BOOK: Paperback; The Two Killers of Rillington Place by John Eddowes

The Two Killers of Rillington Place by John Eddowes, Warner £5.99. Eddowes dares to question in this book the conclusions of the Blessed Ludovic Kennedy. The latter's 10 Rillington Place (published in 1961) was one of the most powerful broadsides in the ultimately successful campaign to have Timothy Evans postumously pardoned for the strangling of his baby daughter, a crime for which he was hanged in 1950. Eddowes argues, conversely, that the experts at the scene - pathologists, lawyers and police - were right in their original conclusion, and that

Evans killed not only the baby but also his wife Beryl, even though the necrophiliac serial killer John Christie, who was living in the same house as the un- fortunate Evanses, later confessed to strangling Beryl Evans and was also hanged. Eddowes's passionate and angry involvement comes from the fact that his own father wrote the first book to argue for Evans's innocence. But Eddowes Snr, so his son claims, was "mentally ill, a fantasist and a liar". So this falls into the category of - what? Filial blasphemy?