A chilling, stomach-turning study of Northern Ireland’s infamous Shankill Butchers, a Loyalist gang of murderers who preyed on Belfast’s Catholic population. Investigative journalist Dillon, who published this account a decade ago in Great Britain, describes the bloody handiwork of the Shankill Butchers. Operating out of Protestant West Belfast, the Butchers were members of a Loyalist paramilitary group (the Ulster Volunteer Force, or UVF), and were led by a sadistic, anti-Catholic psychopath named Lenny Murphy. Murphy would become “the biggest mass murderer in British history,” according to Dillon, who details Murphy’s journey from schoolyard bully to petty criminal to cold-blooded serial killer. Dillon argues that Northern Ireland’s toxic atmosphere of sectarian hatreds played a crucial role in producing Murphy, who used anti-Catholic ideology as a convenient cover for his sadistic love of violence. He murdered his first Catholic in 1972, beginning a killing spree that would last a decade. Accompanied by three gang members, Murphy would typically drive through Catholic areas of Belfast at night. Once a potential victim (usually a drunken man) had been located, Murphy would abduct him, torture him, and cut his throat with a butcher knife. Murphy visibly enjoyed killing Catholics, and Dillon’s graphic descriptions of several murders make for gruesome reading. (Murphy typically “hacked through his victim’s throat until the knife touched the spine” or “until the head was almost severed from the trunk.”) Dillon also reproduces autopsy and police reports that will have queasy readers skipping over the gory details. The Butchers proved difficult to catch because the public of Northern Ireland were accustomed to shocking levels of sectarian violence and generally refused to cooperate with police. The Butchers were finally caught when one of their Catholic victims miraculously survived, and had the courage to testify against them. Murphy was murdered in 1982 by the Irish Republican Army, his sworn enemy. A notably depressing read that exposes the horror of Northern Ireland’s history. (21 b&w photos)
Pub Date: April 13, 1999
ISBN: 0-415-92231-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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