off Esmond Street and the chugging noise of a taxi. Her home overlooked the entry and the sounds had been clearly audible. Black London-style taxis were frequently used in Belfast as a means of transportation and over 200 plied up and down the Shankill Road every day. As a result, Nesbitt ordered that all the taxis in the Shankill were to be taken in and forensically tested, including a black taxi belonging to one of the gang, William Moore, a former meat packer. However, as the vehicle had been thoroughly cleaned, no evidence remained to incriminate Moore in the attacks. Moore subsequently destroyed his taxi. Lenny Murphy Nesbitt did not know at the time that William Moore was part of the murderous gang led by Brookmount Street resident Lenny Murphy, who commanded a UVF platoon that operated mainly from the "Brown Bear" pub, located on the corner of Mountjoy Street and the Shankill Road, not far from the Tennent Street station. Murphy had a pathological hatred of Catholics, and as a means of manifesting this hatred on the Catholic community at large, had formed a murder gang with like-minded friends from his "Brown Bear" platoon. The gang's modus operandi involved the abduction of innocent men walking home at night from areas that were overwhelmingly Catholic due to the sectarian geography of Belfast. Once the victims were hit over the head with a wheel brace and dragged into Moore's taxi, they were driven away to be subjected to a beating and torture session that ended with their being dumped, usually into a Shankill alleyway, where their throats were then sliced with butcher's knives. On the night Francis Rice was killed, Murphy had brought along two female acquaintances to observe the beating and murder. In addition to the cut-throat killings, Murphy and the Shankill Butchers also carried out sectarian shootings of random Catholics and punishment killings against their loyalist rivals, the most notable being that of Noel "Nogi" Shaw on 30 November 1975 as part of an internal UVF feud. Inside the "Lawnbrook Social Club", in full view of his unit, Murphy savagely beat, pistol-whipped and then repeatedly shot Shaw in the head; afterwards he ordered his body to be placed in a laundry basket. Shaw was a part of the UVF "Windsor Bar" platoon which was commanded by Anthony "Chuck" Berry and its members were rivals of the "Brown Bear" gang