At about 9 p.m. on September 23, 1982, two robbers entered Prince’s Lounge at 46th and Walnut Streets in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. When a customer lunged at one of the robbers, gunfire erupted. Two patrons, 35-year-old James Graves and 42-year-old James Huntley were killed. The robbers fled without taking any money.
Shortly after the shooting, the Philadelphia Police Department received an anonymous tip identifying the robbers as Bernard Jackson and Jackson’s brother-in-law, 33-year-old Bruce Reese, who was identified by his nickname, “Touche.” At the time, Reese was on parole after being convicted of a 1974 murder.
Jackson was already in police custody on other robbery charges. After police informed Jackson that he had been identified by at least one of the three women tending bar that night, he offered to provide information about the crime.
Jackson was then charged with second-degree murder, robbery and other crimes for the Prince’s Lounge shooting. He was appointed an attorney who told the Philadelphia County District Attorney’s Office that Jackson would testify for the prosecution if he were offered an acceptable deal.
Jackson began giving statements that changed over time.
On October 14, 1982, he said that he, Reese and a third man whose name he did not know planned to rob the bar on September 28. He said he went in on the night of the 23rd just to determine whether an employee who knew him was working that night. When he saw that she was not there, Jackson said, the two other men entered the bar while he waited outside. He said he handed the unnamed man a .38-caliber handgun he had stolen a month earlier. Reese, Jackson said, had his own gun. Four minutes later, Reese and the other man ran out and jumped into the car. Jackson said the unnamed man said he had shot two people who tried to stop the robbery.
Eight days later, on October 22, after signing an agreement to plead guilty to third-degree murder, Jackson said the unnamed man was nicknamed “Monk.” Jackson now said that Reese told him that he had been standing near the bar demanding money when Monk started shooting.
On January 14, 1983, Jackson gave two more versions. He first said that Reese had both handguns, a .22-caliber and a .38-caliber. He said Monk was James Lambert and that both Lambert and Reese had told him that Lambert was the shooter.
Later that day, after Jackson was said to have failed a polygraph examination, he said Reese said that “they” shot two men. Jackson also said that Reese approached the bar to get the money, while Lambert stood at the “doorway to the bar.”
On February 4, 1983, Jackson reverted to the earlier version which said that Reese had told him that Lambert was the shooter.
On March 26, 1983, Reese was arrested. Lambert was arrested on May 4, 1983. Both men were charged with second-degree murder, robbery, conspiracy to commit robbery, and possessing an instrument of a crime.
They went to trial together in April 1984 in the Philadelphia County Commonwealth Court of Pleas.
Jackson testified for the prosecution and his testimony was inconsistent. He was impeached during cross-examination with his prior inconsistent statements. He insisted that he was outside the bar and that Reese and Lambert went inside, though in varying roles.
Years later, a federal appeals court would describe Jackson’s prior statements as “devastatingly inconsistent with each other and with his story at trial.” Jackson testified that he initially decided to give police only “some of the truth.” He said that when he told police that Lambert had admitted being the shooter to Jackson, he was “feeding them a story.” He admitted that some of his versions were lies.
Jackson claimed at trial that he was telling the truth when he said Reese had admitted that he shot two people. Then he said that what Reese really said was, “I think we killed a couple of guys in there,” not that Reese specifically shot the victims.
Jackson admitted that three months after his first statement, he was still giving the police different versions of what had happened. The federal appeals court later said, “Still, breathtakingly, at the very end of his testimony, with his credibility hanging, at best, by a thread, and conceding that he was testifying to avoid a death sentence, Jackson somewhat proudly announced that although he had ‘switched what [Lambert and Reese] did interchangeably,’ he always said that Lambert and Reese were the two men involved–they were ‘the only two people’ he supplied to police.”
Assistant District Attorney Robert Myers asked Jackson, “Were there other people out on the street that you had problems with or people that you disliked intensively or had ongoing feuds with?”
“Yeah,” Jackson said.
“And when you got arrested for this murder, you could have [named] them on this murder, is that correct?” Myers asked.
“Yeah,” Jackson said.
“But the only two people that you supplied to the police was Bruce Reese and Monk, who you later found out was James Lambert, is that correct?” Myers asked.
“Correct,” Jackson said.
“And you recall whether you, in all the statements you gave, the four or five statements, however many there are…Did you ever say that there were two other people involved in this job with you, that is, the Prince’s Lounge, other than Touche and Monk?” Myers asked.
“No,” Jackson said.
Jackson testified to his plea deal in the Prince’s Lounge case, but denied that the deal extended to other pending robbery cases he was facing. Arthur Gordon, chief of the District Attorney’s Homicide Unit, confirmed that there had been no plea negotiations concerning the pending robbery cases, and said that Jackson faced a maximum sentence of 120 to 240 years on those cases.
Three women who were tending bar, Marie Green, Sarah Clark and Janet Ryan, testified that two Black men entered the bar together. One remained on the entryway stairs, near a bar at the front, while the other approached a second bar in the back. They said they heard shots from the back bar.
They agreed that the robber who remained on the stairway was shorter and thinner than the back bar robber.
Green, Clark and Ryan had viewed a photographic lineup that included a photo of Jackson. Green and Clark identified him as one of the robbers. Green viewed a photo lineup which included a photograph of Reese, but she did not identify him.
Green contradicted Jackson’s claim that he walked into the bar before the other two men came in. She said she had been at the stairway bar for several hours and no customer had approached her.
During Reese’s defense, Ryan identified Lambert as the man who pointed a gun at her. She also denied that Reese had put a gun to her face.
A detective testified that he had executed a search warrant at a house where Reese’s wife lived, and he recovered four .38-caliber bullets in a dresser drawer containing men’s clothing. A firearms expert testified for the prosecution that those bullets were not the same type of bullets recovered from the bodies of the victims in either caliber or design.
During closing arguments, Myers stressed to the jury that “in every statement,” Jackson always implicated Reese and Lambert. “Mr. Jackson didn’t choose to finger Antman, or Underdog or Weasel [street names for some of Jackson’s associates] and he could have said that to the police…He could have put the case on anybody…He didn’t say his sister did it. He didn’t say his neighbor who he might have hated for 20 years did it or other people he disliked did it. He said Reese did it.”
On April 25, 1984, the jury convicted Reese of second-degree murder, robbery, and conspiracy to commit robbery. Lambert was convicted of first-degree murder, robbery and conspiracy to commit robbery. Both were also convicted of criminal possession of an instrument of a crime.
Reese was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Lambert was sentenced to death.
On May 3, 1984, Jackson pled guilty to two counts of third-degree murder, robbery and conspiracy to commit robbery in the Prince’s Lounge case. He was sentenced to 12 ½ to 25 years in prison. He also pled guilty to five unrelated bar robberies. He received sentences of less prison time, concurrent to that sentence. In June 1984, Jackson pled guilty to eight more robberies, six of which were of bars. On the recommendation of prosecutor Myers, Jackson was sentenced to five to 10 years on each of these robberies and the sentences were also concurrent to the sentence on the Prince’s Lounge case.
Reese’s conviction and sentence were affirmed by the Pennsylvania Superior Court in 1987. Lambert’s conviction and sentence were upheld in 1992.
In 2002, Lambert filed a Post-Conviction Relief Act (PCRA) petition seeking a new trial after he discovered a police report dated October 25, 1982. The report said that a photographic lineup containing a photo of Lawrence Woodlock was shown to a witness. The report said, “Mr. Woodlock is named as a co-defendant by Bernard JACKSON. No identification was made.”
The PCRA petition said that despite the prosecutor’s insistence that Jackson’s testimony could be believed because he always named Reese and Lambert as his partners in the robbery, in fact, Jackson had identified someone else to the police: Woodlock.
Lambert was unsuccessful in the Pennsylvania state courts, however, and he filed a federal petition for a writ of habeas corpus. In 2011, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals granted the writ and vacated Lambert’s conviction because of the failure by the prosecution to disclose the police report.
Meanwhile during this time, Reese had filed two PCRA petitions, both of which were unsuccessful. One month after the ruling in Lambert’s case, Reese filed a third PCRA petition based on the Woodlock police report. This petition was amended in 2017 to include claims that the prosecutor allowed Jackson to testify falsely that he had never named anyone but Reese and Lambert and to testify falsely when he said there was no deal with the prosecution on the unrelated robbery cases.
That same year, Lambert pled guilty to third-degree murder and was resentenced to 34 to 68 years in prison. With credit for time served, he was released immediately.
In March 2019, Reese’s PCRA petition was dismissed. He appealed and the dismissal was upheld.
In 2021, attorney Craig Cooley filed a federal petition for a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of Reese. In 2023, the U.S. District Court granted the writ and vacated Reese’s conviction only on the ground that the failure of the prosecution to disclose the Woodlock report resulted in an unfair trial. The court rejected the other claims.
“[G]iven the weak evidence against Reese, and the fact that Jackson’s credibility was ‘hanging by a thread,’ bolstered solely by the assurance–now belied by the Woodlock [report]–that he never identified a co-conspirator other than Reese and Lambert, there is clearly a reasonable likelihood that the Woodlock [report] could have affected the judgment of the jury,” the court ruled.
On June 28, 2024, the Philadelphia County District Attorney’s Office dismissed the charges against Reese. He was released that day, more than 40 years after his conviction.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 07-07-2025
Last Update Date: 07-07-2025
