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Andrew Evans is an English soldier from Longton, Staffordshire, who was wrongfully convicted and served 25 years in custody after confessing to the 1972 murder of Judith Roberts, a 14-year-old schoolgirl from nearby Tamworth. Evans was stationed at Whittington Barracks near Lichfield – an army base in close proximity to Tamworth – when Judith was dragged from her bicycle and battered to death in June 1972, and later confessed to the crime after seeing the girl's face in a dream. Evans was charged with Judith's murder in October 1972 after he presented himself at a local police station, asking to see a photograph of the victim, and making a signed statement following three days of interviews in which he maintained his guilt. Although he subsequently retracted his confession, a jury convicted him of murder following a trial in 1973, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Advised he had no grounds for appeal, Evans spent the next two decades in prison before his case came to the attention of the British media in 1994, and was taken up by the human rights group ''Justice'' when he contacted them about it. With no other evidence against him apart from his own words, and strong evidence that he was suffering from false memories as the result of anxiety and depression at the time of his arrest, Evans's conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeal in 1997; and he was released from prison. As of 1997 the time he spent in custody was the longest period served by an individual in the United Kingdom as the result of a miscarriage of justice. Evans was awarded £750,000 in compensation from the Home Office in 2000, while the identity of the real killer remains unknown to the present day. ==Background== The daughter of a schoolmaster,〔 Judith Roberts was a 14-year-old grammar school pupil from Wigginton, near Tamworth.〔 After leaving her home on 7 June 1972 to cycle along Comberford Lane, her body was discovered later the same day under a pile of hedge clippings and plastic fertiliser bags in a field adjacent to the road, and a subsequent post mortem concluded she had been battered to death.〔 Police launched a murder investigation involving 200 detectives, who collected more than 15,400 sets of fingerprints and in excess of 11,000 statements. In addition, officers visited over 11,000 addresses as they made house-to-house inquiries, road blocks were established in the area, and 4,200 separate pieces of evidence were followed up. However, in spite of what became one of the Midlands' most intensive hunts for a murder suspect for several years, the killer remained at large.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Andrew Evans case」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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