TIMOTHY EVANS, wrongly hanged 54 years ago for one of the notorious Rillington Place murders, was finally declared innocent yesterday in an historic High Court judgement.

In an extraordinary twist to one of the most famous of all miscarriage of justice cases, a senior judge said Mr Evans should be regarded as innocent of murdering either his wife, Beryl, or his 14-month-old daughter, Geraldine.

He was convicted on January 13, 1950, of murdering his baby daughter in November 1949.

In 1953 - three years after he was hanged - his downstairs neighbour, John Christie, who had been a central prosecution witness at his trial, confessed to killing eight women at 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill, west London.

The victims included Beryl and her 14-month-old baby, whose bodies were found buried in a washroom. Christie, too, was hanged.

Mr Evans, a 25-year-old Welsh van driver with a mental age of 11, was damned by his own false "confession" that he had murdered his wife and daughter.

In March 1965, The Northern Echo launched a celebrated campaign to have Evans pardoned. But the campaign to clear his name was thwarted by a judicial inquiry in October 1966, which concluded that, although it was probable that Mr Evans had not killed his daughter, the probability was that he, and not Christie, had murdered Mrs Evans.

Later that month, Home Secretary Roy Jenkins announced that Mr Evans had been given a royal pardon. But victory in the campaign had always been tarnished because, until yesterday, the justice system still officially suspected Mr Evans could have been his wife's killer.

In the High Court yesterday, lawyers for Mary Westlake, the half-sister of Mr Evans, argued that the posthumous royal pardon already granted to her brother was an inadequate remedy to put right an "historic and unique injustice" and wanted his conviction quashed.

But Mr Justice Collins, sitting with Mr Justice Stanley Burnton, rejected an attempt by Mrs Westlake, from Wiltshire, to overturn a Criminal Cases Review Commission refusal in March to refer the case back to the Appeal Court.

Instead, the judge declared that Mr Evans should be regarded as having been innocent of the charge of murdering his daughter - the offence for which he was executed.

The judge added: "And no jury could properly have convicted him of murdering his wife, and he must be regarded as innocent of that charge too."

Mr Evans was never convicted of his wife's murder. The charge was allowed to lie on the file.

Mrs Westlake was not in court, but her solicitor said after the hearing: "At last we have a definitive statement from a judge in open court for the first time that Timothy Evans was innocent of both murders.

"Until this week, no judge had ever expressed that view. This case has cast a shadow over Mrs Westlake's entire adult life, but at last a court has confirmed that Timothy Evans was an innocent man.

"May Timothy Evans rest in peace."