The Butcher’s Boy

Lenny Murphy - Head butcher

One day a dark and malign shadow fell over the Dulwich playground. The Holyhead ferry deposited another refugee onto the mainland who, on unpacking his Pandora bag, unleashed onto Lordship Lane a slice of the province’s Troubles all of his own, a destructive swarm of mayhem that threatened us all. It was Frankie, on the run, needing somewhere to hide, the brother of a friend. That’s when we first heard the expression, ‘the Shankill Butchers.’

Frankie had been born with troubles of his own, given to inner voices and the darkest of moods; as a 14 year-old he’d stowed away on a ship and found him self up and down the Fulham Broadway in the London sun, his big mistake being to go back home where he was virtually plucked from the gangplank by the UVF or was it the UDA, and pressed into service. Little matter, the die was cast and Frankie would never again be free of his dark masters.

Running messages, flogging dope, carrying guns, driving psychos with Semtex, he was enslaved to a cause he felt nothing for, and the work he did for them combined with the storms he was born with, blew him towards his own inevitable destruction. Used and abused by them, one time he had been frogmarched out of a club leaving his family grieving that he would never return and though he did, his chest and his legs had been burned livid with cigarettes.

The Shankill Butchers specialised in vicious random brutality, plucking strangers off the streets to be treated to an evening of slicing, hacking evisceration. The pack’s leader was an ex-school bully, who in league with his own devilish brothers and a one time butcher favoured the meat man’s tools to slit throats back to the spine, to sever limbs with one swipe, or if he wanted to prolong the pleasure, two; he frequently confused Catholic with Protestant and in the end cared little who he sliced as long as the blood flowed free, the flesh and bone was cleaved and the maw of lust stuffed and satisfied.

After a protracted period of terror with around 30 murders, torture, involving teeth pulling and skinning alive (a woman reported hearing a man screaming, “Kill me, kill me"), the gang foolishly left one victim alive who had them all arrested.

The Butchers, all except its psychopathic, school bully boss, went down for 42 life sentences in the end, and life was intended to mean life, except it didn’t and most walked free under the Good Friday Agreement. The boss bully, as bullies often do, escaped justice entirely but met it in a more appropriate style when he was himself gunned down by IRA bullets one night, his old enemies partnered as they were by the UDA in an unholy alliance, such was the sickness that ordinary mass murderers both side of the divide had begun to feel for those who simply enjoyed slaughter. And it’s hard not to feel that the IRA for once did something right that night, but that perhaps they might have lingered with their brutality and involved his own knives, lest maybe he might have got some final kick out of that too.

But before the Butchers’ own dismemberment, whatever Frankie was up to, they’d booked him on their list of hate and God alone knows what terrors and wild imaginings he carried with him as he ran for his life.

Only temporarily lost in the lights of South London he brought with him the dark malignance of Belfast like it was clamped to his back. There were rumours of guns; wherever he went spontaneous fights broke out, pub tables would be overturned, dirty deals done, hospitalities abused. Initially the crazies of Dulwich hung on to his tales, plied him with drinks, harked to his yarns about cutting edge and blood splatter, they all fanned up their own puny flames and he made them shiver with vicarious delight, but then when the reality of day set in and the drink had left them, whenever Frankie was spied in the distance they would cross Lordship Lane and duck into doorways away from him, and even the London branch of his own family lay low when he visited because nothing good ever came of it. For his sister, indelibly close to him, this was sharp agony because she of all of them clung to the memory of the warm boy that once inhabited the damaged man. 

Frankie went home one time too many, kept his date with destiny and was flung from a hotel balcony to be shattered on the road below. Was it the UDA, was it the IRA or just another country? Could it have even been MI5 who launched him into the great infinity and laughed as the broken bird fell? All the factions had been lurking in the shadows that night and they all had a motive to snuff poor Frankie out, who was in the end almost resigned to his fate, doomed from the start. No one will ever know who actually did it and maybe no one ever should; those murky waters settled and couldn’t be stirred ever without healing hearts breaking all over again.