Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Full horror of The Shankill Butchers ...40 years on
AUTHOR RECALLS HORROR OF SHANKILL BUTCHERS
Top author looks back at the gruesome story of the worst mass murder gang in our bloody history
IT was one of the most horrific killing sprees in British and Irish history.
The Shankill Butchers – a gang of at least 13 men – inflicted terror on the people of Belfast during the 1970s, murdering at least 19 people.
Many of their victims were abducted from Catholic areas and subjected to unimaginable torture before their throats were cut.
Even when 11 members of the murder squad were jailed 40 years ago this week, in an historic move that saw 42 life sentences meted out on a single day, the terror didn’t end.
Lenny Murphy, the man known as the Master Butcher, was already in jail for a lesser offence and evaded justice.
The day after his release in July 1982, he picked up where he left off, battering to death a 33-year-old Protestant man with a learning disability.
He killed three more men, one every month, until he was assassinated by the IRA that November.
The horror of the gruesome campaign was felt across Northern Ireland, but it wasn’t until investigative journalist Martin Dillon took the story on that the extent of the gang’s depravity was fully exposed to the world.
NIGHTMARE
Now living in the US, Belfast man Dillon, 69, continues to be haunted by his time immersed in the case.
He said: “I have this recurring nightmare about one victim in particular.
“It was a terrible story because this guy had lived with a premonition he would be killed in the Troubles and when the police found him his hands were joined at his chest and they had cut his throat.
“The way they’d done it, they actually staged it and it really struck me the senselessness and the cruelty of it.
“In this nightmare – which I’ve had at different points for years – I’m following him and I’m shouting and trying to grab out to warn him. I’m screaming at him and I wake myself up.”
Dillon’s explosive book – The Shankill Butchers – was published 30 years ago and quickly became the authoritative voice on the gang’s brutal campaign.
He added: “I got involved because I realised while the Troubles was going on, while there was the general violence, the bombs going off and the shootings, there was this level of sadism too, this very dark stuff going on in the shadows.
“There were bodies left in alleyways, innocent civilians caught up in this cruel sectarian war and people treated in a horribly inhumane way. “It was almost as if the detail of this cruelty was kept away from the people to avoid some hysteria or panic about the reality of what was happening.”
One of the first cases of this nature that Dillon encountered was not the work of the Butchers, but the murder of a young man in another part of the city who was tortured for information the author says he would not have had.
He recalled: “This story had a huge impact on me because I actually saw the body. I shouldn’t have, but people at the scene thought I was from forensics and I saw for myself he had been tortured.
“He’d been burnt with a poker. He’d had a cross burnt into his back. And when I looked into this story, I realised this crazy, terrifying level of violence wasn’t the only example.
“I realised it was going on and this hidden, dark violence was a part of
the Troubles story.” Delving into the story of the Shankill Butchers, Dillon quickly understood how fearsome the gang’s reputation was within their own community.
Many of them members of the UVF, most of the Butchers’ victims were Catholic civilians – but they also turned on their own, killing ordinary Protestants as well as at least three loyalist paramilitaries.
Dillon said: “There was so much violence at the time, but what they did was particularly gruesome.
“They terrified everyone because in many ways they were just a group of serial killers who had found each other.”
As the Troubles raged around them, the gang would drink in bars and clubs around the Shankill Road frequented by other UVF members, and it was after heavy boozing sessions many of their murders were carried out. Dillon added: “They would sit and drink and talk about how they were going to kill someone that night.
“They would have open discussions about picking someone up and slitting their throat.
“They were the biggest mass murderers in British history, an assassination gang who met regularly and shared their interest in this stuff.
PSYCHOPATH
“Lenny Murphy thought cutting throats was the way to go because he thought it was the most terrifying way to kill someone, and William Moore was a butcher.
“He worked for a butchery firm and he brought the knives to the gang.”
But the author said that while the Shankill Butchers were members of the UVF, their campaign was “not an ideological crusade”. He added: “They were driven by hatred and it was in their DNA, especially Murphy.
“It had this element of a crazy, tribal war with a level of hatred and bitterness that generated extreme violence.
“I think Murphy was a psychopath. Growing up people believed he was a Catholic because of his name – which he wasn’t – and it was almost as if to get rid of that stain of suspicion he had to be even more violent and even more bitter towards the other side.
“I believe he was an aggressive psychopath, but he was never assessed.
“He used to go to court and listen to cases to find out how crime worked.
“He wore gloves during the murders because he had studied how to avoid leaving incriminating evidence.”
One detail that shook Dillon came in the case of one of Murphy’s final killings, a murder he carried out in a house he once shared with his wife and daughter. The writer said: “There was blood and teeth in the kitchen, and a teddy bear on the bedroom floor.”
Through his investigation, Dillon worked closely with RUC Detective Chief Inspector Jimmy Nesbitt who led the case and who came under fire from critics who said the gang should have been caught long before they were, and were angry Murphy never faced justice.
The author added: “Jimmy lived with that until he died. He lived with the failure that he never brought Lenny to
justice. He was a very genuine man and he worked incredibly hard to get those men behind bars. Jimmy wanted Lenny more than anyone.”
Dillon, who left Northern Ireland in 1991, has endured a lot too, including death threats and having a gun held to his mouth.
He also wrote a number of other books, investigating everything from the IRA to the undercover work of the British state.
■ In his latest book, Crossing The Line, Martin Dillon recalls his courageous work during the worst years of the Troubles.