John Reginald Halliday Christie was born in Halifax, Yorkshire, on April 8, 1899. He was gassed and injured in the First World War, and afterwards claimed a period of mutism. He accumulated convictions for theft and for assaulting a woman, and in 1938 moved with his wife Ethel into the ground floor flat at 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill. During the Second World War, with his record unchecked, he served as a War Reserve police constable, which gave him a uniform and an authority he used.
He killed Ruth Fuerst in 1943 and Muriel Eady in 1944 and buried them in the garden. His method with Eady set the pattern: he offered a remedy for her catarrh, a jar and tubing rigged to a coal gas pipe, and gassed her into unconsciousness before strangling her and having intercourse with the body.
In November 1949 Beryl Evans and her fourteen-month-old daughter Geraldine were killed in the house. Beryl's husband Timothy, a semi-literate lorry driver with a low IQ, went to police in Wales, made a series of contradictory statements, and was tried for Geraldine's murder. Christie was the chief prosecution witness. Evans was convicted and hanged at Pentonville on March 9, 1950.
Christie killed his wife Ethel in December 1952 and put her under the front room floorboards, telling relatives she had gone to Sheffield and forging her handwriting. In the first three months of 1953 he killed Rita Nelson, Kathleen Maloney and Hectorina MacLennan, and walled the three bodies into an alcove behind the kitchen. He then sublet the flat and left.
On March 24, 1953, a new tenant stripping the kitchen wall to put up brackets found the alcove. Christie was picked up on Putney Bridge on March 31. He was tried at the Old Bailey in June for his wife's murder alone, ran an insanity defence, and was convicted in eighty-five minutes. He was hanged at Pentonville on July 15, 1953.
He admitted killing Beryl Evans and, at various points, denied and admitted killing Geraldine. The obvious conclusion, that a man who had already been hanged on Christie's word was innocent, was resisted for years. The Brabin inquiry of 1966 produced the peculiar finding that Evans probably killed his wife but not his daughter, and since the conviction had been for the daughter, Evans was granted a posthumous royal pardon that year. The Court of Appeal declined to quash the conviction outright in 2004. Most historians of the case regard Evans as innocent of both. The affair did more than any other single case to end capital punishment in Britain, which was suspended in 1965.