On the evening of 19 March 1949, in Cameo cinema in Liverpool, England, a double murder took place which led to a miscarriage of justice and the longest trial in British history at the time.
[1][2] While the cinema manager, Leonard Thomas, and his deputy, Bernard Catterall, counted the day's earnings, a masked man entered their office armed with a pistol.
Liverpool City Police launched a huge manhunt for the killer, which turned up few leads until some months later when they received a letter from a pair of convicted criminals, a prostitute and her pimp.
Dickson stated that Kelly had borrowed a dark scarf or apron to use as a mask; trying it on in front of the customers of the crowded pub before he and Connolly boarded a tram to take them to the Edge Hill area.
Forensic examination of the crime scene and the angle of the bullet wounds in the victims' bodies indicated that the person who fired the shots had held the gun in his left hand.
After what was then one of the longest murder trials in British legal history, the jury failed to reach a verdict and a retrial was ordered, this time with the defendants tried separately.
However, he was not seen near the cinema and the sequence of events tended to preclude him having played any role as look out as he neither warned George Kelly of John Catterall's arrival at the manager's office nor appeared to have been standing ready at the emergency exit which the gunman clearly had trouble opening.
This led to the question of how the gunman entered the cinema, the conclusion being that he must have either gone through the auditorium from the main entrance, or that there had been an accomplice who had opened the emergency exit from the inside in advance.
According to Skelly’s book, The Cameo Conspiracy, Balmer tried to cover this aspect by having Northam and Dickson state Kelly also produced a pair of pliers in the Beehive.
Dickson was a convicted prostitute and thief who, two years after the Cameo trial, was sentenced with others to a lengthy prison term for the violent robberies of a number of her clients.
During questioning, Johnson admitted being in the vicinity of the cinema at the time of the murders and had been stopped by a police constable, suspicious of his loitering, who had demanded to see his identity card and then taken his name.
Because Johnson's entire statement was ruled inadmissible, after the presiding judge decided that the police had obtained it by threats and inducement, an attempt to try him as an accessory failed and he was freed.
Confessing to even peripheral involvement in a brutal double murder however, simply to have a mere mugging charge dismissed, would seem an unlikely course of action for an experienced criminal like Johnson to take and he clearly had a detailed knowledge of what had occurred in the cinema office.
Eventually the case reached the Court of Appeal in February 2001 and in June 2003 Kelly's and Connolly's convictions were judged to be unsafe and were duly quashed.
[7] Two years after the execution, Chief Superintendent Balmer was investigating the murder of Beatrice Rimmer in Cranborne Road, just a few hundred yards from the Cameo cinema.
The CCRC however failed to investigate further an 81 year-old alibi witness's affidavit and signed, verifiable statement, stating he was present with Devlin and Burns, at the warehouse robbery in Manchester on the murder night.