Donald Hume and Timothy Evans
By IAN GILMOUR
IN last Friday's Daily Express, under the cap- tion 'Fresh out of Dartmoor the man in the Setty case throws fresh light on the century's haunting murder riddle,' there was a leader-page article under the signature of Donald Hume about the Evans-Christie case. In a preface 'Express Chief Crime Reporter Percy Hoskins' told his readers that 'the one unexplained factor had always been the sudden retraction by Evans of his thrice-repeated confession of the murder of his Wife and child,' a remark which, in view of the large number of hitherto unexplained factors in the case, presupposes on the part of Mr. Hoskins a depth of knowledge which is unequalled else- Where and which his previous writings on the subject have not revealed.
Hume met Evans when they were both await- ing trial in Brixton prison hospital. In his article he had this to say about the murder of Mrs. Evans : He [Evans] said : `No. I didn't knock the wife off'—ho was most emphatic. He told me that when he and his wife went to live at Rillington- place Christie came to an arrangement with his wife, and that Christie had murdered her.
and about'the murder of the baby : Then he told me about the child. He said : `It was because the kid kept on crying.'
I said : 'So you did it?' He said : `No, but I was there while it was done.' He told me that he and Christie had gone into the bedroom to- gether, that Christie had strangled the kid with a bit of rag while he stood and watched.
The article ended as follows : But I believe, after all my talks with Evans, that if he did not kill the child himself he was definitely in the room when it was done, and did nothing to stop it. I am convinced that he and Christie together arranged to murder the child. IN THIS EVANS WAS GUILTY.
It is perhaps unfair to Hume to criticise the title of his article—`I can now disclose the miss- ing link in the case of Timothy Evans'—since this may have been the work of the Daily Express, but apart from the fact that the article discloses no 'link,' missing' or otherwise, why the word `now'? Why wait five years? Why did Hume not come forward to tell his story at the Scott Hen- derson inquiry? According to his article he told it to the police officers at Wakefield gaol, but `later at the time of the Scott Henderson inquiry I was asked to give evidence but refused.' Was Mr. Scott Henderson told about this? If not, why not? If so, did he make any effort to see Hume, and why did he not make any reference to the matter in his report? (He certainly knew of Hume's existence, since he mentioned in his report that cuttings of the Setty case had been found in Evans's flat, and he faithfully reported that the police had a theory that Evans had copied some of the methods used in that case. In fact, of course, Evans could not read and the cuttings belonged to Christie.) Hume gives as his reason for refusing to give evidence at the inquiry that he would have got `a bad name with the rest of the chaps here [Wakefield Prison] because I'll be helping the police with what I say.' This is very hard to be- lieve. Leaving aside the point that even on Hume's version of the facts Evans was probably not guilty of murder, how could that version have conceivably helped the police? The state of affairs disclosed by Hume whereby the chief prosecution witness at Evans's trial, Christie, was the actual killer of the baby and the sole killer of Mrs. Evans would hardly have been a matter of self-congratulation at Scotland Yard. The opinion that Hume's view of truth is at best pragmatic does not rest on mere inference or suspicion. In his article he says : 'I kept telling him [Evans] to pick out the best story for the job and stick to it like I had.'
The intrinsic improbabilities of Hume's ver- sion do not restore any of the confidence which may have been lost in considering his reliability as a witness. People have been known to kill babies because they cried, but only after they have had to endure the noise for some consider- able time. The baby's mother had been killed at most two days before, and on both those days Evans had gone out to work, while even Christie's homicidal tendencies are unlikely to have been aroused by the crying of a baby two flats above his own. Although Hume wavers at the end of his article, according to him Evans told him that Christie had murdered Mrs. Evans. Evans cannot have known that Christie had strangled his wife. If he had known, he would have accused Christie of having done so. Instead, he merely said that Christie was responsible, and he told the police at Merthyr Tydfil that his wife had died as a result of an attempted abortion by Christie. In other words, Christie had successfully concealed from Evans that he had strangled his wife. This would have been utterly pointless if he was then in full view of Evans going to strangle the baby.
It is infinitely more likely that Christie would have murdered the baby after he had sent Evans off to Wales. This fits in with the known facts that Evans sold his furniture and his wife's clothes but did not sell the baby's pram or clothes. And if Evans knew his baby was dead, why, when he went to the police in Wales, did he not tell them of the death of the child as well as of the death of his wife? Or, putting it another way, why did he confess to a killing he had not been concerned in and fail to confess to a killing he had witnessed?
The Hume version presupposes that everything said by Evans about the murder of the baby was untrue; that everything said by Christie about the murder of the baby was untrue; that Christie quite gratuitously demonstrated to Evans that he was a strangler; and that although Evans knew this he chose to make to the police an improbable and erroneous accusation against Christie instead of a true one. If it is suggested that he could not make the true accusation because that would, at least to some extent, have incriminated himself, the answer is that it would have been the easiest of all lies to say that Christie had strangled the baby when he, Evans, was not there, and had told him about it afterwards. In short, the Hume version is no more credible than the Scott Henderson report.
In a leading article the Daily Express said that Hume's article, which it correctly described as `sensational,' had struck a blow against those who have said that Evans was hanged for a crime he did not commit, and that one argument against hanging had been discredited. But Hume's article even at its face value does not affect any of the arguments against hanging, and the only discredit- ing done by such ex-convict's tittle-tattle is to those who retail it.
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