Two days before he was due to be hanged for murder on his 24th birthday, Jimmy O’Connor’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Always insisting on his innocence, he later became a successful playwright, and married Nemone Lethbridge, one of Britain’s first female barristers. Now 93, she is determined to clear his name before she dies

Nemone Lethbridge first set eyes on her husband-to-be, Jimmy O’Connor, across a crowded London pub in 1958. In her day, she was an “It Girl”, a glittering Oxford ­graduate and one of the first women to be called to the Bar – among her early cases, she defended the Kray twins. Jimmy was a ­working-class Irishman 14 years her senior, a convicted murderer who’d been sentenced to hang. Other than very different experiences of the law, they seemed to have nothing much in common: but they did have Catholicism.

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