The Shankill Butchers

by Martin Dillon

  On 24 April Murphy was given a pass by a member of the prison staff at the hospital which allowed him to leave the hospital confines. He walked out of the wing in which he was housed and straight to the cell where Mervyn Connor was kept. In his pocket Murphy carried a quantity of cyanide, a pencil and a scrap of blank paper. The two warders whose job it was to guard Connor were some distance away watching television with other prisoners. Another prisoner witnessed Murphy with his hands tightly around Connor’s throat while Connor was writing on a piece of paper. When Connor ceased writing, Murphy continued to hold him by the throat with his left hand and produced a phial from his pocket. He then poured a substance down Connor’s throat and quickly left the cell. When the warders returned to the cell Connor was unconscious and was rushed to the prison hospital where attempts to revive him failed. He died the following morning.

  Major Mullen, the prison’s deputy governor, was incensed by the killing and decided that the seriousness of the matter warranted investigation by the police rather than by the prison authorities. Major Mullen was in no doubt as to who had committed the murder but he wanted some of his staff to be interviewed to establish whether there had been any collusion with Murphy. I can reveal that the police were contacted on three occasions and, to Major Mullen’s surprise and consternation, made no effort to visit the prison. When they turned up eventually they conducted a cursory examination of Connor’s cell and loosely interviewed one or two members of the prison staff. A report on the matter was produced which was forwarded to the prison authorities for scrutiny. When Major Mullen read it he was appalled by the lack of content and was convinced it was a blatant attempt to dismiss the issue by failing to reach any conclusions or suggest a course of action. Major Mullen, who died in 1986, was regarded by all who knew him as an honest and prudent man, someone who did not believe in obscuring the inadequacies of his own regime even if this produced an unfavourable public profile for the prison.

  In this instance he decided to conduct his own enquiry to discover if members of his staff assisted Murphy in committing a murder. He interviewed the member of staff from the hospital who had given Murphy the pass and the two warders who should have been guarding Connor at the time of his death. He also spoke to Murphy, who dismissed as nonsense the contention that he was the only person with the motivation to kill Connor and the only prisoner with access to the cyanide which killed him. Major Mullen produced a report which he insisted be attached to the police file. The police file has disappeared and during the writing of this book I made repeated attempts to ask someone to clarify the reasons for the disappearance, since it would seem to any right-thinking person that an unsolved murder of this nature and the questions it raised should at least have been recorded somewhere. Those policemen who assisted with many of my enquiries for the writing of this book, in particular Superintendent Jimmy Nesbitt, made repeated attempt to trace some documentation of this episode, but without success. It also seems strange that a report by someone as senior as the late Major Mullen, and which I have been told was critical of the investigating officers assigned to the enquiry, should not be available for scrutiny. I know it exists but I was refused access to it despite several requests made to the prison authorities.

  In the Connor enquiry serious questions required answers. How, in a prison that housed so many high-risk prisoners, was Murphy capable of strolling about freely? Why was he allowed to leave the prison hospital? Why were the two warders assigned to protect Connor watching television at the time of the murder? The prisoner who watched Murphy administering the cyanide dose spoke privately to Major Mullen but died later as a result of being battered against a cell wall. The fact that Connor’s murder was not satisfactorily resolved by the police led Murphy to believe he was invincible. The episode also increased his standing within the UVF and brought about a situation in which people were terrified of him because they knew that he would eliminate anyone willing to give evidence against him and that, if he so wished, he could take such steps even within the confines of a top-security prison and get away with it. I believe that because this enquiry was treated, in the opinion of Major Mullen, in such an irresponsible manner, such laxity became a crucial factor in the development of Murphy as the biggest mass murderer in British criminal history. From the moment he killed Connor, Murphy believed that he could act outside the law and that he had the resources to evade detection and, ultimately, prosecution.

  The killing of Mervyn Connor was a salutary lesson for others in the UVF who came to believe that Murphy was always out of control and that for this reason, and his potential for frightening retaliation, he was best left to his own devices. An illustration of the fear he instilled in others, and which relates directly to the fact that he would have been willing to cause the death of eleven other men to exact revenge on Connor, can be seen in the words of one of Murphy’s UVF leaders who told a detective: ‘Murphy doesn’t frighten me but it is what he could do to my wife and kids if I crossed him and didn’t dispose of him quickly.’

  An interesting dimension to the Pavis/Connor affair is that before Murphy killed Connor he forced him to write a confession exonerating Murphy of the murder of Pavis. One can only speculate that when the police realized they had lost their witness and that Murphy appeared to have a more than even chance of beating the murder charge they lost interest in the whole business. If such was the case, then it was a serious error of judgment to allow Murphy to go unchallenged and to fail to seek the necessary evidence to charge him with the unlawful killing of his accomplice. A corollary to the missing file element is that one of the police officers placed in charge of conducting the enquiry in the prison was later connected with files which went missing in relation to the enquiry into the homosexual abuse of young boys at the Kincora Home in Belfast.

  Aside from the killing, Murphy’s time spent in prison was eventful in other respects: he was twice caught attempting to escape. Escapes were always being planned in the prison but mostly by Provisional IRA men who used cunning and inventiveness in producing imitation guns fashioned from bars of soap which were then coloured black with shoe polish. Murphy believed he could upstage these tactics by simply impersonating someone and walking free. It was a bold move considering the man’s notoriety, and it almost succeeded.

  At the beginning of the last week of January 1973 Murphy learned that a petty thief was completing his sentence and was due for release at 6.15 P.M. on 30 January. In his inimitable style Murphy persuaded the man to accept that it was he, Murphy, who would be leaving in his place and that it would be advisable not to contest this. Murphy arranged to exchange clothes with the other prisoner half an hour before his release. With his usual eye for detail he spotted a range of tattoos on the man’s arms which might well be used to identify him on leaving the front gate of the prison. The other prisoner was much the same size and build as Lenny Murphy, so if a distinguishing characteristic were to be sought by a guard it might well be a scar or a tattoo. Murphy arranged to meet the prisoner several days later to enable him to study the tattoos and have them copied onto his right arm with pen and ink on the day of the escape. At 6.15 P.M. on 30 January Murphy, carrying the other prisoner’s belongings and dressed in his clothes, walked through the prison and reached the front gate. An observant guard asked to check for a tattoo which was listed as being on the prisoner’s arm. As Murphy rolled back his jacket and shirt sleeves the newly drawn ‘tattoo’ became smudged and Murphy was returned to his cell. Ten days later Prison Officer Desmond Ball saw Murphy climbing out of his cell window using a rope made of blankets. Ball challenged him and Murphy climbed back in. This escape attempt was not as ingenious as the first since, had Murphy reached the ground, he would have found himself in the prison yard, from where escape would have proved exceedingly difficult. A detective who interviewed Murphy in relation to this offence said that Murphy treated the matter as a joke. It was his impression that the escape attempt was made to enhance Lenny’s reputation rather than because of any
expectation of success.

  On 18 June Murphy was marched through the underground tunnel which links the prison to Crumlin Road courthouse to stand trial for the murder of Pavis. Witnesses for the Crown told the jury that Murphy was the man they saw shoot Pavis. As this evidence was being given Murphy sat motionless in the dock, his face devoid of emotion. Murphy’s defence was that he had never met Pavis and was somewhere else on the night of the murder, but the precise details of that ‘somewhere’ were lost to his memory. He suggested that he could possibly have been working on a car with a friend but could not say for sure that this was so. His lack of knowledge of his whereabouts on the night of the crime would in any other court, taking into account the eyewitness evidence against him, have convinced the jury of his guilt but the crucial factor for the jury in this case was the identification parade. As Murphy had shrewdly reckoned, this was described as central to the jury reaching a verdict. The trial was over within two days and Murphy was told he could walk free from the courthouse. Unknown to him, however, it had been decided that he should be re-arrested and held in detention under the Northern Ireland Special Powers Act. The arresting officers were waiting for him in the foyer of the courthouse and returned him immediately to Crumlin Road Prison. Murphy was returned to court on two subsequent occasions during the following six months to face charges of attempting to escape from lawful custody, and he received sentences totalling three years’ imprisonment. The Crown Case against Murphy was weak. Connor was dead and the Crown did not seek to use a written statement made by him because Murphy would have been in a position to discredit it by referring to the note Connor wrote before he died. As a result the story of Connor’s untimely death and his final confession remained a mystery.

  In the second week of February 1974 he was moved from Crumlin Road Prison to what was then called Long Kesh and is now the Maze Prison outside Belfast. Long Kesh housed Republican and Loyalist internees who lived in compounds, separated from each other. The compounds were run on military lines by the leaders of the respective paramilitary organizations. Prisoners were obliged to undertake military drill every day, to salute their officers and to attend political and military lectures. The atmosphere was very much like that portrayed in movies about prisoner of war camps. The commander in charge of the UVF compound was Gusty Spence. He insisted on strict military discipline, personally drilled his men and did not tolerate breaches of the rules. At the time Murphy arrived in the camp so did many other young men and boys. Spence recalls a boy arriving still wearing his school blazer. He had been found guilty of shooting two people in the head.

  Murphy disliked the atmosphere in the camp. Whereas Crumlin Road Prison had been relaxed and Murphy had had the adulation of other prisoners, Spence regarded him as another volunteer who should obey the rules. Spence has since remarked that many of the young men who were sent to his compound were gun fanatics who regarded themselves as terrorists and not soldiers, as Spence preferred to describe members of the UVF. He says: ‘The job of the older ones like myself was to win them away from the gun, to make them think politically and positively. They just wanted to see themselves as terrorists and heroes yet those of us who had been in there for a long time didn’t talk like that. In fact, if anybody boasted of what they had done it caused deep embarrassment.’

  Murphy was not prepared for the rigorous routine in the camp: chores such as washing out the huts, cleaning the lavatories and the parade ground, or sitting on the roof of a hut to receive coded messages from other compounds. Such routines did not appeal to Murphy who preferred the relaxed lifestyle of Crumlin Road and the simple tasks in the prison hospital. More noticeably, Murphy soon showed that what he detested most of all was having to recognize the authority of others, and particularly those holding a higher rank than himself within the organization. The pattern of surrounding himself with a group of young admirers soon re-emerged. He would impress them with stories of his exploits in Crumlin Road Prison. Within the group was Robert ‘the Basher’ Bates, who was serving a sentence for a firearms offence. Within a short space of time Murphy found himself in serious conflict with authority following an incident in the UVF’s Compound 12. The incident occurred when Murphy and Bates were asked by a UVF officer to undertake a task. They refused, and after a confrontation they gave the officer a severe beating. The penalty for such an offence was that a prisoner would be thrown out of the organization’s compound and would have to seek accommodation in a compound run by another grouping. This punishment was considered by Spence and other leaders to be the equivalent of a court martial. Bates and Murphy were found guilty but the sentence was revoked due to the intervention of the Red Hand Commando leader, John McKeague.

  A leading UVF man of the period has told me that his first impression of Murphy in Long Kesh was that he was a ‘Billy the Kid’ figure who was treacherous to the point that he was regarded as a ‘back-shooter’.

  In October 1974 Murphy was disciplined again for misbehaving after ‘lights-out’ in his hut. He was given additional chores for several days. He was also frequently reprimanded for refusing to rise to his feet when senior officers entered the room but this type of behaviour was dealt with simply by public reprimands. However, a serious reprimand was administered after the prison hospital was ransacked during a major disturbance in the camp.

  Not only was Murphy involved in wrecking the hospital but he also removed a large selection of drugs, similar to amphetamines, to his own hut. A senior UVF officer came across Murphy as he was literally grading the drugs and demanded to know why he had them in his possession. Murphy replied that ‘they might come in handy’. He was ordered to get rid of the tablets but refused. Eventually a ‘Regimental Sergeant Major’ was sent for and instructed to supervise Murphy in flushing the drugs down a toilet. Murphy, as we know, had an intimate knowledge of drugs as a result of his work at Crumlin Road Prison hospital, and it is possible that he had experimented with tablets during his time there.

  Bates was also in trouble with his superiors over his refusal to undertake the duty of sitting on hut roofs for the purpose of receiving messages. This method of communication was used by the UVF to relay information to other Loyalist paramilitary groups, but also to the two IRA factions in the camp. Messages between the sworn enemies consisted often of no more than pieces of news from someone who had been granted the privilege of a visit to the outside world, or expressions of solidarity in relation to demands for better treatment or privileges in the camp. When Bates refused to take his turn at this game he was told bluntly that he would either get onto the roof or would be bodily removed from the compound. Not relishing the threatened punishment, he capitulated.

  During political lectures when Spence and others talked of the moral stamp of approval necessary for a war, Murphy disregarded them. He was intoxicated with his youth, his power and with the status afforded by the use of a gun. He detested the lectures and the democratic socialist thinking which was beginning to creep into the rhetoric of the leadership. Attempts to examine the nature of the conflict in society, and the political solutions which might be sought, were of no interest to him.

  The British Government was aware of the politicization which was going on within Long Kesh and the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland lifted the ban on the UVF and Sinn Fein to allow them to work towards a political dialogue. Much of the impetus for this sort of move emanated from the lobbying of clergymen on both sides of the religious divide. On the outside, the paramilitaries began setting up welfare offices and advice centres with a degree of government funding. It may have been a novel move by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Merlyn Rees, but, like many of his decisions in relation to the paramilitaries, it proved to be naive.

  In 1975, before Murphy was due for release there was a development which until now has never been revealed and which resulted in talks between the paramilitary leaders on both sides within Long Kesh. The leaders of the Loyalist and Republican groupings in the camp were becoming increas
ingly aware that they no longer held sway over events on the outside. Younger men who wished to do things their own way had taken over and they wanted no interference or advice from senior figures in Long Kesh. What worried Spence and those Republican leaders in the Kesh was that the sectarian war was getting out of hand. To understand the curious morality of this concern one must acknowledge that these men regarded themselves as soldiers fighting a war in which there had to exist some sense of honour. As a result of exchanges between the various compounds a coded message was sent to the British Government requesting that the IRA and Loyalist paramilitaries be allowed to set up a conference in Long Kesh to resolve the sectarian war being waged outside. Such a conference, it was suggested, would also require the participation of paramilitary figures from outside the prison who were familiar with events currently taking place. Rees consulted the Governor of Long Kesh and agreed to a conference but stipulated that it should be held in secret within the prison. He also consented to the participation of others, provided they were not people wanted for crimes. The conference was given the title ‘The Anti-Sectarian Assassination Conference’. Two members of each of the major paramilitary groups – the UVF, UDA, Official and Provisional IRA – plus one Catholic and one Protestant clergyman were invited to attend the first meeting. Half the delegates were paramilitary members from outside the camp. When discussion began, Loyalists suggested that in return for an end to the killing of Catholic non-combatants, the IRA should cease killing off-duty policemen and soldiers particularly members of the Ulster Defence Regiment which had been set up as a replacement of the ‘B’ Specials in 1970 as an integrated force of Catholics and Protestants to act in support of the British Army but had soon become a force populated mainly by Protestants because Catholics were under threat of death from the IRA for being members of such a body. Catholic members were easily identified to the IRA which lived within the Catholic Community. The Provos insisted they should retain the right to kill police and members of the UDR when they were on the streets wearing uniform. There was no dissent from this proposition. Likewise, each of the groups retained the right to shoot members of each other’s organizations while the war continued.