Timothy Evans - Events Leading To Evans's Arrest

Events Leading To Evans's Arrest

Several weeks later, on 30 November 1949, Evans informed police at Merthyr Tydfil that his wife had died in unusual circumstances. His first confession was that he had accidentally killed her by giving her something in a bottle that a man had given him to abort the foetus; he had then disposed of her body in a sewer drain outside 10 Rillington Place. He told the police that after arranging for Geraldine to be looked after, he had gone to Wales. When police examined the drain outside the front of the building, however, they found nothing and, furthermore, discovered that the manhole cover required the combined strength of all three officers to remove it.

When re-questioned, Evans changed his story and said that Christie had offered to perform an abortion on Beryl. After some deliberation between Evans and his wife, they had both agreed to take up Christie's offer. On 8 November, Evans had returned home from work to be informed by Christie that the abortion had not worked and that Beryl was dead. Christie had said that he would dispose of the body (abortion being illegal in the U.K. at the time) and would make arrangements for a couple from East Acton to look after Geraldine. He said that Evans should leave London for the meantime. On 14 November, Evans left for Wales to stay with relatives. Evans said he later returned to 10 Rillington Place to ask about Geraldine, but Christie had refused to let him see her.

In response to Evans's second statement, the police performed a preliminary search of 10 Rillington Place but did not uncover anything incriminating, despite the presence of a human thigh bone supporting a fence post in the tiny garden (about 16 long by 14 feet wide). On a more thorough search on 2 December, the police found the body of Beryl Evans, wrapped in a tablecloth in the wash-house in the back garden. Access to the locked wash-house was only possible by using a knife kept by Mrs Christie. Significantly, however, the body of Geraldine was also found, alongside Beryl's body—Evans had not mentioned he had killed his daughter in either of his statements. Beryl and Geraldine had both been strangled. But the police once again failed to discover earlier human remains left in the back garden, only a few feet away from the wash house. Although they examined the garden, they did not find traces of the skeletal remains of two prior victims of Christie, despite their shallow burial. Christie actually removed the skull of Miss Eady when his dog dug it up from the garden shortly after the police search, and he disposed of it in a bombed-out building nearby. This vital clue was ignored when the skull was then discovered by children playing in the ruins, and handed in to the police. If the bones had been found in the garden, the investigation would have taken a different turn.

When Evans was shown the clothing taken from the bodies of his wife and child, he was also informed that both had been strangled. He was asked whether he was responsible for their deaths. This was, according to Evans's statement, the first occasion in which he was informed that his baby daughter had been killed. To this, Evans apparently responded, "yes, yes". He then apparently confessed to having strangled Beryl during an argument over debts and strangling Geraldine two days later, after which he left for Wales.

This alleged confession, along with other contradictory statements Evans made during the police interrogation, was formerly cited as proof of his guilt. Ludovic Kennedy, however, showed that the confessions were fabricated and dictated to Evans by the investigating officers, and that they interrogated the accused over the course of late evening and early morning hours to his physical and emotional detriment, a man already in a highly emotional state. Evans also stated in court that he was threatened with violence by the police, and it is likely that they coerced Evans to his false confession. The police investigation was marked by a lack of forensic expertise, with key evidence missed or ignored, such as the bones of Christie's earlier victims in the back garden of 10 Rillington Place.