The Cameo Murder
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On the evening of 19 March 1949, the manager of Liverpool's Cameo cinema, Leonard Thomas was counting the day's takings assisted by his deputy, Bernard Catterall. A masked man entered their office brandishing a pistol and, after demanding they hand over the bag of cash, shot both of them fatally. The gunman made his escape from the building empty handed after threatening other members of the cinema staff who had come to the men's aid.
Liverpool Police launched a huge manhunt for the killer, which turned up few leads until some months later they received a letter from a pair of convicted criminals, a prostitute and her pimp. Jacqueline Dixon and James Northam were prepared to assist the police with information on the murders in return for immunity from prosecution themselves. This resulted in the arrest of Charles Connolly, 26 and George Kelly, 27, two Liverpool men with convictions for petty crime. Despite their protestations that they had never met before and both being able to produce sound alibis for the evening of the 19 March, the pair were charged with the murder of the two men in the cinema.
They stood trial at Liverpool Assizes on 12 January, 1950 before Mr. Justice Roland Oliver. The prosecution's case was that Kelly was the gunman and that Connolly had acted as lookout as well as having planned the robbery. Much was made of the evidence of Robert Graham, who had been serving a sentence in Walton Prison at the same time that Kelly and Connolly were on remand there and who claimed that both men had admitted to him that they were responsible for the crime. The two defendants stated that they did not know Graham, had only glimpsed him briefly in the execise yard at the prison and were unlikely to have made such an admission to someone they had never met. Graham was later rewarded for his evidence with a reduction in his sentence. Dixon and Northam both testified that they had been present in the Bee Hive public house when Kelly and Connolly had set off for the robbery, having first borrowed a barmaid's apron to use as a mask. Northam alleged that Kelly had borrowed his overcoat to use as a disguise, a laughable idea given that Kelly was tall and broad and Northam was half his size. After a lengthy hearing, the jury failed to reach a verdict and a retrial was ordered, this time with the defendants tried separately.
Kelly was tried first, found guilty and sentenced to death. Connolly was then offered the chance to plead guilty to conspiracy and being an accessory. Concerned that he might otherwise be convicted of murder and share the fate of his co-accused, he had little choice other than to accept the offer and plead accordingly. Connolly's guilty plea destroyed Kelly's assertions of his own innocence and despite an appeal against his conviction, Kelly was executed at Walton Prison, Liverpool on 28 March 1950. Connolly was released from prison in 1957 and died in 1997. Shortly before his death, he took part in an interview on BBC Radio Merseyside during which he continued to protest his innocence.
The case caused considerable disquiet in legal circles for many years and there were a number of attempts to have it re-opened. The evidence put forward by the prosecution, and the people from whom it emanated, had been unsavoury to say the least and the conduct of the man who led the investigation, Chief Inspector Herbert Balmer was itself questionable. More importantly, the trial jury had not been informed that another Liverpool man, Donald Johnston, had demonstrated an intimate knowledge of the crime after being arrested for an offence in Birkenhead and had been charged with complicity in the murders prior to the arrest of Kelly and Connolly. Because his confession was ruled inadmissable, due to the fact the police had obtained it by inducement, an attempt to try him failed and he was freed. This had left the police in the unenviable position of having lost a good suspect due to their own ineptitude. This fact was discovered by a local businessman, Luigi Santangeli who set out to investigate the crime on behalf of Connolly in the 1990s and was given access to the case files by Merseyside Police.
Eventually the case reached the Court of Criminal Appeal in February 2001 and in June 2003 Kelly's and Connolly's convictions were judged to be unsafe and were duly quashed. Kelly's remains were taken from their burial place in the prison by his family and he was given a dignified funeral in Liverpool's Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King.
