Shankill Butchers

This programme contains strong language and scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

This was my patch as a wee boy.

The Shankill.

I won't be the only person from round here

who resents the name of the Shankill being welded

to the worst gang of serial killers in British history...

..a gang that gruesomely lived up to their name.

The Shankill Butchers.

It shamed the Shankill community.

It shamed it.

He was part... practically decapitated.

I saw the body

lying several yards up on the waste ground.

Walked towards it.

I knew it was another one.

Had these victims been Protestants,

this would never have been allowed to go on for as long as it did.

They shouldn't have been called the Shankill Butchers. They were murdering thugs.

That fact runs through thousands of pages of evidence.

40 years on, we've been given unique access to that evidence

and the man who caught the Shankill Butchers speaks publicly for the first time.

We didn't go after loyalist paramilitaries or republican paramilitaries.

We went after killers.

There's one question that cries out from the evidence

as it does from the victims' families who've never spoken out before.

How did the Shankill Butchers get away with it for so long?

Hello, how are you doing?

-Great.

-Good. You're doing all right.

I was just six when the Shankill Butchers were convicted in 1979.

The savage murders they carried out were the talk of the road at a time of everyday brutality.

1972 saw the highest death toll of the Troubles in one year.

Nearly 500 people were killed.

In January, Bloody Sunday was seared into the memory.

Horror followed upon horror.

Loyalists and republican paramilitaries killed at will.

In July, 20 IRA bombs exploded in central Belfast in what became known as Bloody Friday.

Nine were killed, 130 injured.

Events like Bloody Friday was a big watershed.

After that, the Troubles began to get more and more vicious.

A lot of men joined the organisations

thinking this was the only way they could defend their own community.

I had friends who joined at that stage

with that sole intention

that if the IRA was going to blow up bus stations, we'd better get ready for a war.

HE BARKS ORDERS

The paramilitary underworld became a breeding ground for violence.

Power struggles between the UDA and UVF were rampant.

I think from then on, there was a fear come into the Protestant community

that perhaps we had unleashed something we would find very, very difficult to curtail.

Two months after the Belfast bombings, a 32-year-old Protestant

called William Edward Pavis was murdered in one such feud.

The killer who shot him in the head in broad daylight was almost certainly this man,

Lenny Murphy.

How Murphy got away with it tells us a lot about the man

who went on to mastermind the killings of the Shankill Butchers.

Murphy was charged alongside his getaway driver, Mervyn Connor.

He named Murphy as the killer.

Amazingly, they were put on the same wing in Crumlin Road Gaol.

But just two months before the trial, Murphy's major accuser was dead, killed by cyanide.

Beside him, an apparent suicide note.

This is a copy of the note. It's never been made public before.

"To whom it may concern. During my time in prison,

"I've done nothing but think what I've done to the fellow called..." and the name's redacted.

'We know Mervyn Connor is writing about Murphy.

'Here, on the day he was poisoned,

'he says naming Murphy as the killer was a lie he couldn't live with.

'The police conclusion?

'Murphy'd made sure he didn't have to.'

It was common knowledge

that Murphy had been responsible for Connor's death.

Common knowledge?

A very, very extremely cunning man.

Could adjust to any circumstances in which he found himself.

Murphy probably threatened to kill him if he didn't do it.

He was totally ruthless and sadistic

and if he had been involved in the murders that he was suspected of,

of Pavis and Connors, he'd be capable of almost anything.

In June 1973, Murphy was acquitted of the Pavis murder.

For the next two years, Murphy built on his reputation for utter ruthlessness.

He was just 23, but already he was thought to have murdered as many as ten people.

He also set up his own unit.

It's unofficial headquarters was here - Lawnbrook Avenue, right in the heart of the Shankill.

Murphy recruited three henchmen.

They all had one thing in common - a deep-seated hatred of Catholics.

25-year-old Robert "Basher" Bates was a petty criminal

and had been in and out of borstal throughout his childhood.

20-year-old Sam McAllister was another young offender with a reputation for violence.

The third of Murphy's henchmen was 25-year-old William Moore.

He drove a black taxi.

He had also worked as a meat packer and had access to a set of butcher's knives.

About 12 others passed through the gang,

but these three members, Moore, McAllister and Bates,

they were Lenny Murphy's hard core.

He controlled them absolutely.

No-one in the circle talked.

The fear that he instilled in them made sure they didn't talk.

No-one knew about their activities.

No-one was allowed in the Lawnbrook Club

when they were discussing tactics.

It was a completely closed shop.

But being a player in the mainstream loyalist underworld wasn't enough for Murphy.

He was determined to unleash a level of sectarian savagery never before seen in Northern Ireland.

Murphy was about to up the ante...

big time.

On 25th November 1975, the body of Frank Crossan,

a north Belfast Catholic, was discovered by a Shankill resident.

It was about 100 yards down that street in an entry.

I saw this horrendous wound in the throat of the man. The blood was still oozing.

It was absolutely grotesque.

Frank Crossan had been practically decapitated.

He was attacked, hit over the head with a wheel brace and pulled into a waiting car.

He was driven to an alleyway on the Shankill Road and his throat was cut.

It was different. It was... it was so savage, so barbaric.

We'd come across people being stabbed, attacks with knives...

This man obviously had been overpowered

and his throat deliberately slit open.

Evil is the only way you could describe it.

Just evil.

Frank Crossan's body was dumped almost within sight of Tennent Street police station,

where Jimmy Nesbitt was head of CID.

This is a report on Francis Joseph Crossan

which was done by me in November 1975.

He had cutthroat wounds, a number of cutthroat wounds,

some of them quite superficial

but some quite deep, going back to the spine.

Frank Crossan was abducted from an area known as Millfield,

at the back of what is now CastleCourt shopping centre.

A series of side streets and alleyways,

Millfield gives a short cut in and out of the city centre.

We went through every possible line of inquiry.

Those streets along that area were dark and deserted.

Nobody saw anything?

There was no-one about.

There was no-one about and that's why he was abducted.

When police carried out door-to-door enquiries on the Shankill

they say they were met with a wall of silence.

It's all right for outsiders to say, "Why don't you speak up? Why don't you do this?"

You don't know if your neighbour was involved.

You don't know what might happen to your kids.

You've got to live in the area to know and taste that fear.

So, if people had have spoken out, what would have happened?

They probably would have found themselves the victims.

It was very few people would have put their head above the parapet in those days

because you were likely to have it cut off.

People decided, there's one other alternative - go in and close the door.

These things aren't happening in our name but we don't have to be a part of it.

-Close the door and let the murders continue?

-Yes.

If you're going up a blind alley and you're going to where a victim was kidnapped and there are no witnesses,

there's no evidence, there's no clues, there's nothing to go on...

it doesn't matter how many people you have, you can only go to a certain distance.

Less than two months after Frank Crossan's murder,

Ted McQuaid and his wife were walking home from a party in the north of the city.

When they reached the bottom of the Cliftonville Road, the door of a vehicle swung open.

A man jumped out and shot Ted McQuaid in the head.

His wife could only watch as the murderers sped off into the night.

But critically, she was able to tell the police the killers escaped in a black taxi.

The police couldn't trace the taxi

and Ted McQuaid's murder was treated as just another sectarian killing.

But there were similarities with Frank Crossan's murder.

Two Catholics on their way home after a night out...

..both within the same one-mile radius of Millfield...

..and a now black taxi ferrying the gang.

A pattern was emerging.

North Belfast was a patchwork of Catholic and Protestant ghettoes,

some just one or two streets, creating dozens of interfaces and flashpoints.

During the Troubles, more murders were investigated here than anywhere else in Northern Ireland.

The patch covered right from North Street, right up the Shankill Road,

up the Ballygomartin Road,

up the Crumlin Road, right up to Ligoniel.

It was an area of approximately 15 square miles,

about 150,000 people.

Brendan Brown's family ran a Catholic social club in Millfield.

During the '70s, anyone walking through the warren of side streets and alleyways near his bar

was usually heading towards a Catholic area of north Belfast.

Protestants just wouldn't have walked round this district.

If you're wanting to kill a Catholic, it was very easy to identify one?

Yes, anybody walking round here was a taig.

Or was seen as a taig. That's just the way it was.

Thomas Quinn was the next Catholic to be abducted from Millfield.

He'd been drinking in Brendan Brown's club the night he died.

So, on that night, what were your last memories of Thomas Quinn?

Just of Tommy leaving the club to go up home

and shouting good night to him.

I actually shouted, "Good night, Titch, see you tomorrow, " and that was it.

Your brother was working for O'Kanes undertakers...

-Yes.

-..round the corner, and picked Thomas Quinn's body up.

They had the contract with the coroner to pick anybody up who had died suddenly,

and whenever he came back, we asked him, was it anybody we knew.

He says, "I've never seen the man before in my life."

-How did he not recognise him?

-Well...

The man was mangled.

-REPORTER:

-A 55-year-old road sweeper was found at this spot.

much the worse for drink one evening, he was grabbed by the gang,

bundled into a car and driven here to his death.

I remember the body lying again,

this pitiful-looking man with his throat cut.

-Cut in the same way?

-Yes.

In the Thomas Quinn murder, along the route, there had been a noise heard

of a heavy-sounding engine like a black taxi,

so then we began looking at who had black taxis

and that sort of thing, you know - a wide, wide-scale inquiry.

But there were... I think 700 or 800 black taxis

operating in the area at that time.

During the investigation, the police say William Moore's taxi

was forensically tested at least once, but they found nothing.

-Do you think at that stage you're looking for one man?

-No.

Because obviously both men had been overpowered

and taken to their place of execution, and one man couldn't have done that.

And you're trying to find out in your own head, OK, who within my patch hates Catholics that much?

A lot of people, unfortunately, at that stage.

An awful lot of names who could kill someone in such a brutal way?

There were hundreds of paramilitaries who resided in the area.

And was Murphy, or anyone like him, remotely on the radar?

-He would have been on the radar, yeah.

-Why?

Simply because, you know, he was sort of a cunning boy.

We knew he was in the UVF, but he very much kept a low profile.

There'll be no stress down here, Jim.

No, a very quiet life most of the time.

'Investigative journalist Jim Campbell

'says he spoke to loyalist leaders on the Shankill

'who said they knew precisely who was running the gang.'

I'd started writing about the Butcher gang back in the early '70s,

even before a lot of people realised

that there were serial killers on the loose.

I was picking up reports

about this man who they called a "bloody psychopath".

They, like many members of the local community, were frightened of him.

Not perhaps of what he would do himself, but what he was capable of ordering others to do.

-This was Murphy?

-Murphy, Lenny Murphy.

We couldn't publish Murphy's name at the time

because we had no proof, just as the police at that time had no proof.

But being named within journalistic circles, within loyalism?

-And within the police.

-And within the police?

Yeah, the police would have known that Lenny Murphy was the leader of the gang.

-That's not what they tell me, Jim.

-Well...

It's amazing, because most people on the Shankill Road knew Lenny Murphy,

knew what he was up to and lived in total fear of him.

Lenny Murphy was not amenable to the hierarchy in the UVF.

He kept involved in certain activities, with their approval,

and what they authorised him to do,

but when they moved into this cutthroat killings,

they became almost a renegade, breakaway group.

And I'm satisfied that the UVF hierarchy

did not know who was carrying out these murders.

-Did not know?

-Did not know, and certainly would not have given their approval.

That's a big statement to make...

Yeah.

-..for a man that bases everything on evidence.

-Yeah.

It's inconceivable, with respect, Jimmy.

It's inconceivable that in such a tight-knit community,

where everybody knows where everybody's moving,

the police didn't know and now the UVF doesn't know either.

-Inconceivable.

-A very tightly-knit circle.

No-one in the circle talked. They were too frightened to talk.

I would imagine there'd have been at least 30 or 40% of the community

who would have known who the Butchers were,

but they weren't going to name them.

These people had such a grip on the community and there was such fear, you didn't cross them.

I very often asked myself, did the leaders of the UDA and the UVF know what was going on?

Was this being done in their name? Were they allowing this to happen?

Because at that time, I was of the impression

nothing would happen in the area that they didn't sanction,

in the same way you'd say about the Provisional IRA.

You just have your own thoughts about it.

'Just over a fortnight after Thomas Quinn was murdered, a fourth butchered victim.

'Francis Rice was picked up in Millfield.

'His throat was cut.

'His body was dumped in an entry off the Shankill Road.'

Did you have any people that you were watching more closely?

No, we were no further forward.

So the Butchers were winning?

They were winning.

They were getting the headlines, and the fear that they instilled,

it affected the whole city.

-MAN:

-It has got to be stopped, one way or another.

If this goes on and if the Government allows this to go on,

basic humanity is going to break down.

Our whole civilisation is at stake here.

You've used fairly extreme language in describing these killers.

You've described them as Jack the Ripper types.

Jack the Ripper is a gruesome character in history.

To me, this is gruesome.

This is inhuman.

Bestial. It's...

The fact that people were getting picked up randomly

and usually, as far as I know,

they were all innocent people, so it wasn't as if,

I'm not involved in that, so I'm safe.

You didn't have to be anybody, you could be anybody going about your business,

That was what was so fearsome about it.

The killers were dubbed the Shankill Butchers.

It shamed the Shankill community.

It shamed it.

What's wrong with that label?

In my opinion, they shouldn't have been called the Shankill Butchers.

They were murdering thugs.

Shankill was put onto them deliberately to raise the profile

that this is happening in the Protestant community,

but that's the media's fault.

It was now three months since their first victim, and with no sign of the Shankill Butchers being caught,

reports of their sadism spread like wildfire.

There have been some very well-known teams of serial killers that have operated.

In the UK, in particular, for example, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Fred and Rosemary West.

What are your thoughts on the type of people that they were,

the type of person Lenny Murphy was?

It seems that there is a very specific hatred he had for Catholics

and he was going to do anything he could

to stop Catholics encroaching on his territory, community, whatever.

So, it is an aberrant behaviour.

The difficulty is trying to explain it.

The psychopathy or the psychopath is one explanation for it.

-There may well be others as well.

-Like what?

It may be that they could almost form themselves into an army, so they think they're defending territory,

not a legitimate army as, say, the British Army or other armies around the world,

but they have that type of mentality, that they're defending a particular area.

There was so much press about the Shankill Butchers. Do you think that empowered this gang,

drove them to kill even more?

The power aspect that individuals would have got from this would have been very high,

given the reporting levels that appeared to be at the time,

and also the amount of terror which appears to have been placed into the community by their actions

again would have given them the feelings of power.

With no sign of police catching the gang, on both sides of the community, fear intensified.

People in north Belfast now dreaded having to go out.

We never went anywhere.

After it got dark, you never, ever went anywhere on your own.

It really was the most fearful time I've ever had in my life.

When people did venture out, their greatest fear was of being approached by a black taxi.

There was one night we came out,

my brother got into the car and I went to lock the club up

and my brother shouted to me,

"Quick, Brendan, get into the effing car,"

and I jumped into the car, and as we were driving down the street,

down at the far end, down here, they had a young lad against the wall.

The black taxi was sitting... you could see half of the taxi.

The front half of it was up past the houses in Stephen Street.

One of them was shouting, "Take him over Shankill and get the knives,"

and the other one was shouting, "Shoot the Fenian bastard."

Whenever he heard the door banging and the car lights turning, he said he realised then

he was on his own and that's when he made us break the run.

Ask anybody from this district and they'll tell you they could've picked the Butchers up at any stage.

-How come?

-They knew who they were.

They could have picked them up at any stage.

People round here's of the opinion the Butchers were allowed a free hand

and nobody will convince them any different.

Although taxis were heard,

there was no number plates noticed.

You know, the registration numbers weren't taken.

It was just a black taxi.

-But Jimmy, they'd a taxi full of knives and hatchets.

-Yeah.

If I listen to some people from the Catholic community, you weren't trying to find these Butchers.

You and your men were turning a blind eye to these killers.

That's absolute nonsense.

These people were killers,

they were killing innocent, purely innocent victims,

people who were involved in nothing,

brutality, savagery, horrific killings,

and we wanted to catch them

and we put every effort that we could into catching them.

But it didn't stop Catholics being killed.

My understanding of it was that had these victims been Protestants,

this would never have been allowed to go on for as long as it did.

Basically, it said, yous are like dogs on the street.

Yous are second-class citizens, yous don't matter anyway,

this is our country, and if we want to take somebody out

and we want to cut them to pieces, that's fine, we'll do that, we have done it.

Look at us, we're getting away with it.

Some people speculated that it might have suited the security forces

to build up this tension within the two communities,

because it certainly did build up terrible tension.

Are you telling me that innocent Catholics were literally having their throats slit

and the British establishment knew who was doing it?

Yes, I firmly believe that.

The RUC Special Branch,

MI5 and Military Intelligence

had infiltrated the IRA to the highest level.

Do you mean to tell me that they weren't able to infiltrate the Shankill Butchers?

We tried everything possible to solve all murders,

no matter by whom they were carried out.

We didn't go after loyalist paramilitaries or republican paramilitaries.

We went after killers.

Jimmy Nesbitt insists no informants were able to penetrate the gang.

He's equally adamant Murphy himself

was not in any way controlled by police, army or intelligence forces.

That's utterly impossible.

-How impossible? You might not have known?

-I would have known.

Murphy certainly was in no way being controlled by anyone.

The very nature of how they work, they wouldn't have told you.

-They wouldn't have told me.

-How can you tell me it didn't happen?

I know from all the investigations over a period of months and all the rest of it.

You can read people, you get to know people and that, and Murphy was not an informant type.

He was out to commit murder

and he wasn't going to collaborate with the forces of law and order.

Luckily for the police, Lenny Murphy was about to make his first mistake.

In March '76, two women were driving along the Cliftonville Road

when they were shot at from a passing vehicle.

The gunmen abandoned their car and set it on fire on this street...

..right next to the loyalist heartland of Mount Vernon.

A witness saw a man acting suspiciously and called the police.

They searched the street and found a gun.

Next morning, with the street under surveillance,

the man came back to look for the gun and was arrested.

That man was Lenny Murphy.

Murphy was jailed for possession of a firearm with intent to endanger life.

The police might not have reckoned they'd caught the master Butcher,

but many on the Shankill did.

To the whole city's horror, the killings continued.

'Cornelius Neeson is the 25th person to have died in North Belfast this year.'

Victim number five was another Catholic, randomly targeted at night within a square mile of Millfield.

The killing bore all the hallmarks of the Shankill Butchers.

Cornelius Neeson had been hacked repeatedly to death.

Murphy remained in jail for six years.

He might not have been physically out there on the streets,

but he still called the shots.

You see, he was determined the killings would continue.

So he directed them from his prison cell.

And the man he called on to carry on the killing was William Moore.

For the Shankill Butchers, it was business as usual.

Like most teenagers, Stephen McCann wanted to get out and socialise.

When he and his sister, Delia, were old enough, they managed

to persuade their parents to allow them come to a disco here at the Queen's students' union.

I can remember taking the bus and going with friends to it.

It was very exciting to be there.

It felt like you were joining into the proper night life now out in the city, type of thing.

He'd got all new clothes that day too, hadn't he?

-He's got all new clothes...

-He was just looking forward to...

He was just bouncing. He was probably looking forward to a good night out.

He was always in the middle of everything.

He was just a very, very popular guy.

Delia, you were the last to see him?

The last of the family, yeah.

I remember talking to him in the students' union before he left.

And he had on a new duffle coat he'd bought that week

and a new shirt.

I think I admired him and off he went to the party.

That's the last time I saw him.

Got out of the car,

saw the body lying several yards up on the waste ground,

walked towards it.

I knew it was another one.

'Stephen McCann was a schoolboy, murdered on his way home from a disco.

'His death has a profound effect on the youngsters around him.'

He died from the bullet wound of the head. That went

into vital parts of the brain

and he wouldn't have survived that.

The cutthroat wound was the contributory, but less important factor.

I got up the following morning, knew nothing about anything except that

sister Sheila and my auntie Shelia was sitting at the edge of the bed.

I woke up. I remember very, very well

putting on a football boot and just chatting, "Oh, is he OK?"

Very casually. And she said, "Just stop, he's dead."

I suppose the lights went out, then, you know?

Sorry.

It's such a shocking thing to have happened.

In some ways, I think I've never been able to bear to think about it.

A horrendous experience for them.

Tragic.

A young man with his whole life in front of him

coming home from a disco.

He's suddenly taken and thrown into oblivion.

By this stage, had you narrowed down the suspects in any way?

No. No witnesses, no clues.

Nothing.

-It's extraordinary, isn't it?

-It is.

I was genuinely as shocked as anyone else when I suddenly read

the accounts and I thought,

"Hang on a second, here's some people I know. This is not what they're doing."

Psychologist Geoffrey Beattie was brought up in Ligoniel, a Protestant enclave in North Belfast.

As a youngster, he was in a gang with Jim "The Bomber" Watt,

who went on to become a peripheral member of the Shankill Butchers gang.

He wasn't that vicious.

There were people at that time

who I would describe as much, much more vicious, much harder.

Jim Watt, I couldn't have foreseen it.

If you'd given me a list of names and said to me, one of these is going to become a Shankill Butcher,

I definitely wouldn't have got it right.

You've been there, in a gang, and then, of course, as a psychologist,

you must have an understanding then of the weaker members of a gang and that leader having a massive impact?

Some of the weaker members of the gang are kind of bound into the gang partly through fear of the leader.

And what kind of fear is it? Partly fear of rejection

because you're much more vulnerable when you're on your own.

You might be uncomfortable with what you're doing at times

but the trauma of being rejected by the group might just outdo it.

So you stay part of it and you do whatever he asks.

For three months, there was a lull.

But then the cutthroat murders started up again.

I remember one of the girls saying to me, you know,

"God, did you hear they've found another body?"

And I was like "Oh, my God, you're not serious!

"That's somebody's husband or somebody's son."

And the day went on and it was on the news reports and the whole bit

and I didn't connect at all with it.

Like so many victims before him, Joseph Morrissey was abducted in the usual place - the Millfield area.

He'd been into the city centre for a few drinks and was on his way home to North Belfast.

His body was discovered in the Glencairn estate, three miles from Millfield.

He'd been dumped on the ground, right beside this kerb.

After I'd been told it was my father,

I looked over into the corner and my mother was sitting holding herself.

Rocking back and forward on the chair.

Just crying, you know.

"Jesus, not my Joe, not my Joe!"

Her Joe was gone,

you know?

And I kind of knew, just from looking at her,

that, you know, it probably would have been kinder

if God had taken her then.

Didn't speak, wouldn't wash herself,

wouldn't eat. She was pathetically thin.

Crying all the time. This wonderful, vibrant woman that we'd known,

all gone.

Everything gone.

Almost like somebody had ripped inside her body and taken out anything

that was of any value.

His eyes weren't closed properly, and that's how I knew who he was.

He had the most amazing blue eyes.

Pieces of his body had been removed.

And his nose hadn't been stitched back on properly.

He was practically decapitated.

I was very conscious when I bent down to kiss him that his head was very...

They had a steel brace coming up from the top of his spine.

And something around his neck to support his head.

And, of course, he was covered up to the chin because of the horrific injuries to his neck.

In March '77, Francis Cassidy became the latest cutthroat victim.

Just another man making his way home from the pub. This time,

the body was dumped in a different police patch.

The Butchers had now been slaughtering people for 18 months.

And the police were still no closer to catching them.

Just over a month later, though, detectives had a lead that was staring them in the face.

A kidnap victim of the Shankill Butchers survived to tell the tale.

I was going up to Cliftonville Road,

up home, and they stopped

and told me they were CID.

They said to me that I was wanted in Tennent Street.

I thought they were CID

so I went into the car with them.

On 10th May, Gerard McLaverty was on his way home around 11.30 from a friend's house.

He was abducted and taken to a building on the Shankill Road.

It had been a doctor's surgery, but was now derelict.

This white building is where Gerard was taken to.

Again, it's right here in the heart of the Shankill Road.

While ordinary people were going about their normal lives,

little did they know that Gerard would be taken in there for several hours and beaten and tortured.

Meat cleavers, pokers.

They just tortured,

tortured and tortured me.

They asked me if I wanted tea, which I said no.

They cut my wrists.

They put a boot-lace wire around my neck,

which they thought they had

already got me strangled.

In the early hours of the next morning, Gerard was dragged into an entry and left for dead.

But, somehow, he had survived.

He was rushed to hospital.

We were informed that it was an assault.

But when the detectives spoke to him

and he showed him the knife wounds,

they then immediately became very aware that this was something important.

On the morning of the 18th May 1977, we brought Gerard McLaverty

to this location here outside the BRA on the Cliftonville Road.

A week after his abduction, Gerard McLaverty

retraced his journey with two police officers from Tennent Street.

-Where are we going to now?

-Going down the Woodvale Road on to the Shankill Road.

Just about here, there were three men walking citywards

on the footpath, and Gerry McLaverty nearly jumped out of the back of the car.

He says, "See that big fat fucker in the middle? That's one of them."

The man he identified was Sam McAllister.

We drove on down to Berlin Street.

We got Gerry to keep down

and drove down the length of Berlin Street, turned the car

and come back up the Shankill Road again, countrywards.

He thought he'd seen the guy that had tried to kill him?

Yes. He was quite excited about it.

When we were coming back up, he says,

"See that boy with the white trousers, that's another one of them."

We knew him to be a man called Benjamin "Pretty Boy" Edwards.

So he identified two of them.

When we were bringing Gerry back to Tennent Street

police station, he said to us, "You see that big fat fucker?

"When he was interrogating me, he rolled up his shirt sleeve

"and he says 'Look at that, you Fenian bastard! War wound.' "

So we knew then that if McAllister had a hole in his arm, that it was a very good identification.

The police arrested McAllister at dawn the next morning and when

they checked his arms, sure enough they found the scars of two wounds.

Now, when the police lifted the floorboards of McAllister's house,

they found a six-inch steak knife and two ten-inch boning knives.

Nothing was found on them.

They'd all been meticulously cleaned.

Now, Gerry McLaverty was also able to give a description

which would have fitted Billy Moore

and we knew that he had previously owned a black taxi

and he also now owned a yellow Cortina.

And Gerry described how he'd been taken away in a yellow Cortina.

Fibres found inside the car turned out to be from the clothing of Gerard McLaverty.

So it was a case we could prove.

William Moore confessed to the kidnap of Gerard McLaverty.

But there was still no forensic links to the Shankill Butchers' other victims.

Unless somebody talked.

We had then a man admitting kidnapping Gerard McLaverty.

So to tie him in

to the other cutthroat killings,

that was another matter.

Two days later, it's 10am in the morning and Moore was questioned about the cutthroat murders.

He said. "I had nothing to do with them."

Now, at lunchtime, he was being led back to his cell when he stopped and said "Wait, I want to see you.

"I can help you.

"I know about the throat cuttings,"

he said. And then he went on,

"I don't know what to do, I'm scared."

Moore was sent back to his cell for the afternoon to think over what he had said.

We looked in on him from time to time.

It was obvious that

he was under pressure, he was beginning to wilt.

So now it's a waiting game?

Not so much wondering about it as expecting it.

May 21st, 7.35pm

and Moore is brought back into the interrogation room again.

At this point, he admits his involvement in all the throat cuttings.

Here's what he says.

"Murphy done the first three and I done the rest."

When he was asked why, he said, "It was on Murphy's instructions while Murphy was in jail.

"It was that bastard Murphy who led me into all this."

We had Murphy produced from jail to Castlereagh on a number of occasions and interviewed him.

What was he like in the interview room?

Totally dismissive. Laughed at the whole thing.

Later, we asked Moore and Bates

to consider giving evidence against Murphy.

And, in fact, they agreed to do so and they made statements naming Murphy.

But then they later retracted those statements

because of fear.

Moore, Bates and McAllister were quick to excuse their part in the murders.

They said, "We decided to go and get chips.

"We couldn't find a chippy open.

"Somebody suggested we go and get a taig."

But Murphy's three henchmen, along with eight others, did confess their involvement in the murders.

Over the next two years, they also confessed to their involvement

in the killings of 11 other people - Catholics and Protestants.

They shot five men in a bar.

They murdered two Protestant lorry men they THOUGHT were Catholics.

They killed three men during loyalist feuding.

And they murdered a 10-year-old boy when they bombed an Easter parade.

With 19 murders between them, they were, at the time, the most prolific serial killers in British history.

After you, sir.

In February 1979, the Crumlin Road courthouse in Belfast was packed to the rafters with the world's press

to hear the sentences on the Shankill Butchers.

-Bring me back, what was happening around here?

-Well, you had relatives of all the accused.

You had victims' relatives,

you had police, you had barristers.

And really, really tight security here.

I remember there were 11 of them.

They all couldn't fit into the dock.

Some of them had to sit outside here,

and on the far side.

This is where they were.

Here, they came up here. All these guys were handcuffed

when they were brought up in the dock, one by one, handcuffs taken off, take their seats.

The place was crackling with tension.

These were people who'd decided enough was enough, they were going to own up to this.

Out comes Lord Justice O'Donnell then for sentencing. What happens?

They all get to their feet.

And there's a clerk who read out all the charges.

It must have gone on for over half an hour.

"How do you plead?" "Guilty."

"How do you plead?" "Guilty."

The judge said the murders would stand as a monument to "blind sectarian bigotry".

He sentenced the gang to a total of nearly 2,000 years in prison.

But, in the naming of names, one was missing...

..Lenny Murphy.

That was the one name on everybody's lips.

That was the one name, the master Butcher,

that we couldn't name.

The judge knew who we were talking about, the barristers certainly knew who we were talking about,

the boys in the dock knew who we were talking about.

The Shankill Butchers

was a bad time for the Shankill.

These things were being done in the Protestant name.

Protestant people didn't want it, but they didn't

have the courage to stand up and say, "This is not being done in our name."

It was probably unfair to the people of the Shankill to call them the Shankill Butchers.

It sort of put a slur on the whole road, didn't it, in a way?

We don't blame people on the Shankill for what a few people did.

And I have to tell you as well,

before Stephen was buried, with all the comings and goings

were at the house, there was two ladies came and I opened the door to them.

They introduced them as two ladies from the Shankill Road.

And they didn't want to come in, they just said who they were,

where they were from and they were very sorry.

And that was one of the most touching things that happened at that time.

It meant an awful lot to us.

It really did.

I felt there was a wee bit of hope.

Three years after the trial, Murphy was released from jail.

But his own sentence - a death sentence - was only three months away.

In that time, he'd become suspected of more murders.

But, in November 1982, murder caught up with Lenny Murphy.

He was shot in Glencairn, the same estate where many of the Butchers' victims were dumped.

It was people from within Murphy's own constituency.

People who were very well known in the loyalist paramilitary underworld.

They were the people who pointed the finger at Lenny Murphy.

They were the people who gave the IRA gunmen directions to his door.

They told them where he would be at a certain time in the day, and that's how the IRA shot him.

But, even in death, the master Butcher found

enough support in his own community to put a protective ring around him.

Go over to the other side.

You're not getting any photos.

On his headstone, he was honoured as a military hero.

To this day, there are still some who would glorify the Shankill Butchers.

In 1997, with the Good Friday Agreement less than a year away,

more than 1,000 lined the streets for Robert Bates' funeral.

On her way home from work, Charlotte Morrissey was caught up in the procession.

I had to stay in my car for two and a half hours and...

there were huge wreaths.

For me it was like they were honouring some sort of a hero.

You know, and is that what people really thought about the Shankill Butchers?

Were they heroes?

I found myself trapped in the car, unable to get out or speak.

I can't tell you how I felt, but, for me, the message was, you know, he was a hero.

The man, who cut my father to pieces and tortured him for three hours, was a hero.

When William Moore died in 2009, a death notice paid tribute to him

with the same epitaph inscribed on Lenny Murphy's headstone.

My father was a soldier.

My father fought in two world wars.

They were REAL heroes.

Lenny Murphy wasn't a hero.

He was a murdering thug who got away with the most atrocious murders.

But that isn't to say there aren't people on the Shankill who possibly look at him in a different light.

As we look back now, you take a slight comfort

from the fact the Shankill Butchers and the killings were so long ago.

But how much of this sectarianism that allowed that to happen is still embedded?

Sectarianism's still very much part of both communities.

It's the cancer that we haven't dealt with.

So, when I ask you if you think something like the Shankill Butchers

-could ever happen again, unless we actually really tackle sectarianism, the answer's got to be yes?

-Yes.

19 people died at the hands of the Shankill Butchers.

Though their sadistic aim was to kill Catholics, nine who got in their way were Protestants.

Some people say they were worse than the other notorious serial killer who was on the loose at the time.

The Yorkshire Ripper said he heard voices urging him to kill.

The Shankill Butchers just heard the sound of their own hatred.

They used the troubles for what they did.

And what they did was no more than serial killing.

In a normal society, these people would be shunned by the members of their community.

On this occasion, Lenny Murphy was let loose on society, and society paid a terrible price for it.

The family was never the same again.

You could see from today, all this time later, the upset that's still...

and will still continue to cause.

It's hard to believe that there would be such...

cruelty on such a very, very deep level.

Hatred.

Hatred because, what, I'm a Catholic?

Because my father was a different religion?

A good man, a hard-working man who brought up his children to be good human beings.

And to take him and torture him and beat him and cut him and remove parts of his body?

It's beyond my comprehension, it really is.

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