William Moore (loyalist) - Shankill Butchers

Shankill Butchers

Moore was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland and brought up a Protestant in the staunchly loyalist Shankill Road. Moore, who had a few previous convictions for petty crime, worked as a meat packer at Woodvale Meats on the Shankill. When he quit his job, he took with him an assortment of butcher's knives and a meat-cleaver. He then became a taxi driver having bought a black taxi which he drove around the Shankill area, collecting and dropping off passengers. In 1975, Moore met Lenny Murphy in the Brown Bear pub on the Shankill Road. Murphy, who was assembling the gang that become known as the Shankill Butchers, recruited Moore into the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF)

Beginning in November 1975, the gang started abducting and murdering Roman Catholics; apparently in retaliation for the killing of four British soldiers by the Provisional IRA that same month. Moore was ordered by Murphy to get his black taxi and he would drive around Catholic areas of Belfast with other gang members looking for prospective victims. Murphy and the other Butchers would bundle victims into the back of the taxi, then beat and torture them, before Murphy would finally drag them out into an alley and cut their throats with the weapons supplied by Moore. Journalist Peter Taylor spoke to a UVF member who explained that the Shankill Butchers had opted to use knives rather than guns because had they been caught with the latter the prison sentence received would be much longer.

The following year on 13 March 1976 Murphy was arrested and subsequently convicted of a firearms offence, and to divert suspicion from himself he ordered the "Butcher" slayings to continue. They did so, with Moore now acting as the de facto leader. Moore personally slit the throat of a young Catholic student from ear-to-ear and kicked another man to death. He also encouraged the others to torture the victims before killing them. The gang also killed several rival loyalists as a result of petty feuds, in addition to planting a bomb in a Catholic neighbourhood during a Provisional IRA parade. The bomb killed a 10-year-old boy, and wounded over 100 people.