Timothy Evans

Timothy John Evans (November 20, 1924 – March 9, 1950) was a Welsh prisoner who was hanged in the United Kingdom in 1950 for the murder of his infant daughter. Events subsequent to his execution, including several books proclaiming his innocence and a pardon for his daughter’s murder, helped to get capital punishment abolished in Britain. The case is one of the most serious miscarriages of justice that has occurred in Britain.

The grave of Timothy Evans

Life prior to the murder of his wife and daughter

Evans was a native of Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales. In 1935 his mother and her second husband (Evans' natural father had walked out on the family just after Timothy's birth) moved to London and he found work as a painter and decorator. At the time of his arrest, he was working as a lorry driver.

On September 20, 1947, Evans married Beryl Susanna Thorley. In Easter 1948, the couple moved into the top-floor flat at 10 Rillington Place, Ladbroke Grove, Notting Hill, London. Their daughter Geraldine was born on October 10, 1948.

It is not disputed that Evans was prone to tell elaborate lies about himself. He and Beryl were also given to having loud arguments which could be heard by the neighbours. The relationship started to suffer due to Beryl's inability to manage the family's finances, a fact exacerbated when she revealed to Evans, in late 1949, that she was expectant with their second child.

Evans was informed by the ground floor tenant, John Reginald Halliday Christie, that he (Christie) possessed medical experience sufficient to carry out an abortion. Evans initially refused, but relented in the face of his wife's insistence that she wanted to abort and 'trusted Mr Christie'. Beryl Evans was last seen alive on November 8, 1949.

Events leading to Evans' arrest

On November 30, 1949, Evans went to the police in Merthyr Tydfil and confessed to killing Beryl and disposing of her body down the drain outside the apartment building. He said that he had given his wife something contained in a bottle and that she died after ingesting it. He told the police that afterwards he had made arrangements to have his daughter Geraldine looked after, and had returned to Wales. His wife had in fact been strangled, knowledge of which can only have been known to the real murderer.

When police examined the drain outside the front of the building they found nothing and also found that the weight of the drain cover required the combined strength of three police officers to lift it. When re-questioned, Evans told a different story. He now claimed that his neighbour and fellow tenant, John Reginald Halliday Christie, had offered to provide an abortion for Beryl. Evans had returned home from work on November 7 to find Christie waiting for him who told him that the operation "didn't work" and that, as a result Beryl was dead. He said Christie told him that he would dispose of the body "down one of the drains" and told him that he knew of a young couple in East Acton who would look after Geraldine and then told Evans to sell his furniture and "get out of London somewhere".

During a search of 10 Rillington Place, on December 2, 1949, the police found the bodies of Beryl and Geraldine in the small wash house (54" x 52"; 1.37 m x 1.32 m) in the back area of the building. Both had been strangled; the baby's body placed behind the door and Beryl's behind timber that had been propped against a sink in the right hand corner facing the door. The search must have been perfunctory because the search failed to reveal the bones of Christie's previous victims visible in the tiny garden next to the wash house. The police showed scant regard for forensic clues and apparently failed, for example, to search for fingerprints on the wash house door or any other surfaces which the murderer had likely touched when dumping the parcels containing the bodies.

When Evans was shown the clothing taken from the bodies of his wife and child he was immediately asked whether he was responsible for their deaths. He apparently replied with a simple “Yes”. Ludovic Kennedy has argued that until that time Evans had had no forewarning that his daughter was dead and that the affirmative response could, in that situation, mean anything or nothing. Evans now apparently confessed to having strangled Beryl during an argument over debts on November 8, 1949, and to having strangled Geraldine two days later, after which he left for Wales. There was evidence produced later by Ludovic Kennedy and others that the police coerced Evans into making a false confession. Evans was illiterate and the language used in the confession showed it to be a police fabrication. They relied on false information provided by Christie, who at the later trial would be the chief prosecution witness against Evans. When Christie was unmasked later, he himself confessed to murdering Beryl Evans, vindicating the first confessions of Evans, and repudiating the later "confessions" at Notting Hill police station obtained by police coercion.

Evans' trial and execution

Evans went on trial at the Old Bailey in January 1950. He was defended by Malcolm Morris. The court heard evidence related to both killings, although Evans was officially charged only with the killing of his daughter. During the trial, he reverted to his story that his neighbour Christie was the actual killer. Christie gave evidence in the witness box which countered everything Evans alleged, and his word was accepted by the court, and under pressure from the judge, by the jury. His perjury was later found to be an elaborate deception designed to cover his own culpability. Christie had previous convictions, including violence against women, whilst Evans had a completely clean record.

Two important facts were withheld from the jury. There was evidence that Beryl had been sexually assaulted after death, which was inconsistent with Evans' statement; and two workmen, who were willing to testify that there were no bodies in the wash-house when they worked there several days after Evans supposedly hid them, were not called to give evidence (Christie had moved the bodies to the wash-house two weeks later, after the workmen had finished).

The jury found Evans guilty of his daughter’s murder and he was hanged at Pentonville Prison by Albert Pierrepoint and Syd Dernley on 9 March, 1950.

His last words were "Give my kind regards to Mr Black" - his arresting officer Chief Superintendent James Neil Black QPM. He maintained his innocence to the end.

Serial Killer Christie

Three years later, a new tenant in Christie's flat, Beresford Brown found the bodies of three women (Kathleen Maloney, Rita Nelson and Hectorina Maclennan) hidden in the papered-over kitchen pantry, a recess immediately next to the wash house where Beryl and Geraldine Evans were found. A further search of the building and grounds turned up three more bodies, including Christie’s wife under the floorboards of the front room and two women, Ruth Fuerst, an Austrian nurse, and Muriel Eady on the right hand side of the back garden area to the building. Indeed, one of their thigh bones had been used by Christie to prop up a trellis in the garden, but had been missed by the police in their earlier examination of the garden. Christie was arrested on March 31, 1953, on the embankment near Putney Bridge and during the course of interrogation made four separate confessions to the killing of Beryl Evans. He never admitted to the killing of Geraldine Evans, although the evidence points overwhelmingly to his guilt. He had the means and motive to kill the child, and so prevent investigation of their disappearance. The child was strangled, just like all his other victims. Christie was found guilty of murdering his wife and was hanged on July 15, 1953.

The murder of Beryl Evans was never a primary charge in either of the two arrests of Evans or Christie. The former had been charged with the murder of his daughter and the latter with the murder of Mrs Christie. Hence questions that went to the murder of Mrs Evans were not those with which the trials were especially concerned and when Christie was later the subject of a hastily convened inquiry, questions drafted by a solicitor representing Mr Evans were deemed unnecessary by Parliamentary Counsel and never asked. It is this omission, exacerbated by the mental inadequacy of Evans and mental incapacity of Christie that has resulted in the ensuing debate as to whether the execution of Evans was a miscarriage of justice. The forensic evidence was very badly handled, although what remains points quite clearly to Christie as the murderer. He had the motive, and the method of strangulation was similar to the other victims.

Christie’s conviction in 1953, and his confession of the murder of Beryl Evans, raised considerable doubts about the guilt of Timothy Evans. A Parliamentary inquiry initiated by the publication of Ludovic Kennedy's book Ten Rillington Place in 1961, however, produced an equivocal response from the Home Secretary R.A. Butler who stated that whereas no jury would have found Evans guilty in the light of what later became known, there was no certainty of Evans' innocence. Such a response has been rejected by recent commentators, who affirm that Evans was entirely innocent of the charges for which he was hanged. It is clear that police malpractice and incompetence not only led to the hanging of an innocent indivdual, but also indirectly to the murder of four more female victims. The system of criminal justice also failed to recognise at the time and for many years afterwards that a major miscarriage of justice had been made.

The campaign to overturn Evans' conviction

Michael Eddowes, a lawyer, examined the case in his book The Man on Your Conscience which demonstrated why Evans could not have been the killer. The television journalist Ludovic Kennedy followed with his more extensive book where he cast doubt on the police investigation and evidence submitted at the 1950 trial in which Evans was found guilty. Nothing happened until a chemical manufacturer and Liberal Party member named Herbert Wolfe in Darlington, County Durham, got in touch in 1965 with the editor of The Northern Echo, Harold Evans (no relation). Harold Evans made it a major campaign and when Kennedy returned from travels abroad they formed the Timothy Evans Committee with many famous people, including Lady Gaitskell. The result of a prolonged campaign was that the Home Secretary, Sir Frank Soskice, ordered a new inquiry (known as the Brabin enquiry after the High Court judge who wrote the subsequent report). Brabin found that Evans likely did not kill his baby but probably murdered his wife, an unusual conclusion because most commentators at the time (and the lawyers at Evans' trial) thought that whoever killed Beryl Evans also killed the child. Both were strangled, and both were parcelled up after their murder, and put together in the wash house. John Christie had the opportunity, motive and experience to have murdered both Beryl Evans and the baby. He had already murdered two women at the same house during the war, and later strangled four more women, storing their bodies under the floorboards, in an alcove next to the washroom or (with the earlier victims), burying them in the garden. As with many other judicial inquiries of the time, Brabin failed to consider all the evidence, and accepted police evidence without criticism.

However, since Evans had been convicted of killing the baby, he was therefore innocent of the specific crime of which he was found guilty, and hung. Roy Jenkins, Soskice's successor as Home Secretary, recommended a royal pardon, which was granted, and Evans was disinterred from Pentonville Prison and reburied outside. The outcry over the Evans case (with other miscarriages) contributed to the abolition of the death penalty in the UK.

Innocence of Timothy Evans

On 16 November 2004, Timothy Evans' half-sister, Mary Westlake, started a case to overturn a decision by the Criminal Cases Review Commission not to refer Evans' case to the Court of Appeal to have his conviction quashed. She argued that although the previous inquiries concluded that Evans probably did not kill his daughter, they did not declare him innocent, since a pardon is a forgiveness of crimes committed. The request to refer the case was dismissed on November 19 2004, with the judges saying that the cost and resources of quashing the conviction could not be justified, although they did accept that Evans did not murder his wife or child.

A book was published in 2007 by The National Archives and authored by Edward Marston. It reviews the records (many held at the archives) and concludes that Evans was completely innocent of the murder of his wife and child, a conclusion shared by other commentators.

The case was one of the first major miscarriages of justice perpetrated by British Courts after the end of the second World War and was followed by many more, such as the cases of the Birmingham Six, and the Guildford Four, among numerous others. If the lessons of the Evans case had been heeded by the authorities, then many more injustices would have been prevented.

Bibliography

• Michael Eddowes, The Man on Your Conscience: An Investigation of the Evans Murder Trial , Cassell and Co (1955).
• Ludovic Kennedy, 10 Rillington Place, Gollancz (1961).
• Edward Marston, John Christie: Crime archive, The National Archives (2007).

See also

• False confession
• Falsified evidence
• Forensic science
• Intimidation
• Miscarriage of justice
• Police misconduct
• witness

Timothy Evans in popular culture

• Ewan MacColl wrote the song The Ballad of Tim Evans (also known as Go Down You Murderer) about the case. This song appears in the Roger Corman movie A Bucket of Blood.

• A film of 10 Rillington Place directed by Richard Fleischer and starring Richard Attenborough as Christie, Judy Geeson as Beryl Evans, and John Hurt as Timothy Evans was released in the UK on May 12 1971.

External links

• BBC News Hanged man's pardon 'inadequate'
• The Ballad of Tim Evans.
• Discussion of the case
• Archive of Documents
• Discussion of the murders