He admitted he had. Now though, there were serious attempts to undermine his warranted conviction. Realising a further inquiry was necessary, the authorities appointed J. Scott-Henderson QC to investigate. He did so and reported back in record time. The inquiry was held in private because Christie was under sentence of death. Christie did indeed confess to the murder of Beryl Evans but added the rider “The more the merrier”. This was a half-hearted attempt to set up an insanity defence, but Christie did not appeal his conviction, and was hanged at Pentonville Prison on July 15, 1953.
After Christie’s death, investigations continued, in particular it was believed he was responsible for the rape and murder of seven year old Christine Butcher at Windsor in July 1951. On August 19, the same year, a photograph was published of a crowd outside the Windsor hotel where the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson was staying. (Robinson fought Randolph Turpin at Earls Court on July 10 losing on points but winning the rematch on a stoppage in New York two months later). A man in the crowd was thought to be Christie, but he was subsequently identified as George Mason Black and eliminated from the inquiry. That particular murder remains unsolved.
Predictably, not everyone was happy with Scott-Henderson’s findings, especially the Timothy Evans Committee. Eddowes and Kennedy in particular kept hammering away and eventually a full public inquiry was held. Like the Scott-Henderson Inquiry, the Brabin Inquiry resulted in an official publication (Cmnd. 3101) which was published in October 1966. (Scott Henderson actually published two reports, the second answering criticisms of the first). Brabin was thorough beyond all meaning of the word, taking witness statements from 169 people and oral evidence from 79.
After a preliminary hearing, the Brabin Inquiry sat for 32 days between November 22, 1965 and January 21, 1966.
Apparently insignificant facts here and there make the case against Evans even more damning, for example his mother bought the couple a new perambulator, which indicates she knew nothing about any proposed abortion.
Evans claimed there had been blood on the top of his wife’s legs – indicating an abortion, but Beryl was pregnant when she died, and there was no credible evidence she had subjected herself to any such procedure. Furthermore, she had been beaten up prior to death, something that was not part of Christie’s modus operandi.
Kennedy said the way Evans and Beryl lived was typical of people under such conditions, suggesting Beryl gave as good as she got, which was clearly not the case. Evans also had a brief affair more or less openly with a teenager named Lucy Endicott.
One of the most pathetic attempts to exculpate Evans was to claim his confession had been concocted by the police. Kennedy and his gang even went so far as to submit it to a linguistic analysis suggesting that Evans would not have used such words. This was made by Jan Svartvik, a Swedish academic.
Nowadays all such confessions are taped or even videoed, so that question does not arise, but traditionally, confessions and other witness statements are written by police officers for entirely non-sinister reasons. For one thing, they need to contain certain information, and at times there is certain information that must not be included. In legal proceedings, witness statements are often redacted because they include hearsay, information that is considered unduly prejudicial, or for other reasons .
When Evans made his final confession he spoke freely and quickly. It is not surprising that it was not taken down verbatim and that the police used different phrasing in places. At any rate, he never claimed his confession had been fabricated, and considering the way the police sometimes treat suspects in far less serious cases, he had nothing to complain about.
After hearing all this voluminous evidence, Brabin came to a strange conclusion, namely that Evans had probably murdered his wife but not the baby. For that reason he was given a posthumous pardon. As will be seen shortly, Brabin’s conclusion was not as unlikely as it may sound to the uninitiated.
Government bureaucrats were no more impressed with the Timothy Evans Committee than the police. In a letter dated December 21, 1965 to F.N. Charlton, Maurice Crump of the Treasury Solicitor’s Office reported a conversation he’d had with Ludovic Kennedy: “I regret to have to record that I found Mr. Kennedy interested in things which could somehow or another be construed as consistent with Evans’s innocence to the exclusion of anything tending to prove his guilt.”
Even the Brabin Inquiry did not satisfy the Kennedy gang, they kept pursuing the matter, and in November 2004, the Court Of Appeal simply pronounced Evans innocent after declining to hear the case yet again on the grounds of costs.
This alleged miscarriage of justice is one of several cases used by the anti-hanging lobby which was led by Sydney Silverman, a Labour MP who died in 1968. The other cases include Ruth Ellis, Derek Bentley, and James Hanratty.
Ellis was the last woman hanged in Britain. She murdered her lover David Blakely, shooting him several times. There was no question about that, but because she was a superficially attractive blonde, there was a huge campaign to reprieve her. Derek Bentley was a retard but the idea that only intelligent killers should suffer the ultimate punishment is ludicrous. The manufactured controversy over this case stems from the fact that his partner-in-crime pulled the trigger and killed PC Miles, but because he was only 16, Christopher Craig did not hang.
The suggestion that James Hanratty was innocent is too silly for words, but an enormous disinformation campaign was mounted by people with bad intentions. One of the many people who were duped was John Lennon, who even financed a film about the case. Anyone who still has any doubts about Hanratty’s guilt should read the transcript of his 68 page posthumous appeal.
Returning to Evans and Christie, apart from a book on the forensics by the pathologist Francis Camps, the first full length work on the case was published by Michael Eddowes in 1955; it was called The Man On Your Conscience…Eddowes had originally collaborated with Rupert Furneaux, but Furneaux came to a different conclusion and published his book The Two Stranglers Of Rillington Place in 1961, the same year as Kennedy’s book. However, in 1995 a sensational book that flew largely under the radar was published. This was The Two Killers Of Rillington Place by John Eddowes, the son of Michael Eddowes who had died two years previously.
To Part 4.
Back To Part 2.