Timothy Evans

Timothy Evans had a hard life, he was abandoned by his father, suffered from intractable illness and was crap at school. He could write his name, but that was where his literary expertise ended. He was a compulsive liar and prone to making up exciting stories about his life to make himself appear more interesting, a quality which was to cost him dear later in life.

Evans managed to find himself a wife and father a child despite being regularly drunk and frighteningly short-tempered. When he reported to the police that his wife was dead it didn’t take long before the finger of blame pointed straight at him.

Being a compulsive liar, Evans did himself no favours. Initially he admitted he’d accidentally killed her by giving her something in a bottle that a man had given him to abort an unwanted foetus; he had then disposed of her body in a sewer drain.

The police actually debunked his admission of guilt because it took three men to lift the manhole cover which he’d said he’d removed on his own. On top of that no further evidence was found, i.e. no body. Evans changed his story a couple of times and when the bodies of his wife and daughter eventually turned up in the garden behind their flat Evans admitted strangling the pair. The police, for their part made some serious bungles and Evans sounds like he may well have been delusional, it was never going to end well.

Evans was hung by the neck until dead in March 1950. Three years later the truth came out. Unbeknownst to the Evans family they’d been living below a serial killer: John Christie, pictured here looking fairly psycho with his soon-to-be late wife:

Christie had killed two women before Evans even moved into the flat, he’d then killed Mrs Evans and Miss Evans. In all he strangled to death at least eight people, including his own wife, but it could well have been more. He was hung in 1953.

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