Shankill Butcher death revives grim memories

The death in Belfast last weekend of William Moore briefly revived faded memories of one of the most chilling periods in the North's bloody history.

The 60-year-old's sudden death brought an end to the life of one of the principal figures in the notorious Shankill Butchers gang, who abducted their victims and then mercilessly hackedthem to death.

Along with the terrorist dubbed the Master Butcher, Lenny Murphy, and Robert 'Basher' Bates, Moore frequently controlled and organised the wave of killings perpetrated by the gang of Ulster Volunteer Force members who trawled north Belfast looking for Catholic victims to torture and near decapitate.

When Moore was given 14 life sentences in February 1979 for his roles in the abductions and murders of 19 Catholics, Mr Justice O'Donnell said there was no reason whatever, apart from terminal illness, why he should ever be released.

Just under 20 years later, Moore was freed under the prisoner release conditions accompanying the Good Friday Agreement and faded into anonymity in the UVF-dominated Mount Vernon housing estate in north Belfast.

On Moore's release in August 1998, Charlie Neeson, the brother of one of his victims, said he and his psychopathic associates should never have been freed.

"They are animals. None of them should see the light of day. They tortured innocent people and killed them in the most evil ways," he said.

Cornelius Neeson was typical of the Butcher gang's 19 victims.

In August 1976, he was returning from a bingo club when he was waylaid by Moore and another thug, Sam McAllister, not far from the centre of Belfast, and beaten to death.

His brutal murder may have been less prolonged than some of his fellow victims, who were bundled into a black taxi used by the gang and taken to a disused dental surgery or a tacky social club where they were hacked to pieces for hours, sometime before their throats were sliced open and they finally bled to death.

Incredibly, one man, Gerard McLaverty, survived abduction and torture by the gang and when he was sufficiently recovered from his ordeal to assist police he was driven around the Shankill Road area with the then-RUC Detective Chief Inspector Jimmy Nesbitt and managed to pick out a number of the men who had tried to murder him.

His identifications gave Nesbitt and his team of detectives the vital evidence they needed to arrest those they already suspected of the gruesome murders which had shocked Belfast and far beyond.

Lenny Murphy escaped the arrest operations, simply because he had been jailed in 1977 for possessing weapons owned by the UVF. Six years later, while the other principals in the gang were enjoying the relaxed regime of the Maze Prison, the IRA assassinated Murphy.

Bates survived life outside prison for a relatively short period of time.

Released earlier than Moore, in recognition of his dedicated work to produce books in Braille, he was shot dead in 1997 in revenge for the stabbing of another loyalist in a pub in 1977.

Moore, too, is believed to have been involved in that fatal stabbing.

A former meat factory worker, Moore was suspected of stealing a range of large knives and meat cleavers from his former workplace which became the gruesome tools of the Butcher gang.

A 21-year-old student, a seaman, a father of 13, and a Catholic recently returned from living in New Zealand for 15 years were among the victims snatched from the streets after Moore and Bates had consumed quantities of alcohol at a dingy loyalist social club in the Shankill area.

Merely being suspected of being a Catholic was sufficient reason for the alcohol-fuelled Butcher gang to strike.

At his trial, Moore pleaded guilty to 11 counts of murder. His crimes, Lord Justice Turlough O'Donnell said, merited a sentence of life meaning life.

But politics intervened and that proved not to be the case.