The Back Room at Kelly's

On March 14, 1996, a gunman in a knit cap robbed Kelly's Barbershop in Columbia, South Carolina. He forced the owner and a customer, both in their seventies, and a barber into the small back room, made them kneel with their hands behind their heads and shot each of them. The two older men died. The barber, hit in the thumb and neck, called 911 from the floor. Ballistics matched the bullets to the killing of a cab driver a month earlier. The gun turned up at another man's home; he and a friend said it had been passed to Felix Cheeseboro, who had talked about the barbershop. From jail Cheeseboro wrote coded letters about a gun and a robbery. The surviving barber identified him after a session of hypnosis, and the police destroyed the gun before the defence could examine it.