io Rillington Place—Dr. Teare's Evidence
By LUDOVIC KENNEDY IN my book Ten Rillington Place I publish an extract (not published before) from the brief of Evans's solicitors, Messrs. Free- borough, Slack and Company, to his counsel, Mr. Malcolm Morris, in which it is stated: The evidence given by Dr. Tcarc appears to be open to the comment that his expert opinion travelled beyond justifiable inference from his examination of the corpse in so far as he purports to suggest that there might have been an attempt at sexual penetration after death.
I go on to say that as there is no evidence at all that Evans ever engaged in necrophilic activities, and considerable evidence that Christie did, then this suggestion, if true, establishes Christie as Mrs. Evans's murderer beyond any shadow of doubt.
However, I also point out in the book that Dr. Teare had informed me personally that he had found nothing in his notes that could have led him to conclude that there was pene- tration after death, and that therefore he could not have said what Mr. Freeborough thought he had said. One or two reviewers have now suggested that if this statement of Dr. Teare's is true, then the extract from the brief is valueless.
This is not so. The crucial point (and I should have made this clearer in my book) is not whether penetration took place just after or just before death, but the fact that there is evidence that it took place at all. Dr. Teare deposed at the Magistrate's Court (and this is in the record) that the bruise in Beryl's vagina could have been caused by 'an attempt at forced intercourse.' He has also informed me that such intercourse would have taken place either just before death or, less likely but possible, during death. To accept Evans's guilt, therefore, we must accept that he had intercourse with his wife just before or during the time that he strangled her; and this, I suggest, is no less fantastic and unbelievable than the idea of his having intercourse with her just after he had strangled her. (Christie, it may be noted, admitted to having inter- course with some of his victims before death, some of them during death and some of them after death.) Incidentally, there is not a word in Mr. Scott Henderson's Report about the bruise (although he lists all the other marks on her body), not a word about Dr. Teare's deposi- tion concerning 'forced intercourse' and not a word about the extract from the brief (although he prints another extract, highly damaging to Evans, which appears six lines earlier). Nor--and this is the most astonishing thing of all—does Mr. Scott Henderson appear to have asked Dr. Teare as to whether the suggestion contained in the brief might be untrue.
Previous page
