Shankill Butchers
The gang kidnapped, tortured and murdered random civilians suspected of being Catholics; each was beaten ferociously and had their throat slashed with a butcher's knife.
In compiling this detailed work, Dillon was reportedly given unlimited access to the case files of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), who eventually caught the gang.
He spent much of his time frequenting pubs on the Shankill Road, assembling a paramilitary team that would enable him to act with some freedom from the UVF leadership (Brigade Staff).
By then, Murphy was using the upper floor of the Brown Bear pub at the corner of Mountjoy Street and the Shankill Road near his home as an occasional meeting-place for his unit.
Francis Crossin[5] (34), a Catholic man and father of two, was walking down Library Street towards the city centre at approximately 12:40 am when four of the Butchers, in Moore's taxi, spotted him.
[8] A few days later, on 30 November 1975, an internal feud led to the deaths of two members of a rival UVF company on the Shankill and to that of Archibald Waller, who had been involved in the Crossin murder.
Enraged, Murphy had the gunman, former loyalist prisoner Noel "Nogi" Shaw, brought before a kangaroo court in the Lawnbrook Club, one of his Shankill drinking dens.
The previous night she had heard voices in the entry where the body was later found and what she thought might have been a local taxi (those in Belfast being ex-London type black cabs).
[citation needed] Early on 11 March 1976, Murphy tried to kill a Catholic woman in a drive-by shooting; arrested later that day, he was put on remand on an attempted murder charge.
Another Catholic man killed by the gang was Cornelius "Con" Neeson (49), attacked with a hatchet by Moore and McAllister on the Cliftonville Road late on 1 August 1976.
[citation needed] After his arrest in 1977, William Moore was portrayed in subsequent police accounts as having been in effective control of the Butchers gang during Murphy's incarceration.
However, a 2017 book on the UVF, citing an unnamed source, argued that John, an older brother of Murphy who escaped prosecution, had been directing the activities of the Butchers during that time.
[15] Late on Tuesday, 10 May 1977, Gerard McLaverty, a young Belfast man whose family had recently left the city, was walking down the Cliftonville Road.
The gang, who had spent the day drinking, drove McLaverty to a disused doctor's surgery on the corner of Emerson Street and the Shankill Road where he was beaten with sticks.
At first he did not attribute particular significance to this message, as the Butchers had left no one alive before; but on discovering the nature of the assault and the use of a knife, he came up with an idea that was to permanently change the course of his inquiries.
Taking advantage of the aftermath of a loyalist paramilitary strike and local elections, Nesbitt had the recovered McLaverty disguised and driven by police around the Shankill area on Wednesday 18 May to see if he could spot the men who had abducted or attacked him.
A number of the Butchers implicated him and his close associates "Mr. A" and "Mr. B" (John Murphy) in numerous paramilitary activities but later retracted these claims for fear of retribution from the UVF Brigade Staff.
On 20 February 1979, eleven men were convicted of a total of 19 murders, and the 42 life sentences handed out were the most ever in a single trial in British criminal history.
The trial judge, Lord Justice O'Donnell, said that he did not wish to be cast as "public avenger" but felt obliged to sentence the two to life imprisonment with no chance of release.
Martin Dillon's own investigations suggest that a number of other individuals (whom he was unable to name for legal reasons) escaped prosecution for participation in the crimes of the Butchers and that the gang were responsible for a total of at least 30 murders.
One day later, his killing spree resumed when he beat to death a local Protestant man with a learning disability in the Loyalist Club in Rumford Street.
[17] On 29 August 1982, Murphy killed Jim Galway (33), a part-time Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) soldier from the Lower Shankill area, who had been passing information to the UVF and was involved with its Ballymena units.
[21] Murphy was assassinated by a Provisional IRA hit squad early in the evening of Tuesday 16 November 1982 outside the back of his girlfriend's house in the Glencairn estate (where four of the Butchers' cut-throat victims had been dumped).
Dillon suggests that Jim Craig, a leading Ulster Defence Association (UDA) commander whose protection rackets had made him rich and feared in equal measure, fit the description.
In support of this theory, Craig was later executed by his UDA colleagues for "treason", an inquiry having found some evidence of his part in the murder of other top loyalists by republicans.
[23] Moore, Bates, and McAllister shot and wounded a member of the Windsor Bar UVF unit a few hours after the murder of Noel Shaw in November 1975.
On 9 February 1976, Murphy and three of his gang shot and killed two Protestant men, Archibald Hanna and Raymond Carlisle, wrongly believing that they were Catholics on their way to work across the Shankill.
[34] Several of the Butchers, including John Murphy, were questioned about a serious assault in April 1977 in Union Street, near Belfast city centre, on a man they believed wrongly was a Catholic.
Several sources indicate that Mid-Ulster UVF's brigade commander, Robin "The Jackal" Jackson from Donaghcloney contacted members of the gang in the Shankill, "Mr. A" in particular, and had them make an attempt on the life of journalist Jim Campbell, northern editor of the Sunday World newspaper, in May 1984.
Colin Meloy, lead singer and guitarist for the indie folk rock band The Decemberists, wrote a song titled "Shankill Butchers" recounting the faction's grisly exploits.
