Seedy world of addiction

The trial of Wendy Walters for the murder of Barry Evans opened a door on the twilight world of Telford's middle-aged drink and drug abusers.

The jury at Birmingham Crown Court heard how Walters and her acquaintances - most of them in their 40s - spent an aimless existence on state benefits, cadging money off each other to feed their addictions.

Prison sentences, casual sex and even prostitution were a part of their lives, while domestic disputes could easily flare up into violence.

It could all have been so different for Barry Evans, who was adopted at the age of just 10 weeks by Colin and Lillian Evans.

A decent, caring couple, they sat every day in the public gallery of tiny Courtroom Number 10, hearing in detail for the first time about the sad and sordid life into which their son had sunk.

The Evans family emigrated to Australia when Barry and his older brother Terry were children but later returned to Telford.

He was a police cadet for a time but his dream of a career in the police force evaporated as his drink and drug habit escalated.

He had also worked as a security guard, had run an ice cream van and had fathered two sons, who now live in Shrewsbury and Newport.

By the time he died last July at the age of 45, he was an alcoholic and had been on drugs for 25 years, including heroin and ketamine, a human and veterinary anaesthetic blamed by Walters for scrambling his mind.

Barry Evans had made efforts to get off drugs and in the weeks before his death had turned to religion.

But he was also depressed about wasting his life and letting down his parents and had recently set himself on fire, getting badly burned, and had taken an overdose.

He still kept in touch with his parents, who would help him out of scrapes whenever they could, and had a reputation as a friendly person - except when he was drunk.

His final downfall began in the middle of 2006 when, by chance, he met Wendy Marie Walters who immediately recognised him as a drug addict.

He invited her back to his place and she spent the night there.

Walters had married her husband Christopher in 1998 but he was serving a four-year jail sentence, imposed in 2005 at Shrewsbury Crown Court, for going with two accomplices to the Brookside home of Walters's then lover Roy Lacey and beating him up in a jealous rage.

Walters herself had been bound over by Judge Robin Onions who said she had been playing off her husband against her lover.

Walters, who claimed in court to have successfully kicked her heroin addiction while on remand in prison, had three daughters, one of whom died in 2003, while one had been adopted and the other was living with her father.

After spells of homelessness, she moved on her own into a privately let first floor flat at Bembridge, Brookside, in September 2006.

She met Barry Evans again in March 2007 and he moved in with her although she said she had only had sex with him once and their relationship had been more "best friends" than lovers.

Their friendship was often stormy. The jury heard witnesses describe how Walters had previously threatened Barry Evans with a knife in one of their drink-fuelled rows. But there was also an obvious fondness between the pair who exchanged sloppy text messages in which each described their love for the other.

There was also animosity between Mr Lacey and Mr Evans. Mr Lacey viewed him as a rival and wanted to keep Walters to himself.

On July 7, Mr Lacey turned up unexpectedly at the flat after being dropped off by police following a domestic incident with his partner in Dawley.

The three of them got drunk on mugs of whisky until the mood became ugly when Mr Evans called Mr Lacey a paedophile.

Walters left the flat with Mr Lacey, leaving Mr Evans in a drunken sleep on the settee. She went to Telford Town Centre where she cashed her £77.49 giro cheque and bought a £19.99 mobile phone from Woolworths, a £21.99 cross necklace from Argos and groceries from Asda in the early afternoon.

She phoned another friend, Shaun Johnston, and had sex with him in a picnic area before he dropped her at the flat.

At 3.34pm, the emergency operator received a 999 call from Walters. Paramedics attended but were unable to save Mr Evans's life.

He bled to death on the living room floor after suffering eight stab wounds. Three of the wounds were in the back, two of them with such force they pierced the shoulder blade.

The fatal blow - a downward stab wound into Mr Evans's chest - severed the pulmonary artery serving the heart and lungs and he would have collapsed and died within minutes.

By Peter Johnson