On this date, 9 March 1950, during post World War II Britain, Timothy Evans was executed by hanging at Pentonville Prison. Timothy Evans was one of the first ‘innocent’ people which I heard of being wrongfully executed, when I was in my childhood. His case was one of the few reasons that turned me to an abolitionist. However, as time passes, I studied the case carefully, I had doubts on whether he is truly innocent of his crimes. I will post information about him from Wikipedia and some other links before explaining why I doubt if he was truly innocent of the murders of his wife and child.
Born
|
20
November 1924
Merthyr Tydfil, Glamorgan |
Died
|
9 March
1950 (aged 25)
HMP Pentonville, London |
Nationality
|
British
|
Occupation
|
Lorry
driver
|
Known for
|
Wrongful
execution for murder of 13-month-old daughter, Geraldine Evans.
|
Timothy John Evans (20 November 1924 – 9 March 1950) was a Welshman accused
of murdering his wife and infant daughter at their residence at 10 Rillington
Place in Notting Hill, London. In January 1950 Evans was tried and convicted of
the murder of his daughter, and he was sentenced to death by hanging. During
his trial, Evans had accused his downstairs neighbour, John Christie, of
committing the murders. Three years after Evans's execution, Christie was found
to be a serial killer who had murdered a number of other women in the same
house. Before his own execution, Christie confessed to murdering Mrs. Evans. An
official inquiry concluded in 1966 that Christie had also murdered Evans's
daughter, and Evans was granted a posthumous pardon.
The
case generated much controversy and is acknowledged as a major miscarriage of
justice. Along with those of Derek Bentley and Ruth Ellis, it played a
major part in the abolition of capital punishment in the United Kingdom in
1965.
Early
life
Evans
was a native of Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales. His biological father abandoned
the family in 1924 shortly before Evans's birth. Evans had an older sister
Eileen and a younger half-sister Maureen, born when Evans's mother re-married
in 1929. As a child, Evans had difficulty learning to speak and struggled at
school. Following an accident when he was eight, Evans developed a tubercular
verruca on his right foot which never completely healed and which caused him to
miss considerable amounts of time from school for treatments; this further set
back his education. Consequently, he was unable to read or write anything beyond
his name as an adult.
In
1935 his mother and her second husband moved to London and Evans worked as a painter
and decorator while attending school. He returned to Merthyr Tydfil in 1937 and
briefly worked in the coal mines but had to resign because of continuing
problems with his foot. In 1939 he returned to London to live again with his
mother and in 1946 they moved to St Mark's Road, Notting Hill. This was just
over two minutes' walk from 10 Rillington Place, his future residence after he
married.
Married
life
On
20 September 1947, Evans married Beryl Susanna Thorley, whom he had met through
a friend. They initially lived with Evans's family at St Mark's Road but in
early 1948 Beryl discovered she was pregnant and they decided they would find
their own place to live with their child. In Easter 1948, the couple moved into
the top-floor flat at 10 Rillington Place in the Ladbroke Grove area of Notting
Hill. Their neighbours in the ground-floor flat were John Christie, a post
office clerk and former Special Constable, and his wife, Ethel Christie.
Unknown to Evans, Christie was also a serial killer who had already killed two
women at the property prior to the Evanses' arrival; he would go on to murder
at least another three women as well as his wife over the next five years.
Timothy and Beryl's daughter Geraldine was born on 10 October 1948.
Their
marriage was characterised by angry quarrels, exacerbated by Beryl's poor
housekeeping and inability to manage the family's finances. However, Timothy
also misspent his wages on alcohol and his heavy drinking at the time
exacerbated his already short temper. The arguments between Timothy and Beryl
were loud enough to be heard by the neighbours and physical violence between
them was witnessed on several occasions. In late 1949, Beryl revealed to
Timothy that she was pregnant with their second child. Since the family was
already struggling financially, Beryl decided to have an abortion. After some
reluctance, Evans agreed to this course of action.
Events
leading to Evans's arrest
Several
weeks later, on 30 November 1949, Evans informed police at Merthyr Tydfil that
his wife had died in unusual circumstances. His first confession was that he
had accidentally killed her by giving her something in a bottle that a man had
given him to abort the foetus; he had then disposed of her body in a sewer
drain outside 10 Rillington Place. He told the police that after arranging for
Geraldine to be looked after, he had gone to Wales. When police examined the
drain outside the front of the building, however, they found nothing and,
furthermore, discovered that the manhole cover required the combined strength
of all three officers to remove it.
When
re-questioned, Evans changed his story and said that Christie had offered to
perform an abortion on Beryl. After some deliberation between Evans and his
wife, they had both agreed to take up Christie's offer. On 8 November, Evans
had returned home from work to be informed by Christie that the abortion had
not worked and that Beryl was dead. Christie had said that he would dispose of
the body (abortion being illegal in the U.K. at the time) and would make
arrangements for a couple from East Acton to look after Geraldine. He said that
Evans should leave London for the meantime. On 14 November, Evans left for
Wales to stay with relatives. Evans said he later returned to 10 Rillington
Place to ask about Geraldine, but Christie had refused to let him see her.
In
response to Evans's second statement, the police performed a preliminary search
of 10 Rillington Place but did not uncover anything incriminating, despite the
presence of a human thigh bone supporting a fence post in the tiny garden
(about 16 long by 14 feet wide). On a more thorough search on 2 December, the
police found the body of Beryl Evans, wrapped in a tablecloth in the wash-house
in the back garden. Access to the locked wash-house was only possible by using
a knife kept by Mrs Christie. Significantly, however, the body of Geraldine was
also found, alongside Beryl's body—Evans had not mentioned he had killed his
daughter in either of his statements. Beryl and Geraldine had both been
strangled. But the police once again failed to discover earlier human remains
left in the back garden, only a few feet away from the wash house. Although
they examined the garden, they did not find traces of the skeletal remains of
two prior victims of Christie, despite their shallow burial. Christie actually
removed the skull of Miss Eady when his dog dug it up from the garden shortly
after the police search, and he disposed of it in a bombed-out building nearby.
This vital clue was ignored when the skull was then discovered by children
playing in the ruins, and handed in to the police. If the bones had been found
in the garden, the investigation would have taken a different turn.
When
Evans was shown the clothing taken from the bodies of his wife and child, he
was also informed that both had been strangled. He was asked whether he was
responsible for their deaths. This was, according to Evans's statement, the
first occasion in which he was informed that his baby daughter had been killed.
To this, Evans apparently responded, "yes, yes". He then apparently
confessed to having strangled Beryl during an argument over debts and
strangling Geraldine two days later, after which he left for Wales.
This
alleged confession, along with other contradictory statements Evans made during
the police interrogation, was formerly cited as proof of his guilt. Ludovic
Kennedy, however, showed that the confessions were fabricated and dictated to
Evans by the investigating officers, and that they interrogated the accused
over the course of late evening and early morning hours to his physical and
emotional detriment, a man already in a highly emotional state. Evans also
stated in court that he was threatened with violence by the police, and it is
likely that they coerced Evans to his false confession. The police
investigation was marked by a lack of forensic expertise, with key evidence
missed or ignored, such as the bones of Christie's earlier victims in the back
garden of 10 Rillington Place.
 |
|
Timothy Evans (centre), being escorted by
police from Paddington Station to Notting Hill police station, December 1949
|
Trial
and wrongful execution
Evans
was put on trial for the murder of his daughter on 11 January 1950 (in
accordance with legal practice at the time, the prosecution proceeded only with
the charge of murdering Geraldine; Beryl's murder, with which Evans was still
formally charged, was "left on file", though evidence from this
murder was allowed to be used to prove Evans's guilt in the murder of
Geraldine). Evans was represented by Malcolm Morris. He recanted his confession
during consultations with his solicitor and alleged that Christie had always
been responsible for the murders. This was the basis of Evans's defence in his
trial, which Evans maintained as the truth until his execution. Subsequent events
were to confirm the veracity of Evans's beliefs.
Christie
and his wife, Ethel, were key witnesses for the prosecution. Christie denied
that he had offered to abort Beryl’s unborn child and gave detailed evidence
about the quarrels between Evans and his wife. The defence sought to show how
Christie was the murderer by highlighting his past criminal record. Christie
had previous convictions for several thefts and malicious wounding. The latter
case involved Christie striking a woman on the head with a cricket bat. But his
apparent reformation, and his service with the police, impressed the jury. The
defence also could not find a motive for why a supposedly respectable person
like Christie would want to murder two people, whereas the prosecution could use
the explanation in Evans's confessions as Evans's motive for wanting to kill
the victims. Evans had no criminal record. Had the police conducted a thorough
search of the garden and found the bones of two prior victims of Christie, the
trial may not have occurred at all, and a serial killer prevented from
murdering again. However, Evans's reputation for conflicting statements fatally
undermined his credibility. That reputation was created by the police
themselves in preparing several false confessions, forcing Evans to incriminate
himself with threats of violence. The case largely came down to Christie’s word
against Evans's and the course of the trial rapidly turned against Evans. The
trial itself lasted only three days and much key evidence was omitted, or never
shown to the jury. The judge was prejudiced against Evans from the start, and
his summing-up biased against the defendant. He was found guilty two days later
— the jury taking just 40 minutes to come to its decision. After a failed
appeal held before the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Goddard, Mr Justice Sellers and
Mr Justice Humphreys on 20 February, Evans was hanged on 9 March 1950 by Albert
Pierrepoint, assisted by Syd Dernley.
This
outcome was severely criticized when Christie's murders were discovered three
years later. During interviews with police and psychiatrists prior to his
execution, Christie admitted several times that he had been responsible for the
murder of Beryl Evans. If these confessions were true, Evans's second statement
detailing Christie's offer to abort Beryl's baby is the true version of events
that took place at Rillington Place on 8 November 1949. Ludovic Kennedy
provided one possible reconstruction of how the murder took place, where an
unsuspecting Beryl lets Christie into her apartment, expecting the abortion to
be carried out, but is instead attacked and then strangled. Christie claimed to
have possibly engaged in sexual intercourse with Beryl's body after her death
(he could not remember the precise details) but her autopsy had failed to
uncover evidence of sexual intercourse. In his confessions to Beryl's death,
Christie denied he had agreed to carry out an abortion on Beryl. He instead
claimed to have strangled her while being intimate with her, or that she had
wanted to commit suicide and he helped her do so.
One
important fact was not brought up in Evans's trial: several workmen were
willing to testify that there were no bodies in the wash-house when they worked
there several days after Evans supposedly hid them. They stored their tools in
the wash-room, and mended the roof during this period. Their evidence in itself
would have raised doubts about the veracity of Evans's alleged confessions, but
the workmen were not called to give evidence. Indeed, the police reinterviewed
the workmen and forced them to change their evidence to fit the preconceived
idea that Evans was the sole murderer. The murderer, Christie, would have
hidden the bodies of Beryl and Geraldine in the temporarily vacant first-floor
flat, and then moved them to the wash-house four days later when the workmen
had finished. Christie had used a similar procedure in both his previous
murders of Fuerst and Eady according to his confession in 1953.
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 had been found. A further search of the
building and grounds turned up three more bodies: Christie’s wife, Ethel, under
the floorboards of the front room; Ruth Fuerst, an Austrian nurse and munitions
worker; and Muriel Eady, a former co-worker of Christie, who were both buried
in the right-hand side of the small back garden of the building. Indeed,
Christie had used one of their thigh bones to prop up a trellis in the garden,
which the police had missed in their earlier searches of the property. Christie
was arrested on 31 March 1953, on the Embankment near Putney Bridge and during
the course of interrogation confessed four separate times to killing Beryl
Evans. He never admitted to killing Geraldine Evans, however. He confessed to
murdering Fuerst and Eady, saying he had stored their bodies in the wash-room
before burying them in shallow graves in the garden. It was in the same
wash-room that the bodies of Beryl and Geraldine Evans were found earlier
during the investigation into their murders. Christie was found guilty of
murdering his wife and was hanged on 15 July 1953 by Albert Pierrepoint, the
same hangman who'd executed Evans three years prior.
Because
Christie's crimes raised doubts about Evans's guilt in the murders of his wife
and daughter, the serving Home Secretary, David Maxwell-Fyfe, commissioned an
inquiry to investigate the possibility of a miscarriage of justice. It was
chaired by the Recorder of Portsmouth, John Scott Henderson, QC. The inquiry
ran for one week and its findings upheld Evans's guilt in both murders with the
explanation that Christie's confessions of murdering Beryl Evans were
unreliable because they were made in the context of furthering his own defence
that he was insane. The conclusion was met with scepticism by the press and the
public alike: if Christie's confessions were unreliable, why should those of
Evans be acceptable? The enquiry ignored vital evidence, and was biased to the
prosecution case. It led to more questions in Parliament, especially from
Geoffrey Bing, Reginald Paget, Sydney Silverman, Michael Foot and many other
MPs. The controversy was to continue until it led eventually to the exculpation
of Evans and a declaration of his innocence of the murder of both his wife and
his daughter.
The
murder of Beryl Evans was never a primary charge in either of the trials 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. When Christie was later the subject of the Scott Henderson Inquiry,
questions drafted by a solicitor representing Evans's mother were deemed not
relevant and Scott Henderson retained the right of deciding if they could be
asked.
Campaign
to overturn Evans's conviction
In
1955, David Astor, editor of The Observer, Ian Gilmour, editor of The
Spectator, John Grigg, editor of The National and English Review, and Sir
Lynton Andrews, editor of The Yorkshire Post, formed a delegation to petition
the Home Secretary for a new inquiry because of their dissatisfaction with the
conclusions of the Scott Henderson Inquiry. In the same year, attorney Michael
Eddowes examined the case and wrote the book The Man on Your Conscience, which
argued that Evans could not have been the killer. The television journalist
Ludovic Kennedy's book Ten Rillington Place went on to criticise the police
investigation and evidence submitted at the 1950 trial in which Evans was found
guilty. This produced another Parliamentary debate in 1961 but still no second
inquiry.
In
1965, Liberal Party politician Herbert Wolfe of Darlington, County Durham
contacted Harold Evans (no relation), the editor of The Northern Echo. He and
Kennedy formed the Timothy Evans Committee. The result of a prolonged campaign
was that the Home Secretary, Sir Frank Soskice, ordered a new inquiry chaired
by High Court judge Sir Daniel Brabin in 1965–66. Brabin found it was
"more probable than not" that Evans murdered his wife and that he did
not murder his daughter. This was contrary to the prosecution case in Evans's
trial, which held that both murders had been committed by the same person as a
single transaction. The victims' bodies had been found together in the same
location and had been murdered in the same way by strangulation. Despite his
perverse conclusion, the Brabin enquiry exposed police malpractice during the
Evans case, such as destruction of evidence. The neck tie which had been used
to strangle Geraldine, for example, was destroyed by the police prior to the
discovery of Christie's crimes in 1953. Even the record book in which the
destruction had to be noted, was itself destroyed by the police. In most
serious cases, police are required to preserve all material and documentary
evidence, so the removal of evidence in this case is suspicious. Many police
statements were contradictory and confused as to dates and times of interviews
with key witnesses, especially of the Christies during the first murder case.
Brabin went to great lengths to prefer police evidence wherever possible, and
exonerate them of any police misconduct (such as threats of violence against
Evans during his interrogation), and he didn't address the allegations made by
Kennedy about the validity of several of the confessions allegedly made by
Evans. He never considered the incompetence of the police in their searches of
the garden at Rillington Place, and had a poor understanding of the importance
of forensic evidence. The enquiry did little to settle the many issues which
arose from the case, but, by exonerating Evans of killing his child, was
crucial in subsequent events.
Since
Evans had only been convicted of the murder of his daughter, Roy Jenkins,
Soskice's successor as Home Secretary, recommended a royal pardon for Evans,
which was granted in October 1966. In 1965 Evans' remains were exhumed from
Pentonville Prison and reburied in St Patrick's Roman Catholic Cemetery in
Leytonstone, Greater London. The outcry over the Evans case contributed to the
suspension and then abolition of capital punishment in the United Kingdom.
The Two Killers of
Rillington Place
John Reginald Halliday Christie was already the
murderer of at least two victims when Timothy John Evans, much younger and with
an IQ of 65, came to live with his wife at 10 Rillington Place. Christie is
supposed to have framed Evans over the killing of his wife and baby daughter,
and was even the principal Crown witness against Evans. Refuting claims that
Evans was innocent of the crimes for which he was hanged but years later
granted a free pardon, this book sets out to show that it was in fact Evans who
killed both his wife and child, and then tried to blame Christie, who at that
time had the bodies of two women buried in his garden. The book also argues
that Beryl Evans was not even present at 10 Rillington Place when Christie was
supposed to have been strangling her there; that, to accept Evans as innocent,
we should have to believe in far greater improbabilities and absurdities than
the presence of two stranglers in one house; that Evans tried to kill his wife
more than once, just before the murder itself; that evidence showing Evans to
be guilty was available at the time; and that commentators both then and since
have altered the evidence to proclaim Evans's innocence.
Publisher:
Little, Brown & Company (23 Jun 1994)
ISBN-10: 0316909467
ISBN-13: 978-0316909464
ISBN-10: 0316909467
ISBN-13: 978-0316909464
John Eddowes, an independent investigator, has done
his homework and discovered that Evans was an extremely violent character who
tried to kill his wife not long before the murder. He cites medical evidence to
show that Evans was, technically speaking, a psychopath who was always losing
control.
But, above all, he performs a ruthless dissection
of Ludovic Kennedy’s book, highlighting its ‘errors, omissions and alterations’
and producing a brilliant and totally damning account of Kennedy’s arguments.
He points out that when Kennedy was asked, at the Brabin inquiry of 1968, about
some particularly misleading attack on the police, he admitted: “Yes, that is
wrong.” Yet in a paperback edition of 10 Rillington Place, 20 years later, the
same incorrect statement has been left unchanged.
But there is one enormous obstacle to believing
that Evans was innocent: at Notting Hill police station, he confessed to the
murder of his wife and baby, not once but three times. It was only after
talking to the murderer Donald Hume in jail — who advised him to change his
story then stick to it — that Evans accused Christie of the murders.
If Evans was innocent, why did he confess in such
circumstantial detail to the murders? According to Kennedy, because he was
virtually ‘brainwashed’ by shock, and said whatever the police wanted to hear.
But anyone who reads Evans’s confessions can see that this is just not on. No
one could sound so precise and circumstantial if he was innocent.
Christie had no reason whatever to kill the baby
even if he had murdered Beryl Evans. And if he hadn’t killed her then it would
have been sheer madness to kill the baby.
But the case he presents is nevertheless, quite
overwhelming. After this book, it should be impossible for any sensible person
to believe in the innocence of Timothy Evans.
Colin Wilson
Evening Standard
LINKS:
COMMENTS:
I
had checked with many of my friends from the United Kingdom, most of them told
me that they do not believe that Timothy Evans was innocent of the murders of
his wife and child. Some of my friends doubted and say that he was only
‘legally innocent’.
I
would like to give my thoughts on why I believe that Evans was only ‘legally
innocent’. First of all, if Evans truly was innocent of the murders, the first
thing he would do when he discover the corpses was to quickly inform the
police, not take weeks later to do so. I was wondering why he confessed to the
murders three times and not once.
Evans
was a well-known liar, he was good at changing stories and making people see
him as a gentle lamb. Although he put the blame of the murders on Christie, I
have doubts if Evans was telling the truth. To catch a serial killer is to
think as though you are a serial killer, if I were a serial killer myself, I will
definitely not choose my neighbour as one of my victims, as it is a high risk
of drawing the police to me like flies.
Although Christie
confessed to killing Beryl Evans, I doubt he did it, because he is a serial
killer that was already arrested. He must be saying this in his mind, “I am
going to get charge with killing many women. I might as well add Beryl as
another one of my victims.”
I am just giving my opinion and I do
encourage people to read John
Eddowes book:
The Two Killers of Rillington Place. I suspect
that this case of Timothy Evans is just anti-death penalty propaganda to scare
the public that they would be wrongfully executed. Many of the judges before
the 1960’s and even the pathologist, Keith Simpson believe that Timothy Evans
was guilty.
My
friend will soon blog about how to prevent an innocent man from being
wrongfully executed.
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