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During 23 years with BBC Cymru Wales (BBC CW), and 42 years in journalism (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), he often had to fight his way through a thicket of lies by miscarriage of justice victims, and now this is put centre stage by information about the falsehoods told by Welshman Timothy Evans, who was hanged for murders carried out by the serial killer Reg Christie.
It should be drilled into the brain of every Current Affairs journalist who is embarking on a ‘miscarriage of justice’ story: SOMEONE WHO LIES, MAY NOT BE A MURDERER!
This crucial fact has been highlighted for me by new information coming to light about Reg ‘John’ Christie, and two of the murders which he committed, but for which Timothy Evans who was born near Merthyr Tydfil was hanged in 1950, notably in the book about this ghastly episode – The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place’ by Kate Summerscale.
Mr Evans was an inveterate liar (as well as being violent), making it difficult for his defence team, and he was hanged in March 1950 for the murders of his wife Beryl and baby daughter Geraldine.
In January 2003, the Home Office (HO) awarded his half-sister, Mary Westlake, and his sister, Eileen Ashby, ex gratia payments as compensation for this 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”.
Ms Westlake died understandably disillusioned with the entire justice system.
Mr Evans, like many of the miscarriage of justice victims I have interviewed over the years, had lied about what had happened, so the jury thought (rightly) he was a dodgy character who was guilty also of murder (wrongly).
At first Mr Evans confessed to the terrible killings, and then he changed his story, with his last words being: “Christie done it”, so why, you may ask, did he earlier say that 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”.
This is a valid fear, and I have heard it from many people who have been jailed wrongly, but if at all possible my advice for those who are being interviewed is NOT to lie.
Let me give you some examples.
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 Mr 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.
Let’s look at another instance, although this is not (in theory) a miscarriage of justice case – the horrific Clydach murders in 1999, when four people (Mandy Power her elderly disabled mother Doris, and two young children) were brutally beaten to death. They were nominated for two awards at the BAFTA Cymru ceremony, including one for best Factual Series.
Despite this awful event not allegedly being a miscarriage of justice, the man convicted of the murders (David ‘Dai’ Morris) died in jail still protesting his innocence.
A website his sister Debra Morris (now Thomas) helped set up, along with her niece, questions Morris’ guilt and has almost 31,000 members. On it she published a reply from Channel 5 to her complaint about another programme, but above the letter she wrote: “What research did they do????”.
The successful prosecution case against him was that he had gone to Ms Power’s looking for sex, high on drink and drugs, been spurned and beat the entire family to death, leaving his chain there in the process. Yet the evidence suggested Doris had been killed first, NOT her daughter, when presumably it would have been the person doing the spurning who would have died FIRST!
The problem was that he LIED. In reality the chain (which we heard a lot about), had nothing to do with his conviction. It was his constant lying and criminal record that sent him down.
In a formal interview for MITV (they wouldn’t do one with ME!), Assistant Chief Constable (ACC) of SWP, David Thorne, made a startling admission about the mistakes that were made by the police in the earlier miscarriages of justice. During filming for the programme Mr Thorne appeared on, a forensic review found traces of DNA on a sock which it is believed was used to hold the murder weapon, that were “more likely than not” to have come from Mr Morris, and SWP trumpeted the finding.
They effectively said: ‘We know we got it wrong in the past, but this time is different. Trust us’. Yet a long-running campaign has been launched to establish his innocence, and after the first trial when Morris was convicted, his sister Debra gave a tearful press conference with her parents when she stressed her belief that he was NOT guilty. She said: “He just didn’t do these things…they’ve got the wrong man”.
ACC Thorne, though, insisted on MITV, that Morris was the RIGHT man, but acknowledged that mistakes had been made in previous police inquiries. He proclaimed: “It’s safe to say we got it wrong (in the past). We absolutely got it wrong. (There were) HUGE errors in the way investigations were conducted (but) we HAVEN’T found that in this case. This is not a miscarriage of justice”.
However I had made a BBC Panorama television programme about the shocking Clydach Murders a few years after they had been committed, and I was the first to question the police actions during THIS investigation too.
As I said in the opening of the programme: “One police force in Britain has a disturbing record of locking up the wrong people in murder cases”.
During MITV, the Senior Investigating Officer (SIO) at the time, Detective Superintendent (DS) (Retd.) of SWP Martyn Lloyd–Evans (who used the word ‘sublime’ when he meant ‘subdued’!), is questioned about the apparent mistake of not releasing to the public a witnesses E-Fit constructed soon after the murders, which, it said, had a 90 per cent likeness. He replies that because the man seen was carrying a bag, and it was believed the killer did not have one, it was not put out.
Mr Evans said: “I didn’t think it was relevant”, but the E-Fit matched almost exactly the face of the first senior police officer on the scene, Inspector (at the time) Stuart Lewis, who (against all procedure) had only stayed there a matter of minutes, or that of his identical twin brother (another police officer, Sergeant [also at the time] Stephen Lewis, whose wife was having a gay affair with one of the victims).
Inspector Stuart Lewis, had changed his shift to be on that night, yet at crucial hours during the murders his whereabouts were unknown. He was driving a red Peugeot diesel, and a car similar to this was spotted near the murder scene. So to say the E-Fit was ‘not relevant’, appeared bizarre in the extreme, to critics of the police.
However Mr Evans’ record was considered so exemplary he was later chosen to examine cold cases in the Major Crime Review unit.
In 2009, he said: “What we do is use today’s technology on yesterday’s cases which means that offenders who may think that they are safe 20 years after a crime has been committed aren’t any more and could receive a knock on the door any day”.
In the MITV films Mr Evans’ boss as the then head of SWP CID, Wynne Phillips, also said something incredible: “We can’t manufacture evidence”. But events before the murders, showed that SWP have done EXACTLY that, and I made another programme about THEM!
So the verdict (wrong word to use in these circumstances!) has to be: DO NOT LIE…
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.
