Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

Psychological Vulnerability 485
provided a ‘Statement of Person Under Caution’. This statement was written
down by a police officer and then typed. This statement was a confession to
murder. He described how he went out of the barracks the day before he left
the Army. It was in the afternoon and he got into a car. He then remembered
standing in a field and seeing the girl. She had something dark on and a blue
flowered dress. He pulled her off her bicycle, hit her in the face with a fist, and
then dragged her across the field. She had a bruise on her face on the right
hand side. He took her white knickers off, pulled off her brown blunt shoes, put
her stockings inside the shoes and put the shoes inside the knickers. The girl
had a gold coloured watch on with black figures. She had nothing on from the
waist down, he hit her on the side of the face when she started to come round,
then dragged her to the hedge. He put her clothes under the hedge, there was
something lying across the body, he hit her with something which was so thick
that he could only get three quarters of his hand around it. He said he did
not have sex with her. She had a dark mark on the left of her face where he
had struck her. He then pushed the bicycle into the hedge. The handles and
seat were sticking out. He then went over some fields and climbed over a white
fence.
At 1015 hours on 12 October Evans was seen in the police cell and after being
cautioned he stated:
I told you. I killed her, I don’t want it to happen again. I’ll help all I can, you must
believe me now. I’ve told you what I did.
While in the police vehicle near the murder scene Mr Evans told an officer:
I keep wondering why I did it.
When asked why he did it, Mr Evans replied:
It must have been vengeance.
Mr Evans did not know against whom he had wanted vengeance, but thought
it could be the Army.
At 1700 hours on 12 October Evans was visited by his mother. When his
mother expressed scepticism about him having committed the murder Evans
said:
It’s no good mum, I’ve done it, I have, I’ve told them all about it, I killed her.
This police account of a confession to Evans’ mother was corroborated by her
Witness Statement. He told his mother that he had killed the girl, after having
dragged her off her bicycle. She described Evans as a lad who liked attention
and he was always being bullied at school. He tended to be a daydreamer who
was sometimes so engrossed in his thoughts that he was not aware of what was
going on around him.