John Reginald Halliday Christie lived in the ground-floor flat of a small terraced house at 10 Rillington Place, in North Kensington, London, from 1937 until March 1953. When he left it in March 1953, the next people to use his kitchen found three women's bodies in a papered-over alcove. Police then found his wife, Ethel, under the floorboards of the front room and the remains of two more women in the back garden. Christie was arrested on March 31. He confessed to killing all six, and to killing Beryl Evans, a young mother who had lived on the top floor of the same house in 1949.
He was tried for one death only, that of his wife. A jury at the Central Criminal Court rejected his plea of insanity and convicted him on June 25, 1953, and he was hanged at Pentonville Prison on July 15. His case is remembered as much for a man he helped to hang as for the women he killed. In January 1950 Christie had been the chief prosecution witness against his upstairs neighbor, Timothy Evans, who was convicted of murdering his 13-month-old daughter, Geraldine, and executed that March. In 1966, after a High Court judge found it more probable than not that Evans had not killed the child, the Queen granted Evans a free pardon. The conviction itself has never been quashed.
Christie was born in Halifax, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, in 1899. When police began looking for him in 1953, the Yorkshire Post described him as the younger son of Ernest John Christie. He went to Boothtown Council School, worked as a clerk and then as a temporary postman until 1921. The paper reported that he married Ethel Simpson, a clerk, at Halifax Register Office. The London Review of Books, reviewing a 2024 history of the case, describes him as a former choirboy and Boy Scout.
He served in the First World War. Accounts agree that he was hurt in a gas attack: the London Review of Books says he was temporarily blinded by mustard gas, and the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting, in its review of two recent books on the case, says he was severely injured.
He spent the years between the wars in and out of trouble. The Council of Law Reporting describes his offenses in that period as mainly theft, with some time in prison. By 1939 he had five convictions, the figure the Home Office accepted in a written answer to Parliament in July 1953. A relative in Leeds told the Yorkshire Post in 1953 that the family had heard nothing from him since he left Halifax 33 years earlier.
When war came again in 1939, the Metropolitan Police expanded quickly by enrolling men in its War Reserve. Christie was one of them. He served as War Reserve Constable X 112, and no one discovered his convictions. In July 1953, answering a member who asked how a man with five convictions had been taken on, the Home Secretary said he regretted that "in the conditions of rapid expansion of the Metropolitan Police War Reserve" Christie's record had not come to light, and that the checks now made before recruits were accepted were adequate. Later that month another member raised the point again in the Commons, observing that Christie "did slip in" as a War Reserve policeman, and asked whether the same safeguards applied to the Special Constabulary. The Home Secretary promised to look into it.
Christie had moved into 10 Rillington Place in 1937. The house stood in a short dead-end street off Ladbroke Grove, in an area that the Air Mail reviewer of Kate Summerscale's 2024 book describes as a postwar slum. He and Ethel lived in the ground-floor flat; other tenants lived above. At the back was a small garden and an outside washhouse.
The first woman Christie later admitted killing was Ruth Fuerst. She was born in Austria in 1922 and came to Britain in 1939, as a refugee helped by Quakers, according to the London Review of Books. She was interned on the Isle of Man and later worked at a hotel in Mayfair. She met Christie at a snack bar off Ladbroke Grove. She disappeared in 1943. By Christie's own account he killed her around that time, while he was still a police reservist, and buried her in the back garden of the house. Her remains were dug up there in 1953.
Muriel Eady grew up in a children's home after her mother died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. At twelve she was sent to Acton, in west London. In 1944 she met Christie at Ultra Electronics, a radio transmitter factory in Acton where both of them worked, as the Air Mail review records. She disappeared on October 7, 1944. Christie later said he had killed her in the flat, using domestic gas to make her unconscious before he strangled her, and her remains, too, were dug up in the garden in 1953.
By 1949 a young couple, Timothy and Beryl Evans, lived in the top-floor flat with their baby daughter, Geraldine. Timothy Evans was illiterate; that, Bing told the Commons in 1953, was the one thing admitted on all sides. Ludovic Kennedy, whose 1961 book challenged the verdict, later wrote that he had "the body of a man and the mind of a child," a description quoted in the London Review of Books.
Beryl's younger brother, Peter Thorley, was a small boy at the time. In a book published in 2024 he remembered visiting the house, where Reg and Ethel Christie welcomed him and gave him sticky buns. He also described Timothy Evans as a violent drinker and a liar. The Council of Law Reporting, reviewing his book, notes that it rests largely on conjecture and childhood impressions.
What happened in the top-floor flat in November 1949 has been argued over ever since. By the time the police took up the case, Evans had left London; his first confession was made to police in Wales. Major Geoffrey Bing, the member for Hornchurch, set out the official timeline in the Commons in 1953. According to the confession Evans made on the evening of December 2, 1949, he put his wife's body in the washhouse on Tuesday, November 8, and his daughter's on Thursday, November 10, and left 10 Rillington Place on the afternoon of Monday, November 14.
Evans gave four differing accounts in all, according to the London Review of Books. His first statement to the police, Bing said, accused Christie. In his last words on the gallows, as the Spectator's reviewer put it, Evans insisted that Christie had done it, and he had claimed that Christie performed an abortion on Beryl, who was expecting a second child. His confession came only after he was shown clothing from his wife's and daughter's bodies.
The bodies were found in the washhouse. Chief Inspector Jennings of the Metropolitan Police recorded that he found Beryl Evans's body concealed there at 11.50 a.m.; Geraldine's body was in the same outbuilding. A tie was found on top of the child's clothing. Evans said it was his; at least one witness said it was not, according to the Scott Henderson report. It was destroyed after his appeal in the ordinary course of business, the Home Secretary told Parliament in 1953.
Christie made three statements to the police at Notting Hill police station, on December 1, 5 and 8, 1949, of 991, 821 and 375 words. The Home Secretary gave those figures to the Commons in December 1953, adding that no record was kept of the time spent taking statements from potential witnesses. What Christie told the Sunday Pictorial reporter Harry Procter that year was that Evans had killed his wife and child after a row.
Some statements taken in 1949 did not fit Evans's confession. Workmen had been repairing the house that November, and their accounts suggested that Evans could not have hidden the bodies in the washhouse on the dates he gave. A plasterer's mate told the police that no bodies were there on the Friday. A carpenter's account put timber in Christie's possession only after midday on Monday, November 14. The High Court recorded in 2004 that the workmen's statements were never disclosed to the defense or put before the jury. Dr. Odess, who treated Christie, later re-examined his notes and found that Christie's complaint of fibrositis was made on Saturday, November 12, consistent, Bing told the House, with strain from carrying a heavy weight.
Evans went on trial at the Central Criminal Court in January 1950, charged with murdering Geraldine. A second count, for the murder of Beryl, was not tried; it was ordered to lie on the file. The prosecution argued that the two deaths were one transaction, so that all the evidence about Beryl's death could be put before the jury, and the court allowed it.
Christie was the principal witness for the Crown. He denied the accusations Evans had made against him, and he was heard to remark, as the Spectator recorded, "What a wicked man he is." Bing later told the Commons that Christie had lied throughout his evidence, and that if the jury had known Christie had already killed two women and hidden their bodies in the same washhouse, Evans "would have been bound to be acquitted." The jury did not know. Evans had withdrawn his confessions and pleaded not guilty, but neither judge nor jury believed him.
On January 13, 1950, Evans was convicted of the murder of his daughter and sentenced to death. His appeal was dismissed, and he was executed on March 9, 1950. His last words, according to the London Review of Books, were "Christie done it."
Harry Procter, the ambitious young chief reporter of the Sunday Pictorial, had interviewed Christie in 1949 and accepted his account of the Evans household. He later came to feel he had suspected the wrong man, the Camden New Journal reported in 2025 in an interview with Kate Summerscale, whose history of the case follows him closely.
Christie stayed on in the ground-floor flat with his wife until the end of 1952. Ethel Christie was 54 when she died. Kate Summerscale's research into her life, described in the Council of Law Reporting's review, includes an earlier relationship in Sheffield with a man named Vaughan Brindley, which ended over his fear that she could not have children. Summerscale's book asks what Ethel knew about her husband and why she may have been killed.
He killed her in December 1952 and hid her body under the floorboards of the front room. When the police asked him about it in 1953, he claimed that she had been trying to gas herself and that he had merely helped her finish, as the London Review of Books summarizes his account. The jury that tried him did not accept that she had died by her own hand.
In the first weeks of 1953, Christie brought three women back to the flat and killed them. All three were in their twenties. The Air Mail review gives their ages as 26, 25 and 27.
Kathleen Maloney was a sex worker who had given up her five children into care. She first met Christie at the Fountains Abbey pub in Praed Street and later left the Westminster Arms with him. She was never seen alive again.
Rita Nelson was 25. Hectorina Maclennan was 27, according to the Air Mail review; the first press reports in March 1953 gave her age as about 25. Little more was reported about either woman than her name, her age and where she was found. Publishers Weekly's reviewer noted that Summerscale's book writes about all the victims with compassion.
Christie later said he had used gas to make the women unconscious before he strangled them. He wrapped their bodies in cloth and put them in a small alcove off the kitchen, then covered the opening with wallpaper.
In March 1953 Christie moved out of 10 Rillington Place. The landlord let the upstairs tenant, Beresford Brown, use the empty ground-floor kitchen. Brown, the London Review of Books records, was a 43-year-old Jamaican jazz musician who had come to England in 1950 and worked in a dairy.
On March 24, 1953, Brown was putting up a bracket in the kitchen when he noticed the wall sounded hollow. Behind the wallpaper he found the alcove and the bodies of the three women. The police searched the house. Under the front-room floor they found Ethel Christie. In the back garden they dug up the remains of two more women, later identified as Ruth Fuerst and Muriel Eady.
The house had already been the scene of two deaths. The washhouse where Beryl and Geraldine Evans had been found in 1949 stood in the same small yard.
Scotland Yard said it wanted to question the former tenant of the ground-floor flat. Early reports, reprinted by the Yorkshire Evening Post in 2017, said detectives feared the man who had strangled four women and hidden them in the house might lure more women to their deaths. The Halifax Borough Police made inquiries in his home town, but no one there had seen him for many years. The women identified at Kensington mortuary in those first days were listed as Ethel Christie, Hectorina Maclennan, Kathleen Maloney and Rita Elisabeth Nelson. The ages printed in those first reports differ from the ones given later.
On March 31, 1953, a police officer on the beat noticed a man in a brown trilby near the Thames at Putney and asked him to come to the station. It was Christie. He was arrested near Putney Bridge and charged with the murder of his wife. A Yorkshire Post photograph shows him at West London Court on that charge.
In custody Christie talked. He helped the police identify the bodies, and he gave accounts in which, the London Review of Books says, he claimed he had been trying to help some of the women with abortions or had acted in self-defense. He admitted killing all six women found at the house. He also confessed to killing Beryl Evans. The High Court, reviewing the history in 2004, recorded that Christie "later confessed to killing Mr Evans' wife, Beryl," and that his methods fitted her murder.
He never confessed to killing Geraldine. He wrote to Harry Procter from custody admitting the murders of the women, but not of the child, according to the London Review of Books. The same review reports, from Kate Summerscale's research in the files, that a Fleet Street reporter's note passed on rumors that Christie had admitted the child's killing to a prison officer, and that the Attorney General, Sir Lionel Heald, concerned about the effect, helped keep the story quiet, with help from Frank Newsam. That claim comes from Summerscale's reading of the papers; it was never tested in court.
Christie also wrote for the Sunday Pictorial. Bing told the Commons in July 1953 that in those articles Christie said he kept an 18-inch knotted rope that he had used in his murders, and that no such rope was ever found. The Spectator's reviewer notes that Procter was eventually sickened by what became the most lurid and lucrative account of sexual violence his paper had ever printed.
Christie was tried at the Central Criminal Court in June 1953, in the summer of the Coronation, for one murder only: that of his wife. None of the other deaths was ever put before a jury. The trial drew crowds; the Spectator review describes it as a sought-after ticket, with people gathered outside the house in Notting Hill and a group of women trying to break in.
The Attorney General, Sir Lionel Heald, led for the Crown. He told the jury there was "not the slightest warrant" for suggesting that Christie had killed Geraldine Evans. Christie pleaded insanity, hoping, the London Review of Books says, to be sent to Broadmoor rather than to the gallows. The jury found him guilty and sane. On June 25, 1953, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death.
Christie's conviction raised an obvious problem. Two men from the same small house had been convicted of strangling women, and the first had been hanged on evidence given by the second. The Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, asked a barrister, Mr. Scott Henderson QC, to inquire in private into whether there had been a miscarriage of justice in the Evans case. Scott Henderson interviewed Christie, with a shorthand writer present.
He worked quickly. In the Commons debate of July 29, 1953, the Home Secretary said the time from the announcement of the inquiry to the delivery of the report had been seven or eight days. Michael Foot, the member for Devonport, called it an inquiry rushed through in two or three days, and noted that Evans had no lawyer there. Foot also read from the transcript of Christie's interview, in which Christie said he had been told the day before that there was no proof against him: "I was only informed yesterday that there is no such proof."
Scott Henderson concluded that Evans had murdered both his wife and his child, and that Christie had not murdered Mrs. Evans.
The report was in the hands of the government and members by July 14, with Christie's execution fixed for the next morning. On July 14, George Rogers, the member for North Kensington, rose on a point of order to ask how the report could be debated before Christie was hanged, since Christie was, he said, "a vitally material witness." Sydney Silverman argued that the question was not whether Christie should be executed but when. Hector Hughes said the House might be deprived of a very important witness. The Speaker, William Morrison, ruled that "the rule and the practice of the House" forbade him to admit the question at that stage. A motion solely about the Evans report, he said, could be discussed at any time.
The Home Secretary did not postpone the execution. He told the House two weeks later that keeping Christie waiting would have been "an inhuman thing to do." Christie was hanged at Pentonville on the morning of July 15, 1953.
On the night of July 29, 1953, Bing opened a debate on the Scott Henderson report. About 21 members, led by Silverman, had tabled a motion regretting that they could not accept it. Bing called the report unsatisfactory in every way. He argued that it left out evidence, including Dr. Odess's notes and the carpenter's account, that a plasterer's time sheet had gone missing after the trial, and that police statements taken in 1949 had been suppressed and shown to Scott Henderson only later. He said that Christie had "murdered six women in exactly the same way" Evans was said to have killed his wife and child, and had used the same washhouse. He also argued that newspaper cuttings found in Evans's room had more likely been put there by Christie, who was himself found with cuttings about the Evans case.
Michael Stewart, the member for Fulham East, said the report appeared prejudiced against Evans and asked for all the evidence to be published. The Home Secretary rejected the charges of haste and bias. He said that Evans had made two admissions and later confessions, that one confession to the prison medical officer, Dr. Matheson, was of great importance, and that the tie had been destroyed in the ordinary course. Aneurin Bevan also spoke; the Home Secretary called his argument about the tie "tendentious."
The debate did not settle anything. In the weeks that followed, the Home Secretary agreed to place a copy of the transcript of Evans's trial in the House of Commons Library, an exceptional step. He declined to publish all the evidence given to Scott Henderson, because some of it had been given in confidence. When a member suggested that a national missing persons register might have exposed Christie sooner, the Home Secretary said he was not satisfied that such a bureau was justified.
The case did not go away. In 1961 the broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy published Ten Rillington Place, a strong challenge to Scott Henderson's conclusions, as the High Court later described it. Ian Gilmour, a former editor of the Spectator and by the 1960s a member of Parliament, was among those who argued for Evans's innocence.
On February 4, 1965, Gilmour asked the Home Secretary, Sir Frank Soskice, to declare Evans innocent and to let his family have his body. Soskice replied that he had no power to make an official declaration of innocence even if innocence were established. He said that if the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Bill became law, he would consider sympathetically an application under the Burial Act 1857 to remove an executed person's remains for private burial. He told the House that a new inquiry would serve no useful purpose because "It would be impossible to arrive at the truth." Gilmour answered that virtually no one outside the Home Office who had studied the case doubted Evans's innocence.
Within months the government changed course. By November 1965 a High Court judge, Sir Daniel Brabin, was conducting a new inquiry. Soskice told the Commons on November 2 that it was for Mr. Justice Brabin to decide whether the Timothy Evans Committee, the campaign group, could be legally represented. Two days later Eric Lubbock asked what criteria would guide a decision on a free pardon. Soskice said he could not consider the question until he had the report. Lubbock reminded him that his predecessor, Lord Butler, had said a free pardon was impossible because there was "no precedent in the previous 200 years."
Brabin held his inquiry between November 1965 and January 1966. The report reached the Home Office on August 9, 1966, and was published at 2.30 p.m. on October 12. Brabin concluded that it was no longer possible to establish the truth beyond doubt. On the balance of probabilities, he found that Evans had not killed his daughter, the crime for which he was tried, convicted and hanged, but that he probably had killed his wife.
On October 18, 1966, George Rogers, the member for North Kensington who had tried in 1953 to have the report debated before Christie's execution, asked the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, for a statement. Jenkins told the House that he did not think it right to let Evans's conviction stand. He had recommended a free pardon; the Queen had approved it, and it had been signed that morning. "This case has no precedent," he said, "and will, I hope and believe, have no successor."
Rogers welcomed the decision and asked whether Evans's mother might receive compensation. Jenkins replied that this was not primarily a compensation case, since Evans was dead and had no direct dependants, but said he would consider any proposal. John Hall pointed out that the report suggested Evans had probably killed his wife; other members called out "No." Jenkins answered that Brabin had found circumstances in which a jury could not have been satisfied of guilt beyond reasonable doubt, and that he had to deal with the case on which Evans had been tried and executed. Silverman said many people thought Brabin had weighed the probabilities wrongly. Foot asked why the House had ever been given the Scott Henderson report, with its finding of overwhelming evidence of guilt. Jenkins replied that he had not been responsible for that inquiry.
In the House of Lords the same day, Lord Stonham read the Home Secretary's statement. Lord Airedale asked whether a free pardon really cleared a man, since the phrase might suggest to the public that Evans had been guilty and forgiven. Lord Stonham replied that a free pardon expunged the conviction and that in this case it amounted to an admission by the State that Evans had been wrongly put to death.
A pardon is not an acquittal. It is an act of the Crown under the royal prerogative of mercy; it does not set aside the jury's verdict. The legal scholar Gerry Rubin, writing in the Criminal Law Review in 2007, examined the Home Office's policy reasoning in recommending this posthumous pardon.
The pardon covered only Geraldine's death, the one charge on which Evans had been convicted. The count for Beryl's murder had been left on the file in 1950 and was never tried, so no court ever ruled on it, and Brabin's finding that Evans had probably killed his wife stood in the official record.
Decades later Evans's family tried to clear his name entirely. By a letter of August 3, 2000, the Home Office told solicitors for Evans's personal representatives that the Home Secretary had decided to make an ex gratia payment of compensation, without admitting liability. The independent assessor, Lord Brennan QC, considered submissions dated January 27, 2003. He concluded that Evans's conviction and execution for the murder of his child were "wrongful and a miscarriage of justice," and he went further than Brabin: "There is no evidence to implicate Timothy Evans in the murder of his wife," he wrote. "She was most probably murdered by Christie." Payments totaling 250,000 pounds were made to Evans's sister and half-sister.
Evans's half-sister, Mary Westlake, then asked the Criminal Cases Review Commission to refer the 1950 conviction to the Court of Appeal so that it could be formally quashed. The Commission accepted that the legal conditions for a referral were met but declined to refer it. In its reasons, dated March 23, 2004, it said that the free pardon and the compensation had already cleared Evans's name, that "no slur remains on Mr Evans' character," that an appeal would bring no further benefit set against its cost, and that the Court of Appeal would have no power over the untried count concerning Beryl.
Mrs. Westlake sought judicial review. On November 17, 2004, the Divisional Court, Stanley Burnton J and Collins J, dismissed her claim, holding that the Commission had exercised its discretion lawfully. In doing so the judges went as far as any court has gone on the facts. "It is recognised that he committed neither murder," Stanley Burnton J said, adding that Evans "has been exonerated of the murders of his wife and child." Collins J said that no jury could properly have convicted Evans of murdering his wife and that he "must be regarded as innocent of that charge too." No court has ever quashed the conviction for Geraldine's murder. What removed its effect was the pardon, which Lord Stonham had told the Lords in 1966 expunges a conviction.
For the 1971 film 10 Rillington Place, directed by Richard Fleischer, with Richard Attenborough as Christie and John Hurt as Evans, the crew filmed on the street itself. Only the exterior of number 10 was shot there; the interior scenes were filmed at number 8. A three-part BBC drama, Rillington Place, followed in 2016, with Tim Roth as Christie and Samantha Morton as Ethel.
The National Archives at Kew holds the police, court and Home Office files. The Metropolitan Police file on the murders of Ethel Christie and the other women at 10 Rillington Place (MEPO 2/9535) covers 1953 to 1965 and is a mixture of open and closed items. Home Office papers on the case (HO 291/228) record that Christie was convicted of murder at the Central Criminal Court on June 25, 1953, sentenced to death and executed on July 15, 1953. The Central Criminal Court's record of Timothy Evans's case (CRIM 1/2035), with a plan and photographs of the washhouse, points to a separate file on his pardon (CRIM 1/2116/157). Related police files are MEPO 2/9617, MEPO 2/10542 and MEPO 3/3147.
Ludovic Kennedy's account dominated for decades. The Council of Law Reporting now calls it "tendentious and dated." The ICLR reviewer criticizes Howard Brenton's 1970 play Christie in Love for reducing the victims to stereotypes. Two recent books have revisited the case. Kate Summerscale's The Peepshow tells it through the work of Harry Procter and of the crime writer Fryn Tennyson Jesse, who covered the trials and whose 1957 volume on Evans and Christie in the Notable British Trials series linked the two cases. Summerscale estimates that about 10,000 women worked as prostitutes in London in 1951, and she places Christie's victims in a city of acute housing shortage, where poor tenants paid high rents for poor rooms. The book has won the Gold Dagger award for nonfiction, the Camden New Journal reported in October 2025.
Summerscale's conclusion about the Evans household is new and contested. The London Review of Books summarizes it as a finding that Christie probably killed Beryl after Evans said he "wanted rid" of her, and then killed Geraldine two days later. Mark Bostridge, reviewing the book in the Spectator, reads it as an argument that Evans was complicit and asked Christie to kill Beryl. Bostridge accepts that Evans was "undoubtedly guilty of past violence" toward his wife but thinks it "highly unlikely we'll ever know" the full truth.
Peter Thorley, Beryl's brother, goes further in his own book, Inside 10 Rillington Place: John Christie and Me. He believes Evans's first confession to the police in Wales was essentially reliable. The Council of Law Reporting's reviewer notes that the book rests on conjecture and childhood memories, and that both official inquiries had seemed designed to support the Evans conviction. Neither book changes the legal record.
Proven by a court: John Reginald Halliday Christie murdered his wife, Ethel Christie, in December 1952. He was convicted at the Central Criminal Court on June 25, 1953, after the jury rejected his insanity defense, and he was executed on July 15, 1953. No appeal by Christie was reported.
Confessed by Christie, never tried: the deaths of Ruth Fuerst, Muriel Eady, Kathleen Maloney, Rita Nelson and Hectorina Maclennan, whose bodies were found at 10 Rillington Place in March 1953, and the death of Beryl Evans in 1949. These are killings he admitted, not murders proven in court.
Never confessed and never tried against Christie: the death of Geraldine Evans. Timothy Evans was convicted of her murder in 1950 and hanged. A High Court judge found in 1966 that he probably did not kill her; he received a free pardon on October 18, 1966; the Divisional Court said in 2004 that it is recognized that he committed neither murder. His conviction has not been quashed, and the count concerning Beryl was never tried.
How many people Christie killed. The bodies of six women were found at 10 Rillington Place in 1953, and he confessed to killing all of them and Beryl Evans. Reviews of Kate Summerscale's book put the total at "at least seven women" and say he may also have killed Geraldine; the Camden New Journal says at least eight. Only one death was ever proved against him.
Who killed Beryl and Geraldine Evans. Official and judicial views have shifted repeatedly: Evans's conviction for Geraldine's murder (1950); Scott Henderson's finding that Evans killed both (1953); Brabin's finding that Evans probably killed Beryl but probably not Geraldine (1966); Lord Brennan's assessment that there was no evidence against Evans for Beryl's death and that she was most probably murdered by Christie (2003), and the High Court's statement that Evans committed neither murder (2004). Summerscale and Thorley each argue for some degree of involvement by Evans. None of these later views is a verdict.
Whether Christie confessed to the child's death. He told Procter in writing that he had not killed her. Summerscale's reading of the files describes a reported rumor that he admitted it to a prison officer and an effort by the Attorney General to suppress the story. No court ever examined that claim.
Ages and dates. First press reports in March 1953 gave Ethel Christie's age as 45 and Kathleen Maloney's as 19; later accounts give 54 and 26. Hectorina Maclennan is given as about 25 (1953), 26 and 27. The London Review of Books records that Muriel Eady disappeared on October 7, 1944. The Yorkshire Post in 1953 dated Christie's marriage to 1930, which conflicts with the 1924 separation that other accounts describe.
Christie's criminal record at the Evans trial. Accounts differ on how much the jury heard about his past convictions in 1950, and the point remains unsettled.
1899: John Reginald Halliday Christie is born in Halifax, Yorkshire.
First World War: serves in the army and is injured in a gas attack.
About 1920: marries Ethel Simpson.
1921: works as a temporary postman in Halifax until this year.
1924: moves to London; he and Ethel live apart until 1934.
1937: moves into 10 Rillington Place, North Kensington.
1939: enrolled as War Reserve Constable X 112 in the Metropolitan Police; his five convictions are not detected.
About 1943: Ruth Fuerst disappears; Christie later admits killing her.
October 7, 1944: Muriel Eady disappears; Christie later admits killing her.
By 1949: Timothy and Beryl Evans and their baby daughter, Geraldine, live in the top-floor flat.
November 1949: Beryl and Geraldine Evans die in the house.
December 1, 5 and 8, 1949: Christie gives three statements at Notting Hill police station.
Early December 1949: Beryl's and Geraldine's bodies are found in the washhouse; Evans confesses on the evening of December 2.
January 13, 1950: Evans is convicted at the Central Criminal Court of murdering Geraldine; the count concerning Beryl is left on the file.
March 9, 1950: Evans is executed after his appeal is dismissed.
December 1952: Christie kills Ethel Christie.
Early 1953: Kathleen Maloney, Rita Nelson and Hectorina Maclennan die in the flat.
March 20, 1953: Christie leaves 10 Rillington Place.
March 24, 1953: Beresford Brown finds three bodies in the kitchen alcove; Ethel and two more women are found in the following days.
March 31, 1953: Christie is arrested near Putney Bridge and charged with his wife's murder.
June 25, 1953: convicted of murder at the Central Criminal Court and sentenced to death.
By July 14, 1953: the Scott Henderson report finds that Evans killed his wife and child.
July 14, 1953: the Speaker rules out a Commons debate before the execution.
July 15, 1953: Christie is executed at Pentonville.
July 29, 1953: Commons debate on the Scott Henderson report.
1954: Rillington Place is renamed Ruston Close.
1957: Fryn Tennyson Jesse's Notable British Trials volume on Evans and Christie.
1961: Ludovic Kennedy publishes Ten Rillington Place.
February 4, 1965: the Home Secretary tells the Commons a new inquiry would serve no purpose.
November 1965 to January 1966: the Brabin inquiry sits.
August 9, 1966: the Brabin report reaches the Home Office; published October 12.
October 18, 1966: Timothy Evans receives a posthumous free pardon.
1971: release of the film 10 Rillington Place.
August 3, 2000: the Home Office decides on an ex gratia payment to Evans's family.
2003: Lord Brennan's assessment finds no evidence against Evans for Beryl's death.
March 23, 2004: the Criminal Cases Review Commission gives its reasons for declining to refer Evans's conviction.
November 17, 2004: the Divisional Court dismisses Mary Westlake's claim.
2024: Kate Summerscale's The Peepshow is published; Peter Thorley's Inside 10 Rillington Place follows.
By October 2025: The Peepshow has won the Gold Dagger award for nonfiction.