The Christie Case

[Spitfire]

Gordon, I don’t think that Mrs Evans remarried after her 1933 marriage to Penry Probert.
Thomasina Agnes (Lynch) Probert (1901-1982) WikiTree FREE Family Tree.pdf

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

Thank you, Al. I hope other Casebook members will read the book now, so that we can hear from them. There are of course all the usual reviews on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk, although not all those readers were necessarily knowledgeable about the case beforehand. John Curnow is intimately familiar with it, since he’s written his own book, and his comments are at the link I mentioned earlier, 10-rillington-place.co.uk.

Undoubtedly memories of the case have caused lasting pain to both of the families involved, though unfortunately on opposite sides. Like others, I have wondered why Peter Thorley left it so late in life to make his own story more public. His wife Lea states that they have been through hundreds of documents researching the case, but the archives were opened nearly three decades ago. He didn’t explain this delay himself, but since his existence apparently surfaced for the first time in a Sunday Mirror article in December of 2016, it seems likely he was finally goaded into action by the BBC’s Rillington Place shown earlier that month, and decided, or was encouraged, to write a book.

This is only speculation, but he may also have been discouraged from speaking out earlier by the fact that the Evans family were still dominating public discourse in recent decades, or out of consideration for their own feelings, so opposed to his own. But apparently that’s no longer a factor, since the Daily Express article called Peter “the only surviving witness.” I suppose Evans’s sisters “Eileen” Ashby and “Maureen” Westlake must have passed away by now. Maureen (Mary Josephine) was born in 1929, and Eileen (Eleanor Veronica) in 1921, so if they were still alive they would be 91 and 99 today. Mind you, I have no idea if they had children of their own, which they very likely did.

Speaking of family, another thing puzzles me, though it’s a minor matter with no bearing on the case itself. After her husband Daniel Evans left her in 1924, Timothy’s mother Thomasina Agnes Evans partnered with a man named Penry Probert. Maureen was his daughter, Timothy’s half-sister. The couple subsequently married in 1933, so the former Mrs. Evans became Mrs. Probert. I imagine the reason they didn’t marry earlier was because she first had to have her husband Daniel declared legally dead, and I believe it takes seven years to do that.

Anyway, Timothy’s mother was “Mrs. Probert” at the time of the murders. Yet Daniel Brabin in 1966 consistently referred to her as “Mrs. Evans.” More interestingly, Scott Henderson in 1953 referred to police who in 1949 “took written statements from Mrs. Evans (Mrs. Probert as she then was)...” [My emphasis.] This seems to imply that four years later, the former Mrs. Probert had reverted to being “Mrs. Evans” again. How come?

I got a hint from one source that Penry Probert and his wife may not have been quite as close by 1949 as many other couples are, so they could have split or divorced by 1953. But if that happened, his wife could either have kept the name “Probert” (as many do) or reverted to her maiden name of “Lynch,” as others do. Why revert to the name of a brief former husband who apparently abandoned her decades earlier, who in her own words was “no good to himself or anybody else”?

It could be that she chose to revert to the name of Evans, or just preferred to be called by that name, to highlight her identity as the mother of Timothy, a son she now believed innocent.

And for all I know, she might have divorced Penry Probert and remarried another man named Evans! Would that be too much of a coincidence?

Well, coincidences do happen, which is why it’s not as unlikely as it sounds that two stranglers lived in the same house in a poor, crime-ridden area. And what look like coincidences are far more likely in Wales, where half the people seem to be named Evans and the rest of them named Jones! A Welshman, himself named Evans, once told me that half the kids in his school class seemed to be named Jones. In the Welsh rail disaster of Abermule in 1921, the drivers of both trains involved were named Jones, as was the signalman who bore much responsibility for the collision, while one of the firemen was named Evans. Similarly, when Timothy Evans first confessed to police at Merthyr Vale that he had “disposed of his wife,” the detective constable he told this to was also named Evans. So since his mother still had relatives in Wales, it’s not impossible that she subsequently reconnected with an old school friend named Evans and married him.

Needless to say, all that is pure conjecture with no evidence whatsoever to support it, As Sir Thomas More wrote in his History of King Richard the Third: “...of al this pointe, is there no certaintie, & whoso diuineth vppon coniectures, maye as wel shote to farre as to short.” Anyway it would be interesting to know the history of the Evans family in the years after the murders.

Beryl's brother was so taken in by Christie's nauseating kindness (sorry, but I can see Richard Attenborough's impersonation of him in my mind's eye) that he actually wrote that nice Mr Christie wouldn't have murdered Beryl.

Well, Mrs Christie said much the same when her husband was confronted by Evans' mother almost immediately after her son had been sentenced to death, but that didn't stop nice Mr Christie from putting Mrs Christie underneath the floor boards.

[Parisi North Humber]

Hi all, does anybody know where I can find the autopsy/post mortem reports for all the 10 RP victims?

I have to say that I tend to agree with Caz and Limehouse that Evans seems less likely than Christie to have committed the murders, however I would like to read the indepth medical reports. Most of the programmes about this case tend to be dramatic in genre rather than documentary in style. I would welcome the chance to study the nuts and bolts facts of the case without a third party putting their spin (unwittingly or not) onto what I am viewing.

Helen x