Though they had no proof that Murphy was the driving force behind the Shankill Butchers, they suspected him strongly. So Murphy saw it almost as a boon when he was arrested on March 13 in connection with a gun used in the shooting of a young Catholic man several days earlier.

As he sat in the familiar surroundings of the Crumlin Road Prison awaiting prosecution on the charges, Murphy concocted a plot, every bit as devious as the one he is believed to have hatched for the execution of Connor, his cohort, years earlier, to throw investigators off his trail, at least as far as the Shankill Butchers case was concerned.

Using a trusted intermediary, he instructed his followers that the dimwitted and sycophantic Moore, who had swapped his black taxi for a slightly more conspicuous yellow Ford Cortina should temporarily succeed him as head of the gang. He also ordered his followers to continue the Shankill Butcher slayings, using precisely the same weapons and techniques that he had developed.

And so they did.

If anything, the murders became more brutal. Among the victims was Stephen McCann, a young songwriter, who had made the mistake of walking home with his girlfriend on the wrong street, and was found dead the next day, his corpse battered, his throat slit.

On January 29, Moore and the gang would later admit, they killed James Curtis Banks Moorehead. The signature was clear. There were lacerations all over his scalp and his throat had been slit. Three days later, they abducted and killed 52-year-old bachelor Joseph Morrissey, in much the same manner. In a chilling indication that the Shankill killers were becoming more bloodthirsty and brutal, the coroner's report on Morrissey's   death concluded that he had been attacked, not just with a knife but with a hatchet, and that he had been attacked with such force that his teeth had been ripped out by the roots and his head all but severed from his body.

It almost seems ludicrous to draw such distinctions, but even as the Shankill mob's savage butchery continued, members of the gang were also involved in other activities, potentially equally bloody, but in the grim twisted logic of the sectarian struggle, somehow more acceptable. On April 10, 1977    the 61^st anniversary of the Easter Uprising, a day revered by Catholics as the birthday of Republicanism and Nationalism members of the gang, including Waugh, were involved in a bombing that wounded several people and claimed the life of a 10-year-old boy. The little boy had made the fatal mistake of pressing too close to a makeshift barricade so that he could get a better glimpse of a passing parade. In the depraved calculus of hate, he was a "fair target."