The unsolved murder in a packed cinema that became Bristol’s oldest cold case
Thanks to advances in technology, reopening a cold case can often provide answers to the questions that had been posed years, if not decades, before. Not always, though, since the killer who gunned down a Bristol cinema manager remains unidentified, 80 years after the fact.
It wasn’t even a straightforward shooting, if there’s even such a thing. The assailant meticulously planned the when, where, and why, using the sounds of gunfire being played on the big screen to a packed house of 2,000 audience members to cover up their own trigger-happy plan. Even if that wasn’t the case, the timing was nothing if not fortuitously coincidental.
To this day, it remains unsolved, and it’s gained increasing levels of infamy as Bristol’s oldest cold case. On May 29th, 1946, patrons were minding their own business, watching legendary director William Wellman’s 1939 adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s novel, The Light That Failed.
Little did they know that mere feet away from them, murder was in the air. At the beginning of the film, there’s a scene where the main character, Dick Heldar, is blinded when his girlfriend fires off a shot right next to his head. Using it as the perfect moment of synchronicity, the killer struck behind the scenes.
Robert Parrington Jackson was minding his business, sitting in his office, when two bullets were fired into him. Since the crime had been carried out at the exact moment The Light That Failed pulled its own trigger, nobody was any the wiser until he was discovered bleeding out on the floor.
Reports at the time offered that the screening was halted, with a message flashing up on the screen to ask whether there was a doctor or medical professional in the house who could potentially save Jackson’s life, but the manager died from his wounds. A manhunt began, but it didn’t manage to pinpoint a culprit.
However, in 1989, a low-level criminal called Billy ‘The Fish’ Fisher allegedly confessed to his son on his deathbed that he was the gunman, and his plans to rob the safe kept in Jackson’s office were thwarted when he found him sitting in his office, but the keys were still in his pocket, and the safe was untouched.
Potential suspects were questioned, but nobody was ever charged. Eventually, the investigation was quietly abandoned, despite the murder weapon being discovered several months later in a disused water tank. Eight decades on, and with no concrete evidence to point the finger of blame at anyone, it’s the city’s oldest cold case by far.
Theories have run rampant for years as to the motive behind Jackson’s murder, but the police are no closer to separating fact from fiction today than they were in 1946, with the cinema shooting having settled into Bristolian folklore as one of the city’s most enduring unanswered mysteries.
