Lenny Murphy
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Hugh Leonard Thompson Murphy, who commonly went by the name Lenny Murphy (March 2, 1952 - November 16, 1982), was a loyalist paramilitary from Belfast, Northern Ireland who was the leader of the Shankill Butchers. Although never convicted of murder, Murphy is known to have killed numbers of people through his own actions, and to have ordered the deaths of many more.
Early life
Murphy was born in Belfast, the youngest of three sons. He logged his first conviction at the age of twelve for theft.
After leaving school when he was sixteen he joined the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), a loyalist paramilitary group.
Murphy had a fanatical hatred of Roman Catholics and like many loyalists, believed that because the republican paramilitary groups such as the Provisional Irish Republican Army were comprised of Catholics, that all Catholics had the same views. It has been suggested that Murphy's visceral loathing of Catholics may have stemmed from his own family being suspected of having recent Catholic ancestry.
In his book The Shankill Butchers, Irish writer Martin Dillon suggests that Murphy was involved in the torture and murder of four Catholic men as early as 1972.
First crimes
On September 28, 1972, a man named William Pavis was shot dead at his home by loyalists because he was alleged to have sold firearms to the IRA. Murphy was arrested for this crime along with an accomplice, Mervyn Connor.
They were held in prison together but before the trial, Connor was killed by cyanide in his cell after writing a suicide note in which he confessed to the crime and exonerated Murphy. It was apparent that Connor had been forced to write the note before being forcibly fed the cyanide by Murphy, but there was not enough evidence to charge him. The case against Murphy for the murder of Pavis subsequently collapsed.
By 1975, Murphy was twenty-three and back on the streets of Belfast. He was married with a daughter (he was to father six children in all) but spent much of his time drinking in the bars of the loyalist Shankill Road. With his brother William he soon formed a feared gang of more than twenty men that would become known as the Shankill Butchers, one of his lieutenants being William Moore.
The gang is believed to have killed four Catholics during a robbery in October 1975 and over the next few months began to abduct, torture and murder Catholics they dragged off the streets late at night, Murphy hacking the victim's throats open with a butcher's knife. They killed three Catholic men this way and shot dead three others. None of the victims had any connection to the IRA or any other republican group.
The Butchers were also involved in the murder of Noel Shaw, a loyalist from a rival UVF unit, who had shot dead Butcher gang-member Archie Waller in Downing Street, off the Shankill Road, in November 1975. Four days before his death, Waller had been involved in the abduction and murder of the Butchers' first cut-throat victim, Francis Crossan.
Shaw's kangaroo-court sentence, one day after Waller's death, consisted of a vicious beating and pistol-whipping by Murphy while the accused was strapped to a chair in full view of the Butcher gang, followed by a hail of bullets from Murphy. His body was later dumped in a back street off the Shankill.
It is believed that Murphy was despised and feared by those higher up in the UVF because he was out of control. The manner in which he tortured and killed his victims by a slow painful death, which included jumping on the bodies after they were dead, sickened many, even in a society accustomed to extreme violence.
Imprisonment
On March 13, 1976, Murphy shot and injured a young Catholic woman. He was arrested and charged with attempted murder but was able to plea bargain whereby he was allowed to plead guilty to the lesser charge of a firearms offence, and received twelve years' imprisonment. He was a suspect in the Shankill Butcher murders and, to divert suspicion, relayed orders from prison, through his brothers, to the rest of the gang to continue their murders.
The Shankill Butchers, now under the operational command of William Moore, went on to kill and mutilate at least three more Catholics before they were arrested in May 1977 and, in 1979, imprisoned.
Many confessed to their crimes; however, although they named Murphy as the godfather, they retracted those parts of their statements in fear of Murphy and his brothers. Murphy was questioned once again about the Butcher murders but refused to co-operate.
The total of sentences handed down to the gang at Belfast Crown Crown was the longest in British criminal history.
Death
On completing his sentence for the firearms charge, Lenny Murphy walked out of the Maze prison in July 1982. During his term inside, he had kept his head down and acted as a model prisoner to ensure he was freed as early as possible.
After his release, it is believed that Murphy killed three more people over the next six months, including a partly-disabled man beaten to death on the very day that Murphy returned to the Shankill.
On November 16, 1982, aged 30, Murphy was shot and killed by the IRA in the Glencairn area of the upper Shankill. Coincidentally, he was cut down in a hail of bullets just around the corner from where the bodies of many of the Butchers' cut-throat victims had been dumped.
The IRA claimed responsibility, and according to RUC reports, the UVF provided the IRA hit team with the details of Murphy's habits and movements, which allowed them to assassinate him at that particular location.
Another line of inquiry ends at UFF commander James Craig, who saw Murphy as a serious threat to his widespread racketeering and provided the IRA with key information on Murphy's movements. Craig was later executed by his comrades for "treason"
References
- The Shankill Butchers', Martin Dillon, 1989 ISBN 0-415-92231-3
- Crime Library's Through a Veil of Blood and Tears article