Billy Giles (3 September 1957, Belfast – 25 September 1998, Belfast) was an Ulster Volunteer Force volunteer who later became active in politics following his release from the Maze Prison in 1997 after serving 14 years of a life sentence for murder. Family life Billy Giles was born William Alexander Ellis Giles in Belfast, Northern Ireland on 3 September 1957, and grew up in Island Street, in loyalist east Belfast. His father Sam, worked as a plater in the nearby Harland and Wolff shipyard, and his mother, Lily was a housewife. Giles was the eldest of six children. The Giles family was very religious, the Protestant church having been the centre of their lives. Giles often attended the rallies of Ian Paisley, and was strongly influenced by his sermons. His father, a former soldier in the British Army, was a member of the Orange Order, The Royal Black Preceptory, and The Apprentice Boys of Derry. His brothers also served in the army. The Troubles At the age of 14, he witnessed first-hand the events of Bloody Friday on 21 July 1972 when the Provisional IRA exploded 26 bombs across Belfast, killing nine people, and injuring 103. As the years passed, he found himself attending many funerals of friends he had lost and people he had known. In 1975, he joined the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and was trained in the use of weapons and explosives by former military personnel; he had just turned 18 years old. At the outbreak of the republican hunger strike in 1981, Giles had gradually become disassociated from the UVF. Following the deaths of the ten republican prisoners, however, Giles believed that, in the wake of the hunger strike, "there was going to be an uprising and they [Protestants] were all going to be slaughtered" by the IRA. Giles mentally prepared himself to go to war against the IRA and therefore returned as an active member of the UVF. Killing On 19 November 1982 in Newtownards, Billy Giles abducted a Roman Catholic married man, Michael Fay, and shot him in the back of the head, killing him instantly. He then stuffed the body in the car's boot. Fay had been Giles' friend and workmate. The killing was in retaliation for the fatal shooting of Karen McKeown, a young Protestant Sunday school teacher by the Irish National Liberation Army two months previously. Giles was arrested by the