Alan Evans jailed for life for murdering his wife, Louise, in Kidderminster

Father-of-three Alan Evans, broke down in tears as the unanimous verdict was delivered at Worcester Crown Court after a five-week trial.

But welder Evans, aged 35, who worked in Droitwich, showed no emotion as he was jailed for life, to serve a minimum of 17 years, after a judge described the murder of his wife Louise, pictured above, as a callous and deliberate killing.

Passing sentence, Mr Justice Hickinbottom condemned the welder for using a skipping rope and a vacuum cleaner as props in a “grotesque” attempt to pass the killing off as an accident.

Describing Evans’ defence case as an “insensitive” charade which had caused unnecessary anguish to his wife’s relatives, the judge told him: “We shall never know precisely what happened at your home that night.

“However, we do know this – every life is precious. 

"Louise was a devoted and loved mother, daughter, family member and friend.”

Evans hurled his wife down the 12-step flight of stairs at the family home in Stoney Lane, Kidderminster, while the couple’s three children slept.

Later, after Evans summoned help from a neighbour, one of the children was sent back to bed after being roused by the commotion.

The judge said: “On all the evidence, I am sure that you killed her with the intention of killing her at the foot of the stairs by asphyxiating her.

“You did not go to her aid, you did not summon help.”

During the trial, the jury was told Evans conducted a secret four-month affair with family friend and teaching assistant, Amanda Chadwick, and chose to rekindle their relationship after killing his wife.

And Mr Justice Hickinbottom said he believed Mrs Evans found an item on the night she was killed that exposed the affair.

The judge told Evans: “Your wife found something in the house that confirmed your relationship with Miss Chadwick had been sexual, or that you had maintained a conduit by which to contact her. It is clear she discovered something really shocking to her.”

During the trial, neighbours said they heard Louise shouting and swearing on the night she died, which was rare.

They also heard a bang, and jurors were told this could have been when Louise was thrown down the stairs, at about 11.30pm, but an ambulance was not called for more than an hour.

“You spent part of that hour moving things in your house to make it appear as though your wife’s death was an accident,” the judge told Evans.

“You grotesquely put a skipping rope under your dead wife’s arm and placed a vacuum cleaner at the top of the stairs, saying to the police and this court that you found the hose of that device two or three steps down.

“You maintained this charade that you knew nothing of her death and had slept through a terrible accident.”

CHILDHOOD SWEATHEARTS

CHILDHOOD sweethearts Alan and Louise Evans seemed a model couple.

In their 18 years together, they had never had a problem and Louise had proved to be “an amazing mother” to their three children, her husband told the jury.

“She was beautiful. She was outgoing, friendly, kind,” he said.

“Louise was not just my wife, she was my best friend.”

But he had met another woman.

He had considered leaving Louise for his mistress Amanda Chadwick and he had called his wife a “bitch”, Jonas Hankin told the jury.

Just weeks after his wife died, he started having sex with Mrs Chadwick, having met her again in a pub.

Their relationship carried on and Evans might have thought he had got away with it and was considering their future.

But in February this year, he was arrested.

Despite that, Mrs Chadwick told the court she still loved him.

He first met Mrs Chadwick, a classroom assistant at the Kidderminster school Evans’ own children attended, in the playground and they began taking their dogs for walks in the park. Her home, in York Court, was only five minutes’ walk from the home of the Evans family.

A friendship gradually developed and he occasionally did gardening or jobs around the house for her.

She and her husband had been round to the Evans house for coffee and she described Louise as “quiet, genuine and nice”.

Then, from March 2012, Evans and Mrs Chadwick started to have sex – in hotel rooms and in their respective marital beds.

Evans had talked about the future with her but had made no definite plans.

He told her he was sleeping apart from his wife.

Mrs Chadwick said her marriage was at an end.

She had since separated from her husband, Simon McHugh, although they had been together for 12 years. She had two children, aged 11 and seven.

Evans also told her that he had deleted the text messages they had sent but it became obvious that Mrs Evans was aware of them.

He and Mrs Chadwick had laughed about her suspicions of their affair and Ms Chadwick had texted Mrs Evans to express sympathy that the couple were having difficulties, and offering a sympathetic ear.

Shortly afterwards, she texted Evans to say: “Haha, I’m so funny.”

Torn between the two, he decided he was staying with his wife.

Mrs Chadwick said she was “shocked and heartbroken” when he told her.

But he could not quite get over Mrs Chadwick – he had a secret SIM card for his mobile and Mrs Chadwick’s number on a post-it note placed on top of a kitchen cupboard.

HE FEARED HE WOULD LOSE EVERYTHING - SO COMMITTED MURDER

FAMILY man Alan Evans feared he would lose everything if his wife left him over his love affair.

So on the night she finally uncovered the truth, he killed her. He punched her at least four times in the face and knocked her downstairs at their home.

And as she lay at the foot of the stairs unconscious, he completed his deadly act by smothering her, a jury at Worcester Crown Court decided.

Evans then waited more than an hour after she was killed before he raised the alarm with a neighbour at 12.50am.

He spent the time “dressing the scene”, the jury was told.

There was an ironing board and a vacuum cleaner on the landing, the pipe trailing down a few steps.

He draped a skipping rope at the foot of the stairs to give the impression she had tripped and fallen, her arm bent into an awkward position above her head as she lay dead and rigor mortis set in.

When the emergency services arrived, his story was that he had been asleep in front of the TV and had not heard her fall.

He said she had shouted that the children – who were asleep upstairs when she died – had been playing up and the ironing board had collapsed again.

By the time he got to her, it was too late. He later said he had rolled cigarettes and gone into the garden of their home in Stoney Lane, Kidderminster, for a smoke. She fell while he was out.

But neighbours Charles and Hayley Weale had heard the usually quiet mother-of-three scream and swear through the thin wall.

They were surprised because they normally heard nothing from next door and it was not the kind of language they expected from her.

That was at about 10pm and was followed by the sound of drawers and doors opening and closing.

They were both woken some time later by what they described as an “almighty crash” – a bang so loud they both initially thought it had come from inside their own home.

Something must have happened – it was the “trigger” moment as Jonas Hankin, QC, prosecuting, told the jury – though what really happened will probably never be known.

He said Evans had ditched his lover, Amanda Chadwick, and she had threatened to write a letter to Louise, telling all about their affair.

The letter was never found and Mrs Chadwick said it was not sent but, Mr Hankin asked, could a similar discovery have been what caused her to scream out? Or could she have found some other evidence of the sexual nature of the affair in their bedroom when she had searched the drawers?

It might even have been that she found out her husband had sex with his lover in the marital bed, Mr Hankin suggested.

Whatever the cause, Evans responded.

Medical evidence said overwhelmingly that injuries were consistent with being hit in the face at least four times.

A fall down the stairs could not have caused the injury to her eye, pathologists and other medical experts told the court.

Mr Hankin said Evans, who worked at Droitwich firm Egbert H Taylor, was afraid his wife would leave him and take their three daughters.

Shortly before, she had found out about more than 2,000 text messages Evans had sent to his lover and had temporarily walked out, threatening to leave for good with the children.

He had convinced her to come back and stay, that the affair was over.

But in the weeks leading up to her death, he had laid a trail of “false evidence”, the jury was told.

He had phoned police in June to ask advice on whether he was obliged to leave the family home when his marriage was "breaking down".

He told the West Mercia Police operator: "I have done nothing wrong" and also said he "paid for everything" in the house.

In fact, Louise had paid for the mortgage with her salary as a part-time care assistant and it was also revealed that in August 2012 – less than a month after his wife's death - Evans was in more than £20,600 of debt.

The mortgage came with a life insurance policy which would pay the full amount due in the event either of them died because of an accident.

There was "an ocean of examples" of when Evans had lied to cover his own back, Mr Hankin said.

“He loved his children and his home," he said.

"He didn't want to lose them. But he didn't love his wife."

But Evans claimed they had put their problems behind them. On the on the night of her death they had been happy.

"In 35 years, I only have two regrets.

“One is having the affair, and two, not going to bed at the same time as my wife that night.” he said.

Rudi Forston, QC, defending, said in his closing address that the prosecution case was all speculation.

He quoted Arthur Conan Doyle in conclusion to the jury, with the author's Sherlock Holmes saying, "it is a capital mistake to theorise before you have heard all the evidence because that is when biases come in".
The prosecution case, he said, was full of theories.

But in the end, the jury decided the case was so much more than just a collection of theories - it was the truth.

A MOTHER'S GRIEF

AFTER the jury delivered its verdict, the court was quiet as prosecution counsel Jonas Hankin QC read an emotive victim’s impact statement from Mrs Judith Bollen, Louise’s mother.

She recalled how Louise was the youngest of three children, with two brothers.

Louise was “a beautiful little girl with long blonde hair, which curled if she got wet,” her mother said.

At 15, Louise met Alan, her first and only boyfriend, and they had a church wedding when she was 21.

In the meantime, she had trained as a nurse but had fertility problems so her parents paid for IVF treatment.

She became pregnant at the fifth attempt and Mrs Bollen recalled the joy when she announced she was having twins.

And there was happiness in the family again when, five months later, Louise revealed she has pregnant again.

Mrs Bollen said: “Louise's family was complete. She was a fantastic mother.”

There were many happy family gatherings but on July 10 last year, the family’s world was shattered.

Mrs Bollen said: “We could not believe that the son-in-law that we loved so much would have hurt our daughter. We thought it was a tragic accident.

“When Derek saw her in the mortuary, he knew Alan had assaulted her.”
She wondered how she and her husband could tell the girls that their father had murdered their mother.

Alan had been unsupportive financially for his children whom they often took to their mum’s grave.

“They shouldn’t be visiting their mum in a graveyard. She should be there with them.”

Mrs Bollen said she and her husband had struggled to contain their grief.
They had lain flowers outside their daughter’s house but Alan had thrown them away. His attitude towards his wife’s death had been distressing because he had shown no signs of remorse or regret.

MEDICAL EVIDENCE

FORENSIC pathologist Dr Alexander Kolar raised suspicions about Louise’s death after two post-mortem investigations revealed that her injuries would be “difficult” to explain by any other means than by directly inflicted blows.

He was called to the house at 10am on July 10 and his initial examination raised concerns about injuries to her nose, eyes and mouth which were not accompanied by the abrasions usually expected from a fall.

It was enough for him to carry out a second post mortem in December and in his report in January this year, he and two other pathologists established there had been a “blowout” fracture to her right eye socket, involving two tiny cracks in the bone – injuries he said would be highly unusual from a fall alone as that part of the eye is protected.

It was not consistent with falling down a flight of 12 stairs, the court was told.

“It’s the type of injury encountered when a blow is struck directly to the eye socket or to the rim around the eye socket,” he told the jury.

“It’s a very specific injury as it is in keeping with direct trauma to that site, such as when a fist or a kick is put to the eye socket.”

The jury heard she had cuts and grazes to her back from falling down a carpeted staircase but the injuries to her mouth and eye were unlikely to have been from a fall.

The court heard there was no evidence of either a natural or unnatural cause of death, and exactly what killed her remained unknown.

Heart and brain specialists Drs Simon Survana and Daniel Du Plessis said their examinations had shown no abnormalities which might explain how she died, while Dr Kolar confirmed he too had found that all her other organs were healthy and at a normal level for a woman of her age.

He also said death by smothering usually left no evidence – but in the absence of any other clear causes of death, it had to be considered.