Ireland map with Belfast and Dublin markers

It was all so terrifying, lying there, drifting in and out of consciousness on the damp, sooty cobblestones of that Belfast alley. It was painful excruciatingly painful -- to even open his eyes, and when he did, through the crust of drying blood he could just barely make out the faces of the crowd that had gathered around him.

What was that look in their eyes? Was it sympathy? Revulsion? Were they shocked by the savagery of the beating he had endured? Were they sickened by the sight of the deep gashes on his head and face from when his kidnappers beat him with a nailed club? By the deep gashes in his neck and wrists inflicted with a razor sharp butcher's knife?

Gerard McLaverty's wrist wounds

Or was that look in their eyes something else?

Was it the same hatred he had seen in the eyes of the men who attacked him a few hours earlier? They had snatched him off the street in his own section of the city, trundled him into the back seat of an old yellow Ford Cortina and spirited him through back alleys and side streets to their makeshift charnel house.

Could it be the same hatred for "the other sort" that Gerard McLaverty had grown up with from childhood in Belfast, the unfathomable hatred he had seen in the eyes of Protestants who had guessed that he was "a Taigh," a Catholic, the same visceral disgust he had seen in the eyes of his fellow Catholics when they sniffed out a "Prod" in their midst?

McLaverty tumbled back into unconsciousness as the paramedics stanched his wounds and hefted him into the back of their ambulance for the short trip to Royal Victoria Hospital.

There was no way he could have known it then, but the look in the eyes of the people around him was deeper than disgust, or sectarian hatred. It was far more complex than fear or sympathy. It was the look that one might have seen on the faces of decent Germans when they first understood that Dachau or Bergen-Belson was real, the expression of horror one might have seen etched on the faces of those who first calculated the costs of Pol Pot's killing fields in Cambodia. It was the look people get when they see true evil.

McLaverty could not have known it then, but he was to be the last victim and the only one to survive the murderous rampage of a gang of serial slaughterers who hid behind the veil of politics and sectarian warfare as they indulged their blood lust. At least 19 people had been savagely slain by the gang that would come to be known as the Shankill Butchers.

Some of those killed were, like McLaverty, Catholics. Others were Protestants who were either careless or unlucky. All were considered victims of "The Troubles," the 300-year-old struggle between the Loyalists and the Nationalists in Northern Ireland that has seen more than its share of atrocities from both sides.

In one sense, that is too easy an explanation. In the twisted logic of this 300-year-old battlefield, it almost excuses the men, who under the direction of the psychopathic killer Lenny Murphy, tortured and murdered their prey, using finely honed butchers knives for the purpose.

Hugh Leonard "Lenny" Murphy

But it is accurate to say that the victims of Shankill Butchers were casualties of the war. After all, it was the battle for control of the decaying streets of Belfast that allowed Lenny Murphy and his gang of thugs to grow unchecked into perhaps the most savage band of killers in the history of the United Kingdom. It was the war that gave them the right to call themselves soldiers. It was the war, in all its unchecked brutality that blurred the lines between what was noble and savage. It wasn't just the fog of war, it was the torrential rain of hatred, of blood and of tears that blinded many in Northern Ireland to the true nature of the Shankill Butchers and made it possible to mistake a gang of serial murderers for warriors.

Gerard McLarety could not have known it then, as he drifted in and out of consciousness in the back of an ambulance bouncing along the battlefield of Belfast streets, but just by surviving the Shankill Butchers, he had helped to expose their crimes.

But on that Sunday morning in May 1977, all of that was still to come.

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