DEATH OF TIMOTHY EVANS: HE WAS KNOWN FOR HIS TALL TALES , GRANDIOSE STORIES FOCUSED ON HIS HEROICS.

Timothy Evans: Innocence Hanged

Timothy Evans was not remarkably bright. You need to understand this if any of what follows is to make sense.

He wasn’t terribly nice either. Although subsequent movies have portrayed him sympathetically, a tragic victim of circumstance, the fact is that he drank heavily, and tended to stagger home to yell at his wife. Knock her about, occasionally.

He was known for his tall tales, grandiose stories focused on his heroics. They undermined him when he tried to defend himself on the charge of murdering his baby.

November 30th, 1949, Timothy Evans entered the police station in Merthyr Tydfil. He was worried for the safety of his eighteen-month-old Geraldine, he told them.

Where was the baby’s mother, they asked.

Dead. Died in unusual circumstances.

What circumstances?

She was pregnant again, he told them. A man had given him a liquid to abort the foetus. He’d given it to Beryl to drink. She’d died. 

He’d stuffed her body down a manhole outside the house where he lived, №10 Rillington Place, London. 

He’d arranged for Geraldine to be looked after before returning to his home town.

He was just twenty-five. Looked much older. Never had much of a life. 

His Tad, great hero, abandoned his Mam in her pregnancy. Timothy’s every developmental milestone was late: slow to crawl, slow to walk, slow to talk

How do you teach reading to a child who can’t talk? Behind the class from the very foundational stages, he struggled in school, and could just about write his name when he left, aged thirteen.

Timothy Evans: the move to London

In 1939, he moved with his Mam to London, and watched as German bombers pounded the city to rubble. 

In the desperate housing shortage that followed the war, they were grateful to find a home in Notting Hill, insalubrious though the neighbourhood was.

The next year, he married Beryl Thorley. They lived initially with his mother but, after Beryl became pregnant, in true valleys style, they moved around the corner from Mam, into the upstairs flat of №10 Rillington Place.

On October 10th, Geraldine was born.

It wasn’t a happy marriage. Brought up with Welsh valleys’ values of good housekeeping, he resented her messiness. She resented his drinking. They were permanently broke, both incapable of managing a household budget.

So the “joyful news” in November 1949 that Beryl was pregnant again was appalling.

November 14th, Timothy Evans was back in Wales, staying with relatives who were less than pleased. Had he, like his Tad, abandoned his pregnant wife?

First, they persuaded him to return to London to check on the baby’s welfare, but he was sent away. 

Finally, Evans was persuaded to go to the police on November 30th. For two days, they detained him in the cells while police in Notting Hill did a cursory search of №10 Rillington Place. 

They found nothing. And nothing in the manhole either, although it did take three officers to pull off the cover. Who were Timothy Evans’ accomplices?

Timothy Evans: Doubts arise

Timothy Evans’ second confession: his neighbour in the downstairs flat, John Christie, had offered to abort the foetus (abortion was illegal at the time). 

The morning of November 8th, Timothy Evans had gone to work, leaving Beryl in his neighbour’s “capable” hands. 

That evening, he returned home to be told Beryl was dead. His neighbour had promised to dispose of the body down the manhole, and find a couple to adopt Geraldine. 

He said it would be best if Evans got out of London in the meantime.

This should have given the police pause for thought. Guilty men often confess to crimes they have committed. 

Innocent men often confess to crimes they have not committed. 

But for a man voluntarily to confess to a crime, and then invent a cock-and-bull story to explain how he did it — that’s unusual, to put it mildly.

But the police didn’t believe a word. They manipulated and suppressed evidence not because they feared Evans might be innocent, but because they had no doubt of his guilt.

The photo of Evans being dragged off the train at London’s Paddington station by two burly, grim-faced detectives show a man terrified. 

Bewildered, grieving, racked with guilt, knowing nothing except that Beryl wasn’t down the manhole, he arrived at Notting Hill police station to be informed that a second search of his home had found the bodies of a woman and a baby in the old washouse. 

Both had been strangled. He was shown articles of clothing taken from the bodies. He identified them as Beryl’s and Geraldine’s.

On and on went the questions, the interrogation, always with a threat of violence should the exhausted Evans fail to cooperate. 

Hour after hour into the night, past midnight, into the early hours.

Finally, Timothy Evans signed his third confession: one that sounded more like the statement of a policeman than that of a man who rarely read anything more challenging than the Beano: Timothy Evans had strangled Beryl during an argument over money and hid the body in th

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