There would be others to follow, each murder more gruesome than the last. And it wasn't just Catholics who were falling victim. According to published reports, at least three of Murphy's victims were fellow Protestant paramilitaries, murdered as part of a feud within the UVF. In what is perhaps an enduring symbol of the hate that can flourish in a place like Belfast, three other Protestants would die when Murphy and his men mistook them for Catholics.

By January 1976, it was becoming clear to many in the UVF that Murphy was out of control. But, as had been the case when he was a boy, the danger that clung to him like a sharkskin suit, dissuaded anyone in the organization from seriously challenging him.

And so the body count climbed. There was Thomas Joseph Quinn, the diminutive 55-year-old Catholic widower who was abducted after a night of tippling and beaten so badly before he was sliced to ribbons that even his attackers later said they couldn't tell the battered cadaver had been a man or a boy.

There was Francis Dominick Rice, an unemployed laborer with no connection to the troubles other than the fact that he had temporarily survived them, who suffered the same fate.

Perhaps it was a measure of how deeply Murphy was loathed by others within the UVF, that by March 1976, rumors were starting to circulate in Belfast and some of them, despite the wall of silence that surrounds both the Protestant and Catholic communities, were finding their way to the police.