The Shankill Butchers – A Reappraisal

Brandon Sullivan & Sean Bradfield 🕮 continue with their review of Martin Dillon's The Shankill Butchers.

Chapter Two – A Killer is Blooded

(Intro & Chapter One is here, The Shankill Butchers – A Reappraisal – Part Two (A) is here).

Note – due to the density of materiel in A Killer is Blooded, the reappraisal is split into two parts, this is Part B.

Murder, motorcycles, and Lenny Murphy

On Thursday, 15th January 1973, the Belfast Telegraph reported that two men, “Hugh Leonard Murphy of Percy Street, and Mervyn John Connor of Mayo Street are accused of murdering Edward Pavis of Glenvarlock Street, Belfast, on September 28 [1972].” There are a number of interesting points neglected by Dillon to this court appearance. Firstly, they were charged at Newtownabbey Courthouse, not in Belfast. Secondly, charged with them with notorious UVF member Anthony Berry. Berry was charged with having stolen, with Murphy and Connor, a motorcycle. A motorcycle was used in the murder of Edward Pavis. Lastly, Dillon gets the date of the Pavis murder wrong: Dillon has it as 26/09/72 – it was 28/09/72.

Dillon gets some of the facts surrounding Edward Pavis’s legal troubles with firearms correct – Pavis did go shooting with a Catholic Priest, but omits that two men with Catholic sounding names (Patrick McIlhattan and Liam Joseph McAuley) were also arrested, and that Pavis had in his possession a Luger pistol.

Dillon is correct that the UVF would have been suspicious that one of their “own” community was involved in the selling of firearms to nationalists and Catholics, or indeed spending time with them, let alone shooting with them. The murder of Pavis was, however, still atypical for Belfast at the time in terms of motive, but standard in terms of execution. Pavis was shot at a distance of one or two inches. Contemporaneous newspaper reports described powder burns, a motorcycle (allegedly driven by Connor), and a long-haired youth (allegedly Murphy) talking to the 32 year old Pavis.

It is interesting to note that Murphy was so confident in his ability to evade justice that he actually entered the Pavis household, chatting to his father briefly in the front room.

It is worth considering whether Murphy would have conceived of this operation of his own initiative. Dillon didn’t say this, instead describing the operation as an “order.” If it was an order from his UVF superiors, this demonstrates that at this stage in his terrorist career he was not the “independent” maverick that Dillon describes him as later in his book.

As an aside, a section of Pavis’s inquest makes reference to a comment PIRA leader Martin Meehan is supposed to have made to the East Belfast man as he left Crumlin Road Gaol on parole: “You’re getting out; but you’ll not be back in here.” Without context it is impossible to make much of this third-hand information, but a cynic might wonder if there was some level of collusion between supposed bitter enemies to deal with a common problem. Like much of what went on in the early 1970s we are unlikely to ever find out exactly what happened and what the machinations were; speculation is not something we indulge in, so we are merely sharing the information for others to consider.

Murphy and Connor escaped the dragnet over the autumn and winter until their luck ran out. Dillon wrote:

Several months passed before the police picked up Murphy and his accomplice, during which time another motorcycle was stolen in the Glencairn estate and used in the murder of a Catholic.

It is likely that this is a reference to the murder of 16-year-old James Joseph Reynolds, who was on Dandy Street, near the Shore Road area of Belfast, when two men on a stolen motorcycle attacked him. He was struck by a number of bullets fired from a Sten submachine gun. The motorcycle had been stolen from the Crumlin Road earlier that day. The Sten was recovered later on in the Shankill area. Dillon may have mistaken Glencairn for Crumlin Road. Anthony Berry and Mervyn Connor were charged with the murder. The victim had received threatening letters in the post previously.

Mythology in the Making

Armed loyalists travelling on motorcycles and murdering Catholics, or Protestants who associated with Catholics, was not unusual during the Troubles. But the way that Murphy acted following his being arrested and charged with the murder of Pavis was extraordinary. Dillon’s research is thorough, and is corroborated by contemporaneous newspaper reports. Pavis’s parents were ordinary, elderly people who were grieving and their nerves were evident during cross-examination. This made for weak evidence for the prosecution, but the RUC had a further ace up their sleeves. They had found witnesses to the murder of Pavis and arranged for an identity parade to take place. As Dillon wrote:

Murphy demonstrated that his trips to Crumlin Road courthouse did have a purpose. When the witnesses to the shooting were asked to point out the killer, Murphy created a scene, stepped out of the identification line-up and protested that he had no wish to take part in the procedure. In effect, he was preparing the groundwork for his defence by attempting to make void the identification process. He appreciated that any jury given the task of trying him would be forced to consider whether the witnesses identified him because they were sure he was the killer or because his protest at the identification parade line-up made him the most prominent person present. It was a clever ploy and was recognized as such by a detective who was there.

The Belfast Telegraph reported (21/06/73):

Three witnesses later identified Murphy at an informal identification parade as the man they had seen talking to Pavis. All three admitted that when they identified Murphy he was standing apart from the other men and was shouting about his rights.

Earlier that year, the Belfast Telegraph (24/04/73) reported that:

an investigation is being held at Belfast's Crumlin Road jail into the death of a loyalist remand prisoner in his cell ... foul play was not suspected ... it is understood that there were no marks on his body.

Martin Dillon wrote about Connor’s killing:

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 … 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.

Dillon gets the dates wrong, but the rest is probably true, as is Dillon’s assertion that:

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.

At a time when terrorist trials still had juries pre-Diplock, Murphy had played his hand well. He was found not guilty. He didn’t get to enjoy freedom, however: he was re-arrested as he went to leave Crumlin Road Courthouse and interned. This decision received widespread criticism from within loyalism. In the Belfast Telegraph that day it was reported that:

Mr Hugh Smyth, newly elected Councillor for Shankill ward said he intended taking the matter up very strongly with [Secretary of State for NI) Mr Whitelaw: 'I feel that after a jury returns a verdict of not guilty, for anyone to be re-arrested under the Special Powers Act is making a mockery of British justice.

Murphy’s internment plight also made the pages of Orange Cross magazine, with a headline asking “How Long Will This Boy Be Held?”

There are some interesting elements of Murphy’s actions to consider. He had literally got away with murder – twice. And one of his victims was a fellow UVF member. Why did the UVF consider one of their volunteer’s lives as expendable, whilst his killer received the attention of an elected representative, and a feature in a loyalist prisoner’s welfare magazine which was endorsed by the UVF? How did Murphy manage to commit murder inside Crumlin Road prison, and how and why did the documentation of the investigation into Connor’s murder disappear? These are questions which are difficult to answer, but they play into the mythology of Lenny Murphy.

The “boy” would be held until the 13th May 1975.

Rompering Mythologies

At the very end of the chapter, in smaller print, Dillon wrote this, in an notation about the term “romper room.”

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 in some respects pioneered the ‘rompering’ process but it had a more bizarre application in the Shankill area.

What this ‘bizarre application’ was we aren’t told. It is correct that John McKeague was infamous, as well as “homosexual.” His infamy came from his links to violent, militant loyalism. And it is true that there was a paramilitary outfit named the Red Hand Commando who were (along with every paramilitary group in Ireland) “made up mostly of young men.” McKeague may have been a sadist, and may have been involved in murders involving torture, though there is no clear evidence to confirm this – but there is no evidence that “rompering” was a refined tactic that had been“pioneered.” We believe the reality is both more mundane, and much more frightening.

In north, south, east, and west Belfast, groups of loyalists engaged in the abduction, torture, and murder of Catholic civilians. We believe that, far from there being a unique locus, or dominant character, behind “romper room” murders, it was instead an organic development across multiple geographical locations in the city, in the same timeframe. One contemporary journalist of the time referred to multiple “knife gangs” and said “at that time war magazines full of gruesome violence were popular … things like the Chinese “death of a thousand cuts.” The journalist also mentioned footage of a hooded loyalist demonstrating how to cut a man’s throat at a loyalist paramilitary training exercise featured on local news footage (other training footage can be viewed here). There would have been no single factor driving this particular phenomena, we believe there would have been a dark alchemy, the result of which was savage and bloody.

In the book Breaking: Trauma in the Newsroom, Martin Dillon contributes a chapter, which discusses the Shankill butcher gang. He wrote the following, discussing the murder of Tom Madden with another Belfast reporter, Peter McKenna:

We often talked about the killing as if the more we discussed it we would somehow solve it … Looking back, our fascination with the murder and similar killings was somewhat bizarre. We were like directors of an absurd play, rewriting the script each time we reviewed it. Peter would imagine the number of killers involved, whilst I would insist that our focus should be on the one I called the prime mover; the dominant torturer with the knife.

Dillon’s focus on identifying the “prime mover” is understandable. Honourable, even. But a fixation on a “prime” and “dominant” individual limits the scope of inquiry. Enter into the mix a man like Lenny Murphy, an individual with a mythology that began when he was in his very early 20s and demonstrated himself able to get away with murder, as well as killing inside the walls of a prison, and it is perhaps easy to see why Dillon linked Murphy to torture murders in 1972.

But the inquiry should not have been limited in scope, and robust analysis and interrogation of the evidence would have led to the identification of other knife gangs operating (and not all of them loyalists). Dillon knew that there were other loyalists knifing Catholics to death in sectarian attacks. He wrote about the double murder carried out by John White in Political Murder in Northern Ireland. White, an extremely active loyalist paramilitary, is not mentioned once in The Shankill Butchers. This is a baffling omission.

This chapter contains what we consider three deep flaws in the book’s credibility: the mythology of Lenny Murphy as an individual; a lack of understanding of the breadth, depth, and provenance of knife and torture murders within loyalism, and Dillon’s apparent fixation on there being one person in a dominant role at the centre.

‎Martin Dillon, 2009, The Shankill Butchers: A Case Study of Mass Murder. Cornerstone Digital. ASIN: ‎B003RRY608

⏩Brandon Sullivan is a middle-aged West Belfast émigré. He juggles fatherhood & marriage with working in a policy environment and writing for TPQ about the conflict, films, books, and politics.

⏩Sean Bradfield is a Former researcher who shouldn't care about this stuff so much but can't help himself.