The Shankill Butchers were a gang of sectarian killers, chilling even by the standards of Ulster’s Troubles in the 1970s. A band of Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) fanatics, they earned their nickname for the way they mutilated their victims. Based in the Shankill Road, the Belfast heartland of the loyalist paramilitaries, they cruised streets and back alleys looking for Catholics who they kidnapped and then beat, tortured and killed, slashing their throats and sometimes virtually decapitating them with butcher’s knives and cleavers or suspending their victims from meat hooks.
Protected by their reputation and the fear surrounding their leader, a sadistic sectarian killer called Lenny Murphy, 11 members of the gang were eventually convicted of killing 19 people. The final figure may have been as high as 30 and many more would have died but for Detective Chief Inspector Jimmy Nesbitt, regarded as the most professional detective in the Royal Ulster Constabulary. He accrued more commendations than any other UK police officer.
The leader of a small, hard-pressed murder squad based in the centre of Belfast, Nesbitt, was in bed at home one morning in November 1975 when he was called to a body found in an alley. Francis Crossan, a 38-year-old Catholic, was the first of the gang’s victims. He had been kidnapped, beaten in the back of a taxi and dumped in an alley where Murphy hacked at his head until it was almost severed.
Nesbitt and his men were already veterans of the gathering violence of the Troubles. They had solved 101 of the 132 murders committed over the previous two years, but Crossan’s death was savagely different. Nesbitt told his officers: “We’re dealing with someone more brutal than the average terrorist and we’d better get him.”
For three years Nesbitt stalked the gang. A quiet and unassuming man, often casually dressed with a cigarette between his lips, he was sometimes taken for a journalist rather than the best detective in Northern Ireland.
Advertisement
Although he and his men worked 18-hour shifts, seven days a week, they struggled to break the wall of silence protecting the gang. They faced accusations of failing to catch the gang because they were Protestants, which Nesbitt angrily rejected. He said, “We were professional detectives. If people are being murdered you give everything to catch the killers. We weren’t interested in the religion of who was killed. The religion part only came into it because it provided us with a motive.”
He had nothing but contempt for the Shankill Butchers, who he described as “resolute and savage”. They were so warped in their views, he said, that when they killed two Protestants by mistake they then perversely planned to shoot six Catholics in “retaliation”.
Murphy — who killed a fellow paramilitary in prison and murdered another in front of his men — was jailed for 12 years for arms offences but continued to mastermind the attacks. By then, the police had built up a huge amount of intelligence; Nesbitt recalled that it was “like a big balloon waiting to burst and we just needed the breakthrough to put everything into place”.
That moment came when one of the victims, Gerard Laverty, a 24-year-old Catholic, survived an attack but was barely alive. Eight days after his ordeal, Laverty was persuaded by Nesbitt to leave his hospital bed to go to the Shankill Road to see if he could spot his attackers. Nesbitt picked the day of the local government elections when many people would be out on the streets. Sitting in the back of an unmarked car, Laverty picked out two men.
Nesbitt and his men had the evidence they needed. In 1979 11 members of the gang were given 42 life sentences totalling 2,000 years in jail. Murphy, who was still in prison, escaped any charges, much to Nesbitt’s intense regret — but he was eventually ambushed, shot and killed by the IRA.
Advertisement
Thomas James Nesbitt was born in 1934 in Belfast. His father was an electrician and the family lived in a middle-class area of north Belfast, not far from the cockpit of violence where Nesbitt later worked. A bright intelligent boy, he was educated at Belfast Technical High School. His parents harboured hopes he would go to university but Nesbitt had other ideas: “I simply wanted to get out into the world and make something of myself. I was itching to do something exciting.”
He left school to work for a linen company as a salesman with the promise of travel. When that dream collapsed he turned to policing. As a boy he read everything he could about detective work and pored over the newspaper reports of murder trials. In 1957 he joined the RUC with the aim of becoming a detective. His baptism of fire was swift. His first posting was to the sleepy border village of Swatragh, Co Londonderry at a time when the IRA was mounting cross-border attacks. On his first night the post was raided and the RUC man next to him was shot. Nesbitt stayed cool, returned fire and repulsed the attackers.
By the early 1970s, as a detective inspector, he was heading the ten-man murder squad at Tennent Street police station in Belfast. It covered a population of 150,000 and 15 square miles — including hardline loyalist and republican areas — and was the target for attacks by paramilitaries of all colours. The murder squad had a backlog of unsolved cases and was dogged by internal bickering. Nesbitt, a tough detective who led from the front and would take on the most menial tasks, rebuilt its morale. In one weekend in 1974 his team were faced with nine sectarian murders.
His squad eventually solved 250 out of more than 310 killings. In the early 1980s Nesbitt was promoted to RUC headquarters as a detective superintendent. When he left the police he had 67 commendations, a record. Each night he returned home to his wife Marion and his two sons Mark and James and devotedly followed the fortunes of the Crusaders football team.
Advertisement
Years later he still remembered all the victims, including the last , who was a Protestant killed by loyalists who had mistaken him for a Catholic. He was on his way home with a doll he had bought for his three-year-old daughter who was ill. Nesbitt said he looked for clues from the men he interviewed in the “darkness of their eyes”. He recalled the UVF man who told him that killers went on killing so that the details became a blur. But Nesbitt felt the constant pain of dealing with the relatives: “There were times when it hit me hard, not simply seeing the bodies but witnessing the heartbreak and tragedy of the living.”
James Nesbitt, MBE, police officer, was born on September 29, 1934. He died after a short illness on August 25, 2014, aged 79