People pleading their innocence ........

unlike Timothy Evans who was hung after pleading guilty to a crime he didn't commit.

THEY hanged John Reginald Halliday Christie 61 years ago, his execution convinced the world that yes, there were times when an innocent man went to the gallows.

Not Christie. He was an admitted serial killer. And among his victims, he said, were Beryl Evans and her baby daughter Geraldine.

But Timothy John Evans, a semi-retarded illiterate van driver from Merthyr, had been hanged three years earlier - for the murder of his daughter Geraldine. She was found lying beside her mother in the wash house of a London address that would become part of British horror folklore: 10 Rillington Place. Both had been strangled.

Evans went to his death on March, 9, 1950, protesting his innocence. And there it might have ended.

But Christie left 10 Rillington Place on March 20, 1953. Four days later Beresford Brown, the new tenant, decided to redecorate. He ripped down wallpaper that had covered a cupboard. Inside were three female corpses. Police then found Christie's wife beneath the floorboards and two more bodies in the back garden - where a human bone helped prop up a fence.

So Timothy Evans was back in the news. Four of the women found had been murdered AFTER he was hanged.

A poser for the police. Was it possible that two murderers could occupy the same small house at the same time, killing independently of each other, yet using the same methods? At his trial Evans claimed Christie, the principal prosecution witness, was the murderer. 'A desperate claim by a desperate man,' said the law - which, even after Christie's hanging, persisted in labelling Evans a killer.

It began at 10 past three on the afternoon of November 30, 1949 when Timothy Evans stepped diffidently into Merthyr's central police station. 'I have disposed of my wife,' he told astonished officers. 'I have put her down a drain.' But later he claimed that Christie had performed an abortion on Beryl. 'He told me she died during the operation and he took Geraldine to some friends to look after.'

Police found the bodies in Rillington Place and Evans, who insisted he knew of his baby's death only after returning to London with them, signed a confession 'because I have nothing left to live for'.

Christie had suggested putting Beryl's body down a drain and Evans appropriated this story. On Christie's advice he sold his furniture for pounds 40, caught a train to Cardiff, then on to Merthyr - and the gallows.

In court Christie described violent quarrels between Evans and his wife. Who could have dreamed that this former policeman, this perfect witness had murdered two women five years before?

His first victim was Ruth Fuerst, an Austrian refugee who, thinking that this War Reserve Policeman could help her, called on him while his wife was away. He strangled her while having sex then buried her in the back garden. Number two was Muriel Eddy, who worked with Christie at a factory. When she complained of feeling ill Christie prescribed his special cure - a lethal inhalation of gas. Her next stop, the back garden.

They were there when police searched the house years later looking for Beryl and Geraldine. As Christie chatted to two detectives a dog sniffing round his feet turned up a human skull. Christie kicked the dog away - then trod the skull back into the earth.

After Evans' trial, Christie walked nonchalantly away from the court with his wife - his next victim. In December 1952, he strangled her with a stocking and stuffed her under the floorboards. A month later it was the turn of Rita Nelson, a London prostitute who was gassed, raped and hidden in the cupboard later to be opened by Beresford Brown. Then came prostitutes Kathleen Maloney, January 12, and Hectorina McLennan, March 3.

At his trial Christie confessed to murdering Beryl but denied killing Geraldine. Later, though, he said that after he killed Beryl: 'Geraldine was crying so I had to do her in as well.'

Yet it took until 1966 before Evans was given a free pardon, 13 years before the law could admit that a mistake had been made.

He was as much a victim of Christie as any of the others, a little man who, when he walked into Merthyr's police station, also walked into legal history.

1) O.I.OYSTON

Four months after a high-profile police raid on a modelling agency in Manchester nine charges were levelled against him, including four rape charges. He was initially arrested on 9 February 1995.
At the committal in May 1995, one of the alleged rapes and two separate charges of indecent assault were thrown out by a stipendiary magistrate.

Charges involving three complainants came to trial. He was cleared of offences against two women but found guilty of the rape and indecent assault of the third complainant.

At his first trial in Manchester in February 1996 for the rape and indecent assault of a former model, he was acquitted of indecent assault but the jury could not reach a verdict on the rape charge. At retrial he was acquitted of the rape charge after the former model was shown to have lied at the first trial and that Oyston had had a long term relationship with her both before and after the alleged rape. She also admitted that it was only after being contacted by police officers investigating the model agency that she felt impelled to speak out having previously made no allegation against Oyston.

A second rape trial in Manchester in March 1996 saw Oyston acquitted after it was shown that the model had taken money from him, enjoyed a consensual affair with him and continued to meet him socially after the alleged rape.

A third trial at Liverpool Crown Court began in April 1996, including both the retrial of an earlier rape case and the trial of the allegations of rape and indecent assault made by a third complainant. The third complainant had originally said she was raped at Oyston's home on a night between October and December 1991, but seven days into the third trial the judge agreed to a request from the Crown and allowed the indictment period to be extended by twelve months, to run from 4 October 1991, to 31 December 1992.
The woman had made no complaint in that period and notes from her first police interview had been lost. She had been between 16 and 17 years old in the indictment period. Oyston denied having any intercourse with her. After failing at first to reach a verdict, the jury eventually found Oyston guilty of rape and indecent assault. He was jailed for six years on 22 May.

During the trial Oyston also claimed he was the victim of a long-running conspiracy by two government ministers, and that a "very nasty campaign" had been waged against him for up to twelve years. Oyston claimed that at one time he was being investigated by the Fraud Squad, the Inland Revenue, the Drugs Squad, the City's regulatory takeover body Imro, international private investigators, The Sunday Times and other newspapers.
He told his defence counsel Anthony Scrivener, QC, that he had been cleared of wrongdoing. In 1989, he had won substantial damages, costs and an apology from The Sunday Times. He also distributed a 72-page glossy booklet, "The Oyston file", detailing the allegations to reporters at his trial.

After his conviction Oyston continued to insist on his innocence, claiming that he had been framed in an elaborate conspiracy involving business rivals and government ministers.
Doubt was raised on the validity of his conviction and the case and the preceding police investigation saw questions raised in the House of Commons, particularly by MP Dale Campbell-Savours who brought it up a number of times from January 1998 onwards then later when he became Baron Campbell-Savours in the House of Lords in 2003.

In December 1997 Oyston lost his appeal against conviction at the Court of Appeal in London, when the appeal judges upheld the conviction and dismissed his appeal against his six-year jail sentence. He had to pay £100,000 court costs.

The Radio Authority then ruled that he was not a fit person to own a radio station. They wrote to the four stations in which he was known to have a controlling interest – The Bay (North Lancashire and South Cumbria), Radio 1521 (County Armagh, Northern Ireland), Goldbeat (Cookstown, Northern Ireland) and City Beat 96.7 (Belfast), saying that Oyston should not hold the licences.
He was forced to relinquish control as each of the radio stations stood to lose their licence should he retained a controlling interest. He also stood down as chairman of Blackpool F.C.

In March 1999 the girl brought a civil action against Oyston, claiming £500,000 for psychological damage, which he settled out of court. In April 1999 a parole panel rejected his application for parole because he had not completed the Sex Offender Treatment Programme from which he had been barred because he would not admit his guilt.


After serving three years and six months in prison, Oyston was released on parole on 7 December 1999. After a judicial review of the Parole Board's refusal, Mr Justice Hooper found on 14 October 1999 that the board had acted unlawfully by denying an early release because Oyston would not admit the crime.
The rule had been applied as a "catch 22". Under normal parole terms, Oyston would have been due for release in May 1999. Still maintaining his innocence, he was released from Wealstun Prison in West Yorkshire on 7 December. He had to sign the sex offenders' register as part of the conditions of release. All he said in public on his release was, "I am pleased to be going home but there will be no celebrations until my name is cleared." He also repeated allegations of a conspiracy, claiming police had been told by a businessman in the West Midlands three months before his arrest that he had paid £5,000 to a woman to "set Owen up". He also unsuccessfully appealed to the European court for his conviction to be overturned.

In the twelve months after his release, he was not seen in public, and became a recluse in his home at Claughton Hall, Claughton, Lancaster.
On 29 June 2001 Oyston spoke publicly for the first time since his release. He vowed to fight to clear his name, saying "The fact that the media haven't caught up with me until now doesn't mean I have been hiding. I’m still fighting to clear my name. Shortly a judgement will be made in Europe about my case. I won't stop fighting to clear my name. I will eventually."
The appeal was rejected by the European Court of Human Rights on 22 January 2002 as "manifestly ill-founded". They ruled that it was a fair hearing and that fresh evidence adduced by Oyston in the rape case which was refused by the Court of Appeal was inadmissible. They stated that "there was no reason to reach a different conclusion in the present case."

Even dafter is the Reg Kray approach -- "we were doing society a favour by knocking off other villains".