Family of hanged man lose court plea

THE family of the man wrongly hanged for two of the notorious Rillington Place murders yesterday looked set to lose a legal battle to get the case referred back to the Court of Appeal.

During a day-long hearing, lawyers for Mary Westlake, the half-sister of Timothy Evans, argued that the posthumous Royal pardon already granted to her brother was an "inadequate remedy" to put right an "historic and unique injustice".

But Mr Justice Collins and Mr Justice Stanley Burnton said they did not need to hear legal argument from the Commission and would give their formal ruling tomorrow.

Lawyers in the case agreed that could only mean that Mrs Westlake, from Whitley, Melksham, Wiltshire, had lost her case.

Mr Evans was convicted on 13 January, 1950 of murdering his 14-month-old daughter, Geraldine, in November 1949.

He had also been charged with murdering his wife, Beryl Evans. That charge was not pursued after the first conviction but allowed to lie on the file.

Mr Evans received a Royal pardon in 1966 after two official inquiries, but his family say that does not erase the actual conviction, which continues to leave a stigma.

At trial, Mr Evans maintained his innocence and claimed that John Christie, his downstairs neighbour at 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill, west London, was responsible.

Christie was a key prosecution witness at his trial.

Three years after Mr Evans was hanged, Christie confessed to strangling eight female victims, including Mrs Evans and her daughter, whose bodies were found buried in a washroom of the house. Christie was himself hanged.

A 25-year-old Welsh van driver with a mental age of 11, Mr Evans was damned by his own false "confession" that he had murdered his wife and baby daughter.

Both Mrs Westlake and Mr Evans’s sister, Eleanor Ashby, now in her eighties and listed as an "interested party" in yesterday’s application for judicial review, have so far received an interim payment of 250,000 in compensation for the trauma of the trial and loss of their brother. The judges heard the final amount they will receive has not yet been disclosed.

But, despite compensation and the pardon, the stigma of the conviction remained and the family decided to fight on to have the murder conviction itself quashed.

In March, a commission panel decided that, although there was a "real possibility" that the Court of Appeal would not uphold the conviction, it would exercise its discretion not to refer. The commission said: "The free pardon, with its recognition of Mr Evans’s case as a miscarriage of justice, was sufficient to establish his innocence and to restore his reputation. Compensation has also been paid to the family."