S5 Ep10: Did Britain Hang an Innocent Man? The Murders at Rillington Place Part 2

Crimes of the Centuries

Amber Hunt and Audioboom

True Crime, Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 3.8K Ratings

🗓️ 5 May 2025

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When 25-year-old Tim Evans was hanged for killing his wife and 14-month-old daughter in 1949, few outside of his family questioned whether justice had been done. After all, Evans had at one point confessed to the crimes. But during his trial he recanted, saying that a neighbor had killed his 20-year-old wife Beryl during a botched abortion attempt. It seemed a ludicrous attempt at diversion -- until that same neighbor was himself revealed to be a serial killer just three years later. The questions sparked by the case helped fuel a movement to halt the death penalty in Britain.

"Crimes of the Centuries" is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring forgotten crimes from times past that made a mark and helped change history. You can get early and ad-free episodes on the Grab Bag Patreon page.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Some crimes are so heartbreaking or shocking, they change laws, change society, or even
0:12.4	earn the label Crime of the Century. But the stories that made headlines and decades past
0:18.9	aren't necessarily remembered today.
0:22.6	I'm Amber Hunt, a journalist and author, and in each episode of this show,
0:26.8	I'll examine a case that's maybe lesser known today, but was huge when it happened.
0:33.9	This is Crimes of the Centuries.
0:53.3	Thank you. This is Crimes of the Centuries. The front page headline in the Kensington Post on December 9th, 1949, did what the best crime headlines do.
1:01.3	It humanized the victims while conveying just how horrible their fates were.
1:06.6	Geraldine and mother were expected for tea, but police found them dead in wash house.
1:11.5	Geraldine was barely a year old.
1:14.4	Her mother Beryl was only 20.
1:17.1	The story began, quote, two years last September, a happy young couple left Kensington
1:22.8	Register office to start married life.
1:25.7	Last week, the strangled bodies of the young wife and her baby daughter were found in a
1:30.1	North Kensington house, and the husband was charged with his wife's murder, end quote.
1:35.7	It seemed like an open and shut case, and not just because the husband's often to blame in
1:41.1	these type of domestic deaths.
1:43.4	Tim Evans had walked into a police station and
1:45.9	confessed before the victims had even been discovered, and that certainly looked bad.
1:51.1	Neighbors were also quick to say that the couple had been arguing of late. Barrel was spotted
1:56.0	with bruises after one particularly loud row. One neighbor believed that Barrel was pregnant, and yet her husband,
2:03.6	Timothy John Evans, was also known to have hooked up with one of his wife's younger friends recently.
	...

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