Was mystery man found mutilated on Shankill killed by soldiers, or a victim of Butchers? Martin Dillon investigates
No OFFICIAL records exist for tortured body witness claims he saw, reveals top author.
The scene off the Shankill Road after the discovery of the body of a man murdered by members of the Shankill Butchers.
April 08th, 2022.
As the author of books like The Dirty War and The Shankill Butchers, I thought I knew the names of all the Butchers victims and the names of the dead of other grisly killings which bore the hallmarks of Lenny Murphy's UVF gang, but could not be directly attributed to them.
But in the autumn of 2021, a source with a very dark, intriguing story sought me out and requested that I protect his/her identity.
Lenny Murphy, leader of the Shankill Butchers gang.
They wrote to me about seeing a victim who looked like he was probably killed by The Butchers. I was naturally curious.
This source was adamant about not having his/her name revealed to the public. I gave an undertaking that I would not expose their identity to public scrutiny.
The story presented to me claimed the existence of an unknown, tortured victim of the Troubles. The source for this claim will henceforth be referred to as C to shroud their identity.
The more information C provided, the more I became convinced that this was a matter which demanded my attention.
According to C, the victim was male in his 30s. He bore obvious marks of torture and had been shot and Dumped in the Shankill area of west Belfast where the Butchers, and loyalist paramilitaries like the UDA and UVF, plied their trade in the early 70s.
Some of the knives used by the gang of sectarian killers.
After re-reading C's Email, I checked the official death register. Could I have missed something? Had Lenny Murphy and his band of Butchers murdered someone whose death escaped my attention and that of my late friend, Detective Inspector Jimmy Nesbitt - the man who brought the gang to justice?
I revisited my research papers but found no victim for the date and the location C provided. I consulted my friend, the fine investigative journalist, Kathryn Johnson, and like me she could not find a death notice to fit the date C provided, but she promised to continue her search.
I spoke to former security forces friends and they dismissed the claim. Official records had no victim listing for C's date.
During the Troubles, official records were never the most reliable source of data, leaving journalists to test information and rumours against the knowledge of their personal contacts. I also relied on my perceived sense of the integrity of an individual source. Was it someone seeking revenge, or were they a conduit for others in the paramilitary and security worlds.
After exchanging more Emails with C, I was able to tick off several boxes. The first one I ticked was about C's openness because C provided me with the kind of personal information that sources were often reluctant to divulge.
Another box was that C offered information to confirm he/she had genuine cause to be in the vicinity of where the body of the unknown victim was dumped. C was also able to name others who were present at this location. Therefore, there were other witnesses who could be evaluated if traced.
'Fat Sam' McAllister, one of the cut-throut killers.
C had good reason to remember this experience because it followed quick on the heels of another awful event. On January 13th, 1976, C was one of the first persons to witness the aftermath of an IRA bomb blast in a shopping arcade in central Belfast.
For an 18-year-old like C was at the time, it was horrifying and traumatic. Aside from the injured, four bodies and body parts littered the debris. Two of the dead were the bombers.
This was C's memory of this first tragedy: "There were two old pensioners lying on the ground, blood coming from the back of their heads. Initially I thought they may have been dead. Turned out they had only been knocked over by the blast. As I looked into the arcade all I could see was white dust and out of the dust staggered a soldier who was completely white with dust and a trickle of blood coming down his face from under his beret.
"There was also a civvy searcher in the same condition; they were both completely dazed. The white dust started to clear and as I entered the arcade there was just a pile of rubble where the shop was.
"My one lasting memory was about the fine dust that had settled everywhere, intermingled with the dust that looked like fine paint spray you would get if you sprayed a car - really fine speckles. But it wasn't paint, it was blood and it was everywhere in the dust that coated everything. I could see and I could smell the blood, that metallic smell you get from blood.
"I think that was probably my biggest shock; that someone could be atomised that way. I started digging in the rubble and I don't know how long I was digging there. I looked around and there was a fireman beside me."
The Lawnbrook club where the Shankill Butchers met to drink and plot their murders
C named other people who witnessed the carnage, but I have withheld those names to protect C's identity.
Within 24 hours of the bombing, C was stood over the body of our unknown torture victim. It was January 14th, sometime around 10am. The body of the victim was on a patch of waste ground between Fifth Street and the Shankill Road.
C said: "He was badly mutilated and had been shot in the face. He was lying close to a wall which had his blood splattered on it. We were later told he was last seen drinking on the Shankill on the Friday night.
"We were also told that he had been shot at about 7.30am the morning we found him. They had tried to cover his body with breeze blocks and had possibly been disturbed and fled.
"We were also informed that he was a Catholic who had been living on the Shankill for a number of years."
C noted that no mention of this murder appeared in the newspapers that day or the following day. In fact, it has remained a mystery.
"I have drawn a blank," C wrote.
"My greatest fear is that he had no family to remember him, as he seems to have been airbrushed from the history of the Troubles. I pray for his soul and shed a frequent tear for him. So please if you could give me any help in finding out who he was I would be so grateful, thank you."
I was keen to know more about what C observed because I was familiar with the grisly handiwork of the Butchers and other loyalist killers.
I had once stood over the naked body of a mentally challenged boy who had been branded with a red-hot poker before he died.
At my prompting, C offered this memory: "The victim's arms were crossed across his upper chest and his hands were completely black and blue. He had no teeth and had blood around his mouth. I could see this because his mouth was open.
"We were told he had been tortured and it was suspected he was beaten with hammers as many of the bones in his body were broken.
"Certainly, his hands were completely black and blue every inch. I am not sure but he may have had his eyes gouged out as well. I could see a bullet hole in the centre of his right cheek.
"There were many breeze blocks around the body. We were told they had tried to cover the body with these but were probably disturbed and then fled the scene.
"He was lying close to a wall and there were blood splashes that were visible."
C added other observations which I felt were relevant. For instance, British soldiers, not uniformed police, were at the murder scene. The Army officer-in-charge filed his men past the body, telling them, "This is what could happen to you if you are not too careful."
I found this detail macabre. Police normally cordoned off a murder scene and took control. C saw several plain clothes figures, but did not know who they were.
The soldiers were from the Scots Regiment, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders stationed at the nearby Brown Square Barracks.
According to C's memory of the area that morning, there were small groups of women talking together. A UDR patrol Land Rover was parked nearby and three men in civvies were crouched over the body. Two of them were in their 30s with an older figure. It was not clear if they were RUC detectives or members of the Army's Special Investigation Branch.
I was especially keen to know how many soldiers were present and C responded with details which shocked me.
"They arrived in a four-tonne lorry, Saracen armoured vehicles and Land Rovers. They were all from A Company of the Argyll and Sunderland Highlanders," said C, who reckoned there were as many as 60 to 80 soldiers.
It struck me as a large number and it begged the question what was so important about this victim. Could he have been a soldier? It would have been, I sermised, somewhat bizarre for a Commanding officer to parade so many soldiers past a corpse, though C insisted that he appeared to believe that it provided a lesson for his men.
Could it be that he saw it a lesson of what might happen to any of his men if they were not careful when on patrol in Belfast?
The Argylls A Company was at Brown Square from December 5th, 1975, to April 4th, 1976. The regiment had a sullied reputation in *orthern Ireland. In 1972, some of its members were part of an infamous episode which the regiment tried to cover up.
It was known as the Pitchfork Killings. The victims were two innocent Catholic farm labourers in Co Fermanagh. No pitchfork was used. The two were knifed to death. I exposed details of the crime and the cover-up when writing in The Dirty War.
Andrew Sanders in his book, Times of Troubles, points out that in 1976, 11 Argylls received sentences for theft and handling stolen goods after break-in in the Shankill area and Royal Avenue in Belfast.
He quotes a UVF spokesman saying that the battalion was like a "highly organised crime syndicate."
I told my colleague, Kathryn Johnson, that I found C's accounts of the aftermath of the bombing and finding the mystery victim convincing and dark.
She said C would have been severely traumatised after the shopping arcade experience. Was there any chance this might have led to confused memory, she wondered.
It was a valid question, yet the detail C offered had an exactitude I found difficult to dismiss. His descriptions exuded the kind of shape and colour of a genuine witness statement. C had also not expressed any doubt that one event followed the other.
An element of the story which particularly puzzled me was the absence of uniformed police at the second tragedy. There was also nothing to confirm if the unknown victim was killed at the spot or tortured and brought there to be finally dispatched with a single gunshot to his forehead.
In fact, I had been the first writer of the Troubles to expose killings which involved torture and the disappearing of bodies. The torture victims, mostly innocent Catholics, were abducted from the streets of Belfast and transported to illegal loyalist drinking clubs where they were beaten and tortured (some to death) in front of revellers.
Most of them were killed after they were taken to a known killers' dump site.
Some were secretly buried by the IRA. This killing had all the hallmarks of a Shankill Butchers murder, but how could it have escaped my notice. Surely, it would have been listed in police reports.
Kathryn, using her sources, went in search of answers, and I did likewise. We each reached the same conclusion. If this murder happened as C described, the victim was tortured somewhere in the Shankill, perhaps in an illegal drinking club, and then dumped and shot.
This would have required the involvement of a gang of some sort to transport the body. C said local people directed others to the body. But when did locals first see it?
This, too, remains part of the mystery. From my experience, killers took victims to a dump site in the middle of the night, or just before dawn. Killers liked to torture victims in drinking dens in front of revellers.
The practice became bizarrely known as rompering after a local television programme for children called Romper Room. The clubs where torture took place acquired the name, Romper Rooms.
It was locals who frequently informed police of the existence of a body, or a terrorist group might phone a message to a newspaper or a police station claiming responsibility and providing the location of the victim. If C was correct, it was around 10am when locals alerted C and others to the presence of this victim.
Perhaps, the body had been there for some hours and had remained unnoticed because the killers had tried to conceal it. Later that day, C heard it had been children on their way to school who discovered the body and it was believed that the victim had been a Catholic living in the Shankill area.
Was it possible that C confused the date because of the shock of digging in the rubble for bodies the day before after the arcade bombing? Was C suffering from PTSD and over years had somehow woven this story of the mystery victim into the unconscious mind until it became a fixed memory?
Kathryn and I began digging into the official records of men murdered in January 1976 and both of us settled on the name of a Catholic murdered in the Clifton Street area in the north Belfast area of the city.
He was Patrick Joseph Quail, a Catholic father-of-two. He left his home late on the evening of January 23rd to go for a walk when he was shot. There was no evidence of torture in this killing.
However, it happened in an area not far from where C claimed to have seen the mystery victim. The manner in which Quail was murdered ruled out any possibility that C could have mistaken the Quail murder for our mystery killing.
The Unknown
I cannot say for certain if there ever was an unknown, tortured victim lying bloodied on waste ground on the cold morning of January 14th, 1976, in west Belfast. I can only say that C has lived with the nightmare of this event. In C's mind it happened, and like many others C felt a reluctance to approach official resources.
The underlying problem as I see it that this story of a mystery victim requires more than a writer like me in his New York apartment. It needs the shoe leather approach and time to trace the other witnesses whom C named.
If it should transpire that there is no mystery victim, this story and an investigation into it will still shed a much-needed light on all the cold cases of the Troubles and on all those terrified innocents who were tortured and dumped in fields and alleys.
Were you to ask me if I believe C saw a mystery victim, I would have to say that I believe it may well be true.
Kathryn and I have worked together to bring this story to the public in the hope that it will ignite the memories of others who were in the Shankill area at that time or in the security forces. In other words, we are making a public appeal for information.
Follow these links to find out more on this story: The man who brought down the Butchers
*Anyone who feels that they can help is advised to contact Sunday Life . You can Email us on this link or PM us on Facebook or Twitter . Or call 02890 264312.
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