Murderers or Martyrs

George Skelly

Description

Charged with the "Cranborne Road murder" of Wavertree widow Alice Rimmer, two Manchester youths were hastily condemned by a Liverpool jury on the police-orchestrated lies of a criminal and two malleable young women. George Skelly's detailed account of the warped trial, predictable appeal result courtesy of 'hanging judge' Lord Goddard and the whitewash secret inquiry will enrage all who believe in justice. And if the men's prison letters (including from the condemned cells) sometimes make you laugh, they will make you weep far longer.

Sujets

• True crime
• Greater Manchester
• Lancashire
• Merseyside
• Grand Manchester
• Lancastre

Informations

• Publié par: Waterside Press
• Date de parution: 05 décembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908162311
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 8 Mo

Extrait

Murderers or Martyrs
George Skelly
With a Foreword by Lord Goldsmith PC, QC
Copyright and Publication Details
Murderers or Martyrs
George Skelly
ISBN 978-1-904380-80-1 (Paperback) ISBN 978-1-908162-06-9 (Adobe E-book) ISBN 978-1-908162-31-1 (Kindle/ePub E-book)
Copyright © 2012 This work is the copyright of George Skelly. All intellectual property and associated rights are hereby asserted and reserved by the author in full compliance with UK, European and international law. No part of this book may be copied, reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, including in hard copy or via the internet, without the prior written permission of the publishers to whom all such rights have been assigned worldwide. The Foreword is the copyright of Lord Goldsmith subject to the same terms and conditions.
Cover design © 2012 Waterside Press. Design by www.gibgob.com
Cataloguing-In-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book can be obtained on request from the British Library.
e-book Murderers or Martyrs is available in various ebook formats and also to subscribers of Myilibrary and Dawsonera.
Printed in the UK by CPI-Antony Rowe, Bumper’s Farm, Chippenham, SN14 6LH.
UK distributor Gardners Books, 1 Whittle Drive, Eastbourne, East Sussex, BN23 6QH. Tel: [phone]; [e-mail] ; www.gardners.com
North American distributor Ingram Book Company, One Ingram Blvd, La Vergne, TN 37086, USA. [phone], [e-mail] , ipage.ingrambook.com
Published 2012 by
Waterside Press Ltd.
Sherfield Gables
Sherfield on Loddon
Hook, Hampshire
RG27 0JG , United Kingdom
Telephone [phone]
E-mail [e-mail]
Online catalogue WatersidePress.co.uk
Contents
Copyright and Publication Details
About the Author
The author of the Foreword
Acknowledgements
Witness Statements
Foreword
Photo Section
Preface
Introduction
Prologue CONSPIRACY The Fateful Journey to Liverpool Murder at No.7 and the First Suspect Balmer Takes Control The Conspiracy Begins Devlin and Burns Arrested and Charged with Murder The Committal Proceedings Commence The Hearing is Postponed The Committal Hearing Continues More Damning Prosecution Evidence Police Give Their Evidence A Meeting in the Cells with the Hatchet Man The Prison Letters (or Home Thoughts from Abroad) More Balmer-Planted Press Stories DAMNATION The Trial Begins The Case for the Crown More Lies Marie Milne in the Witness Box More Crown Witnesses in the Box Thomas Rimmer’s Version The “Expert” Witness Testifies Balmer’s Boys in the Box Rose Heilbron Opens the Defence Case Devlin (and the Cosh) in the Witness Box Death of Juror’s Mother Causes Postponement of the Trial Alan Campbell Testifies in Support of the Accuseds’ Alibi Where are Alan Campbell’s Statement and His Indictment? Burns’ Examination-In-Chief by Junior Counsel “If I Were You Burns I Should Try Not to be Clever” — Judge Goldie QC Acting More Like the Prosecutor Heilbron’s Closing Speech for Devlin “He May be a Thief … ” Goldie and the Relevance of George Bernard Shaw’s “Joan of Arc” Summing-Up, Verdict and Sentence How “Expert” is the Expert Witness Evidence? The Appeal and “Justice-in-a-Jiffy” Goddard A One-Man Private Inquiry is Ordered Last Minute Pleading in Vain Epilogue and the Shame of the CCRC
Index
About the Author
George Skelly is a renowned writer and campaigner against miscarriages of justice, and also a novelist and short story writer. After leaving school at 15, an eleven-plus failure, he was later educated at Ruskin College Oxford and Liverpool University, obtaining joint honours in History and English. He is the author of The Cameo Conspiracy (Third edition, Waterside Press, 2011), which helped to exonerate the two men convicted in that historic murder case. A father of four, he lives on Merseyside.
The author of the Foreword
Lord Peter Henry Goldsmith, Baron Goldsmith PC, QC was Attorney General for England and Wales and Northern Ireland from 2001 to 2007, the highest law office in Britain. He now works for the USA law firm Debevoise & Plimpton as head of European litigation practice. Lord Goldsmith explains his longstanding connection with the Devlin and Burns case in the Foreword .
Acknowledgements
Bringing to the reader the full story of this case would not have been possible without the consistent support and practical assistance of several persons to whom I am greatly indebted. They are:
My publisher, Bryan Gibson of Waterside Press for having the courage to publish the story when bigger national publishers refused to do so.
Lord Goldsmith PC, QC for kindly reading the manuscript and providing the Foreword .
Mrs Joan Downing, who kindly provided a statement in 2011 about the police pressure which forced her to change her story in 1952.
Mrs Pat Jones, for the original prison letters of Devlin and Burns to her father John Ford.
Dorothy Skinner, for old street maps and photographs of Hulme and Deansgate.
Kate McNicholl of Merseyside Police for her courtesy and kind assistance.
Anne “Tejar” Carson, Marie Milne’s younger sister for her statement of Superintendent Balmer’s pressure on her sister and family.
Brian Jones (former police officer) for the photograph of the Lighthouse Café in 1951.
Joe Kirwan, a close friend of Devlin and Burns who helped fill in a lot of the gaps.
Jean Woolfenden, Edward Devlin’s niece, for showing me around Hulme and the Barracks Flats.
Most of all there are three special people to whom I extend my deepest and most sincere gratitude. Without their unyielding loyalty and support over many years this book would never have been possible. If I were a soldier I could not have had three better comrades-in-arms. These “Three Musketeers” are:
The unassuming Mr Michael Rigby, a murder aficionado himself, who made numerous journeys down to the National Archives at Kew, London, at his own expense and obtained all or most of the files which form the basis of this book.
Mr Chris Kelly, a former Merseyside police sergeant of great compassion and a sense of justice, who — without my even asking — willingly, in his own time, and at his own expense, took photographs of locations, obtained street maps and other documents and carried out much valuable research on my behalf.
Then, last but most certainly not least, retired businessman Mr Lou Santangeli. Words cannot express my deep gratitude to him. A man with a profound sense of fairness and outrage at injustice, he was responsible for the Appeal Court’s 2003 quashing of the convictions in the infamous 1950 Cameo Cinema murder case. I have been greatly honoured by Lou’s friendship and his unflagging moral support and practical assistance during the past ten years.
All three men are to be greatly commended for sustaining me all these years with their faith and confidence, and for steadfastly sharing my belief in the innocence of Devlin and Burns.
Finally, my sincere thanks go to those individuals, including former prison and police staff, who shared their experiences with me and concerning whom I willingly accept their understandable wish for anonymity.
George Skelly
2012
Witness Statements
A selection of key statements from the case can be viewed in full, on the Waterside Press website:
www.WatersidePress.co.uk/devlinandburns
Foreword
As a young boy growing up in Liverpool I was close to three cousins who were the daughters of my mother’s elder sister. My mother and her sister Thelma were very close and so we children were close to our cousins. Thelma’s husband was Joseph Norton.
I knew him as a serious but kindly man; an outstanding and prominent solicitor with his own practice and a local politician — a former officer in the Army, a leading Conservative on the city council, an alderman and one time parliamentary candidate for a local constituency. He went on take up a judicial post in Birmingham.
I regret though that I never had the occasion that I can recall to talk to him about his earlier legal practice. This is more than a shame as this book reveals that Joseph Norton was one of the two energetic and dogged solicitors who acted for the two young men who, as George Skelly describes here, were prosecuted, convicted and executed for the brutal murder in her own home of Alice Rimmer, a Liverpool widow, in 1952.
I would have welcomed the opportunity to hear first hand from Uncle Joe his impressions of the trial, of the actions of the trial judge Finnemore J and of the competence of counsel, all of them known to me at least by reputation — Basil Nield QC, later Nield J, Rose Heilbron QC, the extraordinary woman advocate with so many firsts to her name, one of the first woman QCs. The first woman appointed recorder, first woman to sit at the Old Bailey as judge, and Sir Noel Goldie. I knew Rose Heilbron a little as she and her husband were friends of my parents.
I would also have liked to have his impressions of the other defending solicitor, Harry Livermore who went on to be Lord Mayor of Liverpool. He was another very prominent Liverpool solicitor. He had a reputation for being quick tempered, a trait this book bears out, though sorely provoked by what he saw as a seriously unfair process, according to the account given by the author of the committal proceedings.
But above all, the great interest of this book is that George Skelly has re-created in painstaking detail the different stages of this trial; the committal proceedings conducted by Norton and Livermore for the defence; the trial before judge and jury with the bulk of defence taken by Rose Heilbron for Devlin, the unsuccessful appeal before the forbidding figure of Lord Goddard and a private inquiry into new evidence by Albert Gerrard QC.
George Skelly inevitably draws strong comparisons with the miscarriage of justice which was eventually found in 2003 to have occurred with the convictions of George Kelly and Charles Connolly in