- Evans above! - 23rd December 2024
- X marks the spot part one - 20th December 2024
- Time on your hands… - 19th December 2024
During 23 years with The BBC, and a 41 year journalistic career (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), for our Editor Phil Parry miscarriages of justice have always been a mainstay of his journalism, and this is now shown in stark relief by the publication of a new book about the murders at Rillington Place when an innocent Welshman was hanged, and parallels exist with one that he exposed…
They are INCREDIBLY difficult.
Every fact must be triple-checked, there should be at least three sources for everything (one of which would preferably be in a letter or email), key witnesses have to be strong enough to withstand a potential grilling in court, and the lawyer has to be totally satisfied.
Obviously all these precautions are taken for every story, but it is even more urgent in what I am talking about – miscarriage of justice cases.
Sadly from my experience these do not attract a large audience, but they are enormously worthwhile because they might ensure an innocent person is released from jail.
All of this has now been put centre stage by a new book about the murders by Christie, who killed at least eight people—including his wife Ethel—by strangling them inside his flat at 10 Rillington Place in London.
‘The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place’ by Kate Summerscale highlights the appalling nature of the crimes, and how an innocent Welshman called Timothy Evans was hanged for two of them.
Mr Evans from Merthyr Tydfil was wrongly convicted of murdering his wife Beryl and infant daughter Geraldine in January 1950, and he was executed by hanging.
In January 2003, the Home Office (HO) awarded his half-sister, Mary Westlake, and his sister, Eileen Ashby, ex gratia payments as compensation for the miscarriage of justice.
An independent legal assessor for the HO accepted that “the conviction and execution of Timothy Evans for the murder of his child was wrongful and a miscarriage of justice” and that “there is no evidence to implicate Timothy Evans in the murder of his wife. She was most probably murdered by Christie”.
Mr Evans last words were: “Christie done it”, so why, you may ask, did he say HE’D done it?
At his trial he put it this way: “Well, I thought that if I didn’t make a statement the police would take me downstairs and start knocking me about”.
It put me in mind of what we had to go through in another miscarriage of justice case.
In an episode of the BBC Cymru Wales Current Affairs programme Week In, Week Out (WIWO) called ‘A Night To Remember’, we showed how a supposed ‘confession’ by one of the innocent men, Darren Hall, was a complete nonsense and the events he described could NEVER have happened.
Not only had Mr Hall told the court that he had murdered newsagent Phillip Saunders, but he said that the other two innocent men (Mike O’Brien and Ellis Sherwood) were involved as well!
We had therefore to prove not only that this could never have occurred in the way Mr Hall said it had done, but also that he had a psychiatric condition so he would admit to things he never did.
He had said, for example, that they had RUN from the scene after dividing up the spoils, yet we secured medical records that showed Mr Hall’s legs were bad so he could not have run at all.
Perhaps endorsing the notion that he was mentally all over the place, I interviewed him in jail (for which permission is rarely granted now), and he said neither he nor the other two were murderers, but that he had been “chained to a hot radiator”.
This last bit may or may not have been the truth, but it does have echoes of Timothy Evans saying he feared the police might start “knocking me about” if he didn’t sign a statement.
We asked a psychiatrist to look into it, and she told us about the illness Mr Hall was suffering from.
All of this took a great deal of time, and was extremely hard, although it was worth doing because it meant that three innocent men could be released from their prison cells.
In the old days it might have been even worse, and they could have hung, as Timothy Evans was…
The memories of Phil’s, remarkable decades long award-winning career in journalism (during which the mistakes of the police were often brought out) as he was gripped by the rare and incurable neurological disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’ (including The Cardiff Newsagent Three case).Order the book now!
‘The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place’ by Kate Summerscale is published by Bloomsbury.
On Christmas Eve – why disturbing news that senior police officers are investigating allegations of perjury and perverting the course of justice against staff in the computer giant Fujitsu and the Post Office (PO), highlight once more the central rôle of Wales in the enormous scandal.
