The Shankill Butchers

by Martin Dillon

  The blunt head injuries were inflicted with a force of moderate degree. They could have stunned him but they would not have caused his death. The incisions on the face did not involve any vital structure but haemorrhage from them could have endangered life. The serious wound was that across the front of the neck. Haemorrhage from the severed arteries and veins would have caused rapid death and the blow which crossed the spinal vertebra would also have been fatal. The defence wounds on the left upper limb were not serious enough to have accelerated death.

  When McAllister later admitted his involvement in the killing he began by saying that the three of them decided to ‘go out and get a Taig’ and he also added that he (McAllister) was ‘half cut’ when he left the Lawnbrook. He went on to describe his participation in the abduction and killing, but he made no mention of having the knife or torturing Morrissey in the car. He did not refer to Mr A.’s house and he pointed out to the police that he could not watch the throat-cutting. This is his statement:

  I think it was in Donegall Street. Me and one of the fellows got out and pushed him into the back of the car. He put up a bit of a fight. I don’t remember where we drove but we finished up at the car park at Glencairn. Me and one of the fellows with me pulled him out of the car. I can’t remember if he was unconscious or not. We took him behind the car and the other fellow with me stayed with him and I got back into the car. I knew he was going to get his throat cut but I couldn’t watch him. We then drove away and split up. I was very drunk that night and it’s hard to remember all the details. Drink was the cause of this as far as I was concerned.

  McAllister sought to attribute all his violent actions to alcohol. Drink may have put him in the right frame of mind but it was not to blame for his actions. He also shows in this statement, as in others, that he was aware of the nature of the crime and how it would be perceived and treated on conviction. He studiously avoided mentioning names, and the major omission from the statement is the fact that the knife used by Moore and himself was returned to him by Mr A. for future use. By the time of the Morrissey killing McAllister was the keeper of the knives which had been used in all previous killings. Along with them he kept a cleaver and a sharpening tool. McAllister’s prime object, even in confessions to the police, was to protect himself. Pride, and fear of Mr A. and the UVF leadership, did, however, oblige him to shield the other gang members. To the end, he wished to be seen as a tough individual, who could accept his own guilt because he had been caught but would never ‘rat’ on his associates.

  McClay presents an interesting study because he came to prominence only with the emergence of the Butcher gang under Moore’s tutelage. This twenty-four-year-old Antrim man did not possess the criminal record of many of the others and he did not come under police scrutiny until Moore and some of the gang were caught. McClay was regarded as shrewd, cunning and dangerous. In some respects he was similar in character to McAllister. He minimalized his participation in the torture and killing of Morrissey and set out to suggest that he was present almost as an observer. Like McAllister, he made the point that he did not wish to name names:

  Me and two other fellows were drinking in a club in the Shankill Road. These two men I cannot name. They approached me and told me I was to go on a job with them and as I am a member of a certain organization I could not refuse. One of these men had a car and it was decided between us that we get out and lift a Taig. I got into the back seat of the car and the other two men got into the front. We drove down the Shankill Road and around the North Street area for a while and eventually finished up in Upper Donegall Street, just above the chapel. It was there we seen a man walking on his own. This man was walking up towards North Queen Street. Myself and one of the other men got out and walked over to him. I asked him where he was going and he started to slabber. He had taken a lot of drink. In the meantime the car had pulled up beside us. This man started struggling and me and the other man put him into the back seat. The other man, I think, got into the front seat and I got into the back seat beside the man we had captured. He fell down on the back seat when I got in beside him. We then drove down towards Royal Avenue and up North Street and on up the Shankill. On our way up the Shankill we called at a house but I am not prepared to state where. After this we drove on up to Glencairn. The driver pulled into the car park off the Forthriver Road and stopped. The driver of our car got out and he opened the back door and ordered the man we had kidnapped out. This man was still conscious and was struggling quite a bit. He was again ordered out and he got out. I remained in the back seat with the door open. The driver took this man away a bit. It was dark, I could hear something falling and the next thing I saw was the driver returning to the car. He got back into the car and the three of us drove off back down to the Shankill where a short time after this I was left home. The next day I seen a few fellows and was told that there was another body found in Glencairn. I knew this was the one we had done. I was told to shut my mouth and say fuck all or else suffer the fucking consequences. It was after this I caught myself on and moved away as I was scared of getting more deeply involved.

  McClay did move away from the Shankill area but remained a gang member. He was not, after Morrissey’s death, party to any further crimes. This may have been due in part to the fact that he spent less time in the company of his fellow murderers, and much more near his home in Antrim, twenty miles from Belfast. The most disturbing part of his statement concerns the claim that Morrissey was still alive and conscious when he left the car in Glencairn.

  McClay neglected to mention that Moore and McAllister forced Morrissey from the car but it was he who had been holding the hatchet and handed it to Moore at the scene of the murder. Morrissey was killed beside the car so it is feasible that McClay sat and watched Moore; McAllister certainly did. Moore did not, as McClay claimed, lead the victim off into the darkness.

  When Moore confessed to this killing he spared no one, and named other gang members, but he did not, nevertheless, admit the full details, such as McAllister having tortured Morrissey in the car. In the case of Moore I believe his reason for not admitting the totality of the crime was to escape the horrific reality of his own actions. This is Moore’s statement, in which McClay is again spelt ‘McKay’:

  Big Sam, Artie and me were drinking in the Lawnbrook Social Club. It was discussed that we got out and get a Taig. It was about midnight when the three of us left the club. I drove away in my Cortina with Sam in the front and Artie in the back. We drove about the town for a while and after some time I drove up Donegall Street. As I drove up Upper Donegall Street, I saw a man on my right walking past the chapel. I stopped my car on the left-hand side going up. Big Sam and Artie got out and ran across to this man. I swung the car round in the street and stopped beside Big Sam and Artie. They were struggling with this man as I stopped beside them. I reached over and opened the back door nearest to them. Big Sam and Artie put him into the back seat and they got into the back beside him. As I drove to the Shankill this man was struggling quite a bit and I remember Artie hitting him with a hatchet and telling him to keep quiet. I knew to drive to – [Mr A.’s house] at – for a gun to shoot this man. I turned left into – and then to – where I pulled up outside [Mr A.’s house]. I got out and went to the door and [Mr A.] opened it. I asked him for a gun and he told me he had not got one. I then got back into the car and drove on up to Glencairn. I pulled my car into the car park opposite the community centre on Forthriver Road. I got out and went to the boot of my car and got a butcher’s knife out of the boot. Me and Sam pulled this man out of the back seat. He was quiet and making no noises. As he was pulled out of the car he fell to the ground. I reached down and cut his throat with the butcher’s knife. Artie had the hatchet in the back seat and somehow I managed to get hold of it and hit him once or twice with it. Big Sam and me and Artie got back into the car and we went back to [Mr A.’s] house. The three of us went in and I had to get the loan of a shirt and a pair of trousers from [Mr A.] as I was covered i
n blood. The hatchet and knife were left in [Mr A.’s] back yard. After changing I drove Sam and Artie back to Sam’s house and I went home.

  In his statement Moore does not shield Mr A. Instead, he seeks to blame him for having encouraged him to commit the crime. During subsequent confessions this willing and seasoned killer attempted to paint a picture of himself as a pawn in the hands of Murphy and Mr A. and to shift the blame from himself onto them. He does, however, spare McAllister, his close associate for many years, by omitting to mention the torture or the fact that ‘Big Sam’ used the knife in the car before they reached Glencairn. He further tries to give the impression that Morrissey’s final demise came about suddenly. He does this by the use of the words: ‘I reached down and cut his throat’ and ‘somehow I got hold of the hatchet’. Contrary to McClay’s statement, Moore says that Morrissey was quiet and ‘making no noises’ when he was pulled from the car. Here again, Moore avoids facing the reality of what actually took place and the fact that the unfortunate Morrissey was conscious of what was happening to him. Moore’s description of the incident, compared against evidence from the autopsy, can reasonably be deduced to be an attempt to deny the central details of the killing.

  The murder of Morrissey provided no further clues for the murder squad of Tennent Street Station. Nesbitt and his squad were preoccupied by other killings taking place at the time. Ten days before the Morrissey murder, Loyalist paramilitaries killed two men in a car and set the vehicle alight. One of the dead was a Catholic and the other a Protestant.

  Again, within a week of the Morrissey murder, Nesbitt and his team were required to investigate the killing of another Catholic in the Cliftonville Road area, a crime which they attributed to the UDA. Thus, in terms of the actual cut-throat murders, the RUC were simply adding to their increasing file of basic information and hoping that the break in the Butcher case, which they constantly discussed, would soon come about. But Moore himself was taking some precautions. After the McCann killing he sold his car to Mr A. believing that it could attract too much attention. The car used in the Morrissey killing was also a Cortina but this time yellow and bearing the registration number DOI 9651.

  Towards the end of February the Tennent Street detectives were busy with quite different murder enquiries. This time it was not the Butchers but the Provisional IRA, and investigations centred on the shooting of John Lee, a Catholic, who had been killed because he had formerly been in the 1st Parachute Regiment. Lee had returned to Belfast to live in the Ardoyne area with his wife who came from that area. The 1st Parachute Regiment had been responsible for the shooting of thirteen unarmed civilians in the Bogside area of Londonderry on 30 January 1972, an event which became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’. The involvement of his regiment was sufficient for the IRA to condemn Lee to death.

  Some three weeks later another married man, Daniel Carville, was shot in front of his son while driving along Cambrai Street, which runs between the Shankill and Crumlin Roads. Daniel Carville had slowed his vehicle because of a ramp on the road when two youths walked towards the car and shot him dead. Carville was unknown to his killers, who were members of the UDA, but they must have known he was a Catholic merely because he was seen leaving a Nationalist district. The two men who murdered Daniel Carville were Kenneth McClinton and Samuel ‘Hacksaw’ McGaw. One month later McClinton murdered a Protestant bus driver who had driven his vehicle against the express threats of Loyalist paramilitaries, issued when Loyalists were protesting in a political strike orchestrated by the Reverend Ian Paisley. Paisley had been attempting to re-create the Workers’ Strike of 1974 which had brought Northern Ireland to a standstill and which also overthrew the Power-Sharing Executive which had been formed between Unionist and Nationalist parties at Stormont.

  The bus driver, Harold Bradshaw, had been driving along the Crumlin Road when he was waved down by McClinton and his accomplice. McClinton boarded the bus and shot Bradshaw through the head at point-blank range. After he was arrested he offered the police this extraordinary parallel: ‘It was just like that shooting which they have shown on television, the famous one where a South Vietnamese army officer shoots this member of the Viet Cong on a street in Saigon. The blood spurted out of his head. Shooting the bus driver was just like that. I could see it all in colour. It was just like I saw it in that television report . . . it was just like you would see it in a film.’

  McClinton was ultimately given two life sentences with the recommendation that he serve no less than twenty-five years. In prison he became a born-again Christian and was later to write about his conversion in one of the local newspapers. The letter was read by the widow of a police inspector who had been shot by the IRA and she wrote to McClinton in prison. This correspondence brought about a friendship between the widow and McClinton and at one stage they pledged they would marry and that she would wait for his release. McClinton’s conversion was a phenomenon which affected a significant number of Loyalist prisoners. Some of these prisoners experienced a genuine conversion while others claimed to have been converted in an effort to appear reformed and thus influence the Life Review Board, or assist in their appeal against their sentence. And in some cases too, such conversion was a temporary means of absolving the feeling of personal guilt on arrival in prison. I shall discuss this conversion phenomenon later in relation to one of the Butchers.

  By the end of March it was again time for the Shankill Butchers to make their mark on events in Northern Ireland. Once more it was an example of Murphy issuing orders from his prison cell. These were conveyed to Mr A. or Mr B. on their visits with him. Murphy revelled in the fact that, while in prison, he was not without the power to effect events in the outside world and, at the same time, to undermine any police suspicions that he was the cut-throat murderer. One has to understand the criminal mind of Murphy as Nesbitt did to understand how he received pleasure from being cunning and from believing he was constantly deceiving the police. In his mind was the knowledge that, before he was sent to prison on the firearms charge, Nesbitt and Fitzsimmons had made it clear that they believed he was the mastermind behind the cut-throat killings and other terrorist incidents; and yet such crimes were still occurring while he was closeted in prison. Early in March Moore had been given a pistol by Mr A. It was the 9mm Walther which had been used by Lenny Murphy in the killing of Ted McQuaid. Mr A. selected another member of the unit, twenty-four-year-old unemployed labourer, Davy Bell, to accompany Moore on a journey in Moore’s Cortina along the Falls Road in West Belfast. The objective was for Moore to demonstrate his daring in penetrating the heart of IRA territory on a killing mission. Such incursions by Loyalist paramilitaries had occurred on a few occasions during the troubles. On this occasion Moore and Bell travelled up and down a one-mile stretch of the Falls Road several times, before abandoning their mission because they could not find an easy target for abduction. Moore was unwilling to risk firing from his car, given the obvious danger that he might not be able to escape from the area. Yet his intention was undoubtedly to use the tried and tested technique of kidnapping a lone individual, preferably one under the influence of drink. This incident is a further illustration of the number of times when the Butchers toured areas of Belfast in search of victims. Jimmy Nesbitt agrees that the random nature of the Butcher killings may be explained by the fact that, although they travelled frequently in search of victims they were on occasions thwarted by the presence of the Security Forces or by the fact that a suitable victim was not readily available. I traced one man who had a narrow escape at about this time, an ex-soldier who was walking up the Cliftonville Road after midnight with his wife and her elderly parents. He saw a passing car, containing several men, stop on the brow of a hill mid-way along the Cliftonville Road. His soldier’s training and his awareness of the realities of Belfast made him take evasive action. The car made a U-turn on the road and then drove slowly in his direction. My source describes what happened:

  My Army training taught me never to stay in the one plac
e for too long so I moved my wife and the others into the garden of an adjacent house and told them to lie down and make no noise. I heard the car stop outside the house where we had been and saw the two men enter the garden, one of them with a spanner in his hand. I am over six feet but I know I would have been presented with a difficult situation even if I had been alone. The fact that I was accompanied by my wife and her elderly parents made life even more difficult for me at that moment. Luckily for all of us, a bedroom light was switched on in the house facing the garden where we had previously been considering hiding. Presumably this happened because of the noise being made by the two men. They fled when the bedroom light lit up the area they were searching. I was lucky because I would have been the one they would have snatched and had I stayed in that first garden, I might not be alive today. I phoned the police and told them about the incident but I was never contacted again. When I eventually saw the photos of Bates, McAllister and Moore in the paper, I recognized them as the men who followed us.

  A middle-aged Protestant who lives off the Cliftonville Road was almost a victim of the Butchers. He was battered and left for dead close to the spot where Neeson was killed. This man was not able to describe his assailants to the police at the time and suffered brain damage as a result of the attack, but I was informed that Moore and McAllister were the culprits.

  On 29 March then, Moore decided once again to initiate three members of his gang in a cut-throat murder. He chose Davy Bell, who had made the unsuccessful tour of the Falls Road with him, twenty-five-year-old Norman Waugh and ‘Winkie’. The nickname ‘Winkie’ is the only evidence to connect the fourth member of the gang. Despite exhaustive enquiries the police have never been able to trace him and Jimmy Nesbitt has told me that this nickname is very common within the Protestant communities of north and west Belfast. Moore, Bell and Waugh refused to name him during questioning though Moore went as far as revealing the nickname.