There’s sordid atmosphere aplenty when it comes to postwar Notting Hill, at that time a slum district in which the house of horrors at 10 Rillington Place was situated. In The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place, Kate Summerscale describes with relish the dilapidated stucco terraces, derelict factories, cheap commercial hotels and bleak lodgings, with rented rooms suitable for Philip Larkin’s Mr Bleaney containing a bed, a wardrobe, a jug and basin, a chair and a frying pan.
It would be a wonder if murders weren’t regularly committed in such a purlieu. Thus it was, on March 24, 1953, that three bodies were discovered, hidden in an alcove of No 10, “wrapped in cloth and smeared with earth and ashes”. These turned out to be the remains of Kathleen Maloney, 26, Rita Nelson, 25, and Hectorina Maclennan, 27. Shortly afterwards a pair of corpses were dug up in the garden: Ruth Fuerst, an Austrian refugee who had disappeared in 1943, and Muriel Eady, who had worked at a radio transmitter factory in Acton called Ultra Electronics alongside John Reginald Halliday Christie — a Rillington Place tenant. She had last been seen in 1944. Under the floorboards in the front room, police found the body of Christie’s wife, Ethel. They had all been strangled.
