William Moore (loyalist)

William "Spud" Moore (born c. 1949) is a loyalist paramilitary from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He was a member of the brutal Shankill Butchers, an Ulster Volunteer Force gang.

In 1972 Moore met 20-year-old Lenny Murphy, who would become the leader of the Shankill Butchers. Moore was then aged 23 and had a few previous convictions for petty crime. He had worked at a butcher's shop from which he had stolen various knives and meat-cleavers. He then started working as a taxi-driver.

Beginning in 1975, the gang started abducting and murdering Roman Catholics. Moore would drive around Catholic neighbourhoods in his taxi looking for prospective victims. Murphy and the others would bundle victims into the back of the taxi and beat and torture them, before Murphy would finally drag them out into an alley and cut their throats. The following year 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 leader. The gang also killed several rival loyalists as a result of petty feuds, in addition to planting a bomb in Catholic neighbourhood during an IRA parade but the bomb killed a 10-year-old boy, and wounded over 100 people.

After a victim escaped alive, the Shankill Butchers were rounded up by police and most of them broke down and confessed, although they were too terrified to implicate Lenny Murphy. They stood trial in February 1979. William Moore pleaded guilty to the most murders, eleven, and was convicted of these and a further eight murders. [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19980811/ai_n14171537] He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

However, Moore was released in 1998 under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. It has been alleged recently that Moore is involved in a loyalist drug-dealing, including a visit to a notorious Edinburgh gang¹.

¹ [http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=15294022&method=full&siteid=89488&headline=crime-capital--how-uvf-brought-the-wars-to-edinburgh-name_page.html Scottish Daily Record - 15 March 2005]