Pithy Title and Long, Boring, Article

Rillington Place, Evans, Christie, Hanratty, Pierrepoint, Executions, Kennedy, Foot, Fingerprints and McKie The heading could practically be your local football team being read out. But it isn't - it's just a list of some of the things which have been pre-occupying me recently. In a few days time I am going to put my heart literally into the hands of a surgeon and I am going to do that voluntarily. For a temporary period I am going to be 'switched off', and I'm naturally slightly anxious about that. Three of the people named in the heading were, on the other hand, involuntarily switched off permanently. I imagine their anxiety was greater when the moment came. For those who do not know the histories of Evans/Christie at 10 Rillington Place or James Hanratty at Deadman's Hill on the A6, a brief synopsis is in order:- John Reginald Christie was the occupier of the ground floor flat at 10 Rillington Place, London, during the 1930's and 40's. His hobby was strangling women with a home-made ligature and then having sexual intercourse with them after they were dead. Obviously this was a fairly solitary and secret pastime, the full extent of which was not discovered until Christie was arrested, tried and hanged in 1953. But it was an activity he engaged in fairly frequently between 1938 and 1952, generally disposing of the bodies of his victims under the floorboards or behind the walls of the ground floor flat. Timothy Evans was an illiterate, mentally backward, young man from Wales, who had the great misfortune to move into the flat above Christie's in 1948. Evans and his wife had a young baby daughter and shortly afterwards Mrs Evans became pregnant again - a pregnancy which was unwelcome and Mrs Evans made some enquiries about having an abortion (which was then illegal). John Christie impressed the Evans' with his purported medical knowledge (non-existent) and somehow persuaded them to allow him to perform an abortion on Mrs Evans. This was to be carried out while Mr Evans was at work. The minute Evans went off to work, Christie strangled Mrs Evans and then had sex with her. When Evans returned home Christie told him that the abortion had gone wrong and that his wife had died. Evans initially believed this and was also very impressed by Christie's warnings that they would both be hanged (for participating in/allowing an illegal abortion) if the police became involved. Evans assisted Christie to put the dead body down a manhole. He acceded to Christie's suggestion that he leave London for a time, while Christie would find suitable foster parents for the baby daughter. Evans went off to Wales and Christie promptly strangled the baby and added her body to the pile of corpses in the environs of the house. Three weeks later, wracked by guilt, Evans went to the police station in Merthyr Tydfil, still believing that he had 'killed' his wife by agreeing to 'the abortion' and still believing that his daughter was alive and well. There he made an immediate 'confession' that he'd 'disposed of his wife'. In due course, the police in London found not only the wife's body, but also the daughter's. Had they continued searching they would have found many more corpses - but they were not to know that. Evans was mentally subnormal, and as mentioned, he could neither read nor write. In police custody he did not have the benefit of a solicitor or of a 'responsible adult'. When the police confronted him with the stunning information that his wife had been strangled, and not only that but that his baby daughter had died in the same way, Evans broke down and 'confessed' to both killings. The legal proceedings which followed swiftly (his trial was precisely 6 weeks after his arrest - beat that Lord Bonomy !) are too complex to easily summarise here, but suffice it to say that John Christie was a leading prosecution witness and that the jury took 40 minutes to find Evans guilty of murder. He was sentenced to death. All he could say on hearing his doom pronounced was "It was Christie". Less than 2 months later, after an unsuccessful appeal, Timothy Evans was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint at Pentonville Prison. In 1953 women's bodies were found under floorboards and behind walls in 10 Rillington Place. Christie was arrested and in due course confessed to many murders including that of Mrs Evans. He never confessed to killing the baby - apparently he could easily confront the fact of killing to pursue his hobby, but even he could not stomach the murder of the child which was carried out purely to conceal the murder of the mother. John Christie was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint on the same Pentonville gallows where Evans had met his end 3 years earlier. A fairly clear and appalling miscarriage of justice for poor Timothy Evans you might think. Not so the Cathy, Colin and Jack of their day. Successive Home Secretaries and their Civil Servants resisted any suggestion that there had been a failure of the system, and there was an official refusal to recognise that Timothy Evans had been hanged for a crime he did not commit, which persisted until 1966 when Roy Jenkins, the new Home Secretary, awarded a posthumous pardon to Evans. Even that only came about because of the 1965 book which journalist and broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy wrote about the case, which so persuasively put forward the case for Evans entire innocence. I don't have Kennedy's book to hand as I write, but I can remember that he made the point at the outset that for the convictions and executions of BOTH Evans and Christie to be correct it requires you to accept, as a preliminary coincidence, that 2 men, independently from, and unknown to, each other, were simultaneously engaged in strangling women with ligatures and then having sex with them, IN THE SAME HOUSE, and then concealing the bodies within the structure of the house, without bumping into each other when so doing. As noted, the Home Office were apparently prepared to accept that preliminary coincidence and fought to maintain it for 13 years. For all these years, the Home Office thought there was absolutely nothing untoward in Evans latter confessions having been couched in the language that might be used by a police Inspector, rather than that of an illiterate half-wit. For all these years, the Home Office resisted any suggestion that Evans conviction was unsafe on the grounds that a leading witness against him (who had been incriminated by him) turned out to be the most prolific British serial killer of the 20th century up to that time, and not only that but that 'witness' killed his victims in precisely the same way as Evans had allegedly done. Evans obtained posthumous 'justice' only because of the persausiveness and brilliance of Kennedy and the courage and integrity of Roy Jenkins. Kennedy's book went on to make a general plea that 'confession' evidence was so unreliable that it should never be admissable as evidence of guilt. I will come back to that shortly. Turning briefly to James Hanratty. He was hanged (by our old friend Albert) in 1962 after an atrocious murder, the details of which needn't concern us here. The point is that the major piece of evidence against him was identification of him by an eye-witness to the crime. It is plain that the circumstances in which the witness saw the murderer were far from ideal, it being dark, the witness for the most part sitting in the front of a car with the murderer in the rear and the witness under strict orders not to look at him, and the witness ultimately only getting a 'fleeting glimpse' of the murderer in the dark at a time when she was terrified out of her wits. That identification in these circumstances was the subject of continuing public criticism from the moment of Hanratty's execution for many years afterwards, attracting many celebrities, including John Lennon, to the cause of clearing Hanratty posthumously. Recent developments in forensic science appear to indicate that Hanratty was indeed the murderer, but I will return to that shortly. Suffice it to say, at the moment, that the campaigning journalist Paul Foot wrote a very powerful book (Who Killed Hanratty?) in 1971 marshalling all the then known facts and presenting all the then known arguements. He reached the conclusion that the identification evidence was flawed, that it had led to the execution of an innocent man, and that eye-witness identification evidence was so unreliable that it should not be admissable as evidence of guilt in any criminal trial. So the position is that- Kennedy says no to confessions Foot says no to eye-witness ID How then is any crime supposed to be proved? That is precisely the question which I put to Ludovic Kennedy when I met him in a bookshop in Edinburgh in 1989. He indicated to me that much more reliance should be placed on scientific evidence ('forensics' as he (wrongly) referred to it). He had a touching belief in the ability of dispassionate science to get it right where the fallible humans couldn't. I wonder what he makes of the current fingerprint scandal engulfing the Scottish system. You just knew I would get to fingerprints eventually, didn't you? Really the only point I want to make here is that recent events have made me doubt (a) the worth of any and all 'expert' scientific evidence and (b) the ability of the relevant organs of government to respond effectively when something goes seriously wrong with expert evidence. The Lord Advocate apparently thinks that fingerprints is an inexact science. It's now placed at the voodoo end of the market along with UFOs and crop circles where one expert's positive ID is another's magnified wood-grain on the door-frame. If fingerprint evidence is not an exact science then what is? If we say no to confessions and identifications thanks to Kennedy and Foot then we can now kiss off fingerprints and other 'forensics' courtesy of Boyd. Relegating the 'science' to the status of guesswork is apparently more palatable than exposing the facts of what really happened to public gaze. I said above that recent expert forensic science evidence has shown that Hanratty was the A6 murderer. Read that sentence again. Do you believe it? Are you any more sceptical of a statement like that than you would have been until all the recent fuss about fingerprint evidence? I think that's the measure of the crisis into which we are currently plunged. For myself, blind acceptance of 'expert' evidence is a thing of the past. Were I a juror then I would start from a position of positive disbelief - the 'expert' would have to work very hard indeed to persuade me. And that is because the powers-that-be have patently failed to allay the public's fears about what happened in McKie's case. All one can now say about the SCRO is that they have been portrayed by the Executive as incompetent or criminal or both. It cannot be very pleasant to be a Scottish prosecutor at the moment leading evidence from the SCRO in front of a jury. But we don't need an enquiry into Shirley McKie's case for the same sort of reasons that it took 13 years to pardon poor Timothy Evans - ie politicians and their advisers would rather kill their own grannies than admit that they'd made an arse of things. Right, all of that's off my chest - I can go and have heart surgery now.