The younger Eddowes had some strong words for his father. He claimed he was “mentally ill, a fantasist and liar.”
In addition to his book about Evans, he wrote two books in which he claimed that Lee Harvey Oswald was a double who had been sent by the Soviets to kill Kennedy. Obviously someone was listening because Oswald’s body was exhumed in 1981 when dental records confirmed the obvious. John Eddowes said his father was responsible for almost all the theories and views that Evans was innocent, which is an exaggeration because any reasonable person who has not examined the evidence in depth might come to that conclusion.
In his book, John points out that Beryl Evans left 10 Rillington Place on the morning of the day Christie was supposed to have strangled her. The builder remembered warning her about the position of the ladder. This is quite important, there were builders working on the house at the time, and it would have been extremely risky for Christie to have murdered Beryl and the baby then dumped their bodies in the wash-house where there was a high risk of them being found. If on the other hand Evans murdered his wife on the spur of the moment, that would make sense, but John Eddowes goes much further. He says Evans planned the murder of his wife and baby; he fell behind with his deliveries because he was recognoitering the Brighton area with a view to dumping Beryl’s body there (as it was believed Setty’s body had been dumped).
After he was sacked though, he came up with a different plan, to frame Christie, “and he might have had more luck than he could possibly have dreamt of, if the two bodies in the garden had been discovered.”
Regarding the coincidence of two murderers living under the same roof and operating independently with each nescient of the other, in his autobiography, the pathologist Keith Simpson wrote “Coincidences are far more common in life than in fiction” and in this case three of of Christie’s victims – whom he’d met in London – had been treated for venereal disease at the same hospital in Southampton. F. Tennyson Jesse made the same observation in her earlier work TRIALS OF EVANS AND CHRISTIE.
One final observation on coincidences, the serial killer Robin Gecht had once worked for an even more infamous serial killer: John Gacy. If one allows for the coincidence of two murderers living under the same roof, operating independently, and one trying to save his skin by pointing the finger at the other, there is really not much more to say for the innocence of Timothy Evans.
Back To Part 3.