Part Four – The Gold Bar Murder Case – Shanghai 1947 – “The Last Briton in a Chinese Jail”

See previous three posts

Part One – “It was a foreigner who shot me”

Part Two – “Drag him out the car”

Part Three – “that’s the 15th notch on my gun butt”

And so, a final postscript to one of the most sensational murders in Shanghai on the eve of the Communist Revolution…

Whitey Malloy was returned to America to serve out his life sentence. Despite his 1949 appeal he remained in jail.

Meanwhile Charlie Archer had been sentenced to life by the Chinese District Court in Shanghai….After she’d testified his wife had feinted in the witness box and had to be carried from the court….and then the world promptly forgot Charles P. Archer…until 1956….

Charles Archer had been thrown in a Shanghai jail for life. In 1949 he became a prisoner of Communist China. What they thought of him is not recorded, but in July 1956 they decided to release him to the British authorities in Hong Kong. He was the last British subject to be held as a prisoner in the People’s Republic.  On July 27th 1956 Archer was brought by Red Army guards to the border with Hong Kong. He was handed over to British officials and taken for a medical check-up in a Hong Kong hospital. The news came to light following negotiations for the release of eleven American missionaries still held in Shanghai jails. The Straits Times in Singapore ran the headline – KILLER FREED.

What happened to Archer after that I do not know….

Shanghai Jail