Britain’s longest-serving prisoner murderer and rapist Ronald Evans – known as the Clifton Rapist - has been released after spending a total of 57 years behind bars. A new ITV documentary, Decoy, will disclose how Avon and Somerset Police sent out undercover officers to trap Evans in a covert operation in the late 1970s.
Women in Bristol were living in fear of a horrific sex attacker stalking the Bristol Downs in search of victims. The campaign of terror first started in 1977 when women, aged between 18 and 33, reported attacks around the Clifton and Durdham Downs.
A honeytrap plan was hatched to arrest Evans when he last walked free in the 1970s. He was responsible for seven sex attacks which prompted a ground-breaking decoy operation involving young female police officers, which will be told for the first time by ITV News.
Read more: How the Clifton Rapist was snared by a honeytrap involving police officers in drag
Michelle Leonard, the covert officer who won a bravery medal for capturing Evans in March 1979, said: “Life should mean life. If he hadn’t had been caught, I think he would have murdered again. Somebody would have resisted."
Ms Leonard was one of a dozen young female decoys who were sent out to walk the streets of Bristol in 1979 by Avon and Somerset Police to catch the man called ‘The Clifton Rapist.’ The operation left her and other undercover officers battling the decision of whether she should allow a convicted killer to attack her or put her own safety first, leaving a violent man to walk the streets of Bristol.
At the time, the attacks were overshadowed in the national media by the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ murders, but they struck fear in Bristol. The fear was so high that women began carrying personal alarms and torch-lit demonstrations were held as police frantically began their search for the sex attacker. Police asked women not to walk alone at night.
The first attack happened in the early hours of July 16, 1977. A woman in her 20s was assaulted as she walked home from a nightclub.
Six more women were assaulted in an 18-month period. Each of his victims gave detectives a chilling description of the attacker and their photofit images bore haunting similarities.
After numerous unsuccessful operations, the force appealed for its youngest Women Police Constables (WPCs) to volunteer to take part in a decoy operation, beginning in January 1979. Twelve women – some just 18-year-old probationary officers – were sent out on the streets under the eyes of observation officers with minimal training.
Senior police officers were eventually deployed and men were asked to don wigs, dresses and make up to go undercover as women. PC Christopher Gould was sent out to the darker side streets in the hope the Clifton Rapist would attack them. He made 36 arrests dressed in drag – but the Clifton Rapist was not one of them.
The ITV series, being streamed online, charts the progression of ‘Operation Argus’ leading up to the fateful night on March 22, 1979, when Evans was captured while Ms Leonard was used as a decoy while walking Whiteladies Road.
"I was frightened," she told ITV News. "I thought ‘keep walking, keep walking.’ I could hear him. And while I could hear his footsteps I thought ‘that’s all right, he’s behind me,’ then I couldn’t hear him anymore."
The offender was identified when arrested as Ronald Evans, a 38-year-old married father living in Patchway who admitted five of the assaults but denied two of the attacks. At the time, the Bristol Post ran the subheadline "'Drag' act ended reign of terror".
It then emerged he had been convicted in 1964 for the murder of a 21-year-old shop worker, Kathleen Heathcote, in the previous year.
Evans had been released from prison in 1975 on a life licence after serving nearly eleven years. He had got a job as an electrician in Bristol and had married for a second time after his release.
Evans was sent back to prison. Years later in 2004, a cold case team linked him forensically with the two assaults he had previously denied in 1979 - a 22-year-old Bristol student in Redland in November 1977 and a 21-year-old student in Clifton Down in December 1978. He was sentenced to another ten years in prison.
After serving 57 years in prison in total, Evans was released in January 2019. Gary Mason, who headed Avon and Somerset Police’s Major Crime Review (Cold Case) Team, admitted in the documentary that he was horrified over his release.
The documentary will also look at the intricacies behind the parole system and the horrifying facts surrounding women’s safety in the UK. In 1980 the rape conviction rate was 34 per cent but today it’s less than 2 per cent.
Decoy, the four-part documentary series by ITV West Country reporter, Robert Murphy, will be available on the ITV News website.
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