Murphy's Law: The Story of the Shankill Butchers

Death Takes on a Life of Its Own

Once a cycle of violence has begun, it grinds on, inexorably. The pursuit of death takes on a life of its own. Gaza. Rwanda. The Congo. Bosnia. Belfast. By the mid 1970s, there was a growing sentiment among some of the older leaders of the Loyalist movement that perhaps the time had come, if not to eschew violence, at least to couple it with a more conciliatory political aspect, as the IRA had been attempting to do. The idea, among some of these old men, was to try to inject reason into the volatile mixture of racial hatred and brutality.

But there were young men, within the lower echelons of the UVF who wanted no part of it. With the old leadership in jail, they had control of the organization and they had plans to make their presence known.

For Lenny Murphy, it was an opportunity ripe for the taking.

Not long after he was released from Long Kesh, Murphy reassembled the members of his crew who were still around. Bates was among them. So was McAllister, and others, more shadowy, who to this day have never been named by authorities as part of the murderous Shankill Butchers gang. There was also some new blood on the street. There was William John Townsley, just 14, though he seemed older and was tougher than any child should be. There was Edward McIlwaine, a loser who had enlisted part time in the legitimate Ulster Defense Regiment. There was Benjamin Edwards and Norman Waugh and Arthur Armstrong McClay. And then, also among these young Turks was a young hoodlum named William Moore.

John Townsley & Edward McIllwaine mugshots

Like many in Belfast, on both sides of the barricade, Moore was a petty crook who had, from time to time, turned his hand to legitimate work. It's rumored that Moore had been trying to impress a butcher's daughter with his willingness to tread the straight and narrow when he took a job at a local butcher shop for a while. The job didn't last long, just long enough for Moore to learn how to carve a side of beef or anything else that happened to find its way onto a hook in his vicinity. As a souvenir of his brief service in the food industry, he also managed to make off with a set of butcher knives, the same knives that would later figure so prominently in the lore of the Shankill Road neighborhood of Belfast.

Moore had two other attributes that made his a valuable recruit to Murphy's gang. First, he had a car, and not just any car. It was one of the ubiquitous black, London-style taxis that prowl the streets in stodgy anonymity on both sides of the barricades. Second, he was not particularly bright, and most importantly, he was in awe of Lenny Murphy.

William Moore and Norman Waugh mugshots

Though members of Murphy's gang may have been involved in operations as early as the beginning of October they are suspected in the murder of two women and a man during a robbery at a Belfast liquor store it wasn't until November 24 that the killing began in earnest. That was the night that Francis Crossan made the fatal mistake of crossing Liberty Street in front of Moore's taxi. According to published reports, Crossan was beaten with a tire iron, forced into the taxi, with Murphy and other gang members inside, and then beaten some more. Murphy, it has been alleged, slit the man's throat.

The sheer brutality of the crime, even by Belfast standards, caught the attention of the local authorities, as it did the press. "Slaughter in Back Alley" is the way it was described in the November 26 edition of the Belfast Telegraph.