In the early hours of August 13, 1964, Peter Allen paced feverishly in his cell at Walton Prison in Liverpool. Every now and then the 21-year-old burst into tears or howled in horror as the clock ticked toward 8am.
On the hour, the key turned in the lock of his cell door and executioner Robert Leslie Stewart led the 6-foot-2 condemned man to the scaffold and positioned him over a trapdoor before pulling a white hood over his head.
As Stewart placed a noose around his neck, Allen muttered only one word: “Jesus.” The executioner pulled the lever, Allen fell through the trapdoor, and the rope did the rest. The entire process took less than ten seconds.
At the same time, a similar scene was playing out 31 miles away in Strangeways Prison, Manchester, where Allen's girlfriend Gwynne Owen Evans, 24, was being held. Like Allen, Evans tearfully maintained his innocence until the end.
Peter Allen was executed in 1964 at Walton Prison in Liverpool, one of the last to be hanged in the UK.
The crime The crime the pair were convicted of was the murder of John West, a van driver for a laundry company.
West had been brutally beaten to death and stabbed during a robbery at his Cumbrian home four months earlier. Evans and Allen allegedly staged the crime to pay fines for an offence they had committed in February of that year.
The murder, trial and subsequent executions generated only a few newspaper articles.
But after their deaths they achieved a notoriety they would never achieve during their lifetimes, as Peter Allen and Gwynne Evans were the last people to be executed for murder in Britain.
Less than a year after their deaths, a Labor MP named Sydney Silverman—who had been committed to the abolitionist cause for more than 20 years—introduced a bill to suspend the death penalty for murder for five years, and it passed in a free vote in the House of Commons by 200 votes to 98. When the bill later went to the House of Lords, it passed by a similar margin: 204 votes to 104.
Four years later, the then Home Secretary, Jim Callaghan, moved a motion to make the law permanent, which was passed overwhelmingly and loudly applauded in the public gallery.
Yet, 60 years after the hangings of Allen and Evans, the debate over the death penalty continues. The debate was recently reignited by the conviction of nurse Lucy Letby, who was sentenced last year. found guilty of the murder of seven babies and the attempted murder of six more.
Gwynne Evans was hanged at Strangeways in 1964 for the murder of bus driver John West
What then was it about Allen and Evans' crime that condemned them to the gallows, at a time when public sentiment was against the ultimate sanction and murderers were regularly granted stays of execution?
To prove this we have to go back to the night of Tuesday 7th April 1964. At 3am, Mr and Mrs Fawcett, an elderly couple from Seaton, Cumbria, were awakened by the sound of dull thuds and a scream from the cottage next door.
Mr Fawcett called a neighbour who walked up to the house and knocked on the door. By then the intruders had fled at high speed in a car and when no one answered he called the police. Officers found the sole occupant, 53-year-old John West, lying dead in a pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs. West, a bachelor who lived alone, was naked from the waist down and his head was covered in cuts.
The walls and stairs were covered in blood, and on the floor near the body was a crude weapon: a piece of rubber with a short piece of steel tubing on one end and putty on the other.
Upstairs in West's bedroom, police found a lightweight raincoat folded on a chair. Inside the pocket was a life-saving medal inscribed with 'GO Evans' and a piece of paper with the name Norma O'Brien written on it, next to an address in Liverpool.
When police knocked on O'Brien's door in Liverpool the next day, she turned out to be a 17-year-old girl. She had met Evans when she was visiting her brother-in-law, a soldier at Fulwood Barracks in Preston, four months earlier.
They then tracked down Evans' parents, who gave them their son's address in Preston, where he lived in a small terraced house with Peter Allen, his wife and two young children.
Police knocked on the door and found only Allen home. Evans had travelled to Manchester with Allen's wife, Mary. But when police tracked them down, they had hit the jackpot.
Evans was in possession of a wristwatch that had belonged to West, and Mary had in her basket a bloodstained shirt that had belonged to her husband.
With both men arrested, the interrogations began. It quickly became clear that each suspect was determined to blame the other for delivering the fatal blows.
West was beaten to death and stabbed during a robbery at his home in Cumbria
But no amount of bluff or bluster could save them, and both men were charged with murder within 24 hours of their arrest. The case went to trial less than three months later.
After more than three hours of deliberation at the end of a two-week trial, a jury of nine men and three women unanimously found both men guilty of “premeditated murder,” making them automatically eligible for the death penalty.
According to medical reports released to the National Archives in the summer of 2017, Gwynne Evans had “severe psychological problems.” If his defense team had pleaded diminished responsibility during his trial, it could have saved his life.
His mother Hannah wrote a letter to the Home Secretary asking for a postponement. 'My son is mentally handicapped and I took him to a psychiatric doctor when he was 8 years old, but he is not a bad boy,' she wrote. 'May God please guide you to a merciful [sic] judgement.'
The mothers of both men also sent a last-minute plea for mercy to the queen. It had no effect.
But where there was life, there was hope. Of the 48 death sentences handed down since the 1957 Homicide Act restricted its use, 19 people were pardoned.
In England, only two executions took place in 1963 and none in 1964, until Evans and Allen were convicted.
According to Elwyn Jones, the creator of the television series Z-Cars, who wrote a book about the case, even the police expected them to be pardoned.
But as we have seen, the judiciary would not change its mind at the last minute.
Protesters march against the death penalty outside Wandsworth Prison in 1959
This year Lucy Letby became the fourth woman in the UK to be sentenced to life imprisonment
And when the death penalty was suspended the following year, efforts to reintroduce it began almost immediately. Patrick Downey, the uncle of Lesley Ann Downey, a victim of Moors murderers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, stood in the 1966 general election against Sydney Silverman, the architect of the 1965 law, on an explicitly pro-hanging platform. (The law had been passed just four weeks after Brady and Hindley were arrested.)
He failed to unseat Silverman, but he did receive over 5,000 votes, the highest number of votes for a truly independent candidate since 1945.
Public support for the death penalty has fallen in recent years to 40 percent, according to the latest YouGov poll. But when asked about specific crimes, Britons are more likely to support the death penalty for crimes such as the murder of a child, killings committed as part of a terrorist act and cases of multiple murder.
When Lucy Letby became the fourth woman in the UK to be sentenced to life imprisonment, a poll for The Spectator found it turned out that 66 percent were in favor of the death penalty.
The era of the noose may be over with the deaths of Evans and Allen, but the debate over whether to reintroduce the noose rages on.