The Shankill Butchers Page 9
In Northern Ireland Catholics often saw the whole Protestant and Unionist community as the oppressors and, obversely, Protestants believed that all Catholics were subversives and therefore Republicans. As a result, when the IRA began to destroy the fabric of Unionism, Catholics were seen by the Loyalist paramilitaries as the root cause of the evil.
In respect of the Shankill Butchers, there was another element, which was sadism. Many studies have indicated that sadists need aggression and I believe that in Northern Ireland the conflict provides the trigger for this aggression. It also allows misfits to find social acceptance by expressing the prejudice which is not just endemic but socially acceptable. It has been argued that a large percentage of the violence in Northern Ireland has not been political or religious. This is a simplification, for the political and religious background has made the violence possible, has often allowed it to be glamourized and has given it the status of being part of an ideological struggle. It has enabled many people who cannot escape prejudice to find a security within it and to accept its manifestations as a badge of patriotism. There are those who will scoff at the description of much of the conflict in Northern Ireland as politico-religious in character and yet much of the paramilitary literature which is referred to in this book was available to Lenny Murphy and his associates in late 1975 and its content supports my thesis, as the following extract from Combat magazine in the autumn of 1975 shows:
The following areas have been marked down by the enemy for take-over: Cliftonville Road and Antrim Road. Soon, the whole of the Antrim Road from Carlisle Circus to Fortwilliam will be dominated. Stem the tide of Popery’s penetration policies. The policy of the Papist Church is to buy as much property as it can in so-called residential areas and let it out at fixed rents to papists. The idea is to replace the Protestant population with Papists and Republicans.
It was against this background in late 1975 that Lenny Murphy began a new campaign of terror. In spite of the fact that a new Brigade Staff of the UVF had taken over, Murphy was determined to go it alone and to vent his hatred as he thought best. It is an indication of his single-mindedness, his sense of omnipotence and invincibility, that he ignored a plea from within Long Kesh to accept the orders of the new Brigade and not to wage war on any group except armed Republicans. Murphy had only one formula in his mind, which was that all Catholics were potential targets.
This instruction from Long Kesh was issued within days of the overthrow of the young leadership:
The UVF, Red Hand Commandos and YCV [Young Citizen Volunteers] prisoners of war in Long Kesh fully support and applaud the actions of those senior officers who recently replaced the former Brigade Staff for the sake of the Loyalist people in general and the UVF in particular. For some time the name of the UVF has been abused. Rumours have been allowed to circulate to the effect that funds have been misappropriated and that gangsterism is rife in our ranks. All this has served to damage our relationship with the people and we hope that the new Brigade Staff will soon set about the painstaking task of renewing our lost confidence. The new Brigade Staff are true Ulster Volunteers of long standing who have held responsible posts in the past, and who are completely competent. These men have our trust and our blessing to restructure the UVF. The sole aim of our organisation is to defend the Loyalist people against their enemies, at the same time stating that it is not our wish to wage war on anyone except armed Republicans determined to overthrow Ulster in order to force us into an Irish Republic.
The attempt in the statement to define the enemy and therefore the targets more clearly was in keeping with the Gusty Spence ethos but it did not appeal to Murphy. He decided that his operation would be kept secret, that he would neither seek orders from the Brigade Staff, nor inform them of his planned actions. There were those in the Brigade who knew of Murphy’s freelance operation, though not in any detail. They were frightened to interfere.
On 23 and 24 November four young soldiers were murdered in South Armagh. The Newsletter, a Belfast-based daily paper, on 24 November dealt graphically with the killing of the soldiers and reported the tough talk of politicians on the need for increased security and stricter measures to deal with the IRA. On the same day Murphy called a meeting with Moore, Edwards and another member of the unit who had become a close ally, Archie Waller. Murphy demanded a response to the weekend violence of the IRA and stated it was time to hit a Taig. He called a meeting for that evening and requested that Moore bring along his taxi and his butchery knives. Murphy spent the rest of the day at his home in Brookmount Street where he was now living with his wife and where, in the same street, his parents shared a home with his brothers William and John. Lenny’s wife, the nineteen-year-old Margaret Gillespie, had married him in Crumlin Road Prison on 5 May 1973 and she was a new dimension to his life on the outside. The ceremony was conducted before Lenny began his stint in Long Kesh and the officiating minister was the then Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland.
When Murphy met Moore and the others that evening he knew exactly where to seek a victim and it was of no importance that he would not know the identity of the target. A tour of the Antrim Road, he told the others, would undoubtedly lead to finding a Taig. Murphy drank with Moore, Waller and Edwards until after midnight before he resolved finally to make his move. He instructed that no guns would be carried on the job. Instead he chose the knives presented to him by Moore, on the grounds that if they were stopped and searched they could argue that Moore had used them in his previous job at the Woodvale meat plant. Murphy’s criminal mind covered every eventuality, including the possibility that the taxi might be stopped by the police or the Army, in which case Moore would also say he was carrying passengers. A short ten-minute route was chosen on the grounds that the shorter the route the less likelihood there would be of them being caught once they had captured their target. The route Murphy mapped out took the team down the Shankill Road, across to the Crumlin Road and down the Antrim Road into Clifton Street with a shorter return journey. The importance of the route was that anyone walking after midnight would be easily identified at a distance and few people would be walking the streets at such a time. More importantly, any person in the vicinity of the lower Antrim Road and Clifton Street was likely to be a Catholic because the sectarian geography of the city determined that Protestants would not use those roads after dark. Murphy proved by this calculation his familiarity with the sectarian dividing lines.
The taxi with Murphy and the others aboard took the planned route with one or two slight variations devised by Murphy. They avoided Clifton Street’s main thoroughfare and entered an adjacent area of narrow and darkened streets such as Library Street and Union Street. Both streets were 150 yards from the bottom of the Shankill and less than one mile from Murphy’s home.
Elsewhere in Belfast that night thirty-four-year-old Francis Crossan was travelling across the city from a club near his home in the Suffolk area of South Belfast to North Belfast, where his family had been intimidated out of their home one year earlier. On his way to the Holy Cross Bowling Club in the Ardoyne district he passed the spot where his brother Patrick, a bus driver, had been the victim of a sectarian shooting several years earlier. Crossan intended spending a few hours with friends at the Holy Cross and enjoying a few drinks. Sarah Ellen Murphy, no relation of Lenny’s, remembers Crossan drinking quietly in a corner of the club. Another member of the club, John Greene, later told police that he chatted with Crossan who was not drinking heavily, just bottles of Guinness. Crossan left the club at ten minutes past midnight. There was no transport available to him so he made his way on foot towards Belfast city centre. It was a foolhardy thing to do but he seems to have been unaware of the danger.
Some time after 12.30 A.M. Moore spotted a man walking down Library Street towards the city’s main thorough-fare, Royal Avenue. It was Francis Crossan. Murphy told Moore to stop the taxi alongside the solitary figure, then Murphy, Edwards and Waller rushed out of the vehicle and Murphy hit Crossan
over the head with a wheel brace. As Crossan fell to the ground his assailants dragged him into the taxi and drove off. Within minutes they were on the Shankill Road. Moore later revealed that Murphy kept hitting Crossan with his fists and the wheel brace and kept repeating: ‘I’m gonna kill you, you bastard.’ Edwards’ recollection was that Crossan ‘kept squealing the whole time’.
Murphy directed William Moore to drive to an alleyway off Wimbledon Street in the Shankill district. By the time they reached their destination Crossan was quiet and Moore stopped the taxi to allow Murphy and the others to carry Crossan’s blood-spattered body out of the vehicle. With Moore’s assistance the four men carried him deep into the alleyway and dragged him along the ground until they were out of sight of the roadway. Murphy then took out a large butcher’s knife and stood over Crossan who was lying on the ground breathing heavily, his eyes closed. Murphy set about hacking at Crossan’s throat until the head was almost severed from the trunk. Finally, and triumphantly, he held the knife aloft. It was a demonstration by Murphy of the ‘ultimate way to kill a man’. Murphy’s clothes and hands were covered in blood and the interior of the taxi was also blood-smeared. Murphy ordered the others to accompany him to his home, where they washed out the taxi and removed their bloodstained clothing, which was later burned. The knife was carefully wiped clean and returned to Moore for safekeeping. Edwards and Waller remained in Murphy’s house that night and Moore drove home.
Six hours after the killing an elderly resident of Wimbledon Street opened the back door of her house in search of her cat and saw what she thought was a tailor’s dummy lying in the alley. On closer inspection she realized she was looking at a battered body. Francis Crossan was lying on his side, his pupils dilated and his head almost at right angles to his body.
The Scenes of Crime Officer who arrived to examine the area surrounding the body found pieces of glass in the alley and glass fragments protruding from Crossan’s forehead. This was later confirmed to be from a beer mug which had been shoved into the victim’s head, either in the taxi or while he was lying in the alley. The State Pathologist, Dr Thomas Marshall, was given the task, as on so many occasions in Northern Ireland, of establishing the cause of death and looking for clues which might assist a police enquiry. His report illustrates the extent of the brutality inflicted on Crossan in a short space of time and the intensity of the attack. Murphy’s willingness to expose himself to large amounts of blood in a confined space, such as the taxi, adds another macabre dimension to his potential for brutality.
Death was deemed by Dr Marshall to be due to the throat wound which crossed the front of the neck below the chin and extended across the right side to the nape of the neck. The tissues of the neck were raggedly divided as far down as the spine, which was also incised. The root of the tongue was severed and the right artoid artery and jugular vein divided, with the result that massive haemorrhaging caused death. There were linear wounds on the head, one on the back of the scalp, a second above and behind the right ear, two above the right eyebrow, another across the root of the nose, a sixth across the tip of the nose and a seventh on the left cheek below the eye. Some of these were caused by a blunt instrument and others by a glass. One wound above the right eyebrow had glass embedded in it. There were also bruises and abrasions on the face, two depressed fractures to the right side of the skull due to severe blows with an object of a limited area. These blows would not have significantly accelerated death. There were other abrasions on the right shoulder, the left hip, the back of the wrists and hands and on the right side.
These findings indicate that three persons – Murphy, Waller and Edwards – had beaten Crossan in the rear of the taxi. Moore later confided to associates that he was also involved in kicking Crossan while he lay in the alley and seconds before Murphy produced the knife.
News of the murder was not given much space in the local papers but the evening edition of the Belfast Telegraph carried a headline on 26 November, ‘Slaughter in Back Alley’, and a photograph of Crossan’s body covered in a blanket. There were several paragraphs describing how the body was found and the name of the victim. Little information was available to journalists and though, even in the Northern Irish context, it was a gruesome crime, it did not merit the coverage a similar crime in the United Kingdom would have done. From the little information available, there was nothing to indicate that this murder was to be the start of a campaign of killings of a similar nature. No organization claimed responsibility, even though it was the custom for paramilitaries to telephone newspapers after an act of terrorism. In this case Murphy was not in a position to speak for the UVF. To have done so would have exposed him as the murderer to the new leaders which, in turn, would have led to confrontation with the new Brigade Staff. Within twenty-four hours the killing of Crossan was a mere statistic, a victim like so many before him and soon to be forgotten. That is the way it is in Northern Ireland. A policeman is killed, a soldier, a UDR man, a Catholic or a Protestant. It is all part of the ritual of daily life and people learn to live with it. While they feel impotent to change it they thank God the victim was not someone they knew and not themselves. One group of people forced to face the tragedies head-on is the Royal Ulster Constabulary. They have to look at the reality of the carnage, reveal the ghastly truth to the families of the victims and, finally, they have to live with the detail until the murderers are found. Francis Crossan and others mentioned earlier were killed within the confines of the Charlie (‘C’) Division of the RUC, and the story of the murder squad detectives in that division is as central to this book as the story of the Shankill Butchers.
5
Charlie Division
‘We’re looking for somebody more brutal than the average terrorist and we’d better get to him.’ Those words were spoken by Detective Inspector Jimmy Nesbitt when he addressed the nine other members of his murder squad on 26 November in the Tennent Street headquarters of the RUC’s C Division, off the Shankill Road. Earlier that morning Jimmy Nesbitt had been in bed when he received a call from the duty officer in Tennent Street station saying that a body had been ‘dumped on his patch’. When he arrived at the murder scene he was joined by one of his closest associates, Detective Sergeant Cecil Chambers just as the body of Francis Crossan was being loaded into a vehicle by mortuary personnel. Nearly fourteen years later Cecil Chambers, still remembers that morning vividly: ‘It was a horrific sight and especially when the body was lifted off the ground because the victim’s head was held to the trunk by tissue. I knew I was witnessing something different . . . a more personal type of killing.’
Jimmy Nesbitt shared that view and expressed it to the six detective sergeants and three detective constables who worked with him: ‘I know this is something different from what we have seen before. It looks like the work of somebody different to the types we have come across. It represents for me a new degree of cruelty. We have seen victims who have been killed with concrete blocks, stabbed, shot or beaten to death but the sight of this victim stirs something inside me which makes me feel cold.’ When I asked about that experience of fourteen years ago he said: ‘Maybe it was the degree of cruelty represented in the broken body of the man but I knew right away that it was an example of a chillingly cold-blooded act. It was not like the experience of seeing someone who had been stabbed. I was convinced that unlike other killings where anger was represented in the way the victim was treated, in this case we were dealing with someone not just callous but clinical.’
Nothing at the scene of the murder indicated to Nesbitt and his team the whereabouts of the killers or where the victim was kidnapped. Aside from the fragments of glass the only signs of how Crossan got there was a tear in his trousers which suggested that the body, after being carried down the alley, was dragged for ten yards. The detectives were lost for any explanation of where Crossan met his death. The possibility of his having been set upon at the entrance to the alleyway was eventually ruled out. So where was he picked up by his killer or kil
lers and why? These were the questions Jimmy Nesbitt realized it was imperative that his team address.
If the victim was abducted elsewhere and transported to the alleyway there was every reason to conclude that planning and transport were required which would strongly suggest the involvement of a paramilitary organization. If Nesbitt could determine where the abduction took place it might well indicate territory controlled by particular paramilitaries and therefore narrow the field of potential suspects.
Essentially, Nesbitt desperately required to know the motive for the murder, knowledge of how the body came to be in the alleyway, and whether he was dealing with a killer or killers. Finally, was the crime committed by a person or persons in the area covered by C Division, or was the victim murdered elsewhere and the body dumped in a place which would encourage the police to concentrate on the wrong neighbourhood? Nesbitt needed considerable manpower to seek answers to a wide range of questions. Primarily, there was an urgent need to establish the whereabouts of the victim before he was murdered which would necessitate numerous interviews and door-to-door enquiries.
It was difficult for Nesbitt to decide how to concentrate his effort because uniformed personnel would only be available to him for several days, after which they would be obliged to return to the difficult day-to-day policing of the Division. His murder squad staff were already burdened with a large number of unsolved killings and daily terrorist incidents. These obstacles were further compounded by the realization that members of the public were always reluctant to assist the security forces because of the fear of terrorist retaliation: he could not expect much public support in his investigation. He knew from experience that his questions would not be answered quickly, if at all. But without answers he would not be in a position to combat the menace he was now facing, the possibility that there was a maniac in the community, or that there was a paramilitary gang which was bringing a new horror to terrorist warfare.