New evidence ‘proves’ innocent man was hanged for Rillington Place murders

Late on March 24, 1953, star crime reporter Harry Procter pulled up outside 10 Rillington Place.

The bodies of three women had been found sealed up in a wall inside one of the dingy Victorian terraces in Notting Hill, with another hidden under the floorboards.

While chatting with one of the officers guarding the door, Proctor remembered visiting three years earlier and interviewing the man police were now hunting – John Reginald Halliday Christie.

Back then he had been sent to speak with him after another tenant, Timothy Evans, was accused of murdering his wife Beryl and baby daughter Geraldine.

He encountered Christie again during Evans’s trial at the Old Bailey, in which the mild-mannered clerk in the horn-rimmed glasses was the star witness who helped send his neighbour to the gallows.

Proctor – like the other reporters covering the case – was convinced it was simply another domestic tragedy.

But the discovery of more bodies inside the house now raised some disturbing questions. Was there a serial killer at work inside 10 Rillington Place? And did he frame an innocent man?

The grim tale of the Christie murders, recounted in countless books, documentaries and dramas in the 70 years since, is revisited once again by bestselling true crime author Kate Summerscale – who has unearthed astonishing evidence suggesting a new solution to one of the UK’s most notorious cases.

Speaking to Metro ahead of the release of The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place last week, Summerscale said the case ‘has the status of a kind of myth or fable in my mind’.

‘When I started researching it, I couldn’t even remember the murderer’s name,’ she says.

‘It was all quite vague in my mind, but it seemed like a sort of founding story about a man who chose to kill women.

‘I wanted to write such a story because of some of the things that were going on now – the Sarah Everard abduction and murder, and there were two sisters who were murdered the previous year, Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry.

‘It just struck me, you know, why did some men specifically target women, women who were strangers to them? And Christie was a very extreme example of this, whose crimes haunted the 1950s and beyond.’

The narrative centres on Proctor, the Sunday Pictorial’s chief reporter determined to prove Christie murdered Evans’s wife and daughter, and Fryn Tennyson Jesse, eager to restore her reputation by covering the case for the prestigious Notable British Trials series of books.

‘They both followed the case closely as it unfolded and were both kind of driven by a desire to not only understand Christie and what happened in his house to the women he murdered, but to work out whether he was also guilty of the murder of Beryl and Geraldine Evans in 1949, for which his upstairs neighbour had hanged,’ Summerscale says.

‘And by having them – one a tabloid reporter, one a rather grander writer – I felt like I could try to get close to the investigation as it developed and to, as it were, be live on the scene with them.

‘Part of the reason the book is called The Peepshow is because Christie was a voyeur. He took pornographic photos of women, he spied on his neighbours, but also Harry Proctor and Fryn Tennyson Jesse were supremely inquisitive about him as they needed to be.

‘And to write about it at all – as I do too – is to risk taking part in that voyeuristic culture and so it’s a sort of nod to that in some ways. Any recital of true crimes has some of that quality to it, a sort of echo of Christie’s voyeurism.’

She describes in the book how Christie ‘made himself almost invisible’, with Jesse writing at the time how ‘in his neat but shabby clothes he had complete protective colouring’.

‘He was the image of an ordinary Englishman,’ Summerscale says of ‘the man of a thousand doubles’.

‘When the police launched a manhunt for him when they found the bodies in his house, his picture was published in the papers and there were hundreds of reported sightings of him from all over the country.

‘Everyone thought they saw him because he just looked like everyone. He looked like every middle-aged Englishman.

‘So that was particularly scary for the period when he was on the loose because you suspected everyone of being Christie. But it was also sort of symbolically scary that somebody who looked so normal – and indeed kind of old fashioned – was capable of this violence and deceit.’

The book takes a forensic look at Christie’s crimes and the horrific methods he employed to carry them out without straying into gratuity or salaciousness like some other true crime accounts.

When it comes to the women he murdered – Ruth Fuerst, Muriel Eady, Beryl Evans, wife Ethel Christie, Rita Nelson, Kathleen Maloney and Hectorina MacLennan – the focus is very much on their lives rather than how they met their deaths.

‘It was very important to me to try to understand who they were individually rather than think of them in some category of destitute or impoverished women,’ Summerscale says.

‘And scattered among the huge dossier of information on these murders in the National Archives are actually quite a lot of details about their lives, so it was a question of looking for those details and piecing them together.

‘There were letters from mothers, there were photographs, there were lots of statements from landladies, friends, lovers. And so I did what I could, also using digital resources, to try to reconstruct their lives, their histories, their personalities.

‘The terrible thing is that if it hadn’t been for the fact they were murdered, they would have left even less trace.

‘People who were this marginal, their lives were not recorded on the whole. So as well as being frustrated at not being able to be more complete and not being able to know more about them, I recognised that I was lucky to have this. This was a way of getting at the social history at the time of individual lives rather than generalities.

‘So it was very important and rewarding actually to do that work.’

Summerscale also highlights the virulent racism which was so rife in London – and indeed inside 10 Rillington Place which the Christies shared with several West Indian residents – at the time.

‘In a way the tensions in the household seemed a sort of foreshadowing of the violence that broke out five years later in the Notting Hill riots,’ she adds.

‘A lot of anxieties about immigration, about sexually independent women, seem to be brought to light in this case.’

Her methodical research also unearthed a hitherto little noticed document released relatively recently with thousands of others which could just cast the case in a whole new light.

‘When Tim Evans was tried, he accused Christie of having killed his wife and daughter,’ she says.

‘But Tim Evan had already made a detailed confession to their murders. So it was an extremely confusing situation on the face of it.

‘But the jury absolutely believed Christie because he seemed sort of frail and respectable and they couldn’t think of what motive he might have for murdering another man’s wife and child.

‘In court he played heavily on his record as a serviceman. He’d been a solider in the First World War and then he’d served as a police officer in the Second World War, so his credentials could hardly have been higher in terms of traditional values of society.

‘So that helped take all the suspicion away from him. And indeed, when Harry Proctor interviewed him at 10 Rillington Place in 1949 he was swayed by the same things. It didn’t cross his mind that this man might be a murderer.

‘The suspicion that Christie might have been the true murderer of Beryl and Geraldine Evans set in pretty much as soon as he was arrested.

‘But the police were eager to play down this possibility because it would have cast their original investigation of the Evans murders in a bad light. They’d been convinced that Tim Evans did it and secured the conviction, so it would also have cast the courts in a bad light.

‘It would have been an absolutely shocking miscarriage of justice if this young man, this 25-year-old van driver, had been executed when he was innocent.

‘So I did find myself wanting to work out what I thought happened and I was really astonished to come across this document that gave an explanation that I hadn’t encountered before.

‘It wasn’t made available to those who reported on the case at the time, and so it was effectively suppressed.’

Summerscale suggests the government ‘recognised it would be really explosive’ and lend huge support to those campaigning for an end to the death penalty.

‘Certainly those people high up must have recognised that it was plausible, otherwise they wouldn’t have bothered keeping it secret.’

The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place by Kate Summerscale is published by Bloomsbury and is on sale now for £22.

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