been formed in 1972 by William ‘Plum’ Smith, Winston Rea and twenty-year-old Stevie McCrea. On Halloween night, 1973, McCrea, a young gunman belonging to the Red Hand Commando (RHC), shot and killed seventeen-year-old James ‘Jiffy’ Kerr on the Lisburn Road in Belfast. A police officer standing nearby heard the fatal shots. When he arrived, he found McCrea stood over the body of a man. He tried to escape, but was later caught red-handed with a Webley revolver stuck in his waistband. When asked why he targeted Kerr, McCrea said it was ‘because he was a fenian bastard’. It seems that Kerr’s close association with IRA man John Rooney sealed his fate in the eyes of the RHC, though he was never claimed by the Provisionals as a member.21 McCrea was later charged with murder and sentenced to sixteen years in prison.
***
HMP Crumlin Road, Belfast, 7:30 p.m., 11 February 1973
The sound of a loud siren pierced the cold wintry air that seemed to envelope Crumlin Road Prison that evening. It was a sound familiar to people who lived locally and usually signalled an attempted escape. Moments earlier, two UVF prisoners, Lenny Murphy and Ronald Waller, had sawn off the bars of the window of cell number 21 in C2 wing before throwing a rope over the thick Victorian-era walls. Cell chairs with rope tied around them had been used as grappling hooks. A prison officer walking past on a routine patrol below was startled when he saw two legs dangling from the cell window.22 As he shone the torch up on the wall he shouted, ‘Don’t bother, lads’, hoping the prisoners would give up and crawl back the way they came. He was surprised when a voice shouted back for him to ‘keep quiet’, which was followed by an appeal to his community spirit. ‘You are a Shankill Road man like ourselves,’ whispered Murphy. Without hesitation, the officer retorted with a curt, ‘No chance’. A few moments later Murphy jumped down and turned to face the prison officer. Both men eyeballed one another in a brief Mexican standoff before the prison officer felt something sharp being thrust into his stomach, causing him to double over in pain. As he did so, he tried desperately to use his radio. ‘Yankee Two …’ No sooner had the words rolled off the officer’s tongue than Waller moved to grab him. ‘For fuck’s sake keep quiet,’ he said in a hushed voice. There was a brief struggle as the prisoners tried to grab the radio receiver off the officer. He resisted, and was kicked in the balls. As he fell to the ground, a loud siren warbled into action. Realising their chances of escaping had been dramatically reduced, the men beat a hasty retreat back up the rope into their cell. They were going nowhere.
Nine weeks later, as prisoners enjoyed a musical concert in C Wing, Murphy was putting a new and more daring escape plan into operation. Sometime on 24 April, he visited Mervyn Connor, his accomplice from the Pavis murder, for a chat. The two men had since been separated to prevent them from getting their story straight and, in the meantime, Connor had taken the opportunity to give evidence to detectives who visited him that Murphy had killed Ted Pavis. What happened next is unclear, but it appears that either Murphy slipped a vial of cyanide into Connor’s drink or forced his mouth open and poured it down his throat before clamping his jaws shut and holding them closed, until Connor swallowed the poison. As the afternoon wore on, Connor complained to his cell mate of feeling unwell and lay down on his bunk. He even skipped his tea in the canteen. At 6:20 p.m. Connor roused himself from his cell and approached a prison warden patrolling the landing to ask for hot water. It was the last time anyone saw him alive. Twenty minutes later his cell mate returned from the concert to find Connor lying prostate on his bed face up, his mouth full of bloody foam. The floor around him was soaking wet with urine. Relaxing music played on the radio in the background but the scene was one of utter chaos. Connor’s right arm and leg were dangling off the bed and his other leg was outstretched where he had undergone spasms from a nasty, violent death. A prison officer on the wing quickly entered the cell to administer first aid when the alarm was raised. He managed to get a faint pulse. Connor had been revived momentarily, turned violently before vomiting onto the floor. A doctor from the Mater Hospital was called and, when he arrived a few minutes later, applied external cardio massage and administered oxygen. Connor was unresponsive, then, suddenly, his pupils dilated and his heartbeat became even fainter. Despite the best efforts of the doctor, Mervyn Connor was pronounced dead at 7:30 p.m.23
Like other prisoners facing long days in the Crum, Mervyn Connor had suffered from bouts of depression. Initially, it was thought that he had committed suicide. A note addressed to the prison governor and discovered on the small desk in his cell, supported this theory. It read:
To whom it may concern,
During my time in prison I have done nothing but think about what I have done to the fellow called [name redacted] I have told lies and made false statements against him. I would not have done this only for the pressure the police put on me most of all [name redacted]
So I can not live with this on my mind
I hope you will understand
[name redacted]
In a short, unremarkable report on the incident, the prison authorities noted how, ‘During the previous couple of days Mervyn took a craze for drawing crosses on sheets of paper.’ The prisoner who had shared a cell with him for three weeks said that Connor had never said anything against the police. He seemed fine, and his request for some letter writing paper gave nobody any cause for concern.
C Wing had originally housed the execution chamber. Now it would become synonymous with Lenny Murphy’s ruthlessness, and form part of the urban legend surrounding his reputation inside the UVF.
Mervyn Connor had joined the UVF in 1972. Originally from the Shankill Road, he was a labourer by trade. Apart from a surgical procedure for a hernia when he was eighteen, Connor was in good health when he died. Psychologically, he was also fit and healthy, which aroused suspicions about the apparent suicide note. So devastated by their son’s death were his parents that police believed they would be willing to testify at his inquest later that year about his state of mind. When they were shown the alleged suicide note, Mrs Connor said that she did ‘not think’ her son ‘was telling the truth’ in it. ‘He had written a statement which implicated another prisoner in being guilty of murder. The name of the other prisoner is the name mentioned in Exhibit C1.’ Detectives attempting to investigate the death said they had ‘run into a wall of silence when questioning prisoners in the jail’.24
It did not take the pathologist long to identify the cause of Connor’s death, concluding that the young man had been poisoned with cyanide. The autopsy revealed that he had significant levels of the substance in his blood and organs and that this was a result of it having been ingested orally. Normally an amount of 50–300 milligrams was needed to kill an adult male but in Connor’s case it was inordinately high, at 450 milligrams. The only way that that could have possibly been administered was if his mouth had been held open and the poison forced down his throat. Even though the poisoning of Mervyn Connor had been witnessed on the wing, most of the eyewitnesses placed themselves at the scene of the concert – it would have been risky giving evidence against Murphy.
At his trial between 18–20 June 1973, Lenny Murphy was acquitted of killing Ted Pavis by the jury. Having observed several murder trials before from the public gallery, he knew how to play the system.25 Without incriminating evidence from his co-accused, who he had killed, he was convinced that the trial would collapse. Murphy walked free from the Crumlin Road Courthouse opposite the prison. His taste of freedom lasted only a few minutes, after which RUC officers re-arrested him under the Special Powers Act.26
***
During his several months at large in July–October 1972, Gusty Spence had reorganised the UVF more formally along British Army lines, with three battalion areas established in Belfast, East Antrim and Mid Ulster. In turn, units equating to geographic areas were established in roughly company size of 100–200 men each. Although these companies were further divided into platoons of 20–30 men, the welfare component continued to dominate. The military ‘teams’ were much smaller, and numbered up to a dozen or so men. With more men in the non-combatant ranks of the organisation, the ruling Brigade Staff began to think about ways to put them to good use in support of military activities. By the middle of 1973, this included approving political activity. Billy Hutchinson, a young YCV member who was particularly active on the Shankill Road at the time, remembered how this played