The Shankill Butchers

by Martin Dillon

  This latest house move brought the Murphys close to Argyll Primary School, where in 1957 Hugh Leonard Thompson Murphy joined his two older brothers in pursuit of an education. Those who remember those days recall that in his first few years of primary school Hugh Leonard, who preferred to call himself Lenny, was given a nickname by his classmates, ‘Murphy the Mick’. This was a derogatory way of indicating their belief that he was a Catholic since the word ‘Mick’, though applied affectionately to the Irish Guards, was used in Belfast in the same pejorative manner as the word ‘Taig’. Whether or not it was in reaction to this branding, Lenny Murphy was a belligerent child and by the time he was ten years old he was threatening other children and removing their pocket money from them at knifepoint. Unlike his brothers, he was small in stature and rarely impressed others with any physical prowess. Instead, he assembled his own gang and when confronted with overwhelming numbers would threaten his adversaries with his older brothers. He is remembered by a classmate as follows: ‘We all called him Mick because we believed that he was a “Taig”. With a name like Hugh Murphy there was little doubt. He never called himself “Hughie” as most kids would have done because Hughie Murphy would have certainly made him a Catholic. But most people in the district believed his father was “one of the other sort”. My parents certainly did. He was a tough wee nut and his brothers were known to be hard men. He would always have threatened you with his brothers if you confronted him on his own. He wasn’t particularly bright. Another thing that struck me was that he never talked about his father or, like other kids, threatened you with his father if you hit him. He was devious. I remember him taking my lunch money off me on the way into school one day. I gave it to him because he had a penknife. You just knew not to mess with him.’

  The accuracy of these observations can only be assessed in the light of Lenny Murphy’s later development, but there is little doubt that he was a troublesome child. The comment about him not being ‘bright’ probably refers to his lack of application to school work, but those who remember him would add that he was cunning. It is possible that there was considerable instability in his life created by the way in which he was viewed by schoolmates, and the constant upheaval caused by house-moves together with a young mother over-compensating for her husband’s lack of dynamism. Joyce Murphy was proud of her sons and was tough with them, encouraging them to behave properly at home and in front of the neighbours. She is not known to have taught them to hate Catholics, though there is little doubt that her three sons grew up with a bitterness towards the other community and a resentment of authority, particularly the police.

  Lenny Murphy first came to the attention of the police at the age of twelve when he was found guilty of shopbreaking and larceny. He was given two years’ probation and ordered to pay eight shillings in compensation. By this time he was at secondary school, where he displayed all the traits of a petty criminal. He is remembered for showing a lack of interest in his studies and more interest in running his own little rackets. One such racket was very similar to the one he ran when at primary school and involved threatening other pupils, stealing their meal tickets and then selling them to other boys at a reduced rate. His attitude to authority in the classroom was such that teachers preferred to leave him to his own devices. In the metalwork room he is known to have exercised his authority by brandishing a metal poker which he had made and on one occasion hitting another pupil over the head with it.

  One of his classmates remembers vividly how Murphy dominated the class to the extent that other boys preferred to avoid his company and did not confront him when he treated them roughly. Still relatively small in stature, he continued to use the threat of his two older brothers when he found himself facing overwhelming odds or a fellow pupil who was willing to confront his belligerence. Unlike his early days when fellow pupils chided him for being a Taig, there was no question of anyone daring to do that at the Model Secondary School. He called himself Lenny and that was the manner in which he was referred to by teachers and pupils alike.

  It was at secondary school that an example of his cunning emerged which illustrated the mind of a developing criminal. A classmate tells the story. ‘Lenny was always extorting money from us all but none of us dared to challenge him. There was always the threat of him calling on the support of his brothers lurking in the background if anyone decided to take him on. He wasn’t big physically but you all knew that he was capable of having you sorted out. One day in the classroom he stole another boy’s wallet and flung it out of the window onto the roof of a portakabin. The teacher was too busy writing on the blackboard to notice the incident and the boy in question did not notice Lenny removing the wallet, but some of us watched how it was expertly removed from a jacket pocket. During the lunchtime break Lenny retrieved the wallet and removed the money from it, taking only the pound notes. Someone in the class told the boy who had lost his wallet about the guilty party and in turn the teacher was informed. No one was willing to give evidence against Murphy, and he knew it. That afternoon the teacher asked everyone to turn out their pockets and the contents were closely scrutinized. Lenny went free. He boasted afterwards that he had rolled the pound notes between fingers and fed them through a hole in his tie which he wore in class with the money carefully concealed.’

  Lenny Murphy knew the right people to target in the school and he chose the boys whose fathers owned newsagent, confectionery or butcher shops; the type of pupils who, unlike himself, were likely to have a plentiful supply of pocket money. In 1968 he left school and was soon in trouble with the law again for theft. He was placed once more on probation for two years, and on this occasion the compensation which he was ordered to pay was £4 10s. In the same year he took a job as a lorry driver’s helper and within a few months was prosecuted for a driving offence. The year 1968 was one of considerable change in Northern Ireland and, though Lenny was not aware of the complexity of the political events which were taking place, he was beginning to associate with people who had a vested interest in what was happening.

  The civil rights movement was developing a policy of street confrontation with the police, and within the Protestant community there were fears that it would all lead to communal violence. Eminent Unionist politicians were talking of the civil rights movement as a front for the IRA which was preparing to overthrow the State. The IRA was certainly present with a new agenda and long-term objectives and, though the guns had not come out on either side, hatred, suspicion and prejudice were about to surface in a virulent way.

  Lenny Murphy was beginning to behave as an adult rather than a teenager, keeping company with men in the Shankill district. He did, however, retain contact with his own age group by attending a disco near his home. A man who also attended the disco at that time recalls that Lenny would take over the running of it as if he owned it, and it was he who decided who should be allowed entry. It was, says this informant, just another example of the means by which he exercised his control over others. Some of the teenagers who went to the disco were pupils from the Model Secondary School and they noticed changes in Lenny’s appearance and temperament. He now dressed trendily and was fond of demonstrating how much he could drink. One Friday night in the spring of 1969 his demeanour at the disco left no one in any doubt that he had drunk too much. Half-way through the evening Joyce Murphy arrived and, after fighting her way through the dancers, she sought out her son and dragged him by the hair from the premises. When Lenny returned to the disco the following week no one dared to mention the incident for fear it might arouse his anger. It was a demonstration of the way in which Joyce Murphy handled her son, even publicly, but it was something she would never be allowed to do again.

  Not long after this, Lenny was regularly seen frequenting two bars on the Shankill Road, the Gluepot and the Bayardo, the latter being a haunt for men connected with the UVF. It was at this time, as events in Northern Ireland were beginning to make headlines, that he joined the junior wing of the UVF. He was observed asso
ciating more openly with prominent figures in the community, unlike his brother, William, who was regarded as a loner, and his other brother, John, who had a small circle of friends but did not visit bars where trouble was easily found.

  An example of the way Murphy behaved when he was under the influence of drink occurred in the Bayardo Bar and was witnessed by a former pupil of the Model Secondary School: ‘Lenny was standing at the bar drinking when a chap called Ritchie accidentally knocked against him, making him spill his drink. Lenny rounded on Ritchie and began threatening him and suggesting that he would take him outside and sort him out. A guy we knew to be a member of the UVF approached Lenny and told him that there were several people in the bar who were likely to give Ritchie support. Lenny immediately backed off. I heard a few weeks later that Lenny and a few of his mates waited outside the Bayardo until closing time and when Ritchie came out they beat him badly.’

  That same witness is of the view that Murphy was developing as a thug, and the more his reputation for being a ‘hard man’ spread around the Shankill area, the more he sought to illustrate his potential for violence. Society around Lenny at this time was starting to get out of control and, added to this, there was a new dimension to his life. His mother was no longer able to control him, his brothers seemed indifferent to his activities and his father did not feature in the equation. The fact that there were fewer restrictions on the world around him and at home was a recipe for disaster.

  In August 1969 Protestant mobs invaded Catholic streets on the nearby Falls Road and hundreds of homes were burned. The same happened in other parts of Belfast with thousands of Catholic families fleeing the city in what amounted to the greatest population displacement since the Second World War. Most of the violence occurred in what was the historic battleground for the two communities, West Belfast, and particularly that area between the Shankill and Falls Roads. Some of the Protestant mobs moved down Percy Street and onto the Falls Road. In the midst of the violence was Lenny Murphy. An associate of his at that time, who has now moved away from Belfast, says that he remembers Lenny being elated with the opportunity to be in the middle of it all. Murphy was not a prime mover in those events but they allowed him to vent some of the hatred which he felt for Catholics. This was the first occasion that it was manifested, though he often talked overtly while drinking in the Bayardo bar of his hatred of all Catholics because they were ‘scum and animals’! This may have been Murphy’s way of distancing himself from his own history and those school days when he was viewed as a Catholic. He was beginning to develop into what one UVF man later called a ‘super Prod’, which was shorthand for saying that Murphy was more anti-Catholic, anti-Nationalist and anti-Republican than even the most bitter man on the Shankili Road.

  The violence of the summer and autumn of 1969 changed the situation in Northern Ireland utterly and, as the poet, Yeats might have said, on both sides ‘a terrible beauty was born’. The Army arrived on the streets of Belfast and Derry in August 1969 following attacks on Catholics’ homes in both those cities. Their arrival followed demands from the Dublin Government and Nationalist politicians in Northern Ireland for a peacekeeping force. Although the soldiers were welcomed by the Catholic population this did not prevent the erection of barricades in both communities where the hatred of the other side had reached an unparalleled intensity. The Army did not attempt to remove the barricades, on the basis that it was an understandable reaction by two communities who had fought and hated each other and were terrified that the conflict could start again at any moment. Behind the barricades other groupings began to flourish, particularly vigilante organizations who set themselves up as protectors of their respective communities. None of the paramilitary groups in the two communities was well prepared for the communal violence on the streets of Northern Ireland in August 1969 and the vigilantes were able to thrive though they would later be sucked into paramilitarism. In many respects the barricades provided the closed atmosphere in which Republican and Loyalist paramilitary organizations could begin to reform and restructure. Initially, the vigilantes or defence organizations, as they were commonly known, were in a primacy role though this was to be short-lived. The Army in those early days saw its role as keeping the two communities apart in those areas where they lived in close proximity. The ghetto system was reinforced. On the Catholic side of the divide there was disillusionment at the failure of the IRA to defend its own districts, and vigilante groups were set up and organized into Citizen Defence Committees. These provided the genesis of the Provisional IRA which was formed in January 1970.

  Similarly, in the Shankill area and other Loyalist strongholds of Belfast the UVF was found wanting. It did not have the arms or the manpower to patrol its own neighbourhoods, and vigilante groups took to the streets. These groups later developed into another paramilitary force, the Ulster Defence Association. The vigilantes established what were called ‘no-go’ areas which in effect meant that they controlled the streets, though in most Catholic districts the British Army held the balance of power. Tension remained high in 1970 but, with the emergence of the Provisionals, romantic nationalism took to the stage and it was not long before the Provisionals turned back the historical clock and engaged in a struggle with the old Republican enemy, the British. But even this did not detract from the fact that the geography of Belfast was being carved up by the vigilantes in a way which was to ensure the permanence of old sectarian divisions and the creation of new ones. There were now areas where Catholics and Protestants could not afford to travel for fear of being apprehended and questioned. Many observers of the situation have failed to understand the significance of the vigilantes and how, on both sides, they determined the manner in which the city would be divided, with the result that sectarian gangs were able to identify the religion of their victims simply by the streets on which they happened to be walking or working. There were subtleties which were recognized only by killers; for example, outside the ghettoes there were public routes but the direction in which a person was travelling on one of those routes would indicate whether he or she was heading towards a Protestant or a Catholic housing estate. This type of information sealed the fate of hundreds of people and was later the basis on which the Shankill Butchers operated and selected their victims.

  The years 1970 and 1971 were crucial in the development of Lenny Murphy. He was in the UVF and was surrounding himself with a group of people loosely known as the ‘Murphy gang’. Among them were two young men, Robert Bates and Samuel McAllister, two nonentities ideally suited to be Murphy’s cohorts, and who were to figure prominently and infamously in Murphy’s later life. Bates, who was nicknamed ‘Basher’, was a man with a short fuse who ran his own gang but abandoned it in favour of being an associate of Murphy. Bates was four years older than Lenny but was nonetheless willing to become a subordinate. He also had a criminal record which dated back to 1966, with seven separate charges of assault and disorderly behaviour. He lived in the Shankill area close to Murphy’s home and had a reputation for having beaten people with beer glasses or bottles in pub fights.