In 1964 hanging was finally abolished in Great Britain, it had been mired in controversy with several high profile miscarriages of justice putting the death sentence into rightful disrepute. Like the other controversies that had dogged it in the preceding years, hanging wasn’t going to be consigned to the barbaric quarters of the history books without one last controversy.
On Monday the 6th of April 1964 James Cook stepped out of the Frenchwood Hotel in Preston, England, where he had been having a few quiet drinks after work, he walked across the car park, his car keys in hand and as he reached the spot where he had left his car he began to feel a little confusion, his vehicle was nowhere to be seen. He looked around the rest of the car park, wondering if he had remembered rightly where he had parked it. The car however was well and truly gone; the theft of the automobile was the first part in a sequence of events that would lead to the last hangings in Great Britain.
At 3.00 a.m. on Tuesday the 7th of April 1964 the residents of number 2 Coronation Avenue, Seaton, Workingham, were awoken by several loud bangs coming from next door, number 28 Kings Avenue[i]. Joseph Fawcett got out of bed and made his way to the window of his bedroom, peering out into the night he could see that something quite peculiar was happening next door. The lights in the various rooms of number 28 Kings Avenue were being switched on and off as if someone was systematically going from room to room searching for something. Then Mr Fawcett heard a car engine being revved outside of the house and he caught a glimpse of the cars tail lights as they sped away from the property. Mr Fawcett sensing that something was dreadfully wrong went around to number 28 Kings Avenue to see if his neighbour, fifty-three year old John Alan West, needed any help. Mr Fawcett knocked on the front door, receiving no reply he then went around to the back of the house peering in through the windows as he went. He received no reply at the back door either, so he went back to his house and began knocking on the wall that divided the two properties, again he received no response. Fearing that he needed to summon help Mr Fawcett left his house again and went across the street to number 25 Kings Avenue where he knocked up Walter Lister. Mr Lister came to the window of his bedroom and Mr Fawcett shivering in the cold night air shouted up the peculiar happenings and asked Mr Lister to telephone for the police.
At 3.30 a.m. Police Sergeant James Parker and Police Constable John Rodgers arrived at the scene, after some discussion about how to gain entry to the property Mrs Fawcett stated that the owner of the house, Mr West, kept a spare key hidden in his garage, the two police officers entered the garage recovered the key from a box of screws and let themselves into the house threw the front door. It took them only moments to discover what had become of John Alan West, he lay on his back at the foot of the stairs, his head and face had been staved in, his face and body was a mass of blood, a stab wound to his chest had penetrated to his heart and caused more blood to pump out of the body saturating the floor in blood, the walls were also bloodstained from the severe beating he had received. In the living room Sergeant Park and PC Rodgers discovered a length of metal piping with a rubber grip which had been wrapped in a pair of pyjamas, the heavy implement was covered in blood; obviously this had been one of the murder weapons. Park and Rodgers immediately sent for their superiors and Detective Inspector John Gibson was duly dispatched. He undertook a search of the rest of the house, and in an upstairs bedroom he discovered placed neatly over the back of a chair a white raincoat. In the pocket of the coat was a wallet, in that wallet was a slip of paper, written on that paper in red ink was a name and an address, ‘Miss Norma O’Brian, 98a Upper Hill Street, Princes Road, Liverpool, L8’. Just what was a scrap of paper with an address 143 miles away in Toxteth, Liverpool, doing in John Alan West’s bedroom? Gibson realising this was one of the only leads he had set about tracking down Miss O’Brien[ii]. Norma O’Brien was only seventeen years of age, she was a machinist, her brother-in-law was in the army and was stationed at the Fulwood Barracks in Preston. Whilst visiting her sister at the barracks Miss O’Brien had met a man who had called himself Ginger Owen Evans, he had told her that he hailed from London and that he was the guest of an officer. The couple had dated, but Ginger had become too hot too heavy too quickly, after only a few dates he had proposed marriage to Miss O’Brien who was so taken aback by the lightening quick proposal she demurred and quickly severed contact with the mysterious Ginger Owen Evans. Norma’s brother-in-law was contacted and he was questioned about Ginger Owen Evans, he’d never known anyone by that name, but he had known a solider by the name of Sandy Evans, he wasn’t from London but from Cumberland, the very county where the murder had taken place, and Sandy Evans had expressed an interest in his sister-in-law, in fact he had given Sandy Evans his sister-in-laws name and address.
A little later that same day the car stolen from the Frenchwood Hotel car park was discovered abandoned in a lean-to shed in a disused builder’s yard off of the Knowsley Road in the town of Ormskirk. The police examined the car and they found two sets of incriminating fingerprints. The police investing the murder and those investigating the stolen car both checked their sets of fingerprints found at the scenes of their respective crimes against police records and low and behold if they both didn’t turn up a match for one John Robson Walby also known as Gwynne Owen Evans also known as Sandy Evans.
Gwynne Owen Evans was just twenty-four years old, he was an unemployed fantasist. Born on the 1st of April 1940 to Thomas and Hannah Walby, Evans’ childhood was a difficult one, at the tender age of ten he was treated at Dovenby Hall Mental Colony in the town of Cockermouth. He was under the supervision of the doctors at the mental colony for quite some considerable time, until he was twelve. At school he struggled and was seen as mentally well below average. It was obvious he didn’t look fondly on his childhood, as an adult he would tell people that he was from Innsbruck in Germany and that his parents were German nationals, despite his having a thick Cumbrian accent. He left school at fifteen whereupon he commenced a succession of poorly paid jobs he was invariably unable to hold down, an engine cleaner for British Rail, a pageboy at a hotel, he had three stints in the army and one in the RAF and finally for a short while he held a job as a dairyman. It was whilst working at the dairy that he be-friend a man by the name of Peter Allen. Allen offered Evans a place to live and he moved in with him and his wife Mary Irene Allen and their two children Mark Anthony[iii] and Peter. Peter Allen was just twenty-one years of age, he too was an ex-service man; he too had struggled in school and had been labelled intellectually sub-normal. Born in Wallasey on the Wirral peninsula on Wednesday the 14th of April 1943 like Evans, Allen had spent large parts of his childhood in hospital, not for psychiatric reasons but to deal with defective hearing which had as a consequence affected his speech. He married Mary in 1961; she was an unmarried cinema usherette from New Brighton, Wirral, with an illegitimate child in an age when such things were deeply frowned upon. Perhaps therefore she was grateful when the immature and dim-witted Allen showed an interest in her, or perhaps it really was true love, either way by 1964 there was trouble in the relationship and there were rumours abounding that the Allen’s lodger was getting more than just bed and board at the Allen household. To add to the strain the family’s finances were in a terrible state, the family was in debt to the tune of £79 a sum today which is equivalent to over a thousand pound. To a household consisting of two children and two unemployed adults plus an unemployed lodger things were in dire straits.
With the fingerprint evidence police arrested Gwynne Owen Evans, the second set of prints from the car belonged to Evans’ landlord Peter Allen so he too was brought in for questioning. Further adding to the weight of evidence against the pair was the fact that Evans had in his possession a wristwatch inscribed with a message to the murdered man. Both men were interviewed and both came up with accounts that were as self serving as can be. Evans had been the one to suggest visiting John Allan West, they had known each other from when Evans had lived in Cumberland, and West had allegedly informed Evans that if he were ever in a tight spot he would help him out. Allen and his wife Mary secured the car, stealing it from the pub car park. This is when the two men began to make the most peculiar decisions indeed. Rather than deciding to make the trip in the stolen car themselves Allen decided to take his wife and children with them, to make a family day trip out of the whole macabre affair. They arrived at West’s in the early hours of the morning. Now this is where the versions deviate, Evans definitely entered the property first after chatting for a while Evans either excused himself from West’s company and secretly let Allen into the house who got to work burgling whilst Evans kept West talking, only for West to somehow find Allen and a fight ensued, alternatively Allen knocked on the front door himself, when the door was opened by West, Allen rushed in and immediately killed West in an unprovoked attack. Whatever took place things quickly got out of hand and John Alan West ended being beaten and stabbed to death by the two men who then ransacked the house for money, they found none, leaving the scene with just a pair of virtually worthless bankbooks. Allen was so blood soaked he was forced to remove his jacket and shirt before he got back into the stolen car, after the murder Evans and the Allen family drove hazily around the area. They stopped off at the Mountain Ash Hotel in Windermere where they filled the car up with petrol before driving to Liverpool where Mary Allen withdrew £10 from West’s bank account at the Liverpool Trustee Savings Bank. The group then travelled over to New Brighton on the Wirral Peninsula where they celebrated their criminal endeavours with a slap-up meal, before then driving to Ormskirk and abandoning the car, along the way the group stopped off to pick up a lamb that they found wandering the moors between Liverpool and Ormskirk by itself. From Ormskirk where they abandoned the car they got the bus back to Liverpool drawing much attention to themselves, well they would, Allen was still topless after having removed his bloody clothes, little Richard Allen was dirty tired and crying as he sat on his mothers knee and the group had with them a lamb which bleated loudly.
Rather than stick to any well rehearsed cover story Evans and Allen simply threw muck at each other when interviewed by the police, each trying to blame the other for the murder. This was ridiculous, the crime in the eyes of the law would be seen as a joint enterprise and as such if one was guilty of murder then they both were. So it was that when they came to trial in July 1964 at Manchester Crown Court they both pleaded not guilty to the crime of capital murder[iv] each man not understanding the law said the other did it. The trial lasted six days, and the jury took just over three hours to deliberate, finding the two men both guilty of capital murder. There could only be one sentence, death by hanging. The two men protested and appealed, but the Home Secretary, Henry Brookes, controversially refused, stating that there were insufficient grounds to interfere in the course of justice. I would disagree, the two men were obviously intellectually sub-normal as attested by their school records and ongoing immature behaviour; and one of the men had a history of psychiatric illness and treatment. Their actions after the murder were hardly normal, drawing attention to themselves in the most ludicrous of ways travelling by bus semi naked and with a sheep. Anyone could see that both men were not the full shilling and should have been shown the benefit of mercy. It wasn’t to be. At 8.00 a.m. on Thursday the 13th of August 1964 both men were led from their cells, Allen was at HMP Walton in Liverpool, Evans was at HMP Strangeways in Manchester, the hangings took place simultaneously, and Evans and Allen went down in the history books as the last men in England to be dealt with by the barbaric standards of such punitive justice.
[i] Number 2 Coronation Avenue was a corner house meaning that their next door neighbour technically lived in a different street.
[ii] Norma O’Brien’s name had incorrectly been transposed on the scrap of paper as ‘O’Brian’ by Gwynne Owen Evans.
[iii] Mark Anthony was Mary’s child from a previous relationship but Peter Allen raised the child as if he were his own.
[iv] The Homicide Act 1957 abolished the death sentence for murder in all but a few set of very specific circumstances; this created the new offence of Capital Murder for which the death sentence could still be used. Capital Murder was defined as:
§ Murder in the course or furtherance of theft.
§ Murder by shooting or by causing an explosion.
§ Murder in the course or for the purpose of resisting, avoiding or preventing a lawful arrest, or of effecting or assisting an escape or rescue from legal custody.
§ Murder of a police officer acting in the execution of his duty, or of a person assisting a police officer so acting.
§ Murder of a prison officer acting in the execution of his duty, or of a person assisting a prison officer so acting, by a person who was a prisoner at the time when he did or was a party to the murder.
IF YOU ENJOYED THIS BLOG PLEASE VIEW THE MURDER TALES SERIES OF BOOKS AVAILABLE FROM AMAZON.
