by Lorna Poplak
At around 3:00 a.m., West’s next-door neighbour, Joseph Hardon Fawcett, was awakened by what he later described as “heavy thuds, as though something was hitting the foundation of the house,” and he seemed to “recollect a shrill scream” coming from next door. Fawcett got out of bed, just in time to hear a car engine starting up and to see the rear lights of a vehicle as it raced away.
He and another neighbour called the police, who were on the scene by 3:45 a.m. “I saw the body of a man lying on the floor at the foot of the stairs,” reported Sergeant James William Park. “There were obvious severe head injuries. There was a large amount of blood on the floor, and the man was obviously dead … it appeared that a struggle had taken place.” The body was that of Jack West, stabbed and bludgeoned to death.
Less than forty-eight hours later, the killers were in custody. One of them had thoughtfully left a raincoat hanging neatly over a chair in West’s bedroom, with a treasure trove of identifying items in the pockets. Among them was a medallion with the name G.O. Evans inscribed on the back. Scribbled on an army memorandum form was another useful clue — the name and address of a Liverpool woman, Norma O’Brien. O’Brien recognized the medallion and was happy to furnish the police with details of its owner, a man calling himself “Ginger” Owen Evans, whom she had met in Preston the previous year.
As with a child’s puzzle, the police just had to follow the dots to find the culprits. One by one, they pulled in Allen, then his wife, and lastly Evans. Both men were well known to police, both with a history of convictions for minor crimes. The duo’s spoils this time? The princely sum of ten pounds withdrawn from West’s bank account using his stolen bank books, and West’s gold watch, which Evans had grabbed on his way out of the house.
As West was killed in the course of a theft, Allen and Evans were both charged with capital murder under the Homicide Act of 1957. They were tried jointly in Manchester on June 23, 1964, with Mary Allen testifying in her husband’s defence.
The two men’s stories differed wildly.
Allen said that Evans was the first to enter West’s house. Subsequently, Evans came out and invited him (Allen) in. While on his way upstairs, Allen was startled by West and hit him just a very few times. Evans wielded the knife and did most of the damage.
Evans claimed that he was not involved in the murder at all. His intention had been to borrow money from West, not to rob him (Jack “was like a father to me”), and certainly not to kill him. Allen, Evans said, burst into the house uninvited and was met by West, whereupon Allen attacked him viciously. As proof, Evans pointed out that Allen’s clothes were drenched in blood; his own were clean.
By all accounts, Mary Allen and her lodger had been much more than friends, but during the trial, she turned on Evans fiercely. She supported her husband’s claim that Evans had come out to the car to fetch Allen, and had subsequently savagely attacked his “friend” and “father.”
A huge array of circumstantial evidence undermined Evans’s claims and pointed to his guilt. West was found wearing just a shirt and vest. It did not seem likely that he would have gone to the door so inappropriately dressed. His false teeth, which had been knocked out of his mouth, were found at the top of the stairs. There was also the testimony of the neighbours that the lights had come on upstairs before they came on downstairs, and the forensic evidence showing blood spots and splashes on the upstairs walls and stairs. All these details tallied with Allen’s account of the affair.
Had the murder been committed by one of the men alone, with the other guilty of non-capital murder at the most? The jury didn’t think so. It took just three-and-a -quarter hours for them to reach a verdict: Allen and Evans were both guilty of capital murder.
Both men appealed. Their appeals were dismissed and the date of execution set for August 13, 1964.
According to Elwyn Jones, the irony was that despite the brutality of the crime, few people expected Evans and Allen to hang. The number of hangings in Britain had dribbled down to fewer than four a year, and there had been none at all in 1964. The perpetrator of another particularly violent murder in Lancashire, Joseph Wilson Masters, had just had his sentence commuted. Masters, twenty-two, had robbed and beaten to death seventy-five-year -old James Littler in his house after the man had offered him a cup of tea.
Given that the cause of abolitionists had been gaining ground since the Homicide Act of 1957, even the police in the north of England expected Evans and Allen to be reprieved.
In the end, it was all very low key. No fanfare, no violent protests, no overnight vigils. And hardly a peep from the press. Typical was a terse three-paragraph report in the Glasgow Herald on August 14, 1964, beneath the headline “Two Executed for Murder”:
The two dairymen sentenced to death at Manchester Crown Court on July 7 for the capital murder of a van driver were executed yesterday at separate prisons.
Peter Anthony Allen (21) was executed at Walton Prison, Liverpool, and Gwynne Owen Evans (24) at Manchester [Strangeways] Prison. Both lived in Clarendon Street, Preston.
Their appeals to the Court of Criminal Appeal on July 21 were lost, Lord Parker (Lord Chief Justice) saying: — “A more brutal murder it would be difficult to imagine.”
When Ronald Turpin and Arthur Lucas were hanged in Canada in December 1962, the general public was aware that theirs would probably be the very last executions in Canada. Even the condemned men knew, although they took no consolation from that fact. However, when Allen and Evans went to the gallows simultaneously (although at separate prisons) in Britain in August 1964, no one — not the murderers, nor officials in the criminal justice system, not even the government itself — knew that both literally and figuratively, this was to be the end of the rope in Britain. As in Canada, the hangman would soon be out of a job.
The abolitionists had to wait just a little bit longer — until October 1964, in fact, when the Labour government of Harold Wilson came to office. One of the new government’s top priorities was the elimination of capital punishment, and after the election, the use of the death penalty was suspended. Labour MP Samuel Sydney Silverman, a passionate abolitionist for twenty-plus years, introduced a private member’s bill to replace the death sentence with a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment. With government support, this resulted in the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act of November 1965. The act was to remain in effect for a period of five years. In December 1969, both the House of Commons and the House of Lords passed a motion abolishing capital punishment permanently.
So although nobody knew it at the time, the 1964 hangings of Allen and Evans brought down the curtain on a practice that had existed in Britain for well over a thousand years, possibly introduced by the Saxons as early as the sixth century C.E.
According to Julian B. Knowles QC in The Abolition of the Death Penalty in the United Kingdom , “Abolition did not come about as the result of one single event, or for one reason alone. It happened because of a combination of sustained Parliamentary campaigning; public disquiet over three controversial executions in the 1950s; botched reforms to the law of murder in the 1950s; and changing attitudes towards social and penal affairs, most of all, the acceptance by an enlightened majority of MPs that the state just ought not to be in the business of taking human life.”
The early part of the twentieth century saw creeping changes to the British criminal justice system — a 1908 act provided that no child under the age of sixteen could be executed. In 1933, this age was raised to eighteen. The Infanticide Act of 1922 made the killing of a baby by its mother no longer a capital crime, although this had in fact not taken place since 1849. A 1931 act specifically provided that no woman should be hanged after giving birth to a child for a crime committed while she was pregnant.
The first major inroads into the entrenched system of criminal law came in 1949 with the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment. By that time, parliamentarians were starting to question the death penalty more critically, with activist Sydney Silverma
n taking the lead. The commission was not tasked with deciding whether the death penalty should be abolished, but with considering “whether capital punishment for murder should be limited or modified.” The twelve-member group met sixty-three times over the next four years, interviewing a wide range of experts in the field — judges, prison officials, spiritual advisors, medical personnel, and Britain’s hangman superstar, Albert Pierrepoint.
Pierrepoint, the third and last member of a family dynasty that included his father Henry and his Uncle Tom, was the most prolific British hangman of all time. As he modestly claimed in his memoirs, “I have attended more executions in one day than any other man in this country has done in a year, more in twelve months than any other man has done in twelve years, and more in twelve years than any other man in a lifetime, though my uncle was on the list [of British executioners] for forty years.” Some say Pierrepoint executed more than 600 people during his 24 year career, although a more conservative estimate puts his total at around 430.
Albert Pierrepoint (standing) with his uncle Thomas. It is estimated that Albert Pierrepoint hanged between 430 and 600 people during his 24-year career as British executioner in the first half of the twentieth century. He claimed to have never bungled a hanging.
Albert Pierrepoint was born in Clayton, West Yorkshire, in 1905, and his childhood ambition was always to follow in the footsteps of his father and beloved uncle. He got his break in 1932, when he was interviewed and accepted as an assistant executioner. He was promoted to chief executioner in 1941, a job that came with great opportunities for travel to faraway places. For example, among his many executions were those of more than two hundred war criminals in Germany and Austria after the Second World War. By 1946, this very lucrative part-time career enabled Pierrepoint and his wife, Annie, to purchase a pub in Manchester. He carried on working as a publican long after resigning from his position as hangman in 1956.
It was a no-brainer that Pierrepoint would be invited to offer his opinions to the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment in 1949. Unlike the Canadian hangmen whose careers were littered with multiple bumbles and bungles, Pierrepoint claimed that his track record was spotless. To commission chairperson Sir Ernest Gowers’s question “I suppose you must, in so many executions, have had things go wrong occasionally?” his reply was an emphatic “Never.”
The commission’s report, published in 1953, ran to a whopping 506 pages. In spite of its many recommendations, the Capital Punishment UK website states that “in reality there was little significant change as a result of the Commission’s painstaking and highly detailed analysis of the system of capital punishment in Britain and abroad.” The bottom line was that the commission believed that execution should be clean, dignified, and rapid, and they supported the British “long drop” method as described by Pierrepoint as being the best there was.
In addition to contributing to the commission’s report, Pierrepoint was a common element linking together three shocking executions in the 1950s — he was the hangman in each case. Each of them, as Knowles remarks, “raised different concerns but, taken together, they made the case for abolition in a way that purely theoretical and moral arguments could not.”
The tragic tale of Timothy Evans, who was hanged in 1950, horrified the public. As the facts emerged over time, it became clear that Evans was innocent beyond any reasonable doubt of the crimes attributed to him. Evans and his wife, Beryl, had the great misfortunate of renting a flat at 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill, London, and to have as downstairs neighbours John Reginald Halliday Christie and his wife, Ethel. Who would have guessed that the balding, bespectacled, inoffensive-looking Christie was a necrophiliac serial killer who would end up murdering at least eight women? Among his victims were Evans’s wife, Beryl, and their infant daughter. Shocked by his loss and hoodwinked by the cunning Christie, Evans initially confessed to the murders. By the time he realized that Christie must have murdered the two and wanted to recant, it was too late. Evans was tried and sentenced to death in January 1950, and hanged two months later. In 1953, a new tenant at 10 Rillington Place found the bodies of three women, and further searches turned up three more, among them that of Christie’s wife. After his arrest, Christie confessed to killing Beryl Evans, but a subsequent commission of inquiry ruled that his evidence was unreliable. Christie was executed for the murder of his wife (enter Pierrepoint, again), but it would take a further thirteen years before Evans was granted a posthumous pardon.
The firestorm of controversy over the possibility that an innocent man had gone to the gallows was further inflamed by the troubling execution of nineteen-year-old Derek Bentley in 1953. Bentley and a younger friend, Christopher Craig, sixteen, tried to break into a warehouse in Croydon, London, in November 1952. Craig was armed with a revolver, which he used to wound a police officer who tackled them, and to shoot dead another. Police witnesses claimed that even though Bentley was under arrest when the fatal bullet was discharged, he had earlier encouraged Craig to fire. Bentley had an IQ of seventy-seven; he had suffered brain damage as a child; he was epileptic. Nevertheless, he was judged fit to stand trial. The two youths were charged with murder, with a trial judge who greatly favoured both flogging and hanging, and both were found guilty. Craig was too young to be executed and ended up serving a prison sentence of ten years. The jury recommended mercy for Bentley. He could have escaped the noose if Home Secretary Sir David Maxwell Fyfe had exercised the royal prerogative. Instead, Fyfe ruled that “the law should take its course.”
Reginald Paget QC summed up the public’s outrage succinctly in parliament during an unsuccessful attempt to debate Bentley’s death sentence: “A three-quarter-witted boy of nineteen is to be hanged for a murder he did not commit, and which was committed fifteen minutes after he was arrested. Can we be made to keep silent when a thing as horrible and as shocking as this is to happen?”
As the Guardian reported on January 28, 1953: “Crowds jostled in Whitehall last night chanting, ‘Bentley must be reprieved.’ Outside the House of Commons over one hundred people shouted: ‘Bentley must not die.’” All in vain. At 9:00 a.m. that day Bentley was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint at Wandsworth Prison. It took until 1998 for Bentley’s conviction to be quashed by the Court of Appeal.
Then there was the case of Ruth Ellis, a glamorous nightclub hostess who was hanged in 1955 for pumping five bullets at point-blank range into her abusive boyfriend. Ellis made a full confession to the police and confirmed under cross-examination at her trial that her intention had been to kill the man. But Ellis was a blond, beautiful, photogenic twenty-eight-year -old mother of two, and her case triggered widespread public protest. Thousands of people signed a petition in favour of mercy. Home Secretary Gwilym Lloyd George refused a reprieve, and Ellis was hanged on July 13 at Holloway Prison, London — the last woman ever executed in the United Kingdom.
Albert Pierrepoint, her executioner, suffered from the resultant backlash and complained bitterly about the arbitrary nature of the mercy process. Why, he wondered, had the crowds now protesting vigorously against Ellis’s fate so completely ignored the plight of Styllou Christofi, a grey-haired grandmother executed just six months previously for murdering her daughter-in-law ?
When I left Holloway after the execution of Ruth Ellis, the prison was almost besieged by a storming mob. I needed police protection to get me through.… At Euston Station a crowd of newspapermen were awaiting me. I shielded my face from the cameras as I ran for my train. One young reporter jogged alongside me asking “How did it feel to hang a woman, Mr. Pierrepoint?” I did not answer. But I could have asked: “Why weren’t you waiting to ask me that question last year, sonny? Wasn’t Mrs. Christofi a woman, too?”
The Homicide Act (1957) pulled some of the teeth from the death penalty. As with a similar Canadian law passed in 1961, the new offence of capital murder was created. In Britain, this applied to murder accompanied by theft, murder by shooting or an explosion, murder in the course of resisting arre
st or escaping from custody, the killing of a police or prison officer, and second murders. Had it been in force a few years earlier, this act may well have changed things for Bentley, as one of the sections provided that only the person who actually committed a murder would be liable for the death penalty. But as Liz Homans points out in her article “Swinging Sixties,” both retentionists and abolitionists objected to an act they saw as clunky and unworkable. For example, why should murder after rape not be a capital crime if the victim was stabbed to death, but punishable by death if the victim was shot? As quoted by The Telegraph in 1964, the Lord Chief Justice described the law as a “hopeless muddle.”
The tide was slowly turning against capital punishment. Abolitionists were supported by the Church and the judiciary. But bringing public opinion around was not so easy.
The Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act of November 1965, which was to remain in effect for five years, did not bring the controversy to an end. The public reacted violently when three policemen were shot dead in London in 1966, and the Police Federation called for the recall of hanging for the crime of murdering a policeman. In a 1967 article in the Ottawa Citizen entitled “Bring back noose, Britons cry,” Don McGillivray wrote: “Britain’s five-year experiment with the complete abolition of capital punishment is two years old on Wednesday and already a petition to bring back hanging is gathering 5,000 signatures a week.” It was a nail-biting battle, but in December 1969, the members of both the British House of Commons, on a free vote of 343 to 185, and the House of Lords passed a motion permanently abolishing capital punishment.
In an editorial the British Daily Mirror acknowledged that public opinion was against abolition. But, it added, “it must always be the duty of Parliament to lead if there is ever to be any progress in penal reform. The lead has been given. It is clear cut. It is humane. This agonising controversy can now be buried with the hangman’s noose.”