The same hangman executed both men, three years apart, at the same prison. One of them was guilty of seven murders. The other, by the time anyone figured out the truth, was already dead.
A Difficult Start in Life
Timothy John Evans was born in 1924 in Merthyr Vale, Wales. He grew up with significant learning difficulties — by adulthood, he had very limited literacy, often needing others to read documents to him, though he could manage simple material like comics and football scores. He was also known to invent stories about himself, a habit that would prove disastrous once he found himself being questioned by police.
In January 1947, Evans met Beryl Susanna Thorley on a blind date; they married that September. After Beryl became pregnant, the couple moved into the top-floor flat at 10 Rillington Place, a cramped, run-down terraced house in London's Notting Hill. Their downstairs neighbors were John Reginald Christie, a former wartime police reservist, and his wife, Ethel. Their daughter, Geraldine, was born in October 1948.
The marriage was strained almost from the start, marked by frequent, loud arguments — over money, largely, with Timothy's drinking consuming much of his wages. In 1949, Beryl discovered she was pregnant again, at a point when the family genuinely couldn't afford another child. Abortion was illegal in Britain at the time, leaving few real options.
Two Confessions, Then a Third
On November 30, 1949, Evans walked into a police station in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, and told officers his wife was dead. His first account was that he'd accidentally killed her by giving her something to induce an abortion, then disposed of her body down a drain outside Rillington Place.
Police checked the drain. There was nothing there — and removing the manhole cover took three officers working together, making it physically implausible that Evans alone could have used it to hide a body. Confronted with this, Evans changed his story: he said Christie, his downstairs neighbor, had offered to perform the abortion on Beryl, and that something had gone wrong.
What nobody investigating at the time knew was that John Christie was, in fact, a serial killer who would eventually be linked to at least eight murders.
A Body, Finally Found
A search of the property turned up the bodies of Beryl and Geraldine in the wash-house behind 10 Rillington Place — along with the remains of a 16-week male fetus, Beryl's unborn second child. Both Beryl and Geraldine had been strangled; Beryl's body showed signs of having been beaten before she died.
Evans was taken in for further questioning. Under interrogation, he eventually told police he had killed both his wife and daughter during an argument over money, a confession that some later reviewers of the case have argued reads as oddly formal and constructed for a man with Evans's limited literacy — raising long-standing questions about how, exactly, it came to be written down.
A Trial, a Star Witness, and a Verdict
At trial, beginning in January 1950, Evans retracted his confession and accused Christie directly: "Christie done it." Under the law at the time, he was tried only for the murder of his daughter, Geraldine — not Beryl. Christie, called as the prosecution's key witness, denied everything Evans alleged.
The jury deliberated for roughly thirty-five minutes before returning a guilty verdict. Evans was sentenced to death and hanged at Pentonville Prison on March 9, 1950, still maintaining his innocence to the end.
A House With Far Worse Secrets
In March 1953, Christie moved out of 10 Rillington Place, subletting his flat under false pretenses before vanishing. A new tenant, Beresford Brown, later discovered a hidden, wallpapered-over alcove in the kitchen while doing minor repair work — and inside it, the bodies of three women: Kathleen Maloney, Rita Nelson, and Hectorina MacLennan.
A more thorough search of the property than the one conducted back in 1949 turned up far more. Christie's own wife, Ethel, was found buried beneath the floorboards of the front room. Two more sets of remains — Ruth Fuerst, an Austrian nurse, and Muriel Eady, a former friend of Christie's — were found in the garden, having been there, undiscovered, since the original 1949 search of the property for Beryl and Geraldine. In a detail that's stayed grimly memorable in retellings of the case ever since, one of the victims' thigh bones had been used by Christie to prop up a garden fence the whole time — sitting in plain view of investigators who searched the property for Beryl's body and never connected it to anything.
Christie was arrested on March 31, 1953, and confessed to multiple killings, including, eventually, Beryl Evans's murder. He never admitted to killing Geraldine. He was convicted of murdering his wife and hanged at Pentonville on July 15, 1953 — by the same executioner, Albert Pierrepoint, who had hanged Timothy Evans three years earlier.
What Justice Actually Determined
The truth of who killed whom in that house has never been settled with full certainty, and it's worth being precise about what official inquiries actually concluded rather than simplifying it. A 1966 inquiry found that while Evans had probably killed Beryl, Christie was responsible for Geraldine's murder — and since Evans had only ever been tried and executed for Geraldine's death, that finding was enough to support a posthumous pardon. Home Secretary Roy Jenkins recommended the pardon, which was granted that October.
The case didn't end there. In 2003, an independent assessment by Lord Brennan QC, commissioned by the Home Office, went further than the 1966 inquiry had — concluding there was no evidence at all implicating Evans in his wife's murder, not just his daughter's. Compensation was subsequently paid to Evans's surviving family members. In 2004, the High Court declined to formally quash Evans's conviction on procedural and cost grounds, but explicitly acknowledged, 54 years after his execution, that he had not murdered either his wife or his daughter.
A Case That Changed British Law
Timothy Evans's wrongful execution, alongside other contested cases of the era, became one of the central arguments in Britain's campaign against capital punishment. Ludovic Kennedy's 1961 investigative book, Ten Rillington Place, and the 1971 film it inspired — starring Richard Attenborough as Christie and John Hurt as Evans — kept the injustice firmly in public view for decades. The Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act passed in 1965, suspending capital punishment for murder in Great Britain; it was made permanent in 1969, with the death penalty fully abolished in the UK for all offenses by 1998.
Evans's remains were exhumed from Pentonville in 1965 and reburied at St Patrick's Roman Catholic Cemetery in Leytonstone, where he remains today — a quiet resting place for a man whose case helped reshape an entire country's approach to capital punishment, decades too late to do him any good himself.
Sources
Timothy Evans — Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Evans
John Christie (serial killer) — Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Christie_(serial_killer)
Crime of the Century: The Case of Timothy Evans — HeinOnline Blog
https://home.heinonline.org/blog/2021/09/crime-of-the-century-the-case-of-timothy-evans/
The Murders at 10 Rillington Place — Crime Magazine
https://www.crimemagazine.com/murders-10-rillington-place