Thirty-three-year-old Robert Parrington Jackson was a married father of three and managed the Odeon cinema on Union Street, Bristol, England. The establishment had a single theater auditorium and a restaurant on the premises.
At six-twenty-five p.m. on May 29th, 1946, the theater held two thousand people who had come to see a screening of the 1939 film The Light That Failed, an adaptation of a Rudyard Kipling novel from 1891.
At some point early in the movie, there was a scene featuring gunshots, and it is believed that a killer or killers used these fictional gunshots to mask real ones.
Only about fifteen minutes after the film began, the supervisor of the restaurant came up to Robert Jackson’s office and found the manager lying on the floor in a pool of blood, groaning and barely alive. He had been shot in the head, and died later from his injuries.
No one in the theater heard any commotion or knew that anything untoward had happened, though shortly after Robert was discovered, a message was reportedly flashed on the screen asking if there was a doctor in the house. The movie continued, however, as police arrived and started their investigation.
Though robbery would have been the most obvious motive, as Robert had just put the day’s takings into the safe in his office, authorities found the keys to the safe still in Robert’s pocket, and £800 (almost £28,000 today) untouched in the safe.
The murder weapon was believed to be a US Army-issue Colt .45 automatic pistol; this firearm was recovered months later in a water tank used by firefighters.
Several days after the crime, police received an anonymous note with an alleged description of the shooter, and they also questioned several other persons of interest. Since Robert had not been robbed, investigators began looking into other possible motives, speculating that perhaps a jealous man had caught Robert flirting with his girlfriend, or that the partner of a female employee killed the manager for similar reasons.
None of these leads panned out, and the case went cold for many years. Then, in 1993, a man named Jeff Fisher entered a police station in Cardiff, Wales, and stated that his father, Welsh petty crook Billy “The Fish” Fisher, had confessed to the killing on his deathbed in 1989.
According to Jeff, his father had specifically targeted the Odeon cinema in Bristol for robbery. On this purported mission, he had been accompanied by another man named Dukey Leonard. But when Robert Jackson walked in and caught the robbers, Billy panicked and shot the man, fleeing without getting the money.
Despite this confession, there was no forensic evidence tying Billy Fisher to the crime, and as he had subsequently died, the case remained open. Renewed pleas for information were published in the media in 2016, but as of this writing in May of 2024, the shooting of Robert Parrington Jackson is still unresolved.
Crime Immemorial 