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Top criminal barristers Jeremy Dein and Sasha Wass investigate the 1962 armed robbery of a Co-op depot in South London, which resulted in an employee being shot dead.

Mitcham, London, 1962. On a bleak November night, detectives were called to a Co-op warehouse in South London to be confronted with the aftermath of a violent robbery. The manager’s office had been ransacked, the safe plundered of its weekly takings. Outside, a depot vehicle sat abandoned, its window shot out and the body of one Co-op employee, father of two Dennis Hurden, lay lifeless at the entrance.
Within hours, one of the getaway cars had been found, and soon four men were taken into custody and charged for the crime. On 12th March 1963 at the Old Bailey, one of the defendants, George Thatcher, was found guilty of capital murder and sentenced to death.

George’s conviction was quashed on appeal, but he still served almost two decades behind bars. Sixty years on, George’s widow Val is still campaigning to prove her late husband’s innocence. This controversial case hinged on an unrecorded verbal confession extracted by the police of the day in dubious circumstances. But was it a miscarriage of justice, and can our modern-day legal team cast the conviction in a different light?