Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [192]
On 1 September, a PIRA front group murdered five Protestants at the Tullyvallen Guiding Star Orange Lodge in Newtownhamilton. Seventy-year-old farmer William Ronald McKee and his forty-year-old son James died, alongside eighty-year-old retired farmer John Johnston. As the ceasefire ended, loyalist gunmen killed six Catholics living in remote rural areas. On 4 January 1976 masked UVF gunmen burst into a party the O’Dowd family were having around their piano. Three male O’Dowds were shot dead, their bodies collapsing on several children aged under ten. Fifteen minutes later three brothers in the O’Reavey family were killed by the UVF as they watched television. The next day PIRA terrorists stopped a bus carrying ten Protestant workmen home at Kingsmill, South Armagh. They identified one Catholic, the bus driver, and set him aside, before mowing down the remaining nine, their bodies left amid pools of blood and half-eaten sandwiches. The only survivor had been hit by eighteen rounds as he crawled away.
Late 1975 also saw the advent of a UVF unit so ferocious that it was a law unto itself as fellow terrorists were afraid of it. One group to reflect on in what follows are the detectives and forensic scientists who had to cope with the bloody aftermath of what these men did. Thousands of these policemen have never been properly compensated for the traumatising scenes they had to witness—the effects on them including alcoholism, divorce and suicide. The forensic reports were usually so long that it is impossible to quote fully what amount to serial atrocities on the human body.
Hugh ‘Lenny’ Murphy was a slight man with dark wavy hair and smiling blue eyes. As a child he had extorted money from schoolfellows by threatening them with his elder brothers. Murphy hated Catholics, although with names like Hugh and Murphy (which is why he preferred ‘Lenny’) he was often teased as a ‘Mick’ because he was the son of a lapsed Catholic who had married his strenuously Protestant mother—in further illustration that this was not Birmingham, Alabama. The schoolboy name-calling did not last long. Central to the successive gangs the adult Murphy formed were Robert ‘Basher’ Bates, Samuel ‘Big Sam’ McAllister and William Moore, with such additions as Benjamin ‘Pretty Boy’ Edwards and James ‘Tonto’ Watt.
All of these men were members of the UVF, with a visceral hatred of uppity ‘Taigs’. Murphy had ‘William of Orange, Rem [ember] 1690’ and Ulster’s Red Hand tattooed on his upper body, plus a more conventional ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ on his hands. By the age of twenty, he had developed the strange pastime of frequenting hearings at Belfast Crumlin Road court in his spare time from his job as a shop assistant. He would sit there for hours, in his leather jacket and scarf, listening to the trials of IRA men, and watching their friends and relatives sitting in the public gallery, while learning how to evade a guilty verdict. One of the key things was to deny malicious intent, and to omit key parts of any story, all evident in records of interrogations whenever gang members were arrested.
In 1972 Murphy and his friends abducted a thirty-four-year-old Catholic from a taxi. The man was held in Murphy’s ‘romper room’ in the Lawnbrook Social Club,