This week’s episode was one suggested by one of our lovely patrons, Laura!
It is the story of 10 Rillington Place, one of the most infamous addresses in 1950s London, and the murders which haunted the area for years.
On March 24, 1953, Beresford Brown was attempting to drill into the kitchen wall at 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill, so he could put up a set of brackets to hold a wireless set. But the drill went straight through the wall paper and into nothing. After stripping back the wallpaper, Brown discovered that the paper was disguising a kitchen alcove. Brown lived on the top floor of 10 Rillington Place, but the landlord had allowed him use of the kitchen on the ground floor, which was usually let as part of the ground floor flat. The tenant of the ground floor flat has vanished four days earlier, illegally subletting his flat without informing the landlord, and leaving behind a foul smell.
When Brown ripped away the wallpaper, he found the source of the building’s foul smell: the decomposing bodies of three young women.
The police were informed and during a search of the property they discovered three more bodies, one under the floorboards, and two in the back garden. The search was now on for the original tenant of the ground floor flat at 10 Rillington Place: John “Reg” Christie.
This was not the first time that 10 Rillington Place had been the scene of such horrific murders, nor was it the first time that Reg Christie’s name had been brought up in relation to murder or violent crime. So let’s go back up a few years to when this address first became known as a house of death and murder.
In the spring of 1948, 23-year-old Timothy Evans moved into one of the upper floor flats at 10 Rillington Place with his pregnant wife Beryl, who was 18 at the time. In October 1948 their daughter Geraldine was born. Timothy Evans is described as being of low intelligence, easily led, having missed long periods of schooling due to a childhood injury. The couple lived a fairly hand to mouth existence, so when Beryl fell pregnant again less than a year later, the couple feared that they would not be financially able to support two small children.
The couple fought a lot about their situation, so much so that their neighbours became aware of it, and eventually Beryl decided to terminate her pregnancy.
Now, we’re not entirely sure how but at some point their neighbour Reg Christie, who at the time worked at the National Post Office Savings Bank, offered to perform an abortion for Beryl.
This was 1949, 19 years before abortion would become legal in the UK, so a woman’s options for taking full control over her own body were limited, and back street abortions or dodgy under the counter medication were pretty much the only option for terminating a pregnancy. It’s not really that surprising that Beryl took the opportunity when it was presented to her.
But, things didn’t exactly go to plan, and on November 8, 1949, Timothy Evans came home and Christie told him that Beryl had died during the procedure.
Christie reminded Timothy Evans that everyone was aware of his and Beryl’s fights, that he was a heavy drinker who regularly fought with his wife, not just about her second pregnancy, but about her supposed inability to manage the family’s finances, or what was left of them after he was done drinking. He convinced Evans that the police would point the finger at him if he informed them of his wife’s death.
So, instead of calling the police and telling them that his wife had died during an illegal procedure which had been carried out by their neighbour, Timothy Evans fled London, and returned to his hometown of Merthyr Tydfil in Wales. Before he left, Christie assured Evans that he and his wife Ethel would care for his daughter baby Geraldine and that he would take care of Beryl’s body.
But Evans couldn’t stay away for long. He made frequent trips back to London to check on his baby daughter. Each time Christie assured him that Geraldine was safe and well, but he would never let him see her.
On November 30, Evans went to the police and told them that his wife had died after he gave her a concoction which had been mixed by an unknown man to induce a miscarriage. He went on to tell them that he had disposed of Beryl’s body in the sewer drain outside 10 Rillington Place, he said he had then made arrangements for Baby Geraldine to be looked after before returning to Wales.
Police searched the drains and sewers along Rillington Place but they couldn’t find any trace of Beryl’s body. Evans then changed his story, telling them that Christie had killed Beryl while performing an abortion, and that he only found out when he returned home from work and discovered her dead body in their home. He also told them that Christie had disposed of Beryl’s body. On December 2, 1949, police carried out a search of number 10 Rillington Place and found the bodies of Beryl, Geraldine, and the remains of a 16-week-old foetus.
Both Beryl and Geraldine had been strangled. According to a police statement, Evans confessed to murdering them both. First he said he killed Beryl after an argument and then he killed Geraldine a couple of days later, before he fled to Wales.
Evans recanted his confession and later claimed that his supposed confession had been written by the interviewing officers. Nonetheless, he was arrested. In January 1950 his trial for the murder of his daughter began.
At Evans’s trial Christie was a key witness for the prosecution, as was his wife Ethel, telling the court of the fights he overheard between Timothy and Beryl, as well as Evans’s doubts about his wife’s plan to have an abortion. Evans’s defense team was wholly ineffective and failed to follow up on the inconsistencies in the case, as well as the lack of evidence which pointed to Evans, other than Christie’s witness testimony about the couple’s fights. Although they did highlight Christie’s extensive criminal past in an attempt to discredit his testimony – but we’ll get to that in a bit.
In the end, the jury took just 40 minutes to find Evans guilty of baby Geraldine’s murder, and he was sentenced to death. Although he had been charged with Beryl’s murder, he was never tried in court for it, because under British law at the time there was no need for him to be tried for both crimes.
Evans appealed his conviction in February, reiterating his claims that it was Christie who had killed Beryl and Geraldine, but his appeal failed. On March 9, 1950 he was hanged at Pentonville Prison in London.
During Timothy Evans’s trial it came out that Reg Christie had quite the criminal record, and that violence had been a part of Rillington Place long before Beryl and Geraldine Evans’ brutal murders. So who was this man, this post office clerk whose words were able to send his neighbour to the gallows?
Reg Christie was born John Reginald Halliday Christie in April 1899 just outside of Halifax in West Yorkshire. He was the sixth of seven children. He had a troubled and cold relationship with his father and his mother and sisters alternately coddled and bullied him. He was described as a strange child who kept mostly to himself.
When he was almost 12-years-old, Christie’s grandfather, with whom he also had a troubled relationship, died. Christie allegedly said that the sight of his grandfather lying dead on the trestle table gave him a feeling of power and well-being as a man he had once feared was now only a corpse. From then on he began to associate sex with death, violence, and dominance.
When he started secondary school Christie excelled in Maths and Algebra, he had an IQ of 128, he was a member of the local boy scouts, and he sang in local choirs. But he was always somewhat unpopular, with few friends, and fewer relationships.
As a teenager he discovered he was impotent and his first few attempts at any kind of sexual relationship were disastrous, and owing to local gossip, he became known as “Reggie-No-Dick” and “Can’t-Do-It-Christie.” He also developed hypochondria at some point and often feigned or exaggerated illness to gain attention.
He suffered impotence for the rest of his life and reportedly could only perform sexually with sex workers.
At the age of 17 he enlisted in the British Army and served in the first world war. But in June 1918 he was injured in a mustard gas attack, which left him unable to speak loudly for the rest of his life. Christie also claimed that the attack left him blind and mute for three and a half years, but there was never any record of this and it is suspected that the blindness, mutism, and inability to speak loudly were all a part of Christie’s hypochondria.
He was formally discharged from the army in 1919.
In 1920 Christie married 22-year-old Ethel Simpson, also from Halifax, but it was an unconventional marriage, with Christie regularly engaging the services of sex workers, and there was much local gossip that Ethel only stayed with him out of fear. In 1921 in Halifax, Christie began work as a postman, but just a month later he was convicted for stealing postal orders and served three months in prison.
Two years later he was arrested for violent conduct and obtaining money under false pretenses, for which he received 12 months probation.
Ethel and Christie stayed together for four years but separated when Christie moved to London and Ethel remained in Halifax.
After moving to London in 1924 he was arrested for theft and he served nine months in Wandsworth prison.
After this he kept his head down for a few years, or appeared to at least to we can’t know for sure. But in 1929 he committed his first known violent act against a woman. He had been working as a lorry driver and living with a woman named Maud in Battersea, South London. He hit Maud over the head with a cricket bat in what the magistrate described as a “murderous attack.” Luckily she survived, but for this murderous attack, Christie was sentenced to just six months hard labour at Wandsworth Prison.
In late 1933 he was convicted of car theft after stealing a car from a priest whom he had befriended and served three months in Wandsworth Prison.
Upon his release in 1934, Christie reconciled with Ethel when she moved to London, and the couple moved back in together. Their marriage was just as dysfunctional as it had been in Halifax and Christie continued to cheat on her with sex workers to satisfy his increasingly violent sexual urges.
But he did seem to keep his nose clean for a while and throughout the late 1930s worked for the Commodore Cinema in nearby Hammersmith.
In 1937 the couple moved into the top floor flat at 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill, and the following year moved into a larger flat on the ground floor of the building. Notting Hill may now be a fairly well-off, affluent area of London, known for its carnival and markets, but for much of the 20th century it was quite a run down area filled mostly with slums, and cheap tenement buildings in poor states of repair.
10 Rillington Place was a three story, end-terrace property, which, like most tenement buildings in the 1930s, only had one shared outdoor toilet in the communal backyard, and the flats on the upper floors were comprised of a private bedroom and living room, and a shared kitchen space between all the flats on each floor. The ground floor flat which Christie and Ethel moved into did however have its own kitchen. None of the flats had any kind of bathroom.
When war broke out in 1939, Christie joined the War Reserve Police – which was a voluntary branch within the British Police. Due to his quite comprehensive criminal record, Christie should not have been admitted into the police, but possibly because they had other things on their minds at the beginning of the second world war, and possibly because they needed all the men they could get, the force didn’t bother running any of the usual background checks on Christie and he was admitted straight into the force, where he served until 1943.
During his time in the War Police, Christie began an affair with a woman who worked at the Harrow Road station where he worked. The woman’s husband was a soldier who was fighting in Europe. The soldier found out about this affair and beat Christie senseless.
It was shortly after the end of this affair that Christie committed his first known murder.
In August 1943 he murdered 21-year-old Austrian munitions worker Ruth Fuerst. Ruth occasionally supplemented her income with sex work, and given Notting Hill’s reputation as a run down, poverty stricken area, sex work was not uncommon. And this is how her path crossed with Christie’s.
After soliciting her services in a bar in Notting Hill, Christie invited Ruth back to his home on Rillington Place. Ethel was away visiting relatives at the time. Christie later claimed in a confession that he and Ruth had consensual sex, but the validity of this hasn’t been verified. After they had sex, he impulsively decided to strangle her with rope as she lay on the bed. He then hid her body under the floorboards at 10 Rillington Place, but then changed his mind and the next night he buried her in the backyard.
This is referred to as Christie’s first known murder, because his killing streak lasted 10 years and there is only his word that there were no other victims before Ruth. However, modern commentators suspect that he may have committed earlier murders but been able to cover them up or point the finger at someone else during his time in the police force.
The other reason he may have been able to get away with murder is that there was a war on. Ruth was a young girl, far from home, with nobody really looking out for her in London, and when her loved ones back in Austria stopped hearing from her, they assumed that she had died in one of the many bombings that took place in London during 1943. So, sadly, nobody was looking for her, nobody was really looking for murderers in places like London during the second world war, disappearances were pretty much always chalked up as victims of the war.
A few months after murdering Ruth, in late 1943, Christie resigned from the police force, and in 1944 he took up a job at a radio factory in Acton, West London. This was where he met his second victim, Muriel Eady.
In October 1944 Muriel was suffering from Bronchitis and Christie being the kind co-worker that he was offered to help her with a homemade treatment he had concocted. He invited Muriel back to his home and gave her this treatment, which was a type of mixture which Muriel was to inhale by placing a mask over her face which was connected via a pipe to a jar of this mixture. What Muriel didn’t know was that a second pipe had been connected to this jar and that she was also inhaling domestic gas fumes.
In the 1940s domestic gas was derived from coal gas, also known as Town Gas, which has a very high carbon monoxide content, and so, Muriel quickly fell unconscious. There are a few versions of what happened next, or rather different orders of events. After falling unconscious Muriel was strangled by Christie and raped, but accounts differ on whether he sexually assaulted her before or after her death, or whether he strangled her while raping her. After killing her, he buried her body in the backyard of 10 Rillington Place next to Ruth Fuerst.
After murdering Muriel, Christie once again seemed to keep his nose clean for a few years. After the war he got a job at the Post Office Savings Bank and seemed to live quite a normal life. That was until 1948 when Timothy and Beryl Evans moved into one of the upper floor flats at 10 Rillington Place. Christie did appear to be a normal, average neighbour to the Evanses and nobody suspected that he had buried the bodies of two young women in the backyard. But when he overheard his young neighbours arguing about Beryl’s pregnancy and whether or not they could afford to raise two children, he took the opportunity to insert himself into their lives.
Because, if you haven’t realised, Timothy Evans was indeed telling the truth when he accused Christie of murdering his wife and daughter.
Christie offered to perform an abortion for Beryl, but instead he gassed her with domestic gas in the same way that he did Muriel, and he then assaulted her and strangled her to death before committing sexual acts upon her dead body.
After convincing Timothy Evans to flee and return to his hometown in Wales, promising to care for baby Geraldine, Christie also strangled her, and hid the two bodies in the communal wash house at 10 Rillington Place.
When Timothy Evans was found guilty of Geraldine’s murder, Christie
broke down in tears in the middle of the court room, it is speculated that it could have been out of guilt not only for murdering Beryl and Geraldine but also for an innocent man being sentenced to death, or more likely, relief that he had got away with murder.
In hindsight, a number of questions were raised as to how good a job police actually did when they were searching for Beryl and Geraldine’s bodies, because the garden was approximately four metres square, yet they missed the two bodies that were buried in the garden. One of them wasn’t even buried that well. A femur bone had been dug up by a dog which belonged to one of the tenants and instead of reburying it, Christie just used it to prop up a fence post which had begun to lean over slightly. Christie’s dog also dug up Muriel’s skull and he disposed of it in a nearby building which had been bombed out during the war and not yet demolished.
If the garden been properly examined and excavated and if Christie’s flat had been searched police would have been able to connect him to the four murders and four more lives could have been saved.
Following Timothy Evans’s trial, Christie lost his job because he had not disclosed his previous convictions. He became depressed and quickly burned through his and Ethel’s savings. In August of that year he found a job as a clerk at the British Road Services’ Shepherd’s Bush depot, and things went quiet again for a few years.
Following the murders of Beryl and Geraldine Evans there was a bit of a revolving door of tenants at 10 Rillington Place, most of whom were a part of the Windrush Generation (which we discussed in more detail in our episode about the murder of Stephen Lawrence) and the Christies were not quiet in their racism.
Ethel Christie reported other tenants for assault and theft, some cases went to court, others were dismissed, and they even engaged the services of the Poor Man’s Lawyer Centre to ensure that they had exclusive access to the communal outdoor space. Now, some sources say that this was so that they could ensure space between them and their new neighbours who they vehemently hated, but others say that it was so that there was no chance of anyone discovering the bodies of Ruth and Muriel which were still buried there.
But in 1952, Christie went back to his murderous ways, but this time he wasn’t targeting foreign workers or loose acquaintances who wouldn’t be traced back to him.
At the beginning of December Christie quit his job at the British Road Services depot, telling his boss that he had found a better job in Sheffield and that he and Ethel would soon be returning to Yorkshire.
On the morning of December 14, 1952 Christie strangled his wife Ethel in bed, and he told a lot of lies to keep anyone from realising that Ethel was dead. With neighbours and acquaintances in London he stuck to the story that the couple were returning to Yorkshire, he said that Ethel had left London first to set up their new home and that he would be following on in the new year. For family and loved ones back in Halifax he wrote letters telling them that Ethel was suffering with rheumatism so she wasn’t able to write her own letters any more. He continued corresponding with Ethel’s friends and family for the next few months, maintaining the pretense that Ethel’s pain was too severe and debilitating for her to write her own letters. But by February 1953 he stopped responding to letters.
In reality Christie had hidden Ethel’s body beneath the floorboards of the kitchen at 10 Rillington Place.
Christie’s neighbours began to complain of bad smells coming from the ground floor flat, so he began treating the entire flat with very strong disinfectants to cover the smell of his wife’s decomposing body below the floorboards. In the days following her murder he sold Ethel’s wedding ring and watch to a local pawn brokers shop, and in early Janaury he sold almost all of their possessions leaving himself just three chairs and a mattress.
Between January 19 and March 6, 1953, Christie committed three more murders. Sadly we don’t know a lot about them, or even exactly when they died because in all of the sources kind of group these three women together almost like a footnote in Reg Christie’s crimes, but we’ll do our best here.
Around January 19 Christie invited 25-year-old Rita Nelson to his flat. Rita was from Belfast and was visiting her sister who lived in the nearby neighbourhood of Ladbroke Grove, she was also six months pregnant. We don’t know the exact circumstances in which she met Christie but at some point he invited her back to his flat where he exposed his victims to carbon monoxide and when they began drowsy he repeatedly raped and then strangled them, not always in that order. Christie claimed in his confession that he had modified the gassing technique for his final three victims, claiming to have leaked gas into the kitchen but this would have also exposed him to the carbon monoxide and most likely incapacitated him as well. Although his explanation of how he gassed his victims was disputed, it was agreed that he had exposed them to carbon monoxide in some way so that they would pass out.
Christie hid Rita’s body in the alcove in the kitchen at 10 Rillington Place.
Sometime in February 1953, Christie met 26-year-old sex worker Kathleen Malony from Southampton who was living in the Ladbroke Grove area of Notting Hill. Once she was back at 10 Rillington Place, Christie gassed her before raping and strangling her, he then hid her body in the kitchen alcove along with Rita’s.
In February Christie met 26 -year-old Hectorina McLennon and her boyfriend Alex Baker in London. They quickly seemed to strike up something of a friendship and Christie even offered them a place to stay while they looked for a flat of their own.
One day in early March Christie met up with Hectorina alone and he invited her back to Rillington Place where he raped and strangled her. He hid her body in the alcove alongside Rita and Kathleen. Hectorina’s boyfriend Alex came to Rillington Place a few days later, asking Christie if he’d seen her, Christie claimed he hadn’t and for the next couple of weeks he met up with Alex multiple times asking him if he’d found her yet. Eventually Alex assumed that Hectorina had just decided to leave without telling him and return to her native Scotland.
Most sources estimate Hectorina’s death as taking place on March 6. Christie stayed in the flat at 10 Rillington Place, with three bodies in the alcove and one under the floorboards, for the next two weeks, but then he decided to leave.
You see Christie just couldn’t stand living in the same building or even street or neighbourhood as black people for any longer. So on March 20, he sublet his flat, illegally, to a young family, charging them three months rent up front only for the landlord to find out and throw them out the next day.
In the two weeks since he’d killed Hectorina, Christie had papered over the alcove in the kitchen so it appeared to be a solid wall, although there was no disguising the smell of decomposing bodies.
Four days after Christie disappeared, top floor resident Beresford Brown tried to drill into what he believed was a wall in the kitchen but was actually just where the alcove had been papered over to hide the bodies, and discovered the source of the foul smell at 10 Rillington Place. And we’re back to where we started.
Christie was hiding out in a hostel in Kings Cross but when the news reported on the discovery of the bodies at 10 Rillington Place he fled. He was found a week later near Putney Bridge and initially denied being Reg Christie. But after checking over documents in his possession, police confirmed his identity and arrested him.
During police questioning Christie confessed to the murders of Rita, Kathleen and Hectorina, as well as his wife Ethel. But the police continued to search 10 Rillington Place and they eventually discovered the skeletal remains of Ruth and Muriel. When confronted with this discovery, Christie admitted responsibility for their murders too. During later questioning he confessed to Beryl’s murder too, but always denied murdering Baby Geraldine.
Christie’s trial began at London’s Old Bailey on June 22 1953, he pled insanity and claimed to have no memory of the events in question. But the jury didn’t buy it and after just 85 minutes deliberation they found him guilty in the exact same court where Timothy Evans had been found guilty three years earlier. He was only tried for the murder of his wife Ethel, and not for the other seven murders he committed.
Christie didn’t appeal his sentence and on July 15 he was executed at Pentonville Prison.
An inquiry was launched to determine whether or not Christie was responsible for Beryl and Geraldine’s deaths. The inquiry found that Evans was guilty of both murders and Christie had only confessed to try and bolster his claims that he was insane.
There was a 12 year campaign to clear Evans’s name, and eventually, in 1965 he received a royal pardon. When convicts were hanged, part of the punishment was to be buried in an unmarked grave within the prison walls. Following Evans’s royal pardon, his body was exhumed and he was reburied in a Roman Catholic cemetery in Leystone, London.
In 2003 Evans’s sister and half sister were awarded compensation for his wrongful execution, and Evans’s case was referred to the court of appeals with the hopes that it would be quashed and he declared innocent. However, because of the time and money involved in such a process this didn’t happen but the Home Office have accepted that given the evidence they believe Timothy Evans was innocent.
The execution of Timothy Evans did have another lasting legacy. It was one of three highly publicised cases that helped lead to the abolition of the death penalty in the UK. The death penalty was abolished in the UK with the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965, which suspended the death penalty for five years. In 1969 the Act was made permanent and the death penalty was abolished for good in England, Scotland and Wales. In Northern Ireland the death penalty was still used in murder convictions until 1973.
FURTHER READING:
John Christie Crime Files (C+I)
Serial Killer John Christie And The Tragic Execution Of Timothy Evans
Rillington Place: What John Christie’s residential burial ground looks like now
Notting Hill MURDER: Part 1 | Murder Maps (Crime History)| S02E04 | True Crime Documentary
Notting Hill MURDER: Part 2 | Murder Maps (Crime History)| S02E04 | True Crime Documentary
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