In the early hours of August 13, 1964, Peter Allen was frantically pacing his cell at Walton Prison, in Liverpool. Every so often, the 21-year-old would break down in tears or howl in distress as the clock ticked down to 8am.
On the hour, the key turned in the lock of his cell door and executioner Robert Leslie Stewart led the 6ft 2in condemned man to the scaffold and positioned him over a trapdoor, before placing a white hood over his head.
As Stewart slipped a noose around his neck, Allen muttered just one word: 'Jesus.' The hangman pulled the lever, Allen dropped through the hatch and the rope did the rest. The entire process took less than ten seconds.
At the very same time, a similar scene was being played out 31 miles away in Strangeways Prison, Manchester, where Allen's friend Gwynne Owen Evans, 24, was being held. Like Allen, Evans tearfully protested his innocence to the end.
Peter Allenwas executed at Liverpool's Walton Prison in 1964 - one of the last hanged in the UK
The crime for which the pair had been convicted was the murder of John West, a van driver for a laundry firm.
West had been callously bludgeoned and stabbed to death in the course of a robbery at his home in Cumbria four months earlier, a crime Evans and Allen had allegedly staged to acquire the means to pay off fines imposed on them for an offence they'd committed in February of that year.
The murder, the trial and their subsequent executions merited only a few lines in the Press.
But, in death, they acquired a notoriety they never achieved in life because Peter Allen and Gwynne Evans were the last people to be executed for murder in Britain.
Less than a year after their deaths, a Labour MP called Sydney Silverman — who had committed himself to the cause of abolition for more than 20 years — introduced a Private Member's Bill to suspend the death penalty for murder for five years and it was passed on a free vote in the House of Commons by 200 votes to 98. When the Bill later went to the House of Lords it was passed by a similar margin: 204 votes to 104.
Four years later, the then Home Secretary Jim Callaghan proposed a motion to make the Act permanent, which won an overwhelming majority to loud cheers from the public gallery.
Yet 60 years to the week after the hangings of Allen and Evans, the debate over capital punishment persists, most recently reignited by the conviction of nurse Lucy Letby, who was last year found guilty of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill another six.
Gwynne Evans was hanged at Strangeways for the murder of van driver John West in 1964
So what was it about Allen and Evans's crime that condemned them to the hangman's noose at a time when popular sentiment turned against the ultimate sanction and murderers were regularly reprieved?
To establish that we must go back to the night of Tuesday, April 7, 1964. At 3am, Mr and Mrs Fawcett, an elderly couple in Seaton, Cumbria, woke up to the sound of thuds and a scream coming from the cottage next door.
Mr Fawcett called a neighbour who walked over to the house and knocked on the door. By then, the intruders had fled by car at high speed 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 foot 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 the stairs were spattered with blood and on the floor near the body was a primitive cosh: a piece of rubber tube with a short piece of steel tube at one end and putty at the other.
Upstairs, in West's bedroom, police found a lightweight raincoat folded on a chair. In the pocket was a lifesaving medallion inscribed 'G O Evans' and a piece of paper with the name Norma O'Brien written on it, next to an address in Liverpool.
When police called on O'Brien in Liverpool the next day, they found she was a 17-year-old girl who had met Evans while visiting her brother-in-law, a soldier at Fulwood Barracks in Preston, four months earlier.
They then located Evans's parents, who gave their son's address in Preston, where he was living in a small terraced house with Peter Allen and his wife and two young children.
The police knocked on the door to find only Allen was home. Evans had travelled to Manchester with Allen's wife, Mary. But when the police tracked them down, they hit the jackpot.
Evans was in possession of a wristwatch that had belonged to West, and Mary had a bloodstained shirt in her basket that belonged to her husband.
With both men under arrest, the interrogations began. It soon became clear that each suspect was determined to blame the other for striking the fatal blows.
West was bludgeoned and stabbed to death in the course of a robbery at his home in Cumbria
But no amount of bluff and bluster could save them and both men were charged with murder within 24 hours of being arrested, the case going to court less than three months later.
After deliberating for just over three hours at the end of a two-week trial, a jury of nine men and three women unanimously found both men guilty of 'capital 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 'serious psychological problems', which, had his defence team entered a plea of diminished responsibility at his trial, could have saved his life.
His mother Hannah sent a letter to the Home Secretary, pleading for a reprieve. 'My son is mentally impaired and I had him under a mental doctor at the age of 8 years but he is not a wicked boy,' she wrote. 'Please may God guide you to make a mercyful [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 48 death sentences passed since the 1957 Homicide Act introduced some restrictions on the use of the death penalty, 19 people had been reprieved.
Only two executions had taken place in England in 1963 and none in 1964 up to the point Evans and Allen were sentenced.
According to Elwyn Jones, the creator of the TV series Z-Cars, who wrote a book about the case, even the police expected them to be reprieved.
But, as we have seen, there was to be no 11th-hour change of heart on the part of the judiciary.
Protesters march against the death penalty outside Wandsworth Prison in 1959
This year Lucy Letby became the fourth woman in the UK to be handed a whole-life jail term
And when the death penalty was suspended the next year, efforts to re-establish it got under way almost immediately. Patrick Downey, the uncle of Lesley Ann Downey, a victim of the Moors murderers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, stood in the 1966 General Election against Sydney Silverman, the architect of the 1965 Act, on an explicitly pro-hanging platform. (The Act had been passed just four weeks after Brady and Hindley were arrested.)
He failed to depose Silverman but polled over 5,000 votes, then the largest vote for a genuinely independent candidate since 1945.
Public support for capital punishment has dropped in recent years to 40 per cent, according to the most recent YouGov poll. But when asked about specific crimes, Britons are more inclined to support the death penalty for the murder of a child, for example, or murders committed as part of a terrorist act and cases of multiple murder.
When Lucy Letby became the fourth woman in the UK to be handed a whole-life jail term, a poll for The Spectator showed that 66 per cent were in favour of the death penalty.
The age of the noose may have ended with the deaths of Evans and Allen but the debate over whether it should be reinstated rages as hot as ever.
