The Shankill Butchers: The Real Story of Cold-Blooded Mass Murder - Softcover

Dillon, Martin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415922313 ISBN 13: 9780415922319

Publisher: Routledge, 1999

Synopsis

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

About this title

About the Author:

Martin Dillon is a native of Belfast although educated in England. He lived in France for a time and returned to Northern Ireland to work as a journalist with the Irish News before joining the Belfast Telegraph. He also worked as a freelance journalist for several national newspapers and American periodicals. In 1973 he wrote Political Murder in Northern Ireland which is regarded as the definitive study of political assassination in Northern Ireland. His second book, Rogue Warrior of the SAS, is a biography of the Second World War hero, Lt. Col. Robert Blair Mayne, and is published by Arrow. The Shankill Butchers which was a bestseller in both Ireland and Britain was the first in his trilogy of books about Northern and Southern Ireland. Martin Dillon has written plays for BBC radio and television and has been Editor in Northern Ireland of many of the BBC's programmes in the area of current affairs. He now works for the BBC History Unit in London.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A chilling, stomach-turning study of Northern Ireland's infamous Shankill Butchers, a Loyalist gang of murderers who preyed on Belfast's Catholic population. Investigative journalist Dillon, who published this account a decade ago in Great Britain, describes the bloody handiwork of the Shankill Butchers. Operating out of Protestant West Belfast, the Butchers were members of a Loyalist paramilitary group (the Ulster Volunteer Force, or UVF), and were led by a sadistic, anti-Catholic psychopath named Lenny Murphy. Murphy would become ``the biggest mass murderer in British history,'' according to Dillon, who details Murphy's journey from schoolyard bully to petty criminal to cold-blooded serial killer. Dillon argues that Northern Ireland's toxic atmosphere of sectarian hatreds played a crucial role in producing Murphy, who used anti-Catholic ideology as a convenient cover for his sadistic love of violence. He murdered his first Catholic in 1972, beginning a killing spree that would last a decade. Accompanied by three gang members, Murphy would typically drive through Catholic areas of Belfast at night. Once a potential victim (usually a drunken man) had been located, Murphy would abduct him, torture him, and cut his throat with a butcher knife. Murphy visibly enjoyed killing Catholics, and Dillon's graphic descriptions of several murders make for gruesome reading. (Murphy typically ``hacked through his victim's throat until the knife touched the spine'' or ``until the head was almost severed from the trunk.'') Dillon also reproduces autopsy and police reports that will have queasy readers skipping over the gory details. The Butchers proved difficult to catch because the public of Northern Ireland were accustomed to shocking levels of sectarian violence and generally refused to cooperate with police. The Butchers were finally caught when one of their Catholic victims miraculously survived, and had the courage to testify against them. Murphy was murdered in 1982 by the Irish Republican Army, his sworn enemy. A notably depressing read that exposes the horror of Northern Ireland's history. (21 b&w photos) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0415922313
• ISBN 13: 9780415922319
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 316