by Ken Wharton
The Shankill Butchers were an extremely vicious Loyalist gang of sectarian killers that held the Catholic sections of Belfast in an absolute grip of terror between 1975 and 1982. I have chosen to include their activities in this chapter as their final (known) killing and the violent death of their leader – Lenny Murphy – took place in 1982. At some of the gang members’ trial in 1979, the sentencing judge referred to their crimes as ‘a lasting monument to blind sectarian bigotry’.
Throughout the history of mankind there have always been serial killers: those who kill for pleasure, who kill in a systematic way; some kill because they hate children, while others kill because they are misogynistic, homophobic or simply because they are racist. Britain’s first female serial killer, Mary Ann Cotton (1832–73), killed for insurance benefits; Peter Manuel (1927–58), who was Scotland’s first serial killer, killed for power; Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, killed because he hated women. It is a widely held opinion that all serial killers have undeniable mental health issues. Loyalist paramilitary Lenny Murphy and a group of other UVF members killed simply because they hated Roman Catholics. The Shankill Butchers were somehow different to other Loyalist killers such as Stephen ‘Top Gun’ McKeag, Johnnie ‘Mad Dog’ Adair, Stephen ‘Inch’ McFerran, Joe ‘Chinky’ Bratty and Robin ‘the Jackal’ Jackson. It is true that these Loyalists with their Chicago Mafia-style nicknames killed as prolifically as the Butchers and were equally motivated by sectarian hatred. It is equally true that they also killed for psychopathic reasons, but Murphy and his gang developed sectarian murder into an ‘art form’. They were cruel, sadistic and ruthless, and in many ways their killing bordered on criminal insanity. One of their victims was beheaded in a most gruesome fashion; it was done through the slow sawing through from throat to spinal column, in such a way that the victim suffered an unimaginable agony before dying. For this reason, Lenny Murphy, his brother, John Murphy, Robert ‘Basher’ Bates, William Moore, Sam McAlister, Edward McIlwaine, Ben Edwards, Archie Waller and at least six others stand apart from the sectarian killers on the Loyalist side.
Their first victims were Marie McGrattan (47), Frances Donnelley (35), Thomas Osborne (18) and Edward Grogan (18), all of whom were Catholics, shot dead at their workplace in Belfast on 2 October 1975. Seven weeks later, the gang chanced upon Francis Crossen (34), a Catholic whom they abducted, before torturing him and finally slashing his throat; they dumped his body in Wimbledon Street on the Shankill. They graduated to killing a fellow UVF member, Noel Shaw, on 30 November of the same year, following his role in the killing of another gang member, Archie Waller. The year 1976 was only ten days old when they killed Edward McQuaid (25) in a drive-by shooting in the Nationalist Cliftonvale Road.
There were seven more murders committed by them during 1976; two were Protestants killed in a case of mistaken identity. They killed a UFF member – James Moorhead (30) – after Murphy had taken issue with what he considered to be a personal insult. One of the murdered men, Cornelius Neeson (49), was attacked with a hatchet by Moore and McAllister on the Cliftonville Road on 1 August 1976; he was dreadfully injured when found, dying a few hours later. A relative said, ‘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.’
The following year, they killed a further five people, four of whom were Catholics. They had simply taken to roaming the streets in a taxi belonging to one of the gang; their methodology was crude, haphazard but generally accurate. They would cruise around the interface areas, noting people who were walking towards a Catholic/Nationalist area; their vehicle would pull alongside the victim as one or more of the gang would leap out and cosh the man to the ground, before dragging him into the back of the car. Several members would pinion the generally semi-conscious person to the floor, stabbing them in a purely random manner to prolong the torture. Sometimes they took the victim into a derelict house where scenes of torture that might well have taken place in medieval times occurred. One RUC officer spoke of ‘... lots of blood, piss and shit stains and piles of teeth which had been ripped out by the roots’.
Lenny Murphy shot a Catholic woman in Cliftonville Road, Belfast, badly wounding her on 11 March 1976; he was forced to flee the scene, abandoning the weapon close to where the shooting had taken place. Foolishly, he returned the next day to retrieve it. Luckily the RUC were waiting for him; he was arrested and charged with attempted murder. On 11 October 1977, he was somewhat incredulously sentenced to only twelve years after plea-bargaining and pleading guilty to lesser offences. Even behind bars, he was able to direct the sectarian murders carried out by the other members of the gang. While awaiting trial for the murder of William Pavis (32) along with another Butcher – Mervyn Connor – he suspected that Connor might betray him to secure a reduced sentence. Inside, Murphy ‘persuaded’ Connor not only to write a suicide note exonerating him for the murder but also to fatally ingest cyanide on 22 April 1973.
The killings continued unabated; the gang seemed impervious to either detection or arrest. However, on 10 May 1977, the RUC – under the leadership of CID Detective Jimmy Nesbitt – had their first real breakthrough: a victim survived an attack by the gang. Gerard McLaverty, who had been abducted, was taken to a disused doctor’s surgery where he was beaten and stabbed several times; for good measure, his tormentors had also slashed his wrists. The gang had then dumped what they naturally assumed was his dead body in a nearby alley. The important thing was that he had survived and was later able to identify individual members of the gang. Nesbitt disguised the only man to survive an attack by the Butchers, taking him around the Shankill area by car, where he was successfully able to identify several of his attackers including McAllister and Edwards. There was one other person who Martin Dillon in his quite excellent book The Shankill Butchers has legally only been able to identify as Mr ‘A’, but he was never brought to trial. Over the course of the next two years, Nesbitt ruthlessly hunted down the remainder of the gang, finally putting them in front of a judge in late 1978. On 20 February the following year, eleven men were convicted of a total of nineteen murders; the forty-two life sentences handed out were the most ever in a single trial in British criminal history. Moore pleaded guilty to eleven counts of murder and Bates to ten. However, most of the gang were released under the terms of the GFA, serving only a small portion of their sentences. Lenny Murphy was still in gaol, so he was never tried along with the other Butchers.
Martin Dillon’s own investigations suggest that several other individuals (whom he was unable to name for legal reasons) escaped prosecution for participation in the crimes of the Butchers and that the gang were responsible for a total of at least thirty murders. Murphy was released from gaol on 16 July 1982, and he wasted no time in returning to murder. The day following his release he killed fellow Protestant Norman Maxwell (33), who failed to show him sufficient respect while he was ‘holding court’ in the Loyalist Club on Rumford Street just off the Shankill. Mr Maxwell was probably dying from the beating that Murphy had administered when he was run over multiple times by a car that, it is alleged, Murphy was driving. A later inquest described the man’s death as ‘... the most savage, barbaric and brutal assault one could imagine, quite ruthless and quite merciless ...’ Murphy cynically ordered that the body was dumped in an interface area at Rocky Road to make the killing look as though it had been carried out by Catholics.
The body of Joseph Donegan, discovered in an entry off Battenberg Street in Belfast’s Shankill Road area, lies covered by a blanket on 25 October 1982. He was murdered by Lenny Murphy and others.
On 29 August, Murphy was responsible for the murder of part-time UDR soldier Jim Galway (33) from the Lower Shankill area, who had been passing information to the UVF. Murphy lured the man to a building site in the village of Broughshane, Ballymena, where he shot him several times in the head; the man’s body was buried at the scene of the murder. His remains were not found
until late the following year. Less than a week later, on 4 September, Murphy killed Brian Smyth (30) in a dispute over money that Murphy owed him following the sale of a car. Finally, on 22 October, the Provisional IRA abducted a UDR soldier, Thomas Cochrane (55), in South Armagh; he was tortured for three days before being shot dead; his body was dumped on a lonely border road. Murphy, despite orders to the contrary from the UVF leadership, kidnapped a Catholic man, Joseph Donegan (48), purportedly to be used as a bargaining tool in bringing about the release of the kidnapped UDR soldier. However, Murphy wasted no time at all in torturing the innocent Catholic, tearing out most of his teeth with pliers. Eventually, the battered man’s body was dumped close to Murphy’s home at Brookmount Street in the Shankill area.
Therefore, in the ninety-eight days following his release from HMP Maze, Murphy had killed a further four times; during this period, he began to assemble a new version of the Shankill Butchers, recruiting those both loyal to his style of sectarian murder and those in both fear and awe of him. Several of these new recruits took part in several of the four killings under Murphy’s influence. The UVF leadership had become increasingly alarmed at the frequency and the nature of the killings, which was causing them some public embarrassment. A decision was taken that they would contact the Provisionals’ leadership through a channel of communication that they kept open, unknown to the public. A senior UVF commander informed PIRA contacts where Murphy was staying and when he would be at the address.
On the evening of 16 November 1982, Murphy was driving back to his girlfriend’s house in Forthriver Park, Belfast, having collected a fish supper in nearby Glencairn. En route, a PIRA gun team in a stolen Morris van turned out of a side street, holding back sufficiently enough so as not to alarm Murphy, who drove on obliviously. He drove around the back of the house as the van pulled past him. As he exited his vehicle, the van suddenly stopped, the back doors opened and two gunmen opened fire with a sub-machine gun as well as a .38mm pistol. Murphy was hit twenty-two times, including seven rounds in his head, as his PIRA assassins made certain that he was dead. The leader of the Shankill Butchers would not kill again; the reign of terror was over.
Several days after the killing, the Provisionals made the following statement:
Lenny Murphy (master butcher) has been responsible for the horrific murders of over 20 innocent Nationalists in the Belfast area and a number of Protestants. The IRA has been aware for some time that since his release recently from prison, Murphy was attempting to re-establish a similar murder gang to that which he led in the mid-1970s and, in fact, he was responsible for a number of the recent sectarian murders in the Belfast area. The IRA takes this opportunity to restate its policy of non-sectarian attacks, while retaining its right to take unequivocal action against those who direct or motivate sectarian slaughter against the Nationalist population.
During the period 1975–82, the gang had killed up to thirty* people; most of the dead were Catholics, chosen entirely at random, but six were Protestants. Murphy’s tactics were simply to find lone persons walking in the direction of Catholic areas; once found, it was a fait accompli that they were Catholics – it was sufficient to warrant their deaths. The Butchers used knives, meat cleavers and hurling sticks, as well as bullets to kill their victims. Most of those killed died very slowly, often being stripped and hung upside down as members of the gang took turns to smash their victims’ heads. There is an unsubstantiated story that one man was skinned alive, dying in the most terrible of agonies.
The leadership of the UFF and the UVF were quite prepared to countenance the random killing of Catholics – though they always maintained that these were targeted – but they much preferred the ‘clean’ killings that involved bursting into a house, opening fire and then fleeing the scene. The tactics and actions of the Shankill Butchers were unacceptable and gruesome; Murphy and his ilk had to go. For these reasons, the UVF spoke to their sworn and deadly enemies, the Provisional IRA, to ensure that the ‘thorn in their side’ was removed and removed forever. When one takes into account that they had contact with PIRA in relation to Milltown killer Michael Stone as well as Murphy, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that that were other occasions when there were lines of communication.
Ballykelly (in Gaelic: Baile Uí Cheallaigh) sits astride the main A2 coastal road, close to the waters of Lough Foyle and the Irish Sea. A large RAF base situated there also housed soldiers whose TAOR (tactical area of responsibility) was the eastern side of Londonderry and Limavady towards Coleraine. In late 1982, the resident battalion was the Cheshire Regiment, a unit that can trace its lineage back to 1762. The Cheshires had only lost one soldier to terrorist action, back in 1974, when Corporal David Smith was killed by the IRA at Kelly’s Bar near Whiterock Road. Dominic ‘Mad Dog’ McGlinchey changed all of that on 6 December 1982.
The Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) was still basking in their supposed involvement in the booby-trap bombing of Tory MP Airey Neave at the House of Commons on 30 March 1979. Their leader at the time, Dominic ‘Mad Dog’ McGlinchey, had long set his heart on a spectacular that would upstage the Provisional IRA and remind the British public of just how powerful and deadly the INLA could be. In the township of Ballykelly was a small shopping and leisure outlet named the Shoppin’ Well. It included a large pub/disco – the Droppin’ Well – which was very popular with both off-duty soldiers and civilians alike. McGlinchey was aware of this and set in motion an outrage that would leave seventeen people dead and thirty seriously injured. Throughout the previous two months of October and November, INLA dickers had visited the pub, noting the attendees, spotting the soldiers with their all-too-obvious English accents, the times for optimum strike and likely bombing spots. They had also noted the young women who would date the soldiers, hoping for romance and excitement. In early December, the operation was scheduled for the first Monday of the month when a disco evening was planned.
A female INLA operative managed to avoid security – which the author has been privately informed was very poor – smuggling in a 10lb (4.54kg) device made of a commercial explosive named Frangex. The woman – thought to have been either Anna Moore or Helena Semple – mingled with the drinkers, sipping a drink as she surveyed the happy, dancing crowd. She must have noted the young, smiling civilians, the soldiers with their unusual accents, nervously hugging the disco walls, watching the local civvie girls dancing around their handbags, chugging back their lagers in the hope that the ‘Dutch courage’ might propel them forward to dance with the girl of their choice. The woman used the cover of the semi-darkness and flashing lights of the disco to leave the bomb next to a support pillar, before leaving the building, condemning seventeen young people to their deaths.
At exactly 23.15, in a flash of whiteness, heat and pure kinetic energy, the world ended for soldiers and civilians alike and condemned many others to months and sometimes a lifetime of pain. Many of those killed and injured were crushed by fallen masonry; some were trapped for up to four hours under the rubble. Some died under the crushing timber and concrete, their lives ebbing away in the darkness – a darkness in which they were deafened by the blast, blinded by the materials that pressed their bodies into the ground. Alone and uncomprehending, they died alone, taking their final thoughts with them to the grave. The last survivor was freed at 04.00 with the final body not recovered until later that morning. It was, at the time, the third worst atrocity of the Troubles, behind only Dublin/Monaghan and Warrenpoint.
A total of eleven soldiers were killed, eight from the Cheshire Regiment, two from the Army Catering Corps and one from the Light Infantry. They were: Private Terence Adams (20), Private Paul Delaney (18), Lance Corporal Steven Bagshaw (21), Lance Corporal Clinton Collins (20), Private David Murray (18), Corporal David Salthouse (23), Private Steven Smith (24) and Lance Corporal Philip McDonough (26) from the Cheshires; Private Neil Williams (18) and Private Anthony S. Williamson (20) from the Army Catering Corps; and Light Infantry soldier Lance C
orporal David Wilson-Stitt (27). Additionally, Alan Callaghan (17), Ruth Dixon (17), Angela Hoole (19), Valerie McIntyre (21) and Carol Watts (25) were killed. Patricia Cooke (21) was pulled alive from the wreckage and was rushed to hospital; sadly, she died on the 16th. Angela Hoole was from Lytham St Annes in Lancashire and was only drinking in the Droppin’ Well as she was visiting her sister, who was married to a Cheshire soldier. All the dead civilians were Protestants, as the INLA had known in advance, making this portion of the outrage overtly sectarian in nature.
A survivor told the author:
The next thing I remember is all hell broke loose. Apparently, the explosives were placed in such a position that they blew away the concrete pillars of the disco room. As a direct consequence of this, the whole shopping precinct above the pub, came crashing down on us. As I was in the bog, and close to the external walls of the pub, I was lucky to escape with minor cuts and bruises and able to get myself out of the rubble. Looking at the state of the place and the devastation around, it’s a miracle that I wasn’t crushed by the tons of rubble from the shops above, as I and many of the emergency services, crawled through the rubble to try to reach the injured.
The INLA claimed responsibility within twenty-four hours when a spokesman said, ‘We believe that it is only attacks of such a nature that bring it home to people in Britain and the British establishment. The shooting of an individual soldier, for the people of Britain, has very little effect in terms of the media or in terms of the British administration.’ McGlinchey said that the Droppin’ Well’s owner had been warned six times to stop offering entertainment to British soldiers. McGlinchey added that the owner, and those who socialised with the soldiers, ‘... knew full well that the warnings had been given and that the place was going to be bombed at some stage’. In June 1986, Anna Moore, Helena Semple, Eamon Moore and Patrick Shotter, all from the INLA, were jailed for life.
