The evening of Wednesday, March 13th, 2002 seemed to be going relatively normally for former rugby player and father of two Evan Jones, who was originally from Chippenham, England, but had lived in Bristol for more than a decade. He stopped in for his usual Guinness at the Beaufort Pub in Montpelier at a little before ten p.m., then had picked up some takeout on the way back to his flat on City Road in St. Paul’s.
While inside his apartment, however, he sustained some type of injury to his leg, and left the flat, perhaps to seek medical attention, though in light of later events, he may have also been fleeing from someone. At around ten minutes to eleven, he stopped at a phone box and contacted his ex-girlfriend Aude Dumoulin in France, though it’s unknown what the reason for the call was.
Minutes later, witnesses reported that Evan approached another man outside the Avonmeade House flats. It’s unclear what was said, but a fight quickly broke out; the emergency call reporting the incident came in at ten-fifty-five p.m.
At that point, it seems that at least one and possibly two attackers knocked Evan to the ground and began kicking and punching him, and also allegedly beating him savagely with a heavy bike chain. There was no CCTV in the area, so the exact details and timeline of the crime are frustratingly sketchy.
Emergency services arrived and transported Evan to the Bristol Royal Infirmary, but the victim never regained consciousness, and later died from his injuries, combined with a heart attack he had suffered during the course of the attack.
In the course of the investigation, law enforcement discovered that Evan Jones had been the victim of a robbery not long before he was murdered, and had complained to the bar staff at his local pub that Bristol was becoming too dangerous and he was considering moving away. Authorities aren’t certain if the robbery was related to the later slaying, or if Evan had been formerly acquainted with his attacker or attackers.
For a time, police were attempting to track down several witnesses who were likely in the area at the time the fight broke out, who it was hoped would be able to shed some light on the identity of the perpetrators. However, these leads appear to have gone nowhere, and although there was a renewed push to solve the crime in 2022, on the twentieth anniversary of Evan Jones’s death, the murder remains unresolved.
Crime Immemorial 