Timothy Evans: peace at last

ON the afternoon of November 30, 1949, Timothy Evans walked into the main police station at Merthyr Vale, South Wales. Striding up to the duty constable, he announced in a voice wavering with emotion: "I want to give myself up. I have disposed of my wife."

As the bemused constable listened in stunned silence, the 25-year-old Welsh-born lorry driver went on: "I put her down the drain. I cannot sleep and I want to get it off my chest."

Timothy Evans was taken into custody and volunteered a frightening written statement. He said his wife Beryl had been pregnant with their second child and had died during a failed attempt to abort the baby at their home, 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill, London.

Evans claimed he had taken the body and put it head first down a drain outside the front door. But when police went to the shabby house they could find no body. It took two of them to lift the drain cover.

Physically, Evans was small and slight, mentally he was retarded with the IQ of a ten year old. He was illiterate and immature.

When detectives told Evans they suspected he was making the whole story up, he changed his tale and named another man - John Reginald Christie - as the person responsible for his wife's death.

Number 10 Rillington Place was a small house at the end of a large terrace. Christie lived on the ground floor with his wife Ethel. Timothy and Beryl Evans lived on the top floor with their 14-month-old baby daughter Geraldine. The occupant of the second floor was in hospital.

When police returned to carry out a more thorough search they discovered Mrs Evans's body and that of her daughter hidden in the wash-house, next to the outside toilet, in the back garden.

The police looked into the garden but, having found two bodies, they didn't bother to dig. Nor, it seems, did they bother to look very hard. If they had, detectives would most certainly have discovered the skeletons of two women murdered by Christie six years earlier. They didn't even require the use of a sharp spade. One skull had worked its way through the soil and was lying part uncovered - a plaything for Christie's dog.

Christie later said that he removed the skull at night under his overcoat to a street where he dropped it through the broken window of a bombed-out house. It was later discovered by children. At an inquest, the skull was thought to have been the remains of an air raid victim.

Also in the garden was the shoulder blade of one of Christie's other victims. He used it to prop up the rickety fence. Unfortunately, neither the skull nor the bones were noticed by police. Had they done so, Timothy Evans would almost certainly have not gone to the gallows and a grave miscarriage of justice would have been avoided.

Evans was supposed to have strangled his wife during a quarrel, killed his daughter two days later, and then hidden their bodies. At his trial, the prosecution's star witness was one, John Christie.

The jury did not believe Evans's defence that Christie had carried out the murder. They rejected the notion that the balding, bespectacled Christie had tried to carry out an illegal abortion on Beryl. She had died of strangulation. The notion that Christie, a former special constable, had strangled her was clearly absurd.

Evans stuck to his story to the bitter end. Even in his finally hours he begged relatives: "To find Christie and have him questioned". His appeals went unheeded by police satisified they had got their man. He was hanged at Pentonville prison on March 9, 1950.

And that would have been it had a new tenant not moved into 10 Rillington Place three years later and opened up an alcove in the kitchen to locate a sickeningly sweet smell. Inside were the bodies of three women.

Police searched the house and gardens with a great deal more thoroughness. Mrs Christie was discovered beneath the floorboards and, finally, the grisly garden remains were uncovered.

Christie was arrested. He immediately confessed to the six murders, plus one unexpected extra - Beryl Evans.

All the women had been strangled with a rope (Christie confessed he kept it in his pocket in the hope of an unexpected female visitor). Most of them had been trussed up like Mrs Evans. Some of the bodies had been wrapped in a black blanket similar to the one used to hide her.

Christie confessed he was a serial killer, a sex pervert and, most hideous of all, a necrophile. At certain points he also professed to killing baby Geraldine (Of Evans he told a friend: "It was him or me - and what would I do with a baby?") but he never officially admitted to the child's killing.

In his defence, Evans said he believed Christie's story that Beryl had died during the abortion and baby Geraldine had been placed with foster parents. He didn't know callous Christie had killed the child to keep the truth a secret.

Amazingly, Christie's confession to the murder of Beryl Evans was not accepted. Instead, it was regarded as an attempt to help his defence of insanity. Christie was hanged for his other crimes but a small group of campaigners refused to close the book on Timothy Evans.

Among them was Darlington industrialist Herbert Wolfe, who wrote an impassioned defence of Evans and submitted it to The Northern Echo for publication.

When the story was drawn to the attention of the newspaper's editor Harold Evans - and MPs began taking an interest - he instigated a campaign to have Evans pardoned. Launched in March 1965 - 15 years after Evans went to the gallows - the Man On Our Conscience campaign captured the attention of politicians and liberal crusaders alike.

Harold Evans said years later: "The campaign took me to meetings in London as the secretary of a Timothy Evans Committee I formed with Herbert Wolfe (and Ludovic Kennedy, Ian Gilmour, Lady Gaitskell and John Grigg).

"News did come out of this. Sitting in a cold room at Westminster, Home Secretary Chuter Ede, who had signed the death warrant, told me he regretted he had done that. Still, I came to feel I had probably gone too far in absenting myself in order to lobby MPs and hold public meetings with politicians, a suspicion that became a conviction the day I found myself locked in the murder house at Rillington Place trying to hold a press conference there against the wishes of a vociferous Jamaican tenant."

Within six months, a new investigation was ordered and, in October 1966, it conceded that, on the balance of probabilities, Evans did not kill his daughter.

In a classic fudge, however, the inquiry did blame Evans for killing his wife despite Christie's confession. Critics claimed this was done to save the reputation of the British judicial system which was under scrutiny as never before (the Echo's campaign is credited with coining the term "miscarriage of justice").

Although Home Secretary Roy Jenkins granted Evans a Royal pardon, the unsatisfactory conclusion to the investigation cast a shadow over his character.

Today, Timothy Evans can at last ''rest in peace'' after two High Court judges finally declared his innocence.

Mr Justice Collins, sitting with Mr Justice Stanley Burnton, declared that Evans should be regarded as having been innocent of the charge of murdering his baby daughter - the offence for which he was executed in 1950.

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.''

The Man On Our Conscience campaign succeeded in drawing attention to failings in the judicial system but only now, four decades later, can it truly be said to have been won.