a ferocious beating. He was subjected to a high level of violence, including a beer glass being shoved into his head. Murphy repeatedly told Crossin: "I'm going to kill you, you bastard", before the taxi stopped at an entry off Wimbledon Street. Crossin was dragged into an alleyway and Murphy, brandishing a butcher's knife, cut his throat almost through to the spine. The gang dispersed. Crossin, whose body was found the next morning by an elderly woman, was the first of three Catholics to be killed by Murphy in this "horrific and brutal manner". "Slaughter in back alley" was the headline in the city's major afternoon newspaper that day. A relative of Crossin said that his family was unable to have an open coffin at his wake because the body was so badly mutilated.A few days later, on 30 November 1975, an internal feud led to the deaths of two members of a rival UVF company on the Shankill and to that of Archibald Waller, who had been involved in the Crossin murder. On 14 October of that year, Waller had killed Stewart Robinson in a punishment shooting gone wrong. With the sanction of the UVF Brigade Staff, he in turn was gunned down by one of Robinson's comrades in the UVF team based in the Windsor Bar, a quarter of a mile from the Brown Bear pub. Enraged, Murphy had the gunman, former loyalist prisoner Noel "Nogi" Shaw, brought before a kangaroo court in the Lawnbrook Club, one of his Shankill drinking dens. After pistol whipping Shaw, Murphy shot him in front of his whole unit of about twenty men and returned to finish his drink at the bar. John Murphy and William Moore put Shaw's body in a laundry basket, and Moore dumped it half a mile away.
Murphy's other cut-throat victims were Thomas Quinn and Francis Rice. Both were abducted late at night, on the weekend, in the same area as Crossin. Quinn was murdered in the Glencairn district of the Upper Shankill in the early hours of 7 February 1976 and Rice a few streets from Murphy's home at about 1:30 am on 22 February 1976, after a butcher's knife had been collected from a loyalist club. Quinn's body was not found until mid-evening, after a phone call to a Belfast newspaper, while Rice's was found about six hours after his murder. Murphy's main accomplices on both occasions were Moore and Bates, while Edwards was party to the killing of Quinn. Another man and two women, whom Dillon did not name, were accessories to Murphy in the murder of Rice.
By this time the expression "the Butchers" had appeared in media coverage of these killings, and many Catholics lived in fear of the gang. Detective Chief Inspector Jimmy Nesbitt, head of the CID Murder Squad in Tennent Street RUC base and the man charged with tracking down the Butchers, was in no doubt that the murders of Crossin, Quinn and Rice were the work of the same people. Other than that he had little information, although a lead was provided by the woman who found Rice's body. The previous night she had heard voices in the entry where the body was later found, and what she thought might have been a local taxi. This had led to William Moore's taxi being examined for evidence, as were all other Shankill taxis; however, the Butchers had cleaned the vehicle thoroughly and nothing incriminating was found. On Murphy's orders, Moore destroyed the taxi and bought a yellow Ford Cortina, which was to be used in subsequent murders.
Early on 11 March 1976, Murphy tried to kill a Catholic woman in a drive-by shooting; arrested later that day, he was put on remand on an attempted murder charge. Shortly after Murphy's arrest, he began to receive visits from "Mr. A" and "Mr. B". He told "Mr. A" that the cut-throat murders should continue in due course, partly to divert suspicion from himself. In a subsequent plea bargain, Murphy pleaded guilty to a firearms charge and was sentenced on 11 October 1977 to twelve years' imprisonment. Another Catholic man killed by the gang was Cornelius "Con" Neeson, attacked with a hatchet by Moore and McAllister on the Cliftonville Road late on 1 August 1976. He died a few hours later. One of Neeson's brothers, speaking in 1994, declared: "I saw the state of my brother's body after he was butchered on the street. I said, 'That is not my brother'. Even our mother would not have recognised him".
Later that year "Mr. A" informed Moore, now the Butchers' de facto commander, of Murphy's orders to resume the throat-slashings. Three more Catholic men from North Belfast were subsequently kidnapped, tortured and hacked to death in the same way as before. The victims were Stephen McCann, a Queen's University student murdered on 30 October 1976; Joseph Morrissey, killed on 3 February 1977; and Francis Cassidy, a dock-worker who was killed on 30 March 1977. Moore proved himself an able deputy to Murphy, committing the throat-cuttings himself and encouraging the gang to use extreme violence on the victims beforehand. In particular, Arthur McClay attacked Morrissey with a hatchet; Moore had promoted McClay after Murphy had been jailed. The three victims were dumped in various parts of the greater Shankill area. The other gang members involved in one or more of these cut-throat murders were McAllister, John Townsley, David Bell and Norman Waugh. "Mr. A" played a prominent part in the planning of Moore's activities.
After his arrest in 1977, William Moore was portrayed in subsequent police accounts as having been in effective control of the Butchers gang during Murphy's incarceration. However, a 2017 book on the UVF, citing an unnamed source, argued that John, an older brother of Murphy who escaped prosecution, had been directing the activities of the Butchers during that time.