The terrible miscarriage of justice in the case of Timothy Evans would feature prominently in the campaign to end the death penalty in Britain
In 1950 a young Welshman was hanged for a heinous crime – the murder of his wife and daughter in the London flat where the family lived.
The main prosecution witness in the trial had been another tenant in the property, a seemingly mild-mannered post office clerk and former police special constable who told the court about the bitter rows he had heard between the accused and his partner.
After a trial lasting just three days Timothy Evans was convicted and subsequently executed.
The man whose testimony had played such a large part in securing the conviction was John Christie – a man who would later be unmasked as a serial killer and necrophiliac. And among his victims had been Evans' wife, Beryl, and the couple's 14-month-old daughter Geraldine.
The wrongful conviction and hanging of Evans would go on to play a major part in the campaign to end executions in Britain. Capital punishment was eventually suspended in 1964 and formally abolished in England and Wales in 1969.
Timothy Evans was born in Merthyr in November 1924. A poorly child with a deformed foot, he missed a great deal of schooling and barely learned to read and write. But, despite that, when the family moved to London in 1935 he managed to find work as a painter and then a van driver.
In 1947 he met and married Beryl Thornley and the couple initially lived with his mother in Notting Hill. When Beryl became pregnant with their daughter, Geraldine, the couple moved to a flat a short walk away at an address that has now became infamous – 10 Rillington Place.
In 1949 Beryl fell pregnant again but this time decided to terminate the pregnancy – something that was illegal at the time.
Exactly what happened next will never be known but it seems Christie, who by then had already killed a number of women, persuaded the couple that he had some medical knowledge and was able to perform the abortion.
What we do know is that while Evans was out of the house Christie strangled Beryl and Geraldine and hid their bodies in the wash-house at the rear of the property.
When Evans returned home later that day Christie told him his wife had died during the procedure – something all too frequent during such unregulated terminations. He then told Evans he would dispose of the body and find someone to look after Geraldine and said the Welshman had better leave London for a while as the police would be looking for him.
Evans, who would later be assessed as having the IQ of a 12-year-old, returned to Merthyr to stay with family members.
But then he did something remarkable – he walked into a local police station and confessed to killing his wife and putting her body down the drain.
Police in London were notified and they checked the drain at Rillington Place but found nothing. However when they returned and searched again they found the bodies of Beryl and Geraldine wrapped in a table cloth and hidden in the wash-house in the garden.
It is perhaps an indication of the thoroughness of the search that the officers did not apparently spot the fact that a human thigh bone was being used to hold up the fence.
Evans subsequently withdrew his confession and said he had made the original statement to protect his fellow tenant, Christie, who had performed a termination on his wife.
But after a three day trial in January 1950 – and deliberations of less that 40 minutes by the jury – the Welshman was convicted of murdering his daughter.
The following month an appeal against the conviction was heard by three judges – including, remarkably, the father of barrister Christmas Humphreys who had prosecuted in the original trial – with lawyers for Evans arguing important evidence was never put before the jury.
But the appeal was rejected and in March the 25-year-old Merthyr man was hanged at Pentonville prison and buried in its cemetery.
It seems the conviction and execution of Evans received little attention. It was a time when there was was widespread support for the death penalty and perhaps a time when people were more deferential to the authorities, the police, and the establishment.
But three years later the terrible truth of what had actually happened at Rillington Place was revealed.
After Christie moved out of his ground-floor flat the bodies of three women – Kathleen Maloney, Rita Nelson and Hectorina Maclennan – were found by another tenant hidden in a papered-over recess in the kitchen.
A further search of the house uncovered three more bodies – Christie's wife, Ethel, who was buried under the floorboards in the front room, and a nurse called Ruth Fuerst, and a former colleague of Christie's called Muriel Eady who were in shallow graves in house's the small back garden. All had been strangled and wrapped up just as Beryl and Geraldine Evans had been.
Christie had even used one of the women's thigh bones to prop up a fence in the garden – something which the police had apparently missed when searching the property following Evans' earlier confession.
Christie was tracked down and arrested in west London in March 1953 and during the course of questioning confessed to killing Beryl Evans – though he never admitted to killing little Geraldine.
Christie was put on trial and found guilty of murdering his wife with his defence of insanity being rejected. He was hanged in July 1953 by Albert Pierrepoint – the same man who had hanged Evans.
Following the unmasking of Christie a campaign led by a number of prominent journalists and newspapers sought to highlight what they said was a miscarriage of justice but two official inquiries ordered by the Home Office found nothing wrong. The first, led by John Scott Henderson QC, upheld Evans' conviction, concluding that Christie's confession of murdering Beryl Evans was unreliable because it was made in the context of supporting his defence that he was insane. The second, chaired by High Court judge Sir Daniel Brabin, found it was "more probable than not" that Evans murdered his wife and that he did not murder his daughter – contrary to the prosecution case in the original trial.
But the campaign continued and in 1968 the new and reform-minded home secretary Roy Jenkins recommended a royal pardon, which was accepted. Evans' remains were exhumed from Pentonville prison and reburied in St Patrick's cemetery in Leytonstone, east London.
The hanging of the Welshman featured prominently in the campaign throughout the 1950s and 60s to end capital punishment and over the years a series of articles and books highlighted the miscarriage of justice and the execution by the state of an innocent man – including the inadequacies of the police investigation, the vulnerability of Evans and questions around his confession, and the conduct of the trial at which he was convicted.
The campaign was eventually successful and capital punishment was abolished in England and Wales in 1969.
The campaign to clear Evans' name continued, however, and though his conviction was not quashed in 2004 senior judges ruled that he should be regarded as innocent of murdering both his wife and daughter.
In the ruling Justice Collins wrote: "It has been generally and correctly regarded as a recognition that Timothy Evans was wrongly convicted and that there was a serious miscarriage of justice. In any event, the material put before us persuades me that Timothy Evans should indeed be regarded as having been innocent of the charge of which he was convicted. Further, no jury could properly have convicted him of murdering his wife and I entirely agree that he must be regarded as innocent of that charge too."
Evans' family said at the time their loved-one could now "rest in peace".
Source: walesonline.co.uk, Jason Evans, April 13, 2020
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
