The man who brought down the Butchers

 Friday, 26th June, 2020.

AT THE young age of 50, a true survivor breathed his final breath. 

His life was a happy life, lived at odds with a terrifying act of barbarous hatred that had left young Gearoid McLaverty physically and mentally scarred. 

Yet, the scars never served as an unwelcome reminder to live a life of fear. 

Instead, because of Mr McLaverty's bravery, the bloody reign of terror conducted by the Shankill Butchers was finally brought to an end. 

His vivid recollections of the night he fell victim to unbridled savagery made him a powerful witness in court, and in his ability to pick out key members of the Shankill Butchers, McLaverty cemented the fate of 11 career killers. 

Gérard McLaverty was a well liked man, living in the Antrim Borough for most of his adult life and often attended Catholic Mass on a Saturday night. 

He held down a string of jobs, working for a time as a Council worker and also as a taxi driver in Antrim Town. 

McLaverty was loved by his friends and family, and when he passed away in March 2008 after a suspected fall, a funeral service was held at St James' Church in Aldergrove. 

This tragedy hadn't been the first to befall McLaverty, however. 

What had happened to him 30 years previously should be the stuff of fiction, a dark tale within a horror film - yet it was terrifyingly real. 

The Shankill Butchers five year killing spree amassed a death toll of at least 23 innocents. 

The product of sectarian violence rife during the Troubles, the group consisted of members of the UVF - yet the victims had not been entirely Catholic. 

Whilst orchestrating horrendous crimes geared to terrify the Catholic community, the Butchers carried out a spree of indiscriminate murders in Belfast. 

Members of the Protestant and Catholic communities both suffered loss at the hands of these unrepentant murders, sparking revulsion from even the most hardened terrorists. 

The Butchers are notorious to this day for the gruesome nature of their atrocities - committing abductions with the intention of torturing whoever they deemed suitable, at times simply for dark 'entertainment'. 

Their victims would not receive a quick easy death. There were slashings with butcher knives, beatings with wheel braces, hatchets and tooth extractions. Often the unimaginable ordeal would only end with the cutting of the victim's throat 'to the bone'. 

Leader of the gang Lenny Murphy was known to the police as an intensely violent man - even by the standards of the times - and spent time imprisoned for sectarian activities. 

When leading his band of henchmen, Murphy's propensity for cruelty came to the fore - and encouraged the Butchers to continue even whilst Murphy was locked up in the Maze. 

Indeed, it would be William Moore who would take up the mantle of 'master butcher' during this period and who led the gang in the violent ambush upon young Gérard McLaverty. 

It was May 11th, 1977.

Friends were having an evening of catch ups, laughter, and gentle boozing in a flat on Belfast's Antrim Road in north Belfast. 

The streets were clearing when McLaverty left the flat with two female friends at 11.30pm, walking them home to the Cliftonville Road, before making his way back towards his home alone. 

It was then that Gérard noticed something amiss. 

"As I walked past the Belfast Royal  Academy I saw a yellow Cortina car. It was parked on the opposite side of the road with its lights out. It was facing up the Cliftonville Road," he later recalled. 

"I could see two men in the front of this car and at the same time two men walked up towards me on the same footpath on which I was standing. I had seen this car draw up while I was walking and had seen these two men get out. I then saw them cross the road and walk towards me." 

What McLaverty hadn't realised was that he had just witnessed the modus operandi of the Shankill Butchers - and that he would be the only survivor to detail the selection and the stalking of their prey. 

In this instance, it had been 'Big Sam' McAllister, a leading henchman of Lenny Murphy and towering presence at six foot tall and 16 stone, who made the first approach. 

The yellow Cortina belonged to William Moore. 

McAllister claimed that the two were CID from Tennent Street, and asked for identification. 

McLaverty showed the pair his diary, which inadvertently given McAllister a strong clue that he was a Catholic due to his surname - enough to sign his death warrant. 

"I then felt the fat man (McAllister) put a gun in my back. He ordered me to go to the yellow Cortina across the road. As I was getting into the back of the car I could see the gun in his hand."

The car travelled through the streets of Belfast, until they had reached the Shankill Road where they pulled up alongside a darkened building far from the lights of Tennent Street. 

"We all got out of the car," recounted McLaverty. "The two men in front of the car took one of my arms each and marched me into the building. The fat man came behind. 

Within the building was a room, with only a dining room chair, two electric heaters, and a counter. 

McLaverty was ordered to sit in the chair, and told he would be staying there until the morning. 

"The fat man and the car driver went behind the counter and came back with sticks. The fat man had a nail driven through the end of it. They both started beating me around the the head with the sticks."

Unbelievably, the brutal beating only ceased when the gang decided it was time for an impromptu tea break. 

"They had a teapot and a kettle and the driver of the car went and made some tea. The fat man asked if I wanted tea and I refused. I said: 'I want to go home'. The fat man said: 'You are not going home. There is no way you are getting out of this'. 

The killers drank their tea and surveyed their captive in silence, before continuing their onslaught. 

They began beating McLaverty with their bare hands and feet before an attempt was made to strangle the man to death with a shoelace. 

"At that time the fat man had a large clasp knife. The driver tightened the lace around my neck and the fat man began slashing at my clothes with the knife. With the tightening of the lace around my neck I lost consciousness." 

When McLaverty regained consciousness, he was surrounded by a crowd of people and whisked away by an ambulance to the Royal Victoria Hospital. 

In a final act of callousness, both of his wrists had been severely slashed ( photograph supplied) - and he was left to die. 

Doctors believe that it had been due to the unseasonably cold night that May that McLaverty hadn't succumbed to blood loss, as the sudden drop of temperature may have slowed the bleeding. 

He had been discovered by an off duty nurse, who had alerted the emergency services of McLaverty's condition. 

.   HEAD OF THE MURDER SQUAD: Jimmy                                  Nesbitt 

The use of knives in the case sent alarm bells ringing for the RUC's C Division, and Jimmy Nesbitt - head of the murder squad - 'had a hunch' that the case could be the big break they were looking for. 

And it was. Gérard McLaverty's became central to the case, and was sent away from the 'murder triangle'. 

His family home address in Crumlin was placed under armed guard. 

Working with the RUC, McLaverty bravely relieved his night of trauma and even agreed to retrace the route of the Cortina car whilst disguised in an unmarked vehicle. 

Whilst in transit on May 18th, he spotted familiar faces amongst the local paramilitaries out in force. 

'Fat man' Sam McAllister, a feared UVF member, was finally able to be linked to the Shankill Butcher tapestry of terror. Another, Benny Edwards, was also identified. The owner of the yellow Cortina, William Moore, was spotted too. 

A series of dawn raids were conducted the following morning, 'lifting' Allister and Moore. 

The questioning of the suspects exposed cracks in Moore's statements, and when interrogators hinted that he could be charged with attempted murder, Moore 'began to sing'. 

When Moore began talking, so did McAllister, and soon a picture was built up of key members within the organisation who had caused the streets of Belfast to run red - yet no one dared unmask kingpin Lenny Murphy, who would be free to kill again before his life ended in a hail of IRA bullets in 1982.

Between May 1977 and February 1979, 11 members of the gang appeared in court and on the final day of hearings it took Judge Justice O'Donnell 20 minutes to deliver the sentences, which totalled 2,000 years of imprisonment - the most handed down in a single sitting in Belfast legal history. 

Amongst those sentenced was Arthur McClay, an Antrim man who was sentenced to life with a recommendation he serve no less than 20 years for his role in the killings. 

Justice O'Donnell praised Gérard McLaverty for showing boundless courage in the face of bloodthirsty carnage that potentially saving the lives of countless others. 

Following McLaverty's untimely passing, then South Antrim MLA and current SDLP Councillor Thomas Burns recounted his time knowing Gérard from Primary school. 

"He was a quiet big fella," Mr Burns reflected, adding that he had held 'no bitterness whatsoever' for those who had scarred him. 

"He lived an open life and felt no fear that he might one day be targeted again for helping bring the Shankill Butchers reign to an end. 

"He potentially saved lives by putting those people in jail. 

"There was no bitterness in him whatsoever, and his friends would attest to that." 

He finally noted that McLaverty would be 'missed by many'. 

South Antrim PUP chairman, and Prison spokesman Ken Wilkinson, said that Gérard was a victim of *orthern Ireland's '' 'dark past'. 

"Mr, McLaverty, along with countless others, suffered in the dark days of the Troubles. 

"Thankfully, those days are now behind us and our communities have moved on." 

Many lives were indelibly marked by the dark years of the Troubles, but the story of Gérard McLaverty shows that scares do not have to hinder us, or serve as a monument to fear. 

Rather, it can fuel positive change. 

Scares may fade but they never completely disappear but the local man proved that they need not stand in the way of living a full and productive life. 

"Thankfully, those days are now behind us and our communities have moved on."

HE WOULD NEVER FORGET HIS BRUSH WITH THE BUTCHERS - BUT HE WOULD NOT BE RULED BY IT. 

With many thanks to the: Antrim Guardian for the original publication. 

Follow these links to find out more on this story and the story around it: Was mystery man found mutilated on Shankill killed by soldiers, or a victim of Butchers?

The flow of arms from the UDR to the UDA was just stunning

Was mystery man found mutilated on Shankill killed by soldiers, or a victim of Butchers?

                           Sunday Life

    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. 

.       Argyll and Sunderland Highlanders

"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. 

.     Father-Of-Two - Patrick Joseph Quail 

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. 

With many thanks to the: Sunday Life and author: Martin Dillon  for the original publication. 

Follow these links to find out more on this story: The man who brought down the Butchers

The flow of arms from the UDR to the UDA was just stunning

Pitchfork Murders: cover-up by British Army exposed

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