Billy Elliot

William Elliot ( – 28 September 1995) was a Northern Irish loyalist and a leading member of the Red Hand Commando (RHC) paramilitary organisation. He fled Northern Ireland after being implicated in the brutal 1994 murder of an epileptic Protestant woman, Margaret Wright, who was beaten and shot inside a south Belfast loyalist bandhall in the mistaken belief that she was a Catholic or informant for the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). For his part in the murder, Elliot was gunned down by members of his own organisation.

Red Hand Commando Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in about 1964 to an Ulster Protestant family, Elliot joined the Red Hand Commando (RHC), a loyalist paramilitary organisation formed in 1972 in the Shankill Road area of Belfast and closely affiliated with the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). He eventually rose in the ranks to become the group's second-in-command. He lived in the staunchly loyalist, working-class Village area of south Belfast.

Margaret Wright killing Elliot was implicated as the leader of the gang which killed Protestant woman Margaret Wright in the early hours of 6 April 1994. Members of the Red Hand Commando, including Elliot, were also present that night. Wright had asked certain questions which led Elliot to believe she was a Catholic or an informant for the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) Drugs Squad.

She was taken to the bandhall storeroom, where she was interrogated by Elliot and Hamilton whilst the bandhall's disc jockey Stephen Rules stood guard outside. Wright, an epileptic, After she was tossed in a wheelie bin, Elliot ordered three other men to remove her from the premises. The men dumped the fatally injured Wright in the back yard of a derelict house several hundred yards away, Rules also told police that he obeyed Elliot's orders out of fear as he had been shot in the leg by Elliot's henchmen on a previous occasion. He returned to Northern Ireland some time after the Combined Loyalist Military Command ceasefire of 1994, but avoided his old haunts and settled in rural Cloughy instead.

His Belfast home was burned by an angry mob in retaliation for Wright's killing, The authors subsequently claimed that the killing had been carried out by Frankie Curry, a claim Curry himself corroborated in an interview shortly before his own death in 1999.

He had arrived home in Belfast a month before his death incorrectly believing that the loyalist ceasefire made it safe for him to return.

In 1996, two men (Christopher Sheals and Stephen Rules) were sentenced to life imprisonment for their part in Margaret Wright's murder. The three men who disposed of her body were each jailed for seven years. Elliot's widow Alison was given a three-year suspended jail sentence after she admitted to having helped him change his blood-stained clothing following the killing. Lord Justice Nicholson said he showed her leniency on account of her two children and the fact that her husband was killed, however "worthless a human being he may have been".

Under questioning in 1998 by the RUC, Thomas Maginnis of Newtownards confessed to Elliot's killing; however he was freed by the Belfast Crown Court two years later after a judge ruled his confessions "inadmissible".