Timothy Evans

Timothy Evans
Timothy Evans (centre), being escorted by police from Paddington Station to Notting Hill Police Station, December 1949
Born	Timothy John Evans (1924-11-20)20 November 1924 Merthyr Tydfil, Glamorgan, Wales
Died	9 March 1950(1950-03-09) (aged 25) HMP Pentonville, London, England
Cause of death	Execution by hanging after a miscarriage of justice
Nationality	British
Occupation	Lorry driver
Known for	Wrongful execution for murder of 13-month-old daughter, Geraldine Evans.

Timothy John Evans (20 November 1924 – 9 March 1950) was a Welshman falsely accused of murdering his wife and infant daughter at their residence at 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill, London. In January 1950, Evans was tried and convicted of the murder of his daughter and was sentenced to death and hanged. During his trial, Evans accused his downstairs neighbour, John Christie, of committing the murders.

Three years after Evans's execution, Christie was found to be a serial killer who had murdered six other women in the same house, including his own wife. Before his own execution, Christie confessed to murdering Mrs. Evans. An official inquiry concluded in 1966 that Christie had also murdered Evans's daughter, and Evans was granted a posthumous pardon.

The case generated much controversy and is acknowledged as a serious miscarriage of justice. Along with those of Derek Bentley and Ruth Ellis, it played a major part in the abolition of capital punishment in the United Kingdom in 1965.

Evans was a native of Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales. His father abandoned the family in 1924 shortly before Evans's birth. Evans had an older sister Eileen and a younger half-sister Maureen, born when Evans's mother remarried in 1929. As a child, Evans had difficulty learning to speak and struggled at school. Following an accident when he was eight, Evans developed a tubercular verruca on his right foot which never completely healed and which caused him to miss considerable amounts of time from school for treatments, further setting back his education. Although some authors have claimed Evans was unable to read, or to write anything beyond his name as an adult he is known to have avidly read comics and to have understood the writing upon the wage packets and the receipts he handled on a daily basis in his job, thus making claims as to Evans being almost illiterate unreliable.

He was also prone to inventing stories about himself to boost his self-esteem, a trait which continued into adulthood and would later interfere with his efforts to establish his credibility when dealing with the police.