Friday 22 March 2013

Chicago Joe & The Showgirl

This was a 1990 film starring Keifer Sutherland & Emily Lloyd, based on real events.  The two principal characters were Karl Gustav Hulton and Elizabeth Jones. He was born in Sweden in 1922 and enlisted in the U.S.Army after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  He found himself in England and a chance meeting with Jones, led to a very short but violent crime spree.  She was born in Neath in South Wales in 1926, but had a troublesome childhood.  Her ambition was to become, of all things, a stripper.  Their partnership lasted just six days.  The first victim was a lady that they accidentally collided with.  She on a bicycle, they in a car.  She died in the accident and they robbed her instead of informing the Police.  Then they attacked another woman, beat and robbed her.  If that was not enough, they threw her into a river, hoping she would drown.  Thankfully, she did not.

    Their next move was to commit cold-blooded murder.  They robbed a taxi driver named George Heath, and then they shot him dead.  George Heath had a cleft chin, so it became known as the "Cleft Chin Murder."  Jones gave herself up to Police and Hulton was arrested later.  Put on trial, both were convicted and sentenced to death.  Jones was reprieved, in a decision that apparently Winston Churchill disapproved of. Hulton was hanged in 1944, and Jones served ten years in prison.  When released, she disappeared, whereabouts unknown.  The Chicago Joe tag came from the fact that Hulton claimed to Jones that he was a Chicago gangster.

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