Britain's Last Hanging: How Capital Punishment Ended

In a special summer episode, Kerry Daynes is joined by journalist and TV documentary maker Jeff Anderson as she revisits one of Britain’s most obscure legal landmarks: the 1964 execution of Gwyn Owen Evans and Peter Allen, the last two men ever hanged in Britain. The pair were convicted of the brutal murder of 53-year-old delivery driver Jack West in Workington, Cumbria, a robbery that spiralled into violence. Kerry and Jeff trace the chaotic trail of evidence that led police straight to the killers within 48 hours, and Kerry offers her psychological assessment of Evans — a compulsive fantasist whose lies extended even to his own identity — and asks whether either man deserved to hang.

Key psychological themes

This episode explores: pathological lying and fantasist personality disorder • joint enterprise and criminal responsibility • the psychology of criminal incompetence • diminished responsibility as a legal defence • capital punishment and its abolition in Britain

Contributors featured in this episode

● Kerry Daynes — Forensic psychologist, presenter, and author of Dark Side of the Mind and What Lies Buried.

● Jeff Anderson — Journalist, TV documentary maker, and producer of The Profiler.

What you’ll learn in this episode

● Why the murder of Jack West, and not Ruth Ellis, technically marks the end of capital punishment in Britain, and how a change of government spared hundreds of other killers from the gallows that same year

● How a raincoat left behind at the crime scene, containing a medallion and a scrap of paper with a name and address, led detectives to their suspect within two days

● Why Gwyn Owen Evans, a self-invented fantasist born John Robson Walby, was already known to psychiatrists for pathological lying long before the murder

● How Evans and Peter Allen’s chaotic escape — a stolen car, missed petrol stops, a rescued lamb — exposed them at every turn

● Why a letter from Peter Allen’s wife, Mary, describing her alleged affair with Evans, became decisive evidence at trial

● What newly released government papers reveal about Evans’s diagnosed psychopathic personality, and the abandoned defence that might have saved his life

● Kerry’s own view on whether either man should have faced execution

Relevant links and further reading

● Kerry Daynes — Dark Side of the Mind (Endeavour, 2019)

● Kerry Daynes — What Lies Buried (Endeavour, 2021)

● The National Archives — released case papers on the trial and execution of Gwyn Evans and Peter Allen

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Credits

● Presented by Kerry Daynes, with Jeff Anderson

● Produced by Shearwater Media

● Executive producers: Jeff Anderson and Steve Anderson

● Music & Editing: Rob Warner

Content note

This episode discusses murder, capital punishment, and execution. Listener discretion advised.

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