(CNS): The Cayman Islands Government has given the Evans family CI$1.226 million to settle a claim made in the years following the tragic disappearance of Anna Evans, who was last seen around lunchtime on 26 January 2011 working at the George Town landfill.
The family began pursuing a legal claim against the Department of Environmental Health in 2017, though what happened to the dump worker has never been established. However, she was declared legally dead in 2020, enabling the legal case to move ahead.
According to a recently released summary of the last Cabinet meeting before the elections, the five remaining government ministers approved the financial settlement to the family.
Cabinet created a new executive appropriation under the Ministry of Sustainability, which holds the DEH portfolio. Under the Public Management and Finance Act, the government took the money from the health ministry’s policy advice budget.
It’s not clear what the legal case had established about Evans’ disappearance and apparent subsequent death, as most of the discussions have been behind closed doors. But CNS understand that the original legal advice to the government was that it couldn’t be held responsible for Evans’ death as her fate remains unknown.
Nevertheless, the government has helped support the family over the years, as she had five children, three of whom were still young at the time. It is understood that the CIG provided a home for them after Anne’s sister, Noreen Dixon, took on the responsibility for caring for her nieces and nephews, who are now all adults.
What happened to Evans, who was just 37 when she disappeared, remains a mystery. Some of her friends and family had suggested her estranged husband, who was assaulted shortly after she disappeared, could have been responsible, but neither he nor any other suspects were ever arrested in connection with the investigation.
Some thought that she could have been crushed at the landfill as a result of an accident, but none of her co-workers have ever come forward to confirm that theory either.
Several years after she disappeared, John Jones, an RCIPS chief superintendent at the time, expressed his belief that Evans met with an accident at the dump, where she could have been crushed by a compactor without the driver knowing, and her body was still somewhere in the landfill.
However, trained sniffer dogs were brought from overseas and deployed during the extensive search for Evans at the landfill, but there has never been any trace of her.
