noticing a small dog resting under the table. ‘That’s a brave lump of a dog you’ve got,’ he said. ‘It’s not a bad un’,’ Ted’s father responded, as he folded his newspaper in half and placed it in front of him. As he rose from the kitchen table, Ted’s father walked into the hall, where he slipped on his shoes and lifted the dog lead from a coat hanger. A few minutes later he had gone, leaving the house by the back door. As Ted’s father walked down the side entry and onto the street, he caught a glimpse of another young man sitting astride a red Honda motorcycle. He had a helmet on and the engine was still running. He thought nothing of it as he carried on walking down the street until he neared the main Castlereagh Road.
A few minutes later, the young man with the long curly hair got up and made his excuses to leave. As he did so, he approached Pavis and put his arm around him, before walking with him down the hallway towards the front door. Ted had no sooner opened the door than the other young man pulled out a pistol from his waistband, shooting Pavis at point-blank range. Ted’s mother was busying herself in the kitchen when she heard the shot. ‘I looked out of the inside front door and saw Ted lying in the hallway near the doorstep,’ she later told detectives.
The young man with curly hair lost no time in running out of the house and climbing onto the back of the motorcycle. ‘Come on, get out of here quick,’ he shouted to his accomplice as they made good their escape. Ted’s father was halfway up Glenvarlock Street when he heard the shot ring out. ‘I then heard squealing so I ran up the road to [redacted] where I saw of the body of Ted lying in the hall. There was an awful mess of blood and I knew Ted had been shot,’ he said.
In his statement to the police, Ted’s father described the suspect as being ‘twenty-five years to thirty years, 5'6" or 7", well built, dark longish hair with long sidelocks, swarthy complexion or unshaven, thick lips, wearing a black leather shorty jacket which seemed to have a belt on it’. Ted’s mother also gave a very similar description of the main suspect, who, she said, was ‘approximately thirty years, 5'5"–5'6", black curly bushy hair with long side locks, scruffy appearance, very thick lips, he was wearing a black coloured motor cycle type coat with a belt’.12 Ted’s father also gave a further description of the man driving the motorcycle, who he recalled was ‘twenty years, 5'3" or 4", light build, good-looking and tidy appearance, light or gingery hair, shortish, wearing a light coloured jacket’.13
It was not immediately obvious why Pavis had been shot, though it soon emerged that word had been passed to him during an earlier spell in prison that he ‘would be out, but you wouldn’t be back’.14 The UVF leadership, journalists believed, had ordered Pavis’ killing because they suspected that he had been selling guns to the IRA.15
It took several months for the police to establish who was responsible for the killing. Eventually their inquiries led them to two young men, Hugh Leonard Murphy, a twenty-year-old lorry driver, and John Mervyn Connor, a nineteen-year-old apprentice motor mechanic. Both were arrested and charged with the murder of Ted Pavis on 25 January 1973. Connor refused to reveal the name of his accomplice in the first round of questioning. After a follow-up interrogation, he gave a full statement to police about the incident:
I now want to tell you who done the shooting over in Glenvarlock Street, it was [Lenny Murphy] who comes from Percy Street and who you have in custody at the present. On the day we went over to Pavis’s house I did not know what [Murphy] wanted to see him about. When they were talking outside I was fiddling about with the bike to keep it going and I did not see [Murphy] produce a gun, but I heard the shot and saw Pavis slump to the ground. [Murphy] ran over and got on the back of the bike. He put his arms around my waist and I noticed a gun in his right hand, pointing up in the air. [Murphy] took the gun away from my waist when he stopped at the bottom of the entry.16
The RUC also established that, when the two men returned to the Shankill, Murphy ordered Connor to torch the motorcycle and hide the weapons they had taken on the job with them.
An associate of Murphy and Connor, who was not involved in the killing, said that after killing Pavis, he was travelling in a car along the Shankill Road with both men. ‘The car hit a pigeon, or something like that,’ the man recalled, ‘and Mervyn Connor stopped the car. He got out and Murphy wasn’t far behind. Mervyn picked up the pigeon but Murphy just snatched it out of his hand and twisted its neck. I knew then that he was not a person you should ever cross. He was just cold. The way he spoke about the murder of Ted Pavis was not something you would expect. I’ve heard guys in hysterics, hitting the drink, crying after they’ve done a murder. The way Murphy talked about the murder was just not normal.’17
Despite his best attempts to cover his tracks, Murphy and Connor were remanded in custody and transferred to the remand wing of Crumlin Road Prison.
***
Conlon’s Bar, Belfast City Centre, 9 p.m., Saturday, 28 September 1972
John J. Conlon’s Bar in Francis Street, Smithfield, was alive with the sounds of revellers enjoying themselves. Twenty-one-year-old James ‘Jimmy’ Gillen and twenty-four-year-old Patrick McKee, two young unemployed men from Ballymurphy, had come down into the city centre for a night out with friends. The group sat perched on a long bench in front of the window of the pub, watching Saturday Variety on the TV along with other customers. Laughter filled the air, and the alcohol kept flowing. There were up to thirteen people in the bar at the time. At around 9:05 p.m. an old man with a dog walked into the bar. No sooner had he ordered a drink than an explosion ripped through the building, collapsing the front wall. Patrick McKee was killed outright. His friend, Jimmy Gillen, died two weeks later from the injuries sustained in the blast. ‘I do not remember hearing a bang or explosion and just felt myself spinning and I was buried below a lot of rubble,’ an eyewitness told police. ‘I was pulled out into the street to the corner of the markets and a soldier bandaged my head and an ambulance brought me to hospital.’18 The survivor who gave the statement had been sitting beside Jimmy Gillen when the bomb went off. His injuries included a fractured skull, deafness, shock and concussion. Moments before the explosion, a policeman had been passing the Conlon’s on a routine patrol. He became suspicious of the vehicle parked across the street from the bar. His partner halted the patrol car and the officer got out to investigate. As he closed in on the suspicious vehicle, he smelt something unusual and immediately realised it was a bomb. As the officer turned around to relay his discovery to his partner, the bomb exploded, sending him flying over his vehicle.19 This was one of a number of car bombings by the UVF at the time.
Despite having now perfected its bomb-making skills, the UVF was chronically short of weapons. On 23 October the Mid Ulster UVF staged a massive raid of the local UDR barracks. Armed men overpowered the sentry and gained access to the armoury, where they stole 85 SLRs, 21 SMGs, 1,300 rounds of ammunition, flares and flak jackets. Those who gained access to the camp knew exactly where to find the weapons.20 Most of the weapons, however, were later recovered. The UVF would continue to seek out other avenues, especially as its ranks began to swell further. A satellite organisation had also 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
