Timothy Evans
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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 a book proclaiming his innocence and a pardon for his daughter’s murder, helped to get capital punishment abolished in Britain. It was held by abolitionists as one of the most serious miscarriages of justice that has occurred in Britain.
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[edit] 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.
[edit] 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.
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 had disposed 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.
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 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.
Evans now 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.
[edit] 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.
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.
[edit] New evidence
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 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. Christie was arrested on March 31, 1953, at the embankment nearby to Putney Bridge and during the course of interrogation made four separate confessions to the killing of Beryl Evans. He never confessed to the killing of Geraldine Evans, however. Christie was found guilty of murdering his wife and was hanged on July 15, 1953.
Key to the residual doubt in this entire matter is that 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 either the suppressed guilt, 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.
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.
[edit] 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 Liberal political leader and television journalist Ludovic Kennedy followed with his more detailed 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, which was followed by Roy Jenkins, Soskice's successor as Home Secretary, recommending a royal pardon. The outcry over the Evans case contributed to the abolition of the death penalty in the UK.
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.
There can be no doubt that the conviction and execution of Evans was a most serious miscarriage of justice, and that an innocent man was executed on the evidence of a serial killer, Reg Christie.
[edit] See also
[edit] 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 and John Hurt as Timothy Evans was released in the UK on May 12, 1971.
