Murphy's Law: The Story of the Shankill Butchers

Mr. X

It was May 1977, and, although Murphy was behind bars, the Shankill Butchers continued to savage their bleeding city. For a time, it almost seemed that Murphy had calculated correctly, that as long as the murders continued, suspicion would be deflected from him.

Then, for the first time, luck and persistence, the only real friends police in Belfast have, came to call.

It seems almost perverse to consider the ordeal Gerard McLaverty suffered to be fortunate, even in the most permissive sense of the word. The young man, deemed by some to be emotionally unstable, had been kidnapped as he walked along Cliftonville Road by a small group of men in a yellow Cortina. They claimed to be plainclothesmen representing the authorities, and told the young man that they were taking him in for questioning. The 20-year-old McLaverty didn't put up a struggle, not even when, instead of taking him to headquarters, they dragged him into an abandoned building in the Protestant section of town.

Over the next few hours, McLaverty was subjected to the same kind of horrific torture that all the other victims of the Shankill Butchers had suffered. There was one difference, however.

Maybe the killers got careless. Maybe McLaverty had some unsuspected well of strength. Whatever the reason, somehow, McLaverty survived, though his killers didn't know that. And when, surrounded by horrified onlookers, he drifted back into consciousness on the damp, sooty cobblestones of that Belfast alley where his attackers had dumped him and left him for dead, McLaverty became the most important man in Belfast.

He was the only man alive who could identify the Shankill Butchers.

The first two he identified were Sam McAllister and Benny Edwards.

It is, perhaps a measure of how poorly the Shankill Butchers embodied the soldierly ideals they purported to embrace, but in hindsight authorities were amazed at how quickly McAllister and Edwards broke down under questioning, abandoned their much vaunted code of silence, and pointed the finger at Moore and Bates and the others. Just as quickly, Moore and Bates placed the responsibility for their actions on Murphy.

On February 18, 1979, the Shankill Butchers were led into the dock at the Crumlin Road Courthouse to face 19 counts of murder. Murphy was not among them. In the months that ensued between their arrest and the trial, Moore and Bates retracted their statements implicating Murphy.

Though his crimes were detailed in court during the two-day trial, he was referred to only as Mr. X.

In the end, the Shankill Butchers, minus the man whose lust for blood inspired, perhaps enflamed them, were convicted. Together their life sentences totaled more than 2,000 years.