The Shankill Butchers

by Martin Dillon

  Only one voice at the meeting failed to see the significance of any agreement with the IRA and it was that of Sam Smyth, a leading member of the UDA who was invited into the prison for the conference. He said that as far as he was concerned a three-year-old child or a seventy-year-old woman belonging to the Catholic community was a legitimate target. He was reprimanded swiftly by the UDA leader, Jim Craig from West Belfast, who was sitting alongside him and ordered him to keep his views to himself. Everyone present knew that the reference to women and children was enough to sign the speaker’s death warrant. Three weeks later Smyth was assassinated by the Provisional IRA.

  News of the conference has never until now been leaked to the media or the general public. Murphy was distinctly unhappy with the agreed arrangement between the paramilitaries. He was due for release within a month of the agreement and was anxious to get back into action. He had his own ideas on the way forward and made them known when he was released from Long Kesh on 13 May 1975.

  * * *

  1 When this term was first used by myself and a co-author of a Penguin Special entitled Political Murder no one was willing to believe that such a term existed or that Loyalist paramilitaries talked of ‘rompering’ victims. While I was working as a journalist investigating sectarian killings, I put it to the editor of the Belfast Telegraph, Eugene Wasson, that ‘rompering’ introduced a new dimension to the conflict but Wasson disbelieved the story. On another occasion I filed a story about a ‘rompering’, in which a mentally retarded Catholic boy named Benstead was branded with a hot poker. Again the story was treated with suspicion. On this occasion I had actually seen Benstead’s body lying in an alleyway because the police at the scene mistook me for a member of their forensic Scenes of Crime team. At that time intimate details of the grisly aspects of some murders were not being released to the media. I was told later that this decision was taken both to spare the public the horror and to avoid giving publicity to the killer gangs. On the morning I saw Benstead’s body I filed my story only to learn that the RUC Press Office had stated that the victim had not been tortured. I reacted angrily and informed my News Editor that I had personally viewed the body and had seen the burn marks on the boy’s hands and feet and the cross which had been etched into his back with a number beside it indicating that he was the fourth victim of a particular murder squad which operated in east Belfast. The murder gang was run by an infamous homosexual paramilitary leader called John McKeague. The gang called the ‘Red Hand Commandoes’, was made up mostly of young men. McKeague was a sadist who initiated his followers by ‘rompering’ victims. This involved bringing a victim to a club, lock-up garage or a disused house, where a group of Red Hand Volunteers participated in the torture and murder of the victim. McKeague, who was shot dead by the INLA in the early 1980s, was believed by Military Intelligence to have been responsible for the murder of a young Protestant boy in Belfast in the mid-seventies. The boy’s body was dismembered, burned over an open fire and dumped in the Lagan River which runs through Belfast. McKeague in some respects pioneered the ‘rompering’ process but it had a more bizarre application in the Shankill area.

  3

  A Killer Squad is Formed

  The year 1975 brought considerable change to the UVF which, in turn, provided an atmosphere perfectly suited to the values and terrorist talents of Murphy and young men of his age, who believed that indiscriminate terror was the means by which they could exact revenge and change the situation. The only problem was that they had a leadership who, languishing in prison, were no longer in a position to control events. Since the dark days of the summer of 1972 Spence had sought to give the UVF a new political direction. The change in his own political attitudes was due in part to his attempts to read Irish history while in prison. He once recalled that when he first asked for an Irish history book the prison governor was so shocked that he enquired as to the reasons for such a request. The book, ironically, was Dan Breen’s My Fight for Irish Freedom. Spence thus began a period of self-education, though he was quick to recognize that Dan Breen was ‘good at kicking the truth about’. Spence also established contact with members of the Official IRA inside Long Kesh, and their political thinking which was developing along Marxist lines left an impression on him and led him to formulate a socialist policy for his own organization. It encouraged him in the view that the gun was not the only way to resolve the tribal warfare within his own society. At one stage he condemned sectarian killings from his prison cell and ordered that they cease forthwith. Spence’s growing awareness of his working-class roots and how they reflected those problems which were germane to both communities is evidenced in this letter which was smuggled from his prison cell:

  One has only to look at the Shankill Road, the heart of the empire that lies torn and bleeding. We have known squalor. I was born and reared in it. No one knows better than we do the meaning of slums, the meaning of deprivation, the meaning of suffering for what one believes in, whatever the ideology. Insofar as people speak of fifty years of misrule, I wouldn’t disagree with that. What I would say is that we have suffered every bit as much as the people of the Falls Road, or any other underprivileged quarter and in many cases more so.

  This growing political dynamic within the UVF was resented by the younger element, who saw it as a capitulation to a left-wing philosophy shared by the enemy. The younger men believed that the leaders of the organization were becoming soft and that fine words would change nothing. They were scathing about Spence’s view of a settlement based on working-class solidarity. They were also uninterested in the public statements and workings of the UVF’s political wing, the Ulster Volunteer Party. This party had been set up in 1974 after Merlyn Rees lifted the legal ban on the UVF, in order to allow it to develop politically, much in the manner of the Provisional Sinn Fein. By the middle of 1975 Spence was well aware of the growing disenchantment within the ranks of the younger volunteers like Murphy, who had joined the UVF not for a political education but to lay their hands on guns. The UVF magazine Combat began warning its members to prepare for an autumn and winter offensive, saying that intelligence indicated that the Provisionals were about to launch a new campaign with weapons which they had been given by Third World and Soviet bloc countries. The magazine also made it clear that members of the security forces, including the police, were pleased with killings carried out by the UVF:

  Our own intelligence sources together with those of the security forces indicate that we and other Loyalist groupings have restricted attacks to known Republican activists. Many of our contacts with CHARLIE and DELTA RUC Divisions have reported that the vast majority of grassroots constables, together with several Special Branch and CID personnel, were overjoyed at the result of our operations in recent times. As one constable put it, ‘If the paramilitaries had concentrated on known Republicans years ago the war would have been won in 1972.’

  Those in the UVF who were about to launch a new offensive took on the role of explaining, in advance, the logic behind their proposed actions:

  We in the UVF hold that war is a relic of physical-force Republicanism and so long as Republicans, be they papists or socialists, are permitted to band themselves together for the purpose of seeking a physical force solution, then the Protestants of Ulster cannot hope to escape the horrors of war. And we further hold that the lust for Republican socialism or popish nationalism on the part of our enemies is so deeply rooted in the nature and instinct that nothing less than superior force will ever induce them to abandon their assaults upon the lives and liberties of the Ulster Protestants.

  These thoughts represented an attitude which was much at variance with the views of Spence and his leadership, and this was further highlighted by the implicit reference to Spence in the following paragraph from Combat:

  Having realized that we are in a war situation and that we have been forced, as a result of political compromise and treason, to engage ourselves in a war effort against our enemies, it must also be realized that the
talk of humane methods of warfare and the rule of civilized warfare and all such homage to the sentiments of mankind are hypocritical and unreal and are only intended for the consumption of stay-at-home armchair generals. There are no humane methods of warfare, there is no such thing as civilized warfare; all warfare is inhuman, all warfare is barbaric; the first blast of the bugles of war sounds for the time being the funeral knell of human progress.

  This was ironically the sort of hard talking that Lenny Murphy and his kind were pleased to hear and not the talk of democratic socialism or of working-class solidarity emanating from the old men of the Spence leadership. The young turks found justification for their terror policy after an attempt at politicizing the UVF failed when the Volunteer Party’s candidate in the October 1974 election polled only 2,600 votes in West Belfast. They were also able to point to the IRA ceasefire of February 1975 which was initiated after the Provisionals attended talks with leading Catholic and Protestant clergymen. Such a ceasefire once again appeared to indicate the hand of British ministers at Stormont Castle. In fact, it was believed within the ranks of the Provisionals that following the failure of the power-sharing executive at Stormont in the summer of 1974, the British were prepared to consider withdrawal from Northern Ireland and that a ceasefire would allow them time to explore that possibility. This was a further sign to the younger members of the UVF that Ulster was in danger of being sold out. A casual observer might well have thought that with the constant political blundering and insensitivity of Merlyn Rees, together with the seeming bankruptcy of British politicizing in Northern Ireland, the Provos were right in their view that the British lacked the political will to stay. Within the UVF there was certainly a fear that a sell-out was a distinct possibility.

  Lenny Murphy’s return to the Shankill Road and his traditional stomping grounds of North and West Belfast was greeted with satisfaction by many young men who needed somebody to lead them in a new campaign. Murphy decided to set up his own unit which would be solely under his control and not that of the UVF Brigade Staff in West Belfast. During the first month of his freedom he spent much of his time in the Brown Bear pub on the Shankill Road, which he established as a headquarters and meeting place. In the same area he found himself faced with a competing unit which operated from the Windsor Bar and was run by a man of Murphy’s generation: Anthony ‘Chuck’ Berry. ‘Basher’ Bates was also now on the outside and soon renewed his acquaintance with Murphy, assuming a subservient role. Murphy knew he needed more recruits in his team if he were to have sufficient power to operate independently of the UVF leadership. He reckoned he required fifteen or twenty, of whom three or four would form an inner circle. A team of twenty would offer him protection not only from the orders of the leadership but also from ‘Chuck’ Berry’s Windsor Bar team. Murphy was fortunate in having alongside him two personal friends who were able to give him a picture of the structure of the UVF in the Shankill area, how it had changed while he was in prison, and who was available for recruitment.Two men were to be his constant support and his eyes and ears. They cannot be named here for legal reasons and will subsequently be referred to throughout this book as Mr A. and Mr B.

  Mr A. and Mr B. were several years older than Lenny and had remained closely in touch with him since his school days. Mr A. was a cold, astute and ruthless character who did not have the flamboyance of Lenny, but one thing they did have in common was a deep hatred of Catholics and a desire to carry out a war of attrition. Mr B. was two years older than Lenny and though not as prominent a figure as Mr A., he also detested the other community to the extent that he was willing to do whatever Lenny asked of him. Mr A. and Mr B. were to be his closest associates. Three others were chosen to form the inner circle of the unit. These three other ‘lieutenants’ had the distinction of also being well known to Murphy: Bates and McAllister, who regarded Lenny as a hero, and a third man, twenty-six-year-old William Moore, from 88 West Circular Road in Belfast. Moore was not well known to the authorities, like Bates and McAllister, but he did have a criminal record dating back to 1966. However, his list of crimes was not comparable to that of the other two. Moore was a ‘dark horse’; someone who possessed unknown potential and was not easily identifiable as a member of an illegal organization. This was considered a plus by Murphy who recruited him after a chance meeting in the Brown Bear pub. Moore knew of Lenny’s past and was impressed by the way he gave orders and stood at the bar with a 9mm pistol in his waistband. Moore lived with his widowed mother to whom he was devoted, and was regarded by neighbours as a quiet, unassuming fellow. When he met Murphy in 1975 he was in the process of changing jobs and had acquired a black taxi of the type used in London. His previous job had been as a meat packer in Woodvale Meats on the Shankill Road. There he had had the good fortune to form a relationship with the daughter of the boss. It was she who had provided the money for the taxi, thus enabling him to leave his lowly position in the meat plant. Moore had been unhappy there and would have preferred carving the carcasses to packaging. He asked someone in the carving room to teach him how to use a knife to slice the flesh from the bone. Before he left the meat plant he stole several well-honed knives and a meat cleaver, which he kept at home as a souvenir of his time there.

  Ownership of a taxi allowed him to become a member of the Shankill Taxi Association, and it is worth examining at this point the use of the London-type cabs known in Belfast as ‘black taxis’. In the early seventies when street rioting was rife in Nationalist areas of Belfast and in particular on the Falls Road, rioters invariably hijacked buses and burned them to provide barricades and also to express distaste for the Belfast Corporation which owned and ran the City’s bus service. Bus services were often withdrawn for days after rioting and many busmen were understandably reluctant to drive vehicles into the Falls area. Not entirely for humanitarian reasons, the IRA decided to provide its own transport service called ‘people’s taxis’.

  Essentially, the service was a racket, in that it was a clever means by which the IRA was able to establish on the one hand a ‘no-go’ area for buses and on the other provide a service which could be used to raise funds for weapons. Within months hundreds of black taxis were operating throughout Catholic West Belfast and each driver was paying a weekly levy to the IRA. Each time the illegality of the taxis was raised the Provisionals burned more buses which, in turn, resulted in an outcry for a transport service. Eventually British politicians at the Northern Ireland office decided for the sake of expediency and to prevent further burning of buses to allow the black taxi service to continue to operate freely. In time it became a legally bona fide service. The UVF decided to form a similar service that ‘would be under the auspices of the Ulster Volunteer Force which has a public conscience and duty to the working people’. Thus, William Moore, taxi driver, was soon working under the ‘auspices of the UVF’.

  While forming his unit Murphy kept a low profile, as did Mr A. and Mr B., McAllister and Bates were the only members of the unit seen on the streets. Moore was rarely seen in their company. He plied his trade as a taxi driver and, when required, attended meetings in the Brown Bear pub. Murphy’s low profile was maintained, with one exception. He assaulted a young Catholic in a late-night affray in a hamburger bar known as Ken’s, not far from Belfast city centre. It happened a month after Murphy’s release from prison when he enquired as to the religious persuasion of twenty-two-year-old John Paul Donnelly who was unlucky enough to find himself standing beside Murphy while ordering food. Even in public Murphy could not restrain himself from hounding Catholics. He and some of his cronies set upon Donnelly and left him badly beaten. On this occasion Lenny narrowly escaped being apprehended by the police. It was fortunate for Donnelly that Ken’s was close to the city centre and there were plenty of late-night revellers to witness the incident and prevent more serious physical damage.

  By September 1975 Murphy had recruited types who would allow him to establish his dominance and thus assume a comparable role to that of ‘Chuc
k’ Berry of the Windsor Bar unit. Additionally, it would place him beyond the control of the UVF Brigade Staff. This autonomy, however, meant that he did not have access to the UVF’s store of weapons. There were now twenty men under his command and a pattern was established for meetings in a room above the Brown Bear. The meetings were chaired by Lenny and his constant companion, Mr A. Some members of the unit were earmarked by Lenny and Mr A. for operational purposes. Their names are worth mentioning at this stage to illustrate the type of people with which Murphy surrounded himself. There was twenty-two-year-old Arthur Armstrong McClay who worked as a plasterer and who committed his first crime at the age of thirteen when he placed explosives in a letter box. He was not known to the police as someone involved in illegal activities until the time the butchers were caught. Another member of the team was twenty-four-year-old carpet salesman Benjamin Edwards, a flamboyant character with a taste for flashy clothes which earned him the nickname ‘Pretty Boy’ Edwards. He was a petty criminal. One member who did not immediately fit the pattern was a young man of Murphy’s age, Norman Waugh. Waugh spent most of his teenage years delivering papers in the Shankill district and was well known. He was regarded as a reticent loner. He had a slight speech defect which made him self-conscious and his features suggested low intelligence, so that people in the district regarded him as ‘not right in the head’. Waugh, the loner, found solace, acceptance and a new status by becoming involved with the Brown Bear unit and being seen in the company of hard men. Those who would previously have viewed him as a figure of fun began to treat him with respect and caution. The eldest member of the team was thirty-one-year-old Edward Leckey, a shop manager from Battenburg Street off the Shankill Road. His life of crime began at the age of fifteen when he was found guilty of larceny and housebreaking. A year later he was again before the Juvenile Court admitting to nineteen charges of housebreaking and theft. His propensity for crime eventually led him into borstal training but it was only when under the control of Lenny Murphy that he became known to the police for UVF activities. Another dark horse in the group was twenty-two-year-old David John Bell from Cupar Street, the location for many sectarian confrontations of the early seventies.