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.
But Christie had scarpered. Scotland Yard received 300 phone calls from members of the public who were convinced they had spotted him — “a gaunt, unshaven man in a battered brown trilby” — in a gents’ lavatory in Golders Green, waiting for a trolley-bus in Ealing, on the East India Dock Road, and in a Lyons tea shop. In fact, Christie was hiding in Rowton House, a hostel for down-and-outs.
Christie was apprehended in Putney on March 31, 1953. He was vague about what had transpired. “I don’t remember what happened, but I must have gone haywire. The next thing I remember she was lying still in the chair with the rope around her neck,” was how he recalled each of the killings. Actually, Christie had long been shrewd and rodent-like, with a violent streak and few morals. The hesitancy was part of the pose.
Born near Halifax in 1899, Christie served as a signaler during the Great War and was severely gassed, resulting in his inability to speak above a sinister whisper. Other lifelong side effects included diarrhea, flatulence, piles, headaches, back pain and insomnia. Summerscale mentions all this now and again, almost in mitigation.
As a postman, Christie stole sacks of mail, “raiding them for checks”. He served a prison sentence for the theft and later went to Wandsworth for stealing a car. In 1929, he was sent down for six months for hitting a woman with a cricket bat. None of these convictions prevented him from joining the Metropolitan Police War Reserve force, where he was in uniform from 1939 until 1943. He was pleased to pass himself off as “an upright, proper and faintly prudish member of the community”, reminding me — as we hear how he crept about Rillington Place with a torch, spying on the residents, looming at them on the stairs, peering through keyholes — of Leonard Rossiter’s Rigsby, the seedy landlord in Rising Damp.
Summerscale is surely correct to surmise that Christie would have gone on undiscovered killing sprees during the blackouts, taking advantage of ruined buildings and bomb sites to dump bodies. As Christie told the police: “All my life I never experienced fear or horror at the sight of a corpse. On the contrary, I have seen many and they held an interest and fascination over me.”
His victims were similar sorts: poor, desperate young women, looking for independence in London — waitresses, barmaids, chambermaids of slender means, down on their luck, “vulnerable to the social and economic power that men like Christie could exert, and to the dehumanizing fantasies they might entertain”.
Such women were willing to trade sex for money or favors, and Christie met them in pubs or snack bars. He would approach them and ask if they had somewhere to stay. He would offer to take their photograph or, if they were pregnant or rumored to be pregnant, allude to his skill as a backstreet abortionist. (Summerscale has a gory page on what botched backstreet abortions involved.) He would also say he had a cure for chronic catarrh.
Having been enticed to the kitchen at Rillington Place, the women were invited to sit in a deck chair. Christie quickly put a mask on them, took a bulldog clip off a rubber tube attached to the gas supply, and as the women lost consciousness, he raped them. “He liked to have sex with dead or unconscious women,” desiring and reviling them simultaneously.
When it was over, the bodies were shoved in a disused coal cellar — Christie first collecting snippets of pubic hair, which he kept in a jam jar. The only one spared sex was Ethel, the shorthand typist Christie had married in 1920. He said “he had strangled her as an act of mercy … She got very depressed.” Ethel also by that time knew (or suspected) too much, and might have blabbed.
Christie failed to charm anybody. His “self-importance and sniveling propriety” offended police, lawyers, reporters, judge and jury. The plea of insanity failed. He was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint at nine o’clock on the morning of July 15, 1953. Within an hour, a wax effigy was on display in Madame Tussauds. Over in Hollywood, Alfred Hitchcock, who had followed the case avidly, cried: “Oh, England’s fantastic for this kind of thing!” There are elements of it in his film Frenzy.
Frenzy revolves around a wrongly accused man — and this, too, connects with Rillington Place. In 1949 another of the tenants, Timothy Evans, “an illiterate, working-class young man of low intelligence”, had apparently strangled his wife, Beryl, and their baby, Geraldine. The bodies were concealed in the outside washhouse. Evans was hanged in March 1950. It later became clear he had been manipulated and framed by Christie, who lied that baby Geraldine had been delivered to foster parents in East Acton.
During Christie’s trial, however, the attorney general did his utmost to rule out any connection between Evans and Christie. The government wished for the Evans verdict to be upheld, the criminal justice system not to be called into question and the campaign to abolish capital punishment not to be given ammunition. There would later be several inquiries and investigations, resulting in a posthumous pardon for Evans in 1966.
But Summerscale, author of the prizewinning history, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, isn’t so sure about Evans’s complete innocence. She suggests a complex and plausible narrative involving domestic violence (“Tim had hit Beryl before … the couple had been quarreling fiercely in the days before her death”) and a terrible pact (“Christie offered to do her in for him, under cover of performing the abortion that she wanted”). The baby was killed “because her crying threatened to give them away”.
The Peepshow examines the macabre saga with tremendous skill and verve. There were many casualties, not only those who were strangled. Summerscale mentions the agony of Evans’s family in their anxiety to know the truth; the ordeal of the relatives and descendants of the murderees; and the plight of the journalist who covered the case for the yellow press and who interviewed Christie and never forgot his clammy handshake. Harry Procter had a breakdown, was sacked by his paper and ended up in a Dagenham council house, dead at 47.
As for Rillington Place, it was demolished and (so I am told) the entire area cleared for a no-man’s-land of ugly Seventies council housing, among it Grenfell Tower. The very ground must be cursed.
Roger Lewis is a critic and the author of Seasonal Suicide Notes and What Am I Still Doing Here?
