Murphy's Law: The Story of the Shankill Butchers

First Blood

It's hard to say with any real precision when Murphy's reign of terror formally began. Like much else in the blood-soaked history of Belfast, the fog of war obscures the details.

According to Dillon and others, the first murder that Murphy is alleged to have taken part in, occurred on July 21, 1972, at the Lawnbrook Social Club, a Loyalist bar that Murphy was known to haunt. According to Dillon reports, a 34-year-old Catholic, Francis Arthurs, who had a little too much to drink that night, found himself in a taxi in the wrong part of town and was abducted and taken to the tavern by Loyalist thugs. Though he was not associated with the IRA or any Catholic paramilitary organization, he was interrogated. Then he was, in the vernacular of the Belfast thugs, "rompered," a reference drawn from the British version of the popular children's television show "Romper Room." According to published reports, Arthurs was brutally beaten by several men until his face was an unrecognizable pulp. Then he was stabbed repeatedly. Though no one was ever charged in connection with the incident such is the power of silence in Belfast -- Murphy, Dillon and others insist, wielded the knife.

A month later, another Catholic, a 48-year-old bachelor named Thomas Madden was returning from a night of drinking when he too was abducted. He was, authorities reported at the time, taken to a garage, hung by the neck from the ceiling, while, as he slowly strangled to death, one of his attackers, armed with a sharp knife, cut deep long gashes down his torso and thighs. A pathologist later catalogued 147 knife wounds on the man's corpse. None of them were fatal, and though the crime remains officially unsolved, authorities now believe that Madden's murder marked the first appearance in the records of the brutal techniques that would come to define the Shankill Butchers.

Four weeks later, another Catholic, William Matthews, 50, was killed. When his body was found it showed signs of the same kind of slow and savage torture that Madden had suffered, the same kind of animalistic rage that had snuffed out Arthur's life.

But it wasn't until Murphy killed a Protestant, a 31-year-old sometime gun dealer named William Edward Pavis, that Murphy crossed into the authorities' consciousness.

At the height of Murphy's bloody rampage, much was made, primarily by commentators sympathetic to the Nationalist cause, of the fact that authorities seemed unable or unwilling to track down the butchers who were killing Catholics, and it was widely inferred that the police, were, if not complicit in the killings, at least willing to tolerate them.

In fact, though many of them were from the Protestant side of town, the police were as outraged and repulsed by the murders as anyone. To be sure, clues may have been missed. Communications between units may have broken down. But the biggest obstacle that police in Belfast faced in trying to crack the case of the Shankill Butchers was the simple fact that they were police in Belfast. It's a place where Protestants and Catholics share not only a deep hatred for each other, where victims and victimizers swap places with alarming alacrity, but where there is an abiding mistrust of authorities and a loathing for informers.

Crimes are solved by luck and persistence, and nowhere is that more true than in Belfast.

In the Pavis case, both factors came into play.