Gwynne Evans and Peter Allen made history in 1964 as the last people ever executed in the United Kingdom, after robbing and murdering a lorry driver in Cumberland. Evans was born as John Walby on April 1, 1940 in Maryport. He dropped out of school at 15 and sometimes worked as a pageboy at a Carlisle hotel and as an engine cleaner for British Railways. Put under state supervision when he turned 17, he was sent to a youth hostel in Bristol. A few months later he enlisted in the British army but was discharged in six months as unsuitable for the service. Walby enlisted a second time in late 1958 and this time only lasted three months before again being discharged.Walby began calling himself Owen Evans and went back to his cleaning job at British Railways for a few weeks before enlisting in the military for a third time in July 1959, this time trying the British air force. He was discharged in four months as unfit for duty. Evans was unemployed for nine months. For a year starting in September 1960 he worked a series of short-lived jobs around Workington, one of which was at a laundry service and met the eventual murder victim John Alan West there. Evans moved to Birmingham in October 1961 and worked several blue collar jobs there. A few days after his 23rd birthday in April 1963, he was convicted as Gwyn Evans for petty larceny and offered the choice of paying a £5 fine or spending four days in jail; he took the latter. A month later, Evans was busted in Dudley for driving a car with an expired driver's license. He was sentenced to three months in jail.
In October, he enlisted in the army yet again but was discharged in a month after his criminal convictions were discovered. Evans then moved to Preston and resided with Peter Allen and his wife. He worked for an agricultural trading society for a month and on January 21, 1964, he and Allen stole the lead flashing strips from a vacant house. A week later, they broke open and stole the contents of a cigarette vending machine, then stole a car and a van and used them to rob several other homes and places of business. Eventually the two were busted when they tried to conceal the van's registration number and were fined £10. Evans was hired by a dairy on March 5. He was fired 12 days later after having only shown up for work on two of them.Peter Allen was born in Wallasey, Cheshire on April 4, 1943 and like Evans dropped out of school at 15. After working some brief jobs, he enlisted in the army in July 1958 and served in an artillery battalion. Allen was honorably discharged after eleven months. He worked for two trucking companies during the next two years. Allen was fired from the first one in August 1960 when he was busted for assisting in a car theft and the second in October 1961 when he was decided to be unable to handle the responsibility of his job. A month later, Allen married an 18 year old movie theater usher named Mary and moved to Manchester. He was then hired by a scrap metal dealer and let go from that job after five months for poor job performance. Allen was hired by a dairy in April 1962, left that job in the fall, and worked at a steel mill for another six months.Allen moved to Preston in April 1963 and was hired by the agricultural trading society where he met Gwynne Evans. He injured his back in two months and was unable to work. Allen was hired by a Preston dairy in February 1964 but fired in a few weeks when he barely showed up for work.
John West was 53 years old in the spring of 1964 and resided at 28 Kings Avenue in Seaton. He was a longtime van driver for Lakeland Laundry and in fact had held that job since he was 19, almost his entire adult life. After a normal work day, West came home the evening of April 6. At 3:00 AM the next morning, his next door neighbor heard a noise and peered out the window to see a car taking off down the street. The neigbor called police, who arrived and found West dead of a stab wound to the chest and major head injuries. In his home was a raincoat and a medallion and army memo form. The medallion was inscribed "G.O. Evans July 1961" and the memo form had the name "Miss Norma O'Brian" on it with a Liverpool address. At the given address there was indeed a Norma O'Brian, age 17, and currently employed at a local factory. O'Brian said that the previous fall, she had been visiting her sister and brother-in-law in Preston where she met a man called Ginger Owen Evans and that she had seen him wearing the medallion.Evans and Allen had stolen a black '59 Ford Prefect sedan to go to West's home and left it in a builders' yard in Ormskirk, Lancashire. Evans asked a neighbor if he could park the car there and she thought something was "off" about this, so she called police on April 7. They found that the Ford was stolen and also traced Evans via his parents, criminal, and military records to Allen's residence in Preston. On the 8th, police arrived at Allen's home on Clarendon Road. He agreed to go downtown and was driven up to Kendal and then to Workington where the homicide unit was based. Allen claimed he was home with his wife the night of the murder.
He said his wife was with her mother in Manchester and gave the address. A Bolton police officer went to the address but only the mother was present; he left telling her he'd wait outside for Allen's wife to return and she did some hours later and immediately went to the police car to tell the officer where Evans was. He was found on a street corner in Miles Platting and had West's watch in his pockets. Taken into custody, he admitted that he, Allen, Allen's wife and children had gone to borrow money from West. Evans claimed Allen had killed West by himself.Although Allen initially denied having done anything, he changed his story after learning that his wife and Evans were in custody. He said Evans proposed robbing West and initially gone into West's house on his own. Evans had then let Allen in, hoping that West would not notice, but West had come downstairs and so Allen had fought him. He said that Evans had given him an iron bar which he used to hit West. Allen then made a statement along these lines.Evans claimed West had told him that he should see him if ever he was in Workington and needed money, so he had gone to ask for a loan. However, he said that Allen had forced his way into West's house intent on robbery, and that Allen had been the only one to attack West. During questioning, Evans spontaneously mentioned that he knew nothing about a knife and did not have one. Until that point, the police had not revealed that West had been stabbed. Evans admitted to stealing West's watch. Mrs. Allen's statement supported her husband's account that Evans had come out to invite him in. She reported that she had asked the two men what had happened in the house, and that Evans had said both had attacked West. At 1:15 AM on April 9, less than 48 hours after the murder, both Evans and Allen were charged.
They were charged with murder in the commission of a robbery but both Evans and Allen claimed the other did it and neither were themselves responsible. Ultimately a jury found both guilty and they were sentenced to death. The latest revision to UK homicide laws had been the Homicide Act of 1957, which instructed the Home Secretary on whether to advise the Queen to commute a death sentence to life imprisonment. A total of 48 persons in the UK had been sentenced to death since 1957 and 19 had had their sentences commuted. Two individuals, Russell Pascoe and Dennis Whitty, had been hanged in 1963 and none in '64. Local authorities apparently assumed Evans and Allen would get their sentences commuted and some citizens petitioned for it. On August 10, the Home Office announced that the Home Secretary found no mitigating circumstances that warranted advising the Queen to commute their sentences.Evans was hanged at Strangeways Prison in Manchester on the morning of August 13 and Peter Allen at Walton Prison in Liverpool.There was a growing disapproval of capital punishment in the Western world after World War II and an act of Parliament in November 1965 formally abolished it and made life without parole the maximum possible criminal penalty in the UK and its territories.
>>18003935>There was a growing disapproval of capital punishment in the Western world after World War II and an act of Parliament in November 1965 formally abolished it and made life without parole the maximum possible criminal penalty in the UK and its territories.this happened because everyone got the mental image in their heads of Nazis and communists lining up people and shooting them so they were like idk the death penalty is wrong, man
>>18004148I'm sure that didn't help, but people had been criticizing it for 200 years at that point.
>>18004148That is true after WWII everyone wanted really soft on crime policies because they associated executions and imprisonment with totalitarian states.
the French used the death penalty until 1977 and they were beheading people too
>>18003925>he was convicted as Gwyn Evans for petty larceny and offered the choice of paying a £5 fine or spending four days in jail; he took the latter.he probably didn't have much more than £5 in total net worth, lol
>>18004211I wouldn't say they were soft but they weren't as harsh. The Mandela Rules for instance were released in 1954. In the US prison administration became a bit more reform oriented until the 1970s. There was definitely a bit of influence from the anti totalitarian backlash though - court rulings talked about "modern standards of decency".
>>18004217Yeah it wasn't abolished until 1981
