The Shankill Butchers

by Martin Dillon

  There was no intervention from the Brown Bear team on McAllister’s behalf when it was known that he was to be punished. One might speculate as to whether he would ever have had to face a kangaroo court if Lenny Murphy had been a free man. There was certainly no question of Mr A. making representations. His chosen role was to make Lenny’s thoughts known to the Brown Bear unit and provide practical assistance for their implementation. Moore would not have had the courage nor the authority to stand up to the UVF leadership and it is likely that he was warned by Mr A. not to interfere. Mr A. preferred, as had Lenny, to keep a distance from the leadership to prevent the gang’s activities becoming known.

  However, this was not the only confrontation the Brown Bear unit had with the UDA, though after the killing of Easton and the reaction of the leadership, they learned a salutary lesson.

  ‘I’m away down here, kid. I’ll see you about.’ These were the parting words of thirty-year-old James Curtis Banks Moorehead to a girlfriend as he left the Rumford Street Social Club on the Shankill Road at 10.00 P.M. on 29 January 1977. He had spent several hours in the club drinking and dancing with a girl he had known for one year, seventeen-year-old Margaret Benson, who later told police that Moorehead was regularly seen in Shankill Road clubs. On the night in question he was drinking for part of the evening with friends. Moorehead was a leading staff officer in the Ulster Defence Association and was known to be a man who could look after himself in a difficult situation. Jim Craig, a leader of the UDA in West Belfast, remembers seeing Moorehead that evening and says that he was in ‘good spirits’. Such a statement could be interpreted literally because Moorehead was slightly intoxicated when Craig left the Rumford Club before 10.00 P.M. Moorehead was known locally as ‘the nigger’ because of his dark complexion. He always dressed in flamboyant style and on the night in question he was wearing a pinstripe suit with matching waistcoat and shirt and dark boots with cowboy heels.

  At 5.15 A.M. on 31 January a lorry driver was examining the engine of his vehicle when he saw the body of a man lying nearby on wasteground close to Adela Street near Carlisle Circus. The first policeman to arrive on the scene was Sergeant Robert Trevor McFarland who remembers seeing the body of a well-built man, five feet seven inches in height, lying on his back, his shirt pulled out of his trousers, his stomach bare and his jacket missing. Sergeant McFarland examined the body for signs of life and found it was cold and rigid. There was no sign of a struggle but there were marks which showed that the body had been dragged for a distance of twelve feet. Fragments of skull were lying close to the body. The deceased displayed multiple injuries to the head and face, and the middle of the forefinger of his right hand was missing.

  Moorehead had in fact been killed in the Shankill area and his body dumped in the district covered by D Division. Murphy and his gang often did this to bring investigation under the aegis of D Division and, because of the proximity of the body to the Nationalist New Lodge Road, dupe the Division into believing the killing to be the work of the Provisional IRA. No one, not even Jimmy Nesbitt, was to deduce this killing to be the work of the Butchers until some of them were finally apprehended. This method of dumping the body of a Protestant close to a Catholic area was a cunning ploy, though on this occasion there was a flaw.

  The UDA carried out its own investigation and handed privately to detectives in C Division a list of men they believed might have murdered Moorehead. None of the Butchers was on the list though it confirmed that Moorehead had probably been killed by members of another Loyalist paramilitary organization, namely the UVF.

  When Moorehead left the Rumford Street club on the night of 29 January he had gone in search of Jim Craig. The first place he visited was the Long Bar. Craig was not there but was drinking in the Bayardo Bar, also on the Shankill Road. Loyalist paramilitaries tend to frequent most of the bars and clubs in the Shankill district, though one or two are favoured mostly by either the UVF or UDA. Moorehead made his way to the Windsor Bar, knowing it to be a UVF haunt but not thinking that by going there he was placing himself in jeopardy. A quick glance round the Windsor Bar told him that Craig was not present, so he decided to use the toilet facilities before leaving.

  Unknown to Moorehead there were three men drinking at the bar, commenting on his presence and taking a decision to kill him. The three were Bates, McAllister and Moore. Their on-the-spot decision to kill a man whom they did not know personally can only be attributed to blood lust. Bates’s account of what later transpired illustrates the gang’s propensity for sudden violence when under Moore’s influence:

  I was in the Windsor Bar drinking and talking to a number of people in the bar. During the evening I was watching ‘Match of the Day’ on television with three or four other people. While we were watching the match a fellow walked into the bar and through to the toilets at the back. I didn’t know him and nobody said anything to him. When he went out to the back, somebody said, ‘There’s your man, the nigger’. One fellow who was drinking in my company went out to the toilets after him. We then heard a commotion like there was a fight. I went out to the toilet and saw the fellow had Nigger in an armlock from the back. Nigger was struggling but couldn’t free himself. Another fellow I was drinking with came into the toilet with me. The fellow who was holding Nigger told us to get something to hit him with and the fellow who was with me went into the bar and brought out a big spanner and a knife. He took these into the toilet and closed the door. I was told to stay on the outside and make sure no one went into the toilet. After about two minutes they opened the toilet door and I went in. I saw Nigger lying on the floor and there was blood everywhere. He was lying on his stomach with his head to the side. I was handed the big spanner and told to hit Nigger with it. I hit him one blow which I think hit him on the shoulder. Altogether the three of us hit him to make sure we were all in on it. We all came out of the toilet and closed the door leaving Nigger lying on the floor. I just knew he was dead at this time.

  The man who entered the toilets and held Moorehead was Sam McAllister; because of his huge frame he was considered by Moore to be capable of restraining Nigger, who was known to be a strong fighter. Bates does not describe the conversation before they decided to kill Moorehead because it was brief and to the point. McAllister was simply told to apprehend the stranger. I believe that this sudden and violent reaction was precipitated by the presence of a man who presented a threat to Moore merely by reason of his physical appearance. Another possibility may have been the racist nickname ‘Nigger’ which made Moorehead less than human in the eyes of William Moore. Moorehead was not killed because he was a member of the UDA. In fact, his membership of the UDA would have guaranteed him immunity in all Loyalist clubs and bars. Bates, in his statement, tries to minimize his role in the murder but it is obvious from the pathologist’s report that the injuries to Moorehead were extensive. There were eighteen lacerations to the scalp and a knife wound to the throat, which did not cause death. There were multiple wounds all over the trunk and limbs attributable to blows with feet and fists. A butcher’s knife was not used by Moore on this occasion but instead the type of wooden-handled knife used to cut sandwiches in a bar. Death was due to blows to the skull, most of which penetrated deep into the brain.

  McAllister and Moore were never charged with this killing. Silence on the subject of the murder was ensured by Moore, as had been the case when Murphy led the gang, by the insistence on all three members of the unit playing a part in the killing. When they left the toilet, they walked casually to the bar, their clothes spattered with blood, and ordered drinks. Ten minutes later Moore ordered the other drinkers on the premises to go home and the barman to lock up. Moore, Bates and McAllister continued to watch ‘Match of the Day’ and when it finished Moore suggested that they move the body and wash out the toilet. First, they removed Moorehead to the rear yard of the Windsor Bar and left the body uncovered. They then cleaned both the toilet and hallway through which they had dragged the body to the yard. They all went hom
e with instructions from Moore to return to the Windsor the following day, Sunday, to dispose of the corpse. They did not take the trouble to establish whether Moorehead was actually dead but were content to assume that he was. The following morning they met up again and Bates learned – for the first time, he claims – that ‘Nigger’s’ real name was Moorehead. The three spent that Sunday drinking in the Windsor Bar. Bates later described how they took turns to go out to the yard to make sure that ‘Moorehead was still there’. I find this both strange and macabre. Rigor mortis had already set in, causing the right arm of the corpse to remain pointing upwards from the elbow. In the event, no one was likely to have moved the body, since the rear yard entrance was locked and no one in the bar had any reason to visit it. Just before midnight Moore and his two accomplices loaded the corpse into a car and proceeded to Adela Street to dump it so that the police would asssume it was an IRA murder of a Loyalist.

  On 2 February Joseph Morrissey left his home on the Antrim Road to meet a friend in Belfast city centre. Morrissey, a fifty-two-year-old Catholic who lived alone, frequently drank in the bars and clubs of Nationalist areas though he had no personal interest in politics. Morrissey was unemployed and his drinking activities relieved the day-long boredom of his life. Around 2.30 P.M. on 2 February Morrissey met his close friend Gerard O’Neill, whom he had known for thirty years, in Mooney’s Bar in Corn Market. Mooney’s was an attractive bar, frequented by people of various ages and social backgrounds. It had gained a reputation for selling the best Guinness in town and it offered tempting plates of fresh oysters. Lenny Murphy was known to have frequented Mooney’s when he chose to play his man-about-town role. O’Neill and Morrissey were commencing a pub crawl, leaving Mooney’s at around 3.30 P.M. for the Cosmo Bar a little distance away in Lower North Street. At 6.00 P.M. they proceeded to the Glenshesk Bar and from there to the National Club in Berry Street, where they remained listening to a band in the entertainment area of the club before returning to the club’s main bar.

  According to O’Neill, Morrissey and he left the National Club around twenty minutes after midnight. O’Neill recalls that Joe Morrissey was not drunk when they went their separate ways and during the day they had ‘had no arguments with other people’. Two others had seen Morrissey and O’Neill that night in the National Club. Paul Calwell, who had been playing snooker there, remembers seeing them and confirms that Morrissey was ‘not drunk by any means’. Calwell offers his own description of Morrissey. ‘When I left Joe, he appeared to be in good health. He was wearing a blue-and-grey-striped pullover with a rectangular button area at the top. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles and a small silver-coloured ring with a stone in it.’ Patrick Hatton also observed Morrissey in the National Club but considered that by midnight Morrissey was ‘rightly’, in other words quite drunk. One can assume that as Morrissey had been drinking since 2.30 P.M., and had not eaten that evening, he would have been intoxicated, though not necessarily so drunk that his physical behaviour or speech would have been erratic.

  On leaving the National Club, Morrissey set off on foot towards the Antrim Road where he lived. It was a journey which took him along Belfast’s main central thoroughfare, Royal Avenue, past North Street and into Upper Donegall Street, passing the spot where Rice had been abducted.

  Three members of the ‘Butcher’ Gang – Moore, McClay and McAllister – were also drinking that night in the Lawnbrook, where many of their crimes were planned. They were discussing the idea of killing a Catholic, a course of action advocated by William Moore. At midnight the three men left the Lawnbrook and climbed into Moore’s Cortina, with Moore at the wheel. They took the route favoured by Murphy which led to the Upper Donegall Street/Upper Library Street area. Around 12.25 A.M. they were passing St Patrick’s Chapel in Upper Donegall Street when Moore saw a man walking along the pavement in the direction of Carlisle Circus and the Antrim Road. It was Joseph Morrissey. Moore stopped the car and told McAllister and McClay to run across the road and intercept Morrissey while he turned the car to bring it alongside the victim. This manoeuvre was cut short by Moore who ‘swung the car round’ to bring it alongside the pavement. McClay and McAllister had run towards Morrissey but Morrissey stood his ground when he saw them. McClay was armed with a hatchet. A fierce struggle ensued, during which McClay hit his victim with the hatchet several times until he felled him. As Moore’s car reached the pavement adjacent to them, Morrissey rose from the ground and began struggling. McAllister and McClay dragged him into the rear of the Cortina and as the car doors closed McClay struck his victim again with the hatchet.

  Moore drove the car into Royal Avenue, turning right into North Street and from there to Peter’s Hill and up the Shankill Road to Mr A.’s house. Moore went in and informed Mr A. that he had a Catholic in his car. Morrissey had not even been asked his religion, but Moore was convinced that he was a Catholic simply because of the area in which he had been walking. Moore told Mr A. that he had a butcher’s knife in the car but that he needed a pistol. Mr A., however, said that he did not have a gun available and that Moore should rely on using the knife. When Moore returned to his car Morrissey was undergoing torture by McAllister and McClay, with McAllister cutting Morrissey with the knife while McClay held him down in the rear seat. It was the same technique as had been used on McCann, telling the victim that he was about to die while relatively superficial incisions were being made on his neck and face. The facial cuts were made in a transverse direction and this gruesome treatment continued until the car reached the car park opposite the community centre at Forthriver Road in the Glencairn Housing Estate. Morrissey was now ‘quiet and making no noises’, according to Moore.

  In the car park Morrissey was dragged out of the Cortina and dropped on the ground. Moore took the knife from McAllister and set to work. As Moore finished cutting his victim’s throat, McClay handed him the hatchet and Moore then attempted to sever the head from the body with several blows. Moore was demonstrating that he could now kill someone with a knife while the victim was still alive, thus proving himself the natural successor to Lenny Murphy.

  The three killers drove back to Mr A.’s house and informed him of what they had done. Moore’s clothes were soaked in Morrissey’s blood and he borrowed a pair of trousers from Mr A. and washed his shoes. After leaving the hatchet and knife in the yard of Mr A.’s house, the killers made their way home in Moore’s car. At 2.35 A.M. Police Constable Alfred Mullen, an observer in a Police Mobile Patrol in the Forthriver area, saw someone lying on the ground near the Community Centre. His torch lit up the mutilated body of Joseph Morrissey. By the time Detective Constable Samuel Wark arrived at the scene the blood from Morrissey’s wounds had been washed away by heavy rain and had flowed into the stream running along Forthriver Road.

  The autopsy report of the State Pathologist, Dr Thomas Marshall, provides a grim account of the brutalization of Joseph Morrissey. I gave serious thought to whether to reproduce the material in this report but decided that it was necessary in order to describe adequately the severity of the attack on Morrissey and the extent of his torture. Statements later made by the three killers fail to indicate the extent of the horror and suffering which they inflicted on an innocent man. The pathologist’s report is as follows:

  This man was healthy. There was no natural disease to accelerate death. The first rib had been fractured some time in the past and it had healed with some deformity.

  He had sustained numerous blunt force injuries. There were eight separate lacerations scattered all over the scalp and another on the left side of the forehead. There were linear, V-shaped, cruciate and arcuate and they could have been caused by a hatchet. One of the wounds to the scalp, above the right side of the forehead, was associated with a subjacent fracture of the left side of the skull. Two more lacerations were situated under the right lower jaw and there were a further two lacerations on the left side of the neck, below the left angle of the jaw. These four lacerations were transverse and the two on the left
were associated with fractures of the left side of the lower jaw with teeth torn out. These injuries could also have been caused by a hatchet. There were numerous injuries on the back of the left upper limb obviously sustained in an attempt to defend himself and some of these could have been caused by the blade of a sharp hatchet. There was a wound across the little finger side of the forearm as clean-cut as an incision but associated in its depths with a fracture of the ulna bone. Another incision-like wound across the base of the fore and middle fingers was associated with fractures of two finger bones and the crushing of a ring on the middle finger. There was also a bruised laceration on the back of the forefinger and two abrasions with some bruising on the back of the ring finger. Some bruises and abrasions scattered on the front of the left leg and slight abrasion on the front of the right leg were by comparison, trivial. They could have been caused in a fall or a scuffle.

  The other injuries on the body were incisions of a type made by a sharp knife. There were seventeen incisions, some of them superficial but many long and deep, across the face mainly in a transverse direction. The forehead bone and the nasal cartilages were found incised in the depths of two of these. Another of the incisions opened up the mouth cavity. Across the front of the neck, just above the voice box, there was a gaping incision about seven inches long. It extended down to the spine and the cartoid artery and the jugular vein at each side of the neck was severed. The incision had been made by at least four cuts and something like a hatchet had also struck there because there was a crushed spinal vertebra in the depths of the wound. A short superficial incision lay above the inner end of the collar bone. On the left upper limb, along with the defence wounds already mentioned, there were some defence incisions. Four were situated on the back of the upper half of the forearm, another crossed the back of the hand and the bones in its depths were incised and there were four superficial incisions on the back of the ring finger.