HE had endured a miserable life.

He was just a few months old when he, with two sisters and one brother, was abandoned in a children’s home.

“He was institutionalised, slow and never able to settle,” said his mortified sister, Kathleen Spring, after she had learnt of his horrifying death in a hostel.

“He was never going to be anything but a drifter.”

However, Patrick Evans, 45, found comfort living in Fareham for five years and was a frequent visitor to the Drop-in Centre whose organiser, Sandra Allen, said of him: “He was a peacemaker. He was always there with the younger ones.”

Fellow vagrant ‘Jersey Alan’ knew him well. “The man wouldn’t hurt a fly – he was even too scared to live on his own. Nobody had a bad word to say about him.”

The epileptic was only too aware of the dangers of life on the street – yet a few months later he was dead, battered to death by a room-mate in a London hostel.

Transvestite Alan Briggs, 43, woke up to find his dress heavily bloodstained, with the body of Evans lying just a few feet away from the bed they had shared.

“I did it,” Briggs confessed to police after his arrest in July, 1995. “I don’t know why I did it. I was drunk. The only thing I can think of is that he said something I didn’t like. I didn’t think I was capable of such a thing.”

Briggs, 43, of no fixed address, pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey the following November when the court heard the victim had died from multiple injuries after being punched so hard his skull, neck, jaw and nose were broken.

Before the killing, the pair had been friends and often travelled together to Fareham to see homeless pals.

“An appalling battering to death of an innocent man,” declared Mrs Justice Heather, passing sentence.

After the hearing, Mrs Spring said the policy of putting two strangers together in one room was risky.

“Patrick had a horrible life and survived so much and then he shares a room with this man and ends up dead.”

But she reflected: “I suppose he was never going to be happy. Perhaps his death has given him peace…”