Four cleared of assisting Christmas Eve gunman

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Four people accused of helping the gunman who shot a beautician outside a pub on Christmas Eve have been cleared.

Connor Chapman, 24, was convicted last year of the murder of 26-year-old Elle Edwards, who was killed when he opened fire outside the Lighthouse pub in Wallasey Village, Wirral, shortly before midnight on December 24 2022, injuring five others, in the culmination of a gang feud.

On Wednesday, a jury at Liverpool Crown Court found Danielle Dowdall, Roxanne Matthews, David Chambers and Paul Owen not guilty of assisting Chapman in the days and weeks after the shooting.

Dowdall and Matthews sobbed and hugged in the dock after the jury returned its verdicts after six hours and 20 minutes of deliberations.

Dowdall, 34, was accused of taking in Chapman’s clothes after the shooting.

The trial, which lasted four weeks, heard Chapman was charged with murder on January 12 and the following morning Dowdall’s mother sent her a screenshot of the police press release.

Dowdall, who described Chapman as her drug dealer and her “mate”, replied: “I know I’m minding his f****** clothes.”

But she said she had been given the Santa sack, which also contained jewellery, by Chapman before the shooting.

She told the court: “Before the girl lost her life I had the jewellery and the clothes, that’s how I know they were no part of that girl’s poor loss of life.”

The jury found her not guilty of assisting an offender.

Chapman’s uncle Chambers, 43, was accused of collecting the clothes from his nephew’s home on Christmas Day and taking them to Dowdall.

He told the court he had been to Chapman’s home to collect extra chairs for the family Christmas dinner.

He also denied helping to arrange the gunman’s “escape route” by taking co-defendant Matthews, 34, to collect a hire car she had booked for Chapman.

He was cleared of two counts of assisting an offender.

Matthews was accused of harbouring Chapman at her home in Noctorum.

The mother-of-three, who was cleared of three counts of assisting an offender, said she had let him stay after his girlfriend kicked him out because Matthews’s friend was pregnant with his baby.

She then claimed she had helped him to book a holiday lodge in North Wales, where he was arrested on January 10, because she wanted to help him “make amends” with his partner and the mother of his child.

She told the court: “I felt more sorry for him obviously with what was going on with his girlfriend.”

Owen, 55, was also cleared of assisting an offender.

The jury heard his car had been used on New Year’s Eve 2022 when Chapman and his associate, Thomas Waring, burnt out the Mercedes used in the shooting in Frodsham, Cheshire.

Owen, who told the court he was a customer of Chapman’s and knew him only as Curly, said he believed the drug dealer was driving the car home for him to move it out of the way of a planned fireworks display at the Horse and Jockey pub in Upton, where he was spending the evening.

The court heard Chapman carried out the Christmas Eve attack, using a Skorpion sub-machine gun, following a feud between gangs on the Woodchurch estate, where he lived, and the Ford estate.

Targets Kieran Salkeld and Jake Duffy, who were injured in the shooting, had been captured on video the day before assaulting Sam Searson, from the Woodchurch estate, the jury was told.

He was jailed for life with a minimum term of 48 years.