Judith Roberts was just 14 years old when she vanished whilst out on a cycle ride on 7th June 1972 in Tamworth, Staffordshire, later the same day her body was found in a field, badly battered and hidden under some discarded fertiliser bags covered with a pile of hedge clippings.
Police believed that Judith had been dragged from her bicycle, into the field then beaten to death and dumped like rubbish.
A massive murder hunt was launched, one of the most intense crime hunts ever known in The Midlands. over 15, 000 sets of fingerprints were taken and 11,000 door-to-door inquiries were made, but the inquiry was stalling.
Four months into the inquiry, the police had what they thought at the time to be a huge breakthrough, a 17-year-old army recruit named Andrew Evans came forward and confessed to the murder of Judith Roberts.
Evans told police that he had been disturbed by a dream during which he believed he had seen Judith and he asked officers for a photograph of the child. He apparently told the police "I keep on seeing her face, I want to see a picture of her. I think I may have done it".
Police asked Evans if he had ever been to Tamworth and his very unusual reply was "I don't know, I don't know, I could have been, "I don't remember where I've been". When Police pressed Andrew Evans for a straight answer to the question "Did you murder Judith Roberts"? He replied "This is it, I don't know. Show me a picture and I'll tell you if I've seen it".
Now don't take me wrong readers but does that really make sense? Does that approach not seem just a little questionable, a little odd? Obviously, Andrew would have seen photographs of Judith in the media, on posters, and in many places, after all, there was a nationwide manhunt for a child killer in progress.
Elaborate Hoax? Yes I think so
I have to say that if I had been a police detective working on the investigation, big alarm bells would have been ringing in my head, something clearly didn't add up. Nonetheless,
detectives continued to pursue things, believing that they may well have had their man.
Andrew Evans was not your average 'thug' on the street, he had been prescribed medication to treat depression and was widely known to be a fantasist. Bizarrely after 3 days of questioning, he made a full confession to the murder of Judith Roberts and he was charged.
Evans had put forward some alibi stories but these had not held up, He had claimed that he had been in army barracks in the company of three other soldiers but police established that two of the soldiers had in fact left barracks sometime before the time of the murder and the third was simply not traceable, suggesting that Evans had made him up.
12 months passed and by the time of the trial, Andrew Evans was absolutely adamant that he was innocent and had played no part in the murder of the 14-year-old. Unfortunately, he was not able to provide any credible evidence to support an alibi.
During the trial, there was no real evidence placed before the jury, save for Andrew's rather shaky and somewhat unbelievable 'confession'. An independent doctor advised the court that Evans was suffering from amnesia, so he was convicted of murder and given a life sentence to prison. His legal team advised him that he had no grounds at all from which to launch an appeal so Andrew Evans spent the next 20 years in custody.
Things began to take a turn when in 1994 whilst serving time at HM Prison Verne in Dorset, Andrew had a chance meeting with Steve Elsworth, who had been at the prison giving a talk on Greenpeace to the prisoners.
Steve Elsworth made a note of Andrew's contact details and a few weeks later returned to Verne Prison to carry out a formal and in-depth interview with Andrew Evans. As a result of the interview, notes were passed on to Carlton Television and they produced a crime show called 'Crime Stalker'. The knock-on affect of that crime show lead to a documentary being produced that was aptly titled 'The Nightmare'.
During this part of his sentence, Andrew had also decided to write to an organisation calling themselves 'Justice' and asked them to take on his case and that is exactly what they did. After an investigation, Justice helped Andrew to make an application to the Court of Appeal and he subsequently won the right to go ahead with an appeal.
The Court of Appeal were told that in 1972 Andrew Evans had been on medication to treat severe depression and that during the trial he had been given a "truth drug" which 20 years on had been proved to produce 'false memories' and that coupled with the very questionable way that detectives had originally handled the case saw Andrew Evans case acquitted. The original conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeal and Andrew was a free man, having been awarded £750,000 (Seven Hundred & Fifty Thousand Pounds) in compensation by The Home Office.
The case thus remains unsolved but in more recent times a theory has been put forward by historian and forensic psychology student Sarah Clark, suggesting that Judith Roberts may well have been an unidentified victim of Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe. She has put the name forward as being responsible for this case and stated that she is working on seven other unsolved murders, which she believes may have also been committed by Sutcliffe.
I am not personally convinced by this theory, although the method of killing does match those used by The Ripper, namely a head injury caused by a blunt instrument. It is in my opinion all too easy to put a murder down to a serial killer, with the attitude "That clears that one up nicely". After all, Sutcliffe will die in prison, so whether he has 12, 30, or 50 murders that he is claimed to have been responsible for then it won't make any difference to his sentence and gets another one off the police's unsolved crime database.
Of course, that is not the right or appropriate way to deal with serious cases where a person, in this case, a child has been killed. The family deserves better and so does the victim, to be fair a murderer could still be prowling the streets out there, knowing that he or she was responsible for a vicious murder.
Let's take a look at a report from The Birmingham Mail published in February 2019, just to see what they have to bring us.
They say that Peter Sutcliffe was convicted of the murder of 13 women and attempting to murder 7 more. He apparently matched the description of a man seen very close to the scene of the 1972 murder and a car with an uncanny similar description to the Ripper's car was seen at the scene on 7th June 1972. The interesting part of that report in my opinion is that having been supplied with all that "information" back in 1972, the police did nothing much to act upon it as far as we are aware. In fact, police went on to push for a conviction of a mentally unstable young man, based solely on a confession that was clearly a fantasy story. Why not use the "evidence" of the car and the man's description to pursue their man?
According to apparent 'news archives' there was evidence put forward at the time as follows:
1. A man matching Sutcliffe's description - black curly hair and long sideburns was seen talking to Judith Roberts shortly before her death
2. The man in question was wearing work clothes and wellington boots, when he was caught Sutcliffe admitted sometimes dressing like this when he was killing
3. Judith was killed by being repeatedly bludgeoned to the head by a blunt instrument, a method of murder used by Sutcliffe.
It has also been suggested that there is a similarity in the way that Judith's body was hidden in comparison to that of red light district worker Helen Rytka, killed by Sutcliffe in 1978. Rytka was hidden beneath asbestos sheeting and of course, Judith Roberts's body was hidden beneath fertiliser bags, but I do not see this as such an odd way to hide a body bearing in mind that Judith was killed in the countryside in a very rural location.
The main point of this blog is to highlight that Andrew Evans was convicted of a crime that he did not commit based on a confession that he made whilst in a delusional state caused by a combination of depression and the medication used to treat it. He was 17 and spent 25 years of his life due mainly to the police's hunger to simply get a conviction, regardless of how truly credible the "confession" actually was.
As to the theory of Sarah Clark, well I am not satisfied that this murder was the responsibility of Peter Sutcliffe at all. I feel that she is swayed by her close ties to the family of Judith. Sarah's mother Donna Osborne was best friends with Judith's twin, Anne, her grandmother was hairdresser to the girls and relatives lived literally just down the road from the murder scene.
I feel that the story and the whole sadness that surrounded a murder that literally stunned a community have been passed down to Sarah and since Andrew Evans was exonerated she has been desperate to get the case concluded to give the people of her village peace and closure, I feel that this may well have clouded her judgment a little, plus the simplicity to put a serial killer's "name in the frame" is just a finishing touch.
My final word on this case. . .Remember that Peter Sutcliffe having confessed his crimes said that "God had told him to kill Prostitutes", that's right 'prostitutes' not 14-year-old children in quiet villages.
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