On March 24, 1953, a Jamaican jazz musician named Beresford Brown was trying to put up brackets for a radio on the kitchen wall of the ground-floor apartment at 10 Rillington Place, in Notting Hill. He lived upstairs. The man who had lived in the house since 1937, and in the ground-floor rooms since December 1938, had moved out four days earlier, and the landlord had let Brown use the kitchen. The wall sounded hollow. Brown peeled back the wallpaper and found a door to an alcove. Inside were the bodies of three women.
The house was searched that night and for days afterward. Under the floorboards of the front room the police found a fourth woman, wrapped in a blanket: Ethel Christie, fifty-four, the wife of the tenant who had left. In the small yard behind the house they dug up the bones of two more. One thighbone had been propping up the fence. The yard measured about sixteen feet by fourteen, and the fence ran alongside the old wash-house where, three and a half years earlier, the police had found the bodies of a young mother and her baby daughter and had hanged the wrong man for it.
John Reginald Halliday Christie was arrested on the morning of March 31 on the embankment near Putney Bridge, after a constable named Thomas Ledger stopped him and asked who he was. After leaving the house he had booked a room for seven nights at a Rowton House hostel in King's Cross under his own name and address, stayed four, and left on March 24, the day the news broke. For a week he slept rough and sat in cafes and cinemas, and on March 28 he pawned his watch in Battersea for ten shillings. When police searched him, they found among his belongings an old newspaper clipping about the remand of Timothy Evans.
Evans and his wife, Beryl, had moved into the top-floor apartment at Rillington Place at Easter 1948. He was a young Welshman with almost no schooling. Their daughter, Geraldine, was born that October. On November 30, 1949, Evans walked into a police station in Wales and said that his wife was dead. His first account made it plain that he did not know where her body was or how she had died. He said it was down a drain in front of the house. It was not. He then said that Christie had killed her in a botched abortion. Beryl was pregnant again at the time. Only later did the police find Beryl and Geraldine in the wash-house, both strangled, Beryl's body wrapped in a blanket and then a tablecloth, her face bruised from a beating before she died. With her was a sixteen-week male fetus. Evans had not known the baby was dead.
What followed in the London interrogation is the part of the case that has never recovered its reputation. Evans was shown his wife's and daughter's clothing and told where they had been found, information that should have been kept from him. The confessions he then signed contain phrases like "terrific argument," in a register that Ludovic Kennedy and others later argued no distressed, barely educated young man would have used, and that were most likely the police's words. He withdrew them after he was charged and accused Christie again, this time of both killings. Several searches of the house had been made by then. The officers never excavated the yard. Christie said later that his dog dug up Muriel Eady's skull shortly after they left, and that he carried it to a bombed-out house on nearby St. Marks Road and threw it in.
Evans went on trial at the Old Bailey on January 11, 1950, for Geraldine's murder only; the Crown had decided not to proceed on Beryl. Christie was a principal witness for the prosecution. He denied what Evans had said and described the couple's quarrels in detail. His criminal record for theft and violence came out in court, and it made no difference. The police had accepted him, as Kennedy wrote, as one of their own, a former reserve constable whose word they took without much further inquiry. Christie had in fact told a colleague in 1947 that he performed abortions. Evans was convicted. His appeal was dismissed on February 20, and he was hanged at Pentonville on March 9, 1950.
The man whose word had helped hang him was fifty when Evans died. Christie was born in Boothtown, near Halifax in Yorkshire, on April 8, 1899, the sixth of seven children of Ernest John Christie, a carpet designer who punished his children for trivial things and showed them little else. When his grandfather, David Halliday, died in the house in 1911, the boy saw the body laid out on a trestle table and later said it gave him a feeling of power; a man he had feared was now only a corpse. He won a scholarship to Halifax Secondary School and was good at algebra; his IQ was later measured at 128. He enlisted in 1916, was called up in April 1917 to the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Regiment, and went to France the next April as a signalman seconded to the Duke of Wellington's Regiment. He was injured in a mustard-gas attack in June 1918, spent a month in a military hospital at Calais, and afterward claimed the gas had left him blind and mute for three and a half years. Kennedy found no record of the blindness and argued that a soldier who could not speak would never have been passed fit for duty. Between 1921 and 1933 Christie was convicted of stealing postal orders as a postman, of obtaining money by false pretenses, of larceny, of car theft, and of hitting a woman he was living with, Maud Cole, over the head with a cricket bat, an attack a magistrate called murderous.
He had worked for three years as a foreman at the Commodore Cinema in Hammersmith. None of that record was checked in the summer of 1939, when Christie applied to become a War Reserve Constable and the Metropolitan Police, swamped with recruits, took him on. He started on September 1, 1939, at the Harrow Road station, where he began an affair with a woman named Gladys Jones that lasted until her husband, a soldier, came home in 1943, found Christie at the house and beat him. He was still in uniform on August 24, 1943, when, by his own account, he brought home Ruth Fuerst, whom he said he had met soliciting in a snack bar in Ladbroke Grove, while his wife was away visiting relatives and strangled her on his bed with a length of rope. Fuerst was twenty-one, an Austrian working in a munitions plant who sometimes made extra money through prostitution. He hid her under the living-room floor and buried her in the yard the next evening. He resigned from the police on December 28.
His second victim he met at work. Muriel Amelia Eady, thirty-one, was a colleague at a radio factory in Acton where Christie had taken a job as a clerk. On October 7, 1944, he invited her to the apartment with the promise of a special mixture that would ease her bronchitis. She breathed Friar's Balsam through a tube from a jar. Once her back was turned, he ran a second tube into the jar from the gas tap, and the coal gas of the time, about fifteen percent carbon monoxide, put her under. He raped and strangled her and buried her next to Fuerst.
After Evans was hanged, Christie lost the clerk's job he had held since May 1946 at the Post Office Savings Bank in Kew when his record came out, leaving on April 4, 1950, and on June 12 he started as a clerk at the British Road Services depot in Shepherd's Bush. The empty rooms upstairs were let to newly arrived West Indian tenants, whom both Christies resented; Ethel reported one of them for assault, and Christie negotiated through the Poor Man's Lawyer Centre to keep sole use of the back garden, where the bones lay. He lived at Rillington Place with Ethel for nearly three more years. She had been Ethel Simpson, from Bradford. They married at the Halifax register office on May 10, 1920, separated after four years while he drifted in and out of prison in London, and reunited in 1934. He had quit the Shepherd's Bush job on December 6. On the morning of December 14, 1952, he strangled her in their bed. He told one neighbor she was visiting family in Sheffield and another that she had gone to Birmingham, and wrote to her relatives that rheumatism had kept her from writing herself. Three days after her death he sold her wedding ring and watch for two pounds ten shillings. On January 8 he sold the furniture for eleven pounds, keeping a mattress, two chairs, the cutlery and the kitchen table, and from January 23 he drew unemployment benefit. On January 26 he forged her signature to empty her bank account, and in February he sold some of her clothes.
In the seven weeks from January 19 to March 6, 1953, he brought three more women back to the apartment: Rita Nelson on January 19, Kathleen Maloney in February, and Hectorina MacLennan on March 6. Rita Nelson, twenty-five, was from Belfast and was visiting her sister in Ladbroke Grove; she was six months pregnant. Kathleen Maloney, twenty-six, worked the streets around Ladbroke Grove. Hectorina Maclennan, twenty-six, has been described in most accounts as a prostitute too, but she had no record of any kind. She was living in London with her boyfriend, Alex Baker, and Christie, who had met them in a cafe, let the couple stay at Rillington Place while they looked for a room. Then he met her alone, brought her back and killed her. When Baker came to the house looking for her, Christie told him he had not seen her, and for several days afterward he met Baker regularly to ask whether there was news and to help him search.
With the last three he refined the gas. He kept a rubber tube attached to the kitchen gas pipe, closed off with a bulldog clip, seated each woman in the kitchen and released the clip. All three had been exposed to carbon monoxide, although the Brabin inquiry later pointed out that his account of the method could not be right as he told it, since the gas would have overcome him too. When they were drowsy he strangled them with a rope, raping them as they lost consciousness and as they died. He wrapped them in blankets, the way Beryl Evans's body had been wrapped, and put them in the alcove. On March 20 he sublet the apartment to a couple for seven pounds thirteen shillings that were not his to take and walked away.
In custody Christie first admitted only to the four women in the house. When told what had been found in the yard, he admitted those two as well. On April 27 he confessed to killing Beryl Evans. On June 5 he confessed to Fuerst and Eady, which helped the police identify the skeletons. He denied, for the most part, killing Geraldine, though he told a hospital orderly after his trial that he might have. He was tried for one murder, his wife's, beginning on June 22, 1953, in the same court where Evans had been tried. His lawyers pleaded insanity and called him mad as a March hare. The prosecution's witness, Dr. Matheson of Brixton Prison, said he had a hysterical personality but was not insane. The jury took eighty-five minutes. Mr. Justice Finnemore sentenced him to death. He said on June 29 that he would not appeal. On July 2 Timothy Evans's mother wrote asking him to confess everything; on July 8 his member of Parliament, George Rogers, questioned him for forty-five minutes; and the next day he spoke to the Scott Henderson inquiry. The Home Secretary, David Maxwell-Fyfe, found no grounds for a reprieve. His last visitors included an old army friend, Dennis Hague, and his sister, Phyllis Clarke, who both said he seemed resigned. Albert Pierrepoint, who had hanged Evans, hanged Christie at Pentonville at nine o'clock on the morning of July 15, 1953. When Christie, pinioned, complained that his nose itched, Pierrepoint told him it would not bother him for long.
The obvious question, whether two stranglers had really lived in one small house at the same time, was put to an inquiry before Christie died. John Scott Henderson, the Recorder of Portsmouth, took a week, interviewed Christie and some twenty others, and concluded that Evans had been guilty of both murders and that Christie's confession to killing Beryl was a lie told to support his insanity plea. The finding was attacked in Parliament and in the press as rushed and prejudiced, and the case would not go away. Kennedy's book Ten Rillington Place, published in 1961, kept it in front of the public.
A second inquiry, under the High Court judge Sir Daniel Brabin, sat through the winter of 1965 and 1966. Brabin concluded that the truth could no longer be established beyond doubt, that it was more probable than not that Evans had killed his wife, and that it was more probable than not that he had not killed Geraldine, the murder he was hanged for. He also found that no jury could have been satisfied of Evans's guilt beyond reasonable doubt. On October 18, 1966, the question of what to do about it was put down in the House of Commons by George Rogers, the member for North Kensington, the same man who had sat with Christie in Pentonville thirteen years earlier. The Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, told the House that the Queen had signed a free pardon that morning. "This case has no precedent," he said, "and will, I hope and believe, have no successor." When a Conservative member, John Hall, rose to point out that the report still made Evans the probable killer of his wife, members around him called out "No." Jenkins answered that he had to deal with the case on which Evans had been tried, convicted and executed. Michael Foot asked that the House examine how the Scott Henderson report, with its overwhelming evidence of guilt, had ever been put before it. The pardon itself bent the government's own rules: the Home Office then recommended a free pardon only where it was satisfied a person was innocent and had clean hands, and on Brabin's findings, a High Court judge noted in 2004, neither condition could be said to be met. Evans's remains had already been exhumed from Pentonville in 1965 and reburied in St. Patrick's Roman Catholic Cemetery in Leytonstone. Britain had suspended hanging for murder that same year, and the Evans case had been one of the arguments that carried it.
The half-finding on Beryl stood until 2003, when the Home Office paid compensation to Evans's half-sister, Mary Westlake, and his sister, Eileen Ashby. Its independent assessor, Lord Brennan, wrote that the conviction and execution were a miscarriage of justice and that there was no evidence to implicate Evans in his wife's murder. "She was most probably murdered by Christie." In 2004 the High Court, hearing Westlake's challenge to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, acknowledged that Evans had murdered neither his wife nor his child.
Whether Christie killed anyone else is not settled. Among his belongings was a tin holding four separate clumps of pubic hair. He said they came from his wife and the three women in the alcove. Only Ethel's matched. The pathologist Keith Simpson, who examined the victims, pointed out that even if two had come from Fuerst and Eady, one could not have come from any of the women known to have died in the house. No one has ever tried to match it to a missing woman in London. The writer Michael Eddowes argued that a war reserve constable had been perfectly placed to kill more women than were found; the historian Jonathan Oates thinks it unlikely, since every known killing took place where Christie lived. Christie was buried in an unmarked grave inside Pentonville, the prison where Timothy Evans had been buried three years before him and from which Evans was eventually carried home.