by Bill Wallace
A year later, he married British immigrant, Sally Lavin, a nineteen-year-old waitress, and with her he would have seven children. He found work as a lorry driver but none of this stopped his criminal sidelines, however, and he was arrested several times for looking in people’s bedroom windows and for other petty criminal acts. In 1955, he was given two years’ hard labour for car theft and he would return to prison in 1960. In between those prison terms, he continued breaking the law. He also killed for the first time when he murdered a divorcee in the course of a break-in, but he got away with it. His real killing spree began, however, on a summer’s night, 27 January 1963.
A couple, Nicholas August, a married man, and a barmaid, Rowena Reeves were enjoying a drink in August’s car in the early hours in a secluded part of the Perth suburb of Cottesloe. Peering into the darkness, Rowena suddenly saw a figure watching them. August leaned out of his window and yelled ‘Bugger off!’ at the man who he presumed to be a peeping tom. When the figure did not move, August angrily chucked an empty bottle at him. Rowena noticed that the man had something in his hand and to her horror realised it was a gun, which was aimed straight at them. Thinking fast, she pushed August’s head down as a bullet flew into the car, grazing his neck and hitting her in the arm. August sat up quickly, turned the key in the ignition and pressed his foot down hard on the peddle. The car sped past the man, almost hitting him. It was a shame they missed him; it would have saved several lives that night if they had not.
August and Reeves survived, although, having lost a considerable amount of blood, she was unconscious by the time they got to the nearest hospital. The next few people that Eric Cooke encountered were not quite so lucky.
A little later that night, fifty-four-year-old retired grocer, George Walmsley, wondered who could be at his door at that time of night. Puzzled, he sleepily made his way to the front door. No sooner had he opened it than he lay dead on the floor with a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.
It was 04.00 a.m. as Cooke made his way round the corner from where he had claimed the life of George Walmsley. There, asleep on the verandah of the boarding house where he had a room, he found John Sturkey, a nineteen-year-old student. Cooke shot him between the eyes without even bothering to wake him up.
He next pumped a bullet into the forehead of Brian Weir, an accountant who had been asleep in his bed. Weir, who lived alone, was discovered the next morning when he failed to turn up for work. His sheets were soaked with his blood and he survived,but was seriously brain-damaged. He became the Night Stalker’s fourth victim of that night when he died from his injuries three years later.
The next day the media went into a frenzy. Perth was just not used to this kind of thing. It was a city were the residents prided themselves on being able to leave their doors unlocked and their windows open. Crime was negligible and murder was unheard of, unlike some of the other cities of Australia with their gangland killings and turf wars. A huge reward was offered for information leading to the capture of the man they were calling the ‘Maniac Slayer’.
Just as the randomness of the killings terrified the people of Perth, so it baffled the police. No one had any idea where the killer would strike next and just in case it was anywhere near their neighbourhood, people began to stock up on guns and ammo and sleep with loaded weapons by their bedside. Windows and doors were now double-locked all the time.
On 16 February, Cooke raped and strangled twenty-four-year-old social worker Constance Madrill and left her naked on the lawn of a west Perth house. The different method of this murder led police not to link it with the recent killings.
They suggested, without any grounds to support their theory, that it had been carried out by an Indigenous Australian.
For the next six months nothing happened and the city began to breathe a little more easily. On 10 August, however, an eighteen-year-old student, Shirley McLeod, was shot dead as she was babysitting. The baby she had been caring for was left unharmed. It was a different gun, but investigators were certain it was the same man and drastic steps were taken. Every male in Perth over the age of twelve was fingerprinted and there was talk of closing down certain secluded roads and alleyways at night.
Just when the city’s terror had reached its peak, they caught him. A couple were picking flowers in some woods in the Mount Pleasant area of the city when they came upon a rifle concealed in some bushes. They called the police who discovered that it was a .22 Winchester, the same weapon that the killer had recently used. It was a remarkable stroke of luck. Without any doubt, he would be returning to collect the weapon at some time and all they had to do was wait. For two weeks the area was put under tight surveillance before Eric Cooke finally turned up. They grabbed him, cuffed him and at last took him into custody.
After initially denying having anything to do with the killings, Cooke began to catalogue an astonishing series of crimes. He claimed some two hundred and fifty break-ins and car thefts, recalling tiny details in a way that amazed the officers interrogating him. He described abusing women while they slept and hit-and-runs that he had deliberately staged, running people over and then speeding off.
Even the Winchester had been obtained in a break-in. The owners were seated in the lounge watching television as he crept out of their house with the gun and ammunition. Initially, he planned to sell it, but used it instead on the babysitting student, He claimed, however, not to recall anything about that murder. When he woke up next morning to see it on the news, he realised that he must have done it. Regarding Constance Madrill, she had wokenup as he searched her house for valuables. He hit her and then strangled her with the electrical cord from a lamp. He had then raped her as she lay dead on the floor. His intention had been to steal a car and take her body somewhere to be disposed of. But he could only find a bicycle and was forced to dump her in the middle of the lawn.
He explained away his murderous night of the previous summer by saying he did it because he ‘wanted to hurt somebody’. When Nicholas August had thrown the bottle at him he had lost his temper and the remainder of his killings and woundings that night had been just opportunistic; his victims really were in the wrong place at the wrong time. He suggested that he was probably just a cold-blooded killer.
One murder to which he confessed was the 1959 killing of thirty-three-year-old Patricia Vinico Berkman, lover of local radio star Fotis Hountas. She had received multiple stab wounds to the head as she lay in bed in her apartment in South Perth. Furthermore, he claimed to have killed wealthy twenty-two-year-old socialite Jillian Brewer later that same year. A twenty-year-old deaf-mute, Darryl Beamish had confessed to killing her but later claimed that he had been forced to make the confession. Nevertheless, he was found guilty and given the death sentence. Cooke, however, cast doubt on that verdict by recalling tiny details about the flat. He also solved a mystery about the murder. When the woman’s body was found, all the doors to the flat were locked from the inside and there was no sign of forced entry. Cooke explained that he had stolen one of Jillian Brewster’s keys when breaking into the flat a few months previously. The appeal court judges did not believe Cooke’s confession, but at least Beamish did not hang; his sentence was commuted to one of life imprisonment.
Eric Edgar Cooke had no such luck. He was hanged in Fremantle Prison on 26 October 1964, the last man to be hanged in Australia.
Timothy Evans
The duty sergeant was unsure whether to believe Timothy Evans or not. The small, rather insignificant man had walked into the police station in Merthyr Vale on 30 November 1949 and told him that he had put his wife’s body down a drain in London. They drove him across to the police station at Merthyr Tydfil where he made a statement to a couple of astonished detectives. They contacted the police at Notting Hill in London and several officers were sent round to the address he had given, the flat where he used to live. It took three of them to lift the manhole cover outside the house – something he claimed that he did alone – but they found nothing beneath
it. The address they were at would become one of the most chilling addresses in British criminal history – 10 Rillington Place, the home of serial killer, John Reginald Christie.
The news that nothing had been found was sent back to South Wales and Evans was informed. He insisted on making another statement in which he said that his wife’s death had actually been the result of an unsuccessful attempt at aborting her unborn baby. Notting Hill police paid another visit to Rillington Place to have a look around Evans’ flat. Christie was brought in for questioning while his wife was interviewed at their flat.
But police were still baffled. Had a crime been committed or not?
Before Timothy Evans had been born in Merthyr Vale in 1924, his father had walked out and was never seen again. As a child, Evans was slow in learning to speak and had difficulties at school which were not helped by the considerable amount of schooling he missed after developing a tubercular verucca on his right foot. As a result, he could neither read nor write anything more than his name by the time he was an adult and nowadays would be described as having learning difficulties. Even at an early age, he had a reputation for his temper and also seems to have been a compulsive liar, concocting elaborate lies about himself, a habit that he still possessed as an adult.
His mother remarried and in 1935, when Evans was eleven, the family moved to west London to make a fresh start. Evans worked as a painter and decorator while still at school, and in 1937 returned to Merthyr Tydfil briefly to work in the mines. His troubles with his foot forced him to give up the work, however. By 1939, he was back in London with his mother.
In 1947, aged twenty-three, Evans married eighteen-year-old Beryl Thorley and they moved into a second-floor flat at 10 Rillington Place where their neighbours two floors below, on the ground floor, were a middle-aged couple, Reg Christie and his wife Ethel. In 1948, Beryl gave birth to their first child, a daughter that they named Geraldine.
On 2 December 1949, police officers made another, more thorough search at 10 Rillington Place, still not actually knowing what they were looking for. However, an officer searching outside in the small back garden that came with the Christies’ flat, made a grim discovery – the decomposed bodies of Beryl Evans and baby Geraldine, hidden in a wash-house behind some wood.
Evans was driven back to London where he identified the clothing taken from his dead wife and daughter. Charged with their murders, he made two statements admitting to having killed them.
The trial opened on 11 January 1950, Justice Lewis presiding and Christmas Humphreys prosecu-ting. Evans was defended by Malcolm Morris. He was tried only for the murder of Geraldine, even though it was widely accepted that he was really being tried for Beryl’s death as well. Evans had by this time returned to his second Merthyr Tydfil statement and was now blaming everything on his neighbour, Reg Christie who, he claimed, had killed his wife while performing an abortion on her. When called to testify, however, Christie gave an engaging performance, diverting attention from his criminal record that included a conviction for assault on a woman, onto his record in World War One where he had been rendered unable to speak for three years by a mustard gas attack. He said that he saw Beryl leave with her baby around noon on the eighth and never saw her again. Later, Timothy Evans came home and he and his wife Ethel went out for the evening. Around midnight, he claimed, he and his wife heard a loud thump from above them. As the man in the second floor flat was away, it could only have come from the Evans’ flat on the third floor. It was followed by the sound of something heavy being dragged across the floor.
The following day, Christie told the police, Evans told him his wife had gone to Bristol and the day after that, he came home saying that he had packed in his job and was selling up and moving to Bristol to join her.
Timothy Evans was found guilty and sentenced to death. His appeal was rejected and on 9 March 1950, he was hanged at Pentonville Prison.
In March 1953, a new tenant, a Jamaican named Beresford Brown, moved into the ground floor flat at 10 Rillington Place, recently vacated by Reg Christie who had given up his job, sold all his furniture and moved back to Sheffield, as he had told friends, to join his wife who had gone on ahead several months previously. While stripping wallpaper in preparation for redecorating the flat, Brown came upon a door that had been covered up by the wallpaper. It appeared to lead to a pantry. Opening the door slightly, he shone a torch into the space beyond. There, to his horror he saw the body of a woman, seated and hunched forward, clad only in a bra, stockings and suspenders. He immediately called the police and when they arrived, they discovered another two women’s bodies. They were the bodies of three prostitutes that Christie had lured back to the house and killed while he lived there – Kathleen Maloney, Rita Nelson and Hectorina MacLennan. Searching the remainder of the flat, under the floorboards of the living room they found the remains of Ethel Christie. Christie had strangled her on December 14 1952. She had been in poor health and Christie claimed later that he had merely put her out of her misery.
A massive manhunt was launched for Christie which ended about a week later when he was apprehended on the Embankment of the River Thames, not far from Putney Bridge. He confessed to the murders of six women and to the murder of Beryl Evans for which Timothy Evans had hanged two years previously.
It had happened in September 1949. To her dismay, Beryl was pregnant again. She and Timothy were already struggling financially and she would now have to give up her part-time job as well. There was also the fact that the flat was just not big enough for another child. She spoke to Timothy about an abortion, but he, a Roman Catholic, would not hear of it.
When she mentioned her predicament to Reg Christie, he hinted that he had gained some medical experience during the war and told her that he could perform an abortion if she wanted. He spoke to Evans about it, but he remained opposed to the idea. Nonetheless, Beryl went ahead. On the morning of 8 November, she went down to Christie’s flat to have the abortion. That night when Evans returned from work, an edgy Christie met him on the stairs of the building and told him that it had all gone disastrously wrong – Beryl had died during the procedure. He impressed upon Evans not only that he would be in serious trouble for attempting to abort a child but that Evans’s rows with his wife, which had been a feature of their marriage, would lead to him being suspected of murder. The slow-witted and infinitely suggestible Evans agreed. Christie offered to dispose of the body down the drain outside and suggested that he would also find a home for Geraldine. Evans helped him carry the body down to the vacant first floor flat. On 10 November when Evans returned from work, Christie informed him that he had placed the child with a couple in Acton. He had, of course, killed her.
Christie now suggested to Evans that he get out of London. In this, he had a stroke of luck as Evans had just lost his job and, there was, therefore, nothing to keep him there. He sold his furniture for £40 and on 15 November took the train to the home of his aunt and uncle in Merthyr Vale. He told them that Beryl had returned to her parents. On 23 November, anxious about Geraldine, he returned to London, but Christie told him he could not see her until she had properly settled in with her new parents. Evans returned to Wales where his aunt and uncle had become suspicious. They had written to Beryl’s parents and learned that she was not there.
The problem for Timothy Evans was that everyone – the police and even his own solicitors – had presumed he was guilty from the outset, a presumption not helped by his confessions, of course. But vital pieces of evidence were also ignored. One involved some workmen who had been using the wash-house to store tools all that week. They stated categorically that when they left the wash-house on 11 November there was nothing out of the ordinary there. Police should have noticed that this was in direct contradiction of Timothy Evans’ statement. He said that he put Beryl’s body there on November 8 and Geraldine’s two days later, ready for disposal in the drain. Furthermore, a carpenter had taken up some floorboards on 11 November and had given them to Reg
Christie on the 14th. Christie had used these pieces of wood to conceal the bodies. Evans had already left Rillington Place earlier that day. No statement was ever taken from the carpenter.
Police did call the workmen back to provide second statements, but this time, they gave the investigators the version they wanted, the one who had last used the wash-house, saying on this occasion that he had not really paid any attention to it.
There were many other factors that should have made the police think twice about Timothy Evans’ guilt. A friend of Beryl’s visited on the day of the murder and was certain that when she tried to open her door, someone was pushing it closed from the inside. It may have been around the time that Christie killed Beryl. Police suggested to her, however, that she had actually visited the day before. Furthermore, vital evidence was lost and contradictory statements by Christie were not seized upon.
Christie’s trial for the murder of his wife opened at the Old Bailey on 22 June 1953. He related the story of her poor health and how he had strangled her on 14 December 1952, to end her misery.
He was found guilty and sentenced to death. On 15 July 1953, he was hanged on the same gallows as Timothy Evans.
Christie had not confessed to the killing of Geraldine Evans and the police still believed there were no grounds to believe that there had been a dreadful miscarriage of justice. An inquiry headed by John Scott-Henderson QC upheld Evans’ guilt of both murders, even though Christie had confessed.
A campaign was launched to obtain a posthumous pardon for Evans. In 1955, the Home Secretary was petitioned by a group of newspaper editors and the first of dozens of books about the case was written. In 1961, a parliamentary debate failed to establish a second enquiry into the case. Another prolonged campaign finally resulted in the Home Secretary of the time recommending Timothy Evans be given a Royal Pardon. It was granted. His body was removed from Pentonville Prison and reburied in Leytonstone in London.
