Timothy John Evans (20 November 1924 – 9 March 1950) was a Welsh lorry driver who was wrongfully accused of murdering his wife Beryl and infant daughter Geraldine at their residence in Notting Hill, London.

During his trial, Evans accused his downstairs neighbour, John Christie, who was the chief prosecution witness in the case against him, of committing the murders.

Three years after Evans's execution, Christie was found to be a serial killer who had murdered several other women in the same house, including his own wife Ethel.

Along with those of Derek Bentley and Ruth Ellis, the case played a major part in the removal of capital punishment for murder in 1965 and, later, its abolition for all crimes.

Following an accident when he was eight, Evans developed a tubercular verruca on his right foot that never completely healed and caused him to miss considerable amounts of time from school for treatments, further setting back his education.

[2][4][5] He was also prone to inventing stories about himself to boost his self-esteem, a trait that continued into adulthood and interfered with his efforts to establish credibility when dealing with the police and courts.

Evans was fined 60 shillings at West London Magistrates’ Court on 25 April 1946 for stealing a car, and driving without insurance or a licence.

[8] The couple initially lived with Evans's family at St Mark's Road but after Beryl discovered she was pregnant in 1948 they moved into the top-floor flat at 10 Rillington Place in the Ladbroke Grove area of Notting Hill.

[9] Their marriage was characterised by angry quarrels; Beryl was alleged to be a poor housekeeper and incapable of managing the family's finances,[10] while Timothy misspent his wages on alcohol, and his heavy drinking at the time exacerbated his already short temper.

[13] His first confession was that he had accidentally killed her by giving her something in a bottle that a man had given him to abort the foetus; he had then disposed of her body in a sewer drain outside 10 Rillington Place.

When police examined the drain outside the front of the building, however, they found nothing and, furthermore, discovered that the manhole cover required the combined strength of three officers to remove it.

In response to Evans's second statement, the police performed a preliminary search of 10 Rillington Place but did not uncover anything incriminating, despite the presence of a human thigh bone supporting a fence post in the tiny (about 16 by 14 feet (4.9 by 4.3 m)) garden.

Several authors who have written about the case have argued that the police provided Evans with all the necessary details for him to make a plausible confession, which they may have in turn edited further while transcribing it.

Evans, who was represented by Malcolm Morris, withdrew his confession during consultations with his solicitor and alleged that Christie was responsible for the murders in accordance with his second statement given to the police at Merthyr Tydfil.

Christie denied that he had offered to abort Beryl's unborn child and gave detailed evidence about the quarrels between Evans and his wife.

Had the police conducted a thorough search of the garden and found the bones of two previous victims of Christie, the trial of Evans might not have occurred at all.

During interviews with police and psychiatrists prior to his execution, Christie admitted several times that he had been responsible for the murder of Beryl Evans.

Ludovic Kennedy provided one possible reconstruction of how the murder took place, surmising that an unsuspecting Beryl let Christie into her flat, expecting the abortion to be carried out, but was instead attacked and then strangled.

[25] They stored their tools in the wash-room (a small outhouse measuring 54 by 52 inches (140 by 130 cm)) and cleaned it out completely when they finished their work on 11 November.

The murderer, Christie, would have hidden the bodies of Beryl and Geraldine in the temporarily vacant first-floor flat, and then moved them to the wash-house four days later when the workmen had finished.

Christie was found guilty of murdering his wife and was hanged on 15 July 1953 by Albert Pierrepoint, the same hangman who had executed Evans at the same prison three years prior.

Because Christie's crimes raised doubts about Evans's guilt in the murders of his wife and daughter, the serving Home Secretary, David Maxwell-Fyfe, commissioned an inquiry to investigate the possibility of a miscarriage of justice.

The inquiry ignored vital evidence and led to more questions in Parliament, especially from Geoffrey Bing, Reginald Paget, Sydney Silverman, Michael Foot and many other MPs.

[27] In the same year, barrister Michael Eddowes examined the case and wrote the book The Man on Your Conscience, which argued that Evans could not have been the killer on the basis that if he were, there were a number of extraordinary coincidences with his crimes and Christie's, most notably that two strangler murderers, who both used a ligature to kill their victims, had been living in the same property at the same time, unknown to each other.

[28] The television journalist Ludovic Kennedy's book Ten Rillington Place criticised the police investigation and evidence submitted at the 1950 trial in which Evans was found guilty.

[29] In 1965, Liberal Party politician Herbert Wolfe of Darlington, County Durham contacted Harold Evans, then editor of The Northern Echo.

In 1965, Evans's remains were exhumed from Pentonville Prison and reburied in St Patrick's Roman Catholic Cemetery in Leytonstone, Greater London.

Lord Brennan believed that the Brabin Report's conclusion that Evans probably murdered his wife should be rejected given Christie's confessions and conviction.