IN HIS STIMULATING book, Battle for the Mind, Dr. William
Sargant describes how 'false con- fessions are sometimes elicited quite unknowingly' and suggests that this is the explanation of Timothy Evans's confession at Notting Hill Gate police station—that he had, quite unintentionally, been brain-washed by the police. Both before in Wales and afterwards at his trial Evans accused Christie, but at Notting Hill Gate he confessed in , great detail to murdering both his wife and his baby; and it was this confession, together with the evidence of Christie—put forward by the prosecu- tion as a 'perfectly innocent man'—which hanged him. Dr. Sargant's theory explains satisfactorily why Evans's 'confession' was accurate on matters known to the police and inaccurate in every other respect, though it does not explain how the police were able to perform the remarkable feat of taking down in longhand a statement of 2,000 words in an hour or an hour and a quarter. I suppose that even with Mr. Butler at the Home Office it is too much to expect the present Govern- . ment to hold a public inquiry into the case-- presumably Lord Kilmuir would have something to say about it. Yet it is difficult to see what the Home Office have to lose by an inquiry. At the moment, outside a small coterie of ministers and officials, Evans's innocence is taken for granted, so that if the inquiry came to the same conclusion it would merely be ratifying public opinion. And, after all, it is at least theoretically possible that the inquiry, unlike Mr. Scott Henderson, would produce convincing reasons for thinking Evans was guilty. But, of course, the Home Office does not believe in miracles.
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