THE WEAPON: How an antique revolver threatened to turn a city into a scene out of the Wild West
Rhys Jones was killed by a revolver which was first used in World War One
The gang warfare which claimed the life of an innocent schoolboy threatened to turn parts of Liverpool into a latter-day Wild West.
So it is grimly ironic that the gun with which Sean Mercer shot Rhys Jones was a battered antique which wouldn't have looked out of place in a cowboy movie.
A .455 calibre Smith and Wesson revolver with a six-inch barrel, this terrifying piece of weaponry may have been handed down through generations of Liverpool criminals.
While the famous American company's revolvers were popular with bandits and lawmen back in frontier days, the model with which Rhys was murdered was designed during the First World War.
The British Army's standard Webley service pistols couldn't be manufactured quickly enough to meet the demands from the trenches, so Smith and Wesson were commissioned to convert their existing .45 revolvers to fire British ammunition.
Soon they were being produced at a rate of 6,000-a-month to be shipped across the Atlantic, and it was one such war trophy which came to be bought by Mercer's fellow Crocky Crew 'soldier' James Yates.
Made in about 1915, it had become grimy and corroded over the ensuing nine decades, but tragically remained in good working order, as tests later confirmed.
However the rifling in the barrel was worn and the bullets fired by Mercer were slightly undersized, causing them to fly end-over-end in a 'tumbling' manner.
As a result, the round which hit Rhys was side-on when it struck him in the back of the neck, splintering bones in his ribs and vertebrae, destroying his windpipe and causing massive blood loss before exiting through his throat.
The .455 calibre Smith and Wesson revolver with a six-inch barrel may have been used by generations of criminals in Liverpool
While the sawn-off shotgun is the weapon of choice among such gangs because of lax controls, the Smith and Wesson was not the only wartime relic in the Croxteth Crew's arsenal.
A video posted by them on YouTube showed a hooded youth pretending to fire what experts believe is a British Army Webley revolver at the camera.
Police who found the murder weapon discovered stashed with it an imitation Walther PPK self-loading pistol - James Bond's weapon of choice - which had been converted to fire live rounds.
The YouTube video also featured a Russian 7.62 handgun.
Police in Merseyside recovered on average nearly one firearm every day last year, many of them war trophies.
But a steady stream of guns smuggled from abroad and reactivated replicas means they are likely to remain readily available to gangs everywhere.
That was graphically illustrated just weeks after Rhys's killing when defendant Nathan Quinn was caught by police in the process of buying a high-powered Browning 9mm self-loading pistol along with a silencer and 13 bullets.
A police officer removes a sign tied to a tree outside Liverpool Crown Court in October
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