On the evening of Tuesday March 24, 1953, Harry Procter, the star crime reporter of the Sunday Pictorial newspaper, drove to a Victorian terrace in Notting Hill, a then rundown area of London. Disturbingly, the bodies of three young women had been discovered. They were rumoured to have died accidentally in botched back-street abortions. But Procter thought the story worth checking out anyway. He turned into Rillington Place, parked his car and switched off the headlights.
No 10, a house divided into flats, was the last building on the left. A police constable stood guard at the front door.
Detectives told Procter that the first body had been discovered that afternoon by a tenant who was cleaning the kitchen in the ground-floor flat. He had torn a hole in the wallpaper as he tried to fix a shelf and in the shadows behind he saw what seemed to be the bare back of a woman.
The police came quickly. They ripped off the wallpaper and lifted out a body, only to find the corpse of another young woman beneath it, and behind that a third.
When they pulled up the floorboards in the front room, they discovered the corpse of a fourth woman. She was identified by a neighbour as Ethel Christie, a middle-aged housewife who had lived in the flat for 15 years.
Her husband, John Reginald Halliday Christie, known as Reg, had gone missing a few days earlier after subletting the flat. He was an accounts clerk and a former policeman, described by neighbours as the poshest resident of the street. He immediately became the chief suspect.
Ethel Christies husband John Reginald Halliday Christie (pictured), known as Reg, had gone missing a few days before her body was found after subletting the flat
Procter realised, with a shock, that he had not only been to 10 Rillington Place before, but had met the man the police were now seeking. A few years earlier, as a reporter for the Daily Mail, he had been sent to interview Christie when another tenant of the building, Timothy Evans, was charged with the murders of his own wife and child.
Back then, late one December evening in 1949, he had knocked at the front door of No 10. After a few minutes a balding, bespectacled figure opened the door. Im Mr Christie, he said, holding out a clammy hand for Procter to shake. He led him down the hall and through a door into his kitchen. Sit you down, said Christie. He put a tin kettle on the stove. I know you reporters like something stronger, he said, but I can only offer you tea.
Procter asked Christie about the murders of his neighbours. Christie said he and his wife had been friendly with Tim and Beryl Evans, a young couple who had rented the top-floor flat of No 10 for the past year.
He had been horrified, he said, to learn a few days previously that the bodies of Beryl and their 13-month-old baby, Geraldine, had been found in a washhouse in the back yard. Evans had briefly accused Christie himself of killing Beryl, but had since made a detailed confession to strangling both his wife and his daughter.
Christie asked the journalist: Who do you think murdered Mrs Evans and her baby? He seemed nervy, Procter thought, almost ingratiating.
Procter saw Christie again a few weeks later, at Evanss trial for the murder of his baby daughter Geraldine at the Old Bailey. This was an era during which suspects could be charged for only one murder at a time. The prosecution opted for the baby. In court, Evans reverted to his original story that it was Christie who had killed both Beryl and baby Geraldine. He even claimed that Beryl, who was four months pregnant, had been killed during a botched back-street abortion performed by Christie, who was rumoured to carry out such illegal procedures in his home.
Ethel Christie and John Reginald Halliday depicted by Samantha Morton and Tim Roth in the BBCs 2016 programme Rillington Place
But the jury did not believe him. There seemed no reason for Christie to have killed another mans wife and child, nor for Evans to have made a false confession.
Evans, aged 25, was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. He was hanged at Pentonville prison in London in March 1950.
The few crime reporters who attended the trial, recalled Procter, had dismissed the Evans killings as an open-and-shut case of domestic violence that would quickly be forgotten. But things looked different now. The latest, horrific discoveries at Rillington Place suggested that a serial killer of women was at large in London. They also hinted at a terrible miscarriage of justice.
For decades, theories have abounded about what really happened at 10 Rillington Place, but having uncovered new evidence, I believe I may have found a solution to the mystery.
London was abuzz with news of the hunt for Reg Christie. Every hour he is at liberty, the police warned, the life of a girl or a woman in any part of the country may suddenly come to a terrible end. They hinted that Christie had sexually assaulted his victims: If the murderer is not caught, there is nothing to stop him carrying out his bestial practices.
The ground floor flat at 10 Rillington Place was dismantled by police. In the small back garden, a band of officers dug up the path and shrubs. Dr Francis Camps, chief pathologist at the London Hospital in Whitechapel, stood puffing on his pipe as he selected items to be sent to the laboratory at New Scotland Yard.
Timothy Evans, pictured under guard of the police, was convicted and later hanged for the murder of his wife
He recognised human bones among the finds; one of them had been propping up a broken fence. They would later be identified as those of two more young women.
After a week-long manhunt, Christie was arrested when a police officer spotted him loitering near Putney Bridge.
When Procter read a copy of the confession Christie gave police, he noticed that they had asked him nothing about the killings of Beryl and Geraldine Evans in 1949. Scotland Yard, keen to rule out any suggestion that the police had made mistakes in that investigation, told the press there was no connection between the two cases.
Procter, remembering his meeting with Christie that December night, was not so sure.
Christies trial for the murder of his wife Ethel began at the Old Bailey on June 22, 1953, with the Attorney General, Sir Lionel Heald QC, prosecuting.
Heald asked Detective Inspector Albert Griffin, who led the Christie investigation, if he had any reason to believe that the wrong man had been hanged for the murder of Geraldine Evans.
None, said Griffin, firmly.
Derek Curtis-Bennett QC, for the defence, said he intended to show that Christies murders had been impulsive and chaotic. My case is insanity, he told the court. If proved, this could earn Christie a reprieve from the death penalty.
Christie had been as mad as a March hare when he killed Ethel, said Curtis-Bennett. He added that Christie had sexually assaulted several of his victims while they were dying, and had showed signs of deviance with his wife Ethel, whose pubic hair he had cut off and stored in a tin.
Questioned by Curtis-Bennett about the death of Beryl Evans, Christie sensationally claimed before the packed court that it had in fact been he who strangled her, after gassing her, and Tim Evans who disposed of the body.
Jodie Comer as Beryl Evans and Nico Mirallegro as Timothy Evans in the BBCs 2016 programme Rillington Place
Did you kill the baby Geraldine? asked Curtis-Bennett. No, said Christie.
Heald got to his feet again. Mr Christie, he said, you have given evidence twice on oath about Mrs Evans. On one occasion you swore you did not kill her, and on the other occasion you swore you did kill her. That is right, is it not?
It cant be right, said Christie.
How do you expect the jury to believe you? asked Heald. Christie did not reply.
The Attorney General, Procter noticed, was determined to undermine Christies claim to have killed Beryl, because it cast doubt on the conviction of Timothy Evans.
The jury at Christies trial returned a guilty verdict. He was to face the hangmans noose for murdering his wife.
Watching from the packed press benches, Harry Procter was bitterly disappointed. Now that Christie had been sentenced to death, there was hardly any time left to discover what Procter believed was the truth: that Timothy Evans was innocent. At Pentonville prison, Christie told one of his guards that he was appalled by the suggestion that he had murdered a child.
He killed for only one reason, he said, implying that his motive was lust.
While having a bath at the prison, according to the guard, Christie took hold of his penis and boasted: You can see why the women came down to Rillington Place.
This bravado almost certainly masked a deep sexual inadequacy. It had emerged during the trial that Christie had struggled with impotency since his teenage years, when friends gave him the nickname No dick Reggie.
Calls to reopen the Evans case were growing following Christies trial. On July 6, 1953 the Home Secretary, David Maxwell Fyfe, announced that he had appointed J. Scott Henderson QC to head an immediate private inquiry. Its conclusions, though not its contents, were published a week later. There was no evidence, said Scott Henderson, to support Christies claim to have killed Beryl Evans.
Christies account of her death, said Henderson, was not only unreliable but untrue. He supposed that Christie had claimed her murder only to bolster his insanity defence, in the hope of a reprieve on mental health grounds.
The evidence against Tim Evans, on the other hand, was overwhelming. He upheld Evanss conviction for Geraldines murder. Two days later Christie was hanged.
But the controversy refused to go away. In November 1965 Harold Wilsons Labour government appointed Daniel Brabin, a High Court judge, to conduct another inquiry. Late in 1966 Brabin published his findings.
Nico Mirallegro as Timothy Evans in the BBCs Rillington Place
He concluded, to the surprise of many, that it was more probable than not that Tim Evans had beaten and strangled Beryl on November 8, 1949, that Christie had helped him to hide the corpse – perhaps because he did not want a police investigation that might uncover the bodies in the garden – and that Christie then killed baby Geraldine to further conceal Beryls death.
In effect, Brabin argued that Tim Evans had been hanged for the wrong murder. Since Evans had been convicted of Geraldines killing, the Queen granted him a posthumous free pardon in October 1966.
Evanss mother and sisters continued to campaign on his behalf. In 2004, the Criminal Cases Review Commission accepted that Evans was innocent of killing either his wife or his child.
Most works inspired by the case adopted the same narrative, including the BBC drama series Rillington Place in 2016: Evanss wrongful conviction was held up as a cautionary tale about the way that the justice system might fail. However, some still believed Evans to be guilty, including Beryl Evanss youngest brother, Peter Thorley, who in 2020 recalled how unhappy his sister had been in the autumn of 1949.
Beryl had showed her then 15-year-old brother the bruises that Evans inflicted on her. Every time I went to visit her and my sweet niece, wrote Peter, I could sense the hatred in the house.
Harry Procter, meanwhile, continued to insist that Christie was guilty of the Evans murders. To Christie, wrote Procter, killing a woman represented a sexual triumph. It was this, Procter believed, that had stopped him from confessing to the murder of baby Geraldine: hers was the one killing that shamed him.
SO what really happened at Rillington Place? In the vast repository of material on the cases at the National Archives in London, I came across a buried memo that suggested a different solution to the mystery of Beryl and Geraldines murders. It came from guard Joseph Roberts, a medically trained warder at Brixton Prison. He was with Christie in the dock when the death sentence was passed. He then led him down to the cells.
As Christie waited for the van to take him to Pentonville, he offered to tell Roberts something that might be important. If the police only knew, he said, they could also charge me with the murder of Evanss baby girl.
Roberts asked if he had killed her. Christie responded at first with his habitual vagueness – More or less as far as I remember, but they cant do anything about it now – but then gave a brusque, perfunctory account of the events of that week in 1949. Christie said that Tim Evans had asked him to do in Beryl because she was in the way, so he had killed her while Evans was at work. Since the little girl kept crying, he said, he had to do her in as well in case the noise of her cries alerted others.
Beryl Evans played by Jodie Comer and Timothy Evans played by Nico Mirallegro in the BBCs Rillington Place
Roberts warned Christie that he would pass this information on to his superiors. Why dont you tell the newspapers, said Christie, and make some money out of me? Roberts did not sell the story, but he sent a memo detailing his conversation with Christie to Dr John Matheson, Brixton prisons chief medical officer. Matheson forwarded it to the Home Secretary. But that memo was suppressed by members of the then Conservative government and was hidden from public view for decades.
For Christie to admit to the childs murder would be dynamite, renewing calls for a public inquiry into Evanss conviction and bolstering the case for the abolition of capital punishment.
A group of Labour MPs had already tabled a Bill to suspend the death penalty for five years. During the debate on this Bill, the government refused to confirm receipt of a report from a prison officer. The Bill was defeated by 256 votes to 195. The death penalty for murder was eventually abolished in 1969. Christie was the last serial killer to be put to death by the state.
The repressed memo was preserved in the Home Office archives, however, and, when the 40-year embargo on the Christie files was lifted in 1993, it was transferred to the public archives, where I discovered it.
In his statement to Roberts – so careless, indifferent, matter-of-fact – Christie may at last have been telling the truth.
At the moment that he believed his fate was sealed, that he was a condemned man, he had for the first time provided a story about the Evans murders that did not serve his interests. Now, when he had nothing to lose, he was describing a contract killing – and claiming to have murdered a baby to save his own skin.
The story that Christie told Roberts at first seems improbable – what would have prompted Evans to ask his neighbour to kill his wife? But it had been established throughout the investigation that Evans and Beryl had been quarrelling in the days before her death, and that Evans had hit her in the past.
Perhaps, while drunk and furious, Evans had told Christie that he wanted rid of her. Perhaps Christie offered to do her in for him. When Evans got back from work on that Tuesday, he may have been shocked to find that Christie had gone through with the murder – he likely did not know that his neighbour had killed before, nor that he took sexual pleasure in doing so.
If Christie then murdered Geraldine, in case her cries aroused suspicion, Evans may have felt complicit in both deaths, and bound to Christie by their secret. If this, or something like it, was how the murders unfolded, Tim Evanss conflicting statements – admitting guilt and then changing his story – make more sense.
He may have been in despair at what he had set in motion, and he knew that Christie would not be a credible suspect in murders for which he had no motive.
Tell Christie I want to see him, Evans had said to his mother when he was awaiting trial in Brixton. He is the only one who can help me now.
When Evans realised that Christie was not going to intervene, he made a last, desperate bid to save himself. Christie done it, he told his family and his lawyers.
This was the truth – if not the whole truth. In the Old Bailey, Evans had maintained that Christie had killed Beryl and Geraldine. But he could not, without incriminating himself, explain why he might have done so. If he were to describe exactly what had happened, both he and Christie might hang.
Confused about his own culpability, torn between guilt at his part in the murders and horror at Christie for having carried them out, Tim Evans may not even have known whose fault it really was.
© Kate Summerscale 2024
Adapted from The Peepshow by Kate Summerscale, published by Bloomsbury Circus on October 3, priced £22. To order a copy for £19.80 go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. (Offer valid until September 28; UK p&p free on orders over £25).