The Shankill Butchers

by Martin Dillon

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Martin Dillon

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  List of illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword by Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien

  Introduction

  1 The Making of a Killer

  2 A Killer is Blooded

  3 A Killer Squad is Formed

  4 The Butchery Begins

  5 Charlie Division

  6 A Public Execution

  7 Murder Most Foul

  8 The First Mistake

  9 Murder Deal

  10 Orders From Prison

  11 A Natural Successor

  12 The Bombing Mission

  13 The Ultimate Witness

  14 The Public Avenger?

  15 ‘Mr X.’ is Back

  Conclusion

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  ‘This was the ultimate way to kill a man’

  During the 1970s a group of Protestant paramilitaries embarked on a spree of indiscriminate murder which left thirty Northern Irish Catholics dead. Their leader was Lenny Murphy, a fanatical Unionist whose Catholic-sounding surname led to his persecution as a child for which he took revenge on all Catholics.

  Not for the squeamish, The Shankill Butchers is a horrifying detailed account of one of the most brutal series of murders in British legal history – a phenomenon whose real nature has been obscured by the troubled and violent context from which it sprang.

  About the Author

  Martin Dillon is a native of Belfast although educated in England. He lived in France for a time and returned to Northern Ireland to work as a journalist with the Irish News before joining the Belfast Telegraph. He has also worked as a freelance journalist for several national newspapers and American periodicals. In 1973 he wrote Political Murder in Northern Ireland (with Denis Lehane) which is regarded as the definitive study of political assassination in Northern Ireland. His second book, Rogue Warrior of the SAS (with Roy Bradford), is a biography of the Second World War hero, Lt. Col. Robert Blair Mayne.

  Martin Dillon has written plays for BBC radio and television and has been Editor in Northern Ireland of many of the BBC’s programmes in the area of current affairs. The Shankill Butchers is the first in a trilogy of books about Northern and Southern Ireland.

  Also by Martin Dillon

  Rogue Warrior of the SAS (with Roy Bradford)

  Political Murder in Northern Ireland

  The Dirty War

  Killer in Clowntown: Joe Doherty, the IRA

  and the Special Relationship

  Stone Cold

  The Serpent’s Tail

  God and the Gun: The Church and

  Irish Terrorism

  The Assasination of Robert Maxwell:

  Israel’s Superspy

  The Enemy Within

  The Trigger Men

  Crossing The Line

  THE SHANKILL BUTCHERS

  A Case Study of Mass Murder

  Martin Dillon

  To all victims of violence

  in Northern Ireland

  Murder is negative creation.

  Every murderer is the rebel

  who claims the right to be omnipotent.

  His pathos is his refusal to suffer.

  W. H. Auden, ‘The Dyer’s Hand’

  List of Illustrations

  1. Hugh Leonard Thompson Murphy, leader of the ‘Shankill Butcher’ gang

  2. Moore and Bates, men who were prominent in Murphy’s reign of terror

  3. Edwards and Townsley

  4. Waugh and Bell

  5. McClay and McIlwaine

  6. ‘Big Sam’ McAllister

  7. James ‘Tonto’ Watt

  8. The Windsor Bar on Belfast’s Shankill Road

  9. A bullet-riddled lorry

  10. Archibald Hanna

  11. Knife marks on the hands of Gerard McLaverty

  12. Funeral of a part-time UDR Sgt

  13. The car in which Lenny Murphy met his death

  14. The mass murderer’s headstone

  15. Jimmy Nesbitt with Det. Sgt Cecil Chambers

  16. Det Inspector John Fitzsimmons

  17. Nesbitt at Buckingham Palace to receive the MBE

  Acknowledgements

  Many people provided help and assistance to me while I was writing this book. Foremost among them was Stephen Dillon who helped with some aspects of the research and possessed a genuine appreciation of the story. Bill McGookin of the Royal Ulster Constabulary Press Office made it possible for me from the outset to gain access to police files and to those men in the Force who were frontline detectives and relevant to the story. I must pay tribute to all the policemen who spoke with me. They all demonstrated integrity. The person within the RUC to whom I owe the greatest debt is Superintendent Jimmy Nesbitt who was unceasing in his efforts to unearth material I required, who constantly sought out detectives who were central to the story and who at all times was honest and frank with me. There were also detectives such as Jim Fitzsimmons, Cecil Chambers, John Scott and Roy Turner who provided me with invaluable insights.

  One man who encouraged my writing of this book was Jim Campbell, northern editor of the Sunday World newspaper who survived an attempt on his life while he was trying to expose this story in the early eighties.

  Others who deserve to be mentioned are: Chris Ryder of the Daily Telegraph, David McKittrick of the Independent, Jim Cusack of the Irish Times, David Ross, a senior producer at the BBC, and freelance journalist, Ivan McMichael.

  I also owe much to my wife, Kathy, who lived with the evidence of the horror of this story.

  The former Nationalist politician, Paddy Devlin, who is now a writer and broadcaster, provided me with interesting perspectives of the Northern Ireland conflict as did the writer and broadcaster, Andrew Body, who encouraged me to examine the important writing of Father McGriel SJ.

  Unfortunately there are those whom I would not name because in doing so I would place their lives in jeopardy. They are members of the legal profession, policemen who work undercover and former members of paramilitary associations. To all those I owe a debt of gratitude for their trust and the revealing manner in which they responded to my questions.

  Pacemaker Press in Belfast assisted with my photographic requirements and the Belfast Telegraph kindly provided relevant photographs from its archives.

  Finally, I must thank the criminologist, John Bach, for assisting me in an understanding of the criminal law in Northern Ireland and the BBC librarian, Adele Gilding, for seeking out historical works relevant to my study.

  Foreword

  The particular atrocities which are horrifyingly documented by Martin Dillon in this book were legitimized in the name of ‘God and Ulster’. Other atrocities are legitimized in the name of ‘God and Ireland’ (or simply ‘Ireland’, with ‘God’ vaguely present). Both kinds of atrocities continue in 1989 in a sinister pattern of sectarian and political ‘tit for tat’.

  That is the general picture, but it needs more qualification. The Shankill Butchers remain unique in the sadistic ferocity of their modus operandi. The Provisional IRA – by far the most important of the various murderous organizations of Northern Ireland – never unleashed on society anyone quite like Lennie Murphy, the chief of the Shankill Butchers.

  At the time of these ghastly random murders of innocent Catholics by Protestant sadists, Catholics found a crumb of comfort in the thought of their own moral superiority. ‘Our own’ murderers might murder more people in the course of time, but at least they didn’t do such horrible things to them before they died, a
nd while they were dying. Catholics were confirmed in their traditional belief that Protestants have a dose of Original Sin.

  I don’t find the theological explanation convincing, but I remain puzzled both by the phenomenon of the Butchers, and the absence of an exact parallel among the Catholic murderers. Lack of centralized authority on the Protestant side and the relatively tight hierarchical structure of the Irish Republican Army may partly account for the difference. The rest of the difference may be accounted for by the fact that the IRA is much more interested in its public ‘image’ than the Protestant paramilitaries have been in theirs. The IRA has had its quota of psychopaths, but it has been on its guard against them, most of the time, if only because of the ‘image’ problem; and it has been better able to control them, because of its tighter discipline. In any case, anyone who may imagine that there is no ‘Butchers’ potential on the Catholic side should reflect on the stripping and lynching of those British soldiers by those Republican mourners at that IRA funeral last year.

  Martin Dillon speaks of ‘the subculture of a paramilitary world’, and his book gives startling insight into that subculture. Lennie Murphy belonged to a Protestant family which had the misfortune of having a ‘Catholic’ surname. The family suffered a good deal of ostracism on that score, as Martin Dillon shows, and this family situation may have been among the factors which turned him into a hunter and killer of Catholics. I suspect, however, that Lennie was primarily a sadist and only secondarily a hater of Catholics. He longed to hurt and kill people and, according to the values of his particular subculture, Catholics were the people who might legitimately be treated in this way.

  Contemplating such horrors, we are apt to say that a person like Lennie Murphy has to be ‘mad’. Maybe. But he was certainly crafty. He cut people’s throats for the pleasure of doing so, but he was also capable of calculation on the subject of throat-cutting. As Martin Dillon tells it, Lennie Murphy – within a week of his confinement in the Maze Prison (not for murder but for a firearms offence) – received a visit from his accomplice ‘Mr A.’ (who is still at large). Murphy told ‘Mr A.’ that the cut-throat murders were to continue in order to throw the police off his track and allay any suspicions they might have about his associates.

  These calculations proved to be correct. In accordance with Murphy’s instructions, the cut-throat murders continued while he was in jail. (Those who hold that it is necessarily a humane policy to allow persons convicted of terrorist-associated crimes to have their quota of visitors should reflect a little on the bloody consequences of ‘Mr A.’s’ visit. The murders continued, the authorities were duly fooled, Murphy was set free and went on to cut more throats.

  Murphy’s modus operandi was such as to convince even ‘normal’ murderers, on both sides of the political-sectarian divide, that he had to be eliminated. In the end, he seems to have been set up by Protestant paramilitaries, in order to be murdered by the Provisional IRA. So in a way he died a curiously ecumenical death; nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.

  There were those who mourned the Butcher, as Martin Dillon records. Eighty-seven death notices in the Belfast Telegraph (a very respectable newspaper, as also is the Belfast Catholic Irish News, which used to carry death notices of IRA volunteers ‘killed on active service’. Business is business). Messages from old friends in the Maze Prison, men with names like ‘Basher’, and ‘Hacksaw’. And there was Lennie’s Aunt Agnes who wrote . . . ‘To us you were very special and God must have thought so too.’

  I suppose He must. It is a chilling thought. And Martin Dillon has written a chilling book. Chilling, but fascinating. Martin Dillon knows Northern Ireland extremely well, and knows both sides of it, without lending himself to the propaganda of either. The Shankill Butchers is the first book of a trilogy, covering both sides of that divide. When the trilogy is completed and published, we shall know a lot more about Northern Ireland than we do now. And not only those of us who are outsiders; Northern Ireland itself will know more. At present, Northern Ireland hardly knows more about itself than the outside world does, since both sides of the divided population feed themselves on their own inherited myths about the other side. But people on both sides – some of them – are likely to read Martin Dillon, and to learn from him.

  DR CONOR CRUISE O’BRIEN

  May 1989

  Introduction

  When I began to write this book I was determined not to apportion blame to either of the two communities in the Northern Ireland conflict, because both Catholics and Protestants must share equally the guilt for what has happened over the past twenty years. This was exceedingly difficult to achieve and I leave it to the reader to decide if I remain true to my intention. The central story in this book deals with a group of men who became known infamously as the ‘Shankill Butchers’, not simply for their crimes but because they were based in a Protestant district of West Belfast known as the Shankill. The book is also about those people who have been lost to memory: the victims. The story of how innocent people met their deaths will, I hope, illustrate the futility of violence.

  The long war in Northern Ireland is littered with tragedy but the ‘Butcher’ murders remain fixed in my mind long after they happened. This is firstly because of the macabre way in which young and old were tortured and killed, secondly because of the ability of the killers to evade capture for so long, and thirdly because of my interest in the factors which created the potential for mass murder. I felt that definitions were required to explain the central theme of the conflict but I detected other factors within the ‘Butcher’ murders which bore similarities to American serial murders. Much has been written about the manner in which terrorists operate but little has centred on the elements within the psychological make-up of the terrorists which, when placed against the prejudice in the society, coalesce to produce mass murderers. It was never my intention to produce a political thesis or to imply support for any of the protagonists. Northern Ireland has its share of heroes and villains and often they are inseparable. If I sought to evidence anything from my research, it was to show that the prejudice which is endemic in Northern Ireland inevitably leads to extermination. At the outset I talked to people who had studied similar cases of mass murder, whether it was the serial murder phenomenon in the United States, or the killings by the Yorkshire Ripper and the Moors Murderers. Most of those I spoke to had never heard of the Shankill Butchers, even though they killed more people than any other mass murderers in British criminal history. The realization of that lack of knowledge persuaded me that this book should be written. I was not to know at the time of the difficulties I would face, nor that I would uncover thirteen other murders for which the leader of the Butcher gang was never charged, or that at least seventeen people who were implicated in some of the killings were never brought before the courts. I discovered that investigating this kind of dimension to the Northern Ireland conflict has its risks, and further, I found myself faced with myths which were difficult to dispel without thorough investigation. The Royal Ulster Constabulary was unstinting in its efforts to provide me with all its files and notes connected with the case.

  The Head of the RUC Press Office was generous with his time and help, and the officer who tracked the Butchers, Superintendent Jimmy Nesbitt, provided me with hours of analysis and access to the members of his team, who studied and eventually trapped most of the Shankill Butchers.

  It was by working closely with the police, studying their methods, their successes, their failings and failures, that I also discovered the immense problems they faced while dealing with this case. There were detractors of the police when the Butcher killings were happening and even after they ceased. The role of the police was denigrated for political reasons and through ignorance. A squad of eleven detectives hunted the Butchers, whereas in the Yorkshire Ripper enquiry there were 304, and yet the trial of the Butchers was the biggest in British criminal history, with forty-two life sentences handed down at one sitting. How many more would h
ave been handed down had all those responsible for the crimes committed been brought to justice, and not just those who committed the nineteen murders dealt with by the Northern Ireland judiciary? This book deals with the reasons why it took so long to bring the Butchers to justice, why some of the guilty are still walking the streets of Northern Ireland, what is fundamentally wrong with the procedures for dealing with terrorists and where the blame for such failings should lie. These are the central issues which unfold with this story.

  For the benefit of the reader I will seek to outline some of the background which is central to an understanding of the organization to which the Shankill Butchers belonged. They were members of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) which has its roots in the years before the 1914–18 War. The UVF was formed by Lord Edward Carson to defend Ulster against Home Rule. However, events took the UVF in a different direction and onto the battlefields of France in the Great War.

  UVF members fought bravely with the 36th Ulster Division and provided a heroic legacy, which was not necessarily mirrored in the manner in which it was later to address itself to the conflict within its own society. Within the ranks of the UVF was a junior wing known as the Young Citizen Volunteers, who formed a battalion within the 36th Ulster Division. In many respects this structure was to mirror that of the IRA, which had within its ranks young men who were members of Na Fianna Éireann (The Youth of Ireland). Two years after the War many of those men who had swelled the ranks of the UVF in 1912 behind the rallying cries of Carson were back in civilian life, tired and weary of fighting, but there were others who chose to remain in the organization to defend the Protestant population. This time the action took place not on the battlefields of the Somme but in the back streets of Belfast, where a historic struggle was about to manifest itself as it had done in the nineteenth century. Between 1920–22, in what is known as the ‘Belfast Pogroms’, the UVF became involved in communal violence and sectarian assassination.