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The murders at Rillington Place: postwar London's grisliest crimes
00:36:40
Kate Summerscale revisits the Rillington Place murders, to explore what these horrendous crimes can reveal about life in postwar London
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Ellie Cawthorn
Hablas Bristo.
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George
George if you've heard that sound from Babbel before, I bet you do. Babbel is the science backed language learning app that actually works with quick 10 minute lessons. Handcrafted by over 200 language experts. Babbel gets you on your way to speaking a new language in just a few weeks with over 16 million subscriptions sold and a 20 day money back guarantee. Just start speaking another language with Babbel right now. Up to 55% off your Babbel subscription at babbel.com Spotifypodcast spelled B A B B E L.com Spotifypodcast rules and restrictions may apply.
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Ellie Cawthorn
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine.
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Kate Summerscale
On 24 March 1953, a tenant of 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill made a gruesome discovery inside the walls of the downstairs flat. He uncovered the bodies of three women and more were to follow. A nationwide manhunt was launched for the prime suspect, Reg Christie, and the murders quickly became a cause celebra. In her new book, the Peep show, bestselling author Kate Summerscale revisits this infamous case to explore what it can tell us about life on the margins in post war London. I spoke to Kate to find out more.
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Ellie Cawthorn
Lovely to have you on the podcast, Kate. Your new book the Peep show re examines the Rillington Place murders and what they can tell us about post war Britain. Can we start by bringing listeners into this story? Can you tell us about the grisly discovery in 1953 that sparked all of this off?
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Kate Summerscale
Yes, it was on the 24th of March 1953. A tenant, a West Indian tenant of a very small terraced house in a dingy street in Notting Hill was clearing out the ground floor kitchen because the tenant of that flat had recently abandoned it and he tore a hole in the wallpaper and he saw behind it the flesh of a white woman. He called the police, they investigated, tore down the wall and found the three bodies in the alcove behind the kitchen, bodies of three young women. And when they searched the house they found the body of a middle aged woman beneath the floorboards in the front room and a series of bones in the garden, including one that was propping up the back fence. And they immediately launched a manhunt for the former tenant of the property, a man called Reg Christie. And the whole country was on high alert looking out for Christie. In the days that followed, these horrifying.
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Ellie Cawthorn
Discoveries led obviously to a massive Core celebra. And over the years since there's been films, there's been books, there's been a TV show actually about this case. But why did you think that you wanted to look at it again and re examine the evidence, as it were?
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Kate Summerscale
I think the sort of immediate prompt was the murders of several young women in London by strangers. 20, 20, 20 21, including Sarah Everard, but not only her. And it just got me thinking about why some men chose to kill women who were strangers to them, picking them essentially because they were women. And Reg Christie, who I very dimly remembered him, and the murders at Rillington Place was one of the most notorious post war killers of this kind. And so I started to look into the story. What I was interested in was his psyche, but also the world in which he lived. And I thought that I might learn something about the connections between a society and these kinds of horrible crimes by going close up to this moment in the 1950s, this post war moment, and what forged him and who were the women he killed and how they ended up in his house.
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Ellie Cawthorn
Yeah, absolutely. And I definitely want to pull on some of those threads in this conversation, what this case can reveal about this historical moment. But before we do that, just to take us back to the story for a moment. So this horrible discovery is made and then Christy has vanished. Can you pick up the story from there and tell us how things unfolded?
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Kate Summerscale
The papers were just full of it, everyone was looking out for him. I've spoken to people who were children at the time. The story was discussed over breakfast and they lay awake at night scared that the terrible man would come and snatch them away. So it was a kind of national fear and obsession. And the terrifying thing about Christie to begin with was that his picture was printed in the papers. He looked such an ordinary, respectable fellow in his horn rimmed spectacles and his trilby and his raincoat and his suit. And he had seemed that way to his neighbours too. He was a white collar worker, very disapproving of immorality and swearing. So it felt particularly horrifying, this idea that he might be your neighbour, that he was such a regular fellow. He was captured and charged with the crimes after about a week of hunting for him and he sort of confessed. He said, I must have done it. He was vague and non committal and he was imprisoned and awaiting trial. And by this point the pathologists had discovered that he had not only strangled these women to death, but he had gassed them before doing so and he had raped them.
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Ellie Cawthorn
There are so Many things that I want to touch on in this story. But just to stay for a moment on the idea of the press and the coverage of this case, which is a large part of your book, I was really interested to read about some of the journalistic practices at play in post war England, because the press were actually incredibly involved with Christie. They didn't give him money outright, but they helped pay for his legal defense. I wonder if you can talk a bit about journalistic standards at the time when it came to crime cases like.
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Kate Summerscale
This, it was so interesting to research and write about Fleet street at the time. It was like a sort of Wild west, incredibly lucrative. Everyone read a paper in Britain, maybe two a day, evening papers, morning papers, Sunday papers, and it was big business. With these millions of readers, newspapers were able to afford Rolls Royces to ferry their informants around, helicopters to take them direct to crime scenes to get the scoop on a story. And they paid money to their informants and interviewees regularly. The tabloid press did anyway. And so in this book, I closely follow a tabloid journalist called Harry Proctor. He was a famous crime reporter at the time who was obsessed with this case, desperate to get the scoop on Christie, and did get an exclusive with him in return for funding his defense. And the psychiatrists who interviewed him and testified to the fact that they believed he was insane at the time of the killings. So it was a very collusive, complicit kind of relationship that the papers were directly, sort of illicitly, it wasn't illegal, but it was secret, funding Christie's defence and paying for a top barrister to represent him at the Old Bailey. And Harry Proctor was driven both by a kind of ambitious desire to get a scoop and to sell millions of copies of the Sunday pictorial he worked for, but also by guilt, because he had interviewed Christie three years earlier at the time that a double murder had been discovered in the same house and Christie had testified against his upstairs neighbour, who was eventually hanged for those killings. And Harry Proctor now thought, oh, my God, it really probably was Christy who committed these crimes, as the upstairs neighbour had claimed at the time. And he felt very ashamed of his failure to properly question Christie, to not suspect him. And so he was seeking a sort of personal redemption as well as a tabloid scoop. So he was a very intriguing character to me.
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Ellie Cawthorn
Well, you've led us on perfectly there to the second part of this story, as you say. It brought up an old cold case of two murders that had happened in exactly the same house. Christie had been questioned. It was the murders of Beryl Evans and her baby daughter, a baby called Geraldine. And Beryl's husband, Timothy Evans, had actually been hanged for these crimes. But there was a very strange backstory in which he went back and forth on what he said had happened, and in some ways he implicated Christie. I wonder if you could introduce us to this earlier story.
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Kate Summerscale
So Tim Evans and his wife Beryl and their child Geraldine, lived in the top floor flat of 10 Rillington Place in 1949, and the couple quarreled quite a lot. Sometimes Tim hit his wife and she was pregnant with a second child by November 1949, which she wanted to get rid of, as she put it, her money was very tight in the household and the marriage was already under a lot of strain. Her body was discovered along with that of her child in the wash house, in the yard behind the house in December. And Tim Evans turned himself in to the police, saying that he had disposed of his wife after she had accidentally died during an abortion that Christie, his downstairs neighbour, was performing on her. He then changed his story, said, no, it was he who had done it. He had killed both his wife and child. And he gave a detailed account of how he had gone about it. And in court he changed again, accused Christie and said Christy done it. But Christie testified against him and he seemed so frail and so respectable, the jury couldn't see what motive he would have had for killing his upstairs neighbor's wife and daughter. And so Tim Evans was found guilty and hanged. So three years later, when it was discovered that Reg Christie was in fact a serial killer, it suddenly seemed altogether possible that Tim Evans had been telling the truth when he said Christie done it. And if so, an awful miscarriage of justice had taken place in Britain.
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Ellie Cawthorn
Maybe at the end of this conversation we can return to that idea and whether you think that there was a miscarriage of justice here, but I just want to touch on some elements that you brought into this story. The idea of abortion is something that comes up with a lot of the victims that Christie was connected to. I wonder if you can give us a bit of context of the status of abortion at the time and the options or lack thereof, that were open to women when it came to abortions.
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Kate Summerscale
Abortion was illegal. And so many women who, for example, couldn't afford to bring up a child resorted to backstreet abortionists. It was illegal both for the abortionist and the woman who had the abortion. There were prison sentences handed down, especially for abortionists. And it was rumored when this case came to trial that Christie was a backstreet Abortionist. And yet at the time, this idea was kind of dismissed by the courts, by the press. Oh, there was no evidence for it, but of course there would be no evidence because no one was going to come forward to say he performed an abortion on me, because it would be to admit to a crime. It seemed to me that there was very strong indications that Christy did carry out abortions and that this may well have been the way that he persuaded some, if not all, of his victims to submit to gas in his house, to come home with him, to not tell anyone where they were going, because that was usually a condition of having an illicit abortion, that no names, no addresses should be shared, yet every one of the women he killed, apart from his wife, Ethel, was pregnant, or rumored to be pregnant at the time of her death.
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Ellie Cawthorn
I guess it's an extreme case, isn't it? But it does hint at the extreme measures women had to go to and the dangers that they had to expose themselves to in order to get an abortion.
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Kate Summerscale
At this time, procedures of this kind were very dangerous. You could contract sepsis, or there were all kinds of ways in which it would have serious complications, sometimes fatal. And women were aware of this risk, which indicates how desperate they must have been to seek this out. But the social conditions were such that women were paid much less than men anyway for menial jobs, and they were liable to be sacked from their jobs just for being pregnant, as a couple of women in this story were. So the pregnancy in itself was an immediate impediment to earning a living. And the child, once born, would most likely be removed from the mother instantly and sent into care, put up for adoption. Because it was more or less impossible for a single woman to support a child, it was hard enough to support herself. So these women, poor young women in London, the options were very bleak if they got pregnant and they were unmarried.
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Ellie Cawthorn
What else do we know about the women who became Christie's victims? Because you've done quite a lot of work reconstructing their stories and their lives before this as well.
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Kate Summerscale
They were dismissed pretty much by the press, but also by the police and the pathologists. One writer described them as mostly poor little tarts whose lives had been bound to end in violence. And I found there was one of one of his victims was indeed a full time prostitute who worked in Paddington and slept in an underground public lavatory at the corner of Edgware Road and Harrow Road and was much beloved by her friends. It seems she was a generous young woman. Most of them were just poor and living fairly Sort of nomadic and difficult lives in London. They worked in munitions factories or cafes. Some were unemployed. And they had very varied stories. Christie's first victim, who was called Ruth first, was a Jewish refugee from Austria who had already had an illegitimate child, who's taken into care, who she tried to visit when she could in Tunbridge Wells, and who had been interned in a camp on the Isle of Man during the war because she was Austrian, and she was sort of bullied there because she was Jewish by the German and Austrian women who were sympathetic to the Nazis. So hers was an interesting and very sad story. Ruth first had wanted to become a nurse when she was classified as an enemy alien. Another woman, called Rita Nelson, had come to London to escape a mental supervision order in Belfast, where she had had a child, and she wanted to become an artist. She worked in cafes and made sketches of the clientele. So these were young women with sort of aspirations, living scrappy lives, hoping for things to improve for them. And they'd come to the city because they wanted freedom, independence, employment prospects. So they had very different aspirations and histories, but they were all desperate for money, for security, and Christie could have lured them back to his house with the promise of an abortion. But he also had other ways of getting women to come home with him. He would promise them nylon stockings or a glass of brandy or money in exchange for posing for his pornographic photographs. And so he sort of played on the weakness and poverty of those he encountered, and he typically chose women who had recently come to the city because they were less likely to have friends and family looking out for them. He said to one woman who actually escaped his clutches, he said, as he sort of came for her, nobody will miss you. And so the idea that their lives were kind of disposable, which was in his mind, it was also echoed in the way that these women were treated in the press and in the courts.
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Ellie Cawthorn
Yeah. And in that sense, your book really reminded me, actually, of the case of Jack the Ripper. And Hallie Rubenholt has written some really interesting stuff here about how his victims were essentially written off as prostitutes and therefore treated with less respect and less dignity. But in fact, actually, many of them weren't, and the reality was much more complicated. And I think that's quite similar to this case, isn't it?
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Kate Summerscale
In some ways, yeah, very similar. And we shouldn't diminish the value of those who did sell sex, because this was one of the few commodities that a poor woman had, you know, at a time when women's work was so Poorly paid. Another example is Jack the Ripper's victims were dismissed in this way, devalued. But also Peter Sutcliffe's victims. Their deaths were sort of minimized because they worked in the sex trade or the early victims did. And suddenly it was all taken much more seriously when someone who clearly wasn't in that world was murdered. So I think it can tell us a lot about the way these cases and their investigation and their reporting can tell us a lot about the ways in which women's lives are weighted.
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Ellie Cawthorn
I was struck by something you said really early on in our conversation about being drawn to this case because of more recent incidences of women being killed by men they didn't know. And there's quite a lot of depressing material in here about the treatment of women. Of course, we have these victims, ultimately of Christie, but we also have Beryl Evans, who was subjected to domestic abuse. Do you think that looking at all of these women's lives and experiences can tell us anything about women's place in 1950s Britain and the treatment of women at that time?
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Kate Summerscale
That Harry Proctor, the tabloid journalist I mentioned, described the murders of Beryl and Geraldine Evans in 1949 as being barely reported in the press because it was such a banal case of domestic violence. He described it as a fish and chippy kind of crime. And that was very sort of shocking and probably still has some currency, that attitude today that cases of domestic violence and domestic murders are not given as much kind of attention and they're less exciting to the reader or the viewer or the listener. So that gave me pause for thought, the idea that it was just less interesting because. And the sensation of the Christie murders was because he'd murdered a stranger, which meant that every woman could imagine themselves at threat and, you know, in danger. But, of course, every woman was also in danger from domestic violence at a time when divorce was rarely an option, because it was so hard for a woman to support herself without a man. So, yeah, the casual nastiness, the language that was used about the women who were killed, but about other women, too, made me see the very strong connections between the sort of fantasies of domination and dismissal that Christie acted out and the ordinary, everyday speech and representation of women and films and on the radio and in the newspapers.
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Ellie Cawthorn
So, as you've mentioned, Christie was found in this manhunt, and he was then put on trial. What kind of defense did he try and mount?
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Kate Summerscale
The defense, as paid for by Harry Proctor's paper, was insanity. It was the only possible defense because there was so much forensic evidence against cr and he had, in a manner of speaking, confessed to the crimes. So he tried to argue, his lawyers tried to argue, that he was in the grip of a terrible kind of insane sexual perversion, a compulsion to kill and rape women, and that he lost control of himself and so he should be treated as a lunatic rather than a rational man. And the lawyers, to support this case, mentioned the way he'd violated the bodies of his victims. And he had a little tin with clumps of pubic hair, sort of trophies that he'd collected. This was all adduced in evidence. How could anyone who did these things be sane? Was the argument. But the jury did not buy it. There was so much evidence of premeditation, certainly in the murder of his wife Ethel, which was the crime for which he was tried, because the courts only tried one murder at a time. And he'd not only clearly planned her murder, but also covered it up quite deviously, telling lies to his neighbours and to tradesmen. And so this was enough to convince the jury that he was and that he knew what he was doing.
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Ellie Cawthorn
And what about the case of Beryl Evans and, of course, Tim Evans, who'd gone down for that crime? Where did Christie's trial leave that case?
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Kate Summerscale
Well, it was very murky. He did confess to having murdered Beryl Evans, but refused to admit to murdering the baby, Geraldine. But even that confession was dubious because his lawyers had encouraged him to confess to as many crimes as possible because that would support the insanity defence. And so some thought that he'd only confess to Beryl Evans murder in order to do that, to comply with what the lawyers were hinting, which was by confessing to her murder, he would seem even madder. But then why draw the line at the child? I think was generally held that the women he killed, his murders, were sort of driven by a sense of his own sexual inadequacy, and that by killing women, they felt like conquests, almost sort of proofs of virility, domination. Whereas the murder of a child would not qualify for that. It was something truly shameful. So it was left quite confusing. He was never tried for that murder. He did confess, but it was sort of left as an open question. Which meant that immediately after his trial, a government inquiry was launched into the safety of the Tim Evans case and whether he had been hanged in error.
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Ellie Cawthorn
Well, that's a really interesting question. This idea that there may have been a miscarriage of justice there. Did it make people rethink, for example, the death penalty? Because we're talking here about a period which is very shortly before the death penalty was abolished. Did this case kind of play into that at all?
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Kate Summerscale
Yes, massively. This case and the Derek Bentley case, which took place in the same year and was also reported on by Harry Proctor, were both cases in which it was thought that these illiterate, vulnerable young men had been hanged for crimes that others had committed and that the justice system had failed them. Therefore, there should be no ultimate penalty of death, because it was impossible to correct an error like that. So by 1953, there was already quite a strong movement to abolish capital punishment, and these two cases played a large part in securing the abolition about 12 years later.
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Ellie Cawthorn
And do you think that we ever will know what happened to Beryl and Geraldine Evans?
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Kate Summerscale
Well received wisdom now, as sort of depicted in the film of 1971 and the more recent BBC drama, is that Christie was the killer, that Evans was innocent, that Christie framed Tim Evans for the murders of his wife and daughter. But I found a document in the archives in the prison files that suggested a different solution, a solution that implies really the complicity of both men. And this document, it's a memo from a prison guard to whom Christie spoke immediately after he'd been sentenced to death. This document was made available to the government straight away. And I found letters that suggest that it was actively suppressed, as actively concealed from the public and was not made public for 40 years.
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Ellie Cawthorn
Why would that have been the case? Why would they be keen to suppress this evidence?
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Kate Summerscale
The Attorney General at the time had himself prosecuted Christie. He'd appeared in the Old Bailey and he didn't want anything that would cast doubt on the verdict that he'd secured and the way that he'd conducted the case. And he wouldn't want things that cast doubt on the competence of the courts in general. That is the verdict in the Tim Evans case just over three years earlier, especially because this would give support to those campaigning against capital punishment. The Attorney General was a Tory, the Tories were pro keeping capital punishment. And so it would be like giving ammunition to his enemies to. To release this document that at least raised the question of whether Christie had killed the baby.
- [27:46]
Ellie Cawthorn
Finally, Kate, I think, you know, some people argue that true crime is purian. It's macabre. But, you know, your book really looks at what we might be able to learn from crime. And what do you think we can learn from this case? What do you think it tells us about the time?
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Kate Summerscale
What I learned from this case was just lots of details of people's lives. True crime records are an amazing source of social history because the witness statements and the evidence that the police gather is incredibly sort of granular about how people live their lives. So there's a lot of banal but fascinating detail about what people ate and did and their daily routines that I love in the records of a murder case, which is not perhaps what you'd expect. But it also, of course, has these very strong emotions. And the way in which it's covered, as well as the crimes themselves, seem to me to be a sort of conduit to the emotional life of a country. The things that people fear, the things that people fantasize about, the anxieties, the pressure points, the fractures, all of this kind of subterranean emotional light seems to be cracked open when a violent crime, a very sort of high profile violent crime takes place. And everyone pours in with their opinions and theories and views. And so it feels as if it's a route to what people felt, what it felt like to be alive in that time, in that moment, both in the banality, but also in the deep, strong emotion.
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Ellie Cawthorn
And one final question, because I can't resist. Do you think that there was anything in particular about Christie, this straight laced, white collar bogeyman, that touched on the fears and anxieties of this time? Or do you think society is always fascinated by this idea of the serial killer?
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Kate Summerscale
I think there was something about his kind of almost Victorian demeanor, his kind of pre war morality coming up against a new kind of social codes changing very rapidly. The war itself had led to a great loosening of family ties and a lot more sexual freedom and experimentation. And so this case seemed to dramatize the collision between that old moral world and the new one that was coming into being that would be more fully realized in the 1960s. And so I think that it did touch a nerve. I think people could sort of recognize both the world of their parents and the world of theirs. It was a sort of generational drama that played out something that was, you know, a huge social shift that was taking place. And his very strong reaction to that tension in these horrific murders did seem to play out feelings that I think many people will have recognized and sort of fear of change and fear of censure.
- [30:51]
That was Kate Summerscale speaking to me. Ellie Cawthorn. Kate's book, which goes into much more detail on this case, is the Peep show, The Murders at 10 Rillington Place, published by Bloomsbury. And if you're interested in another 20th century Corsa Lebra, then I recently spoke to the author, Laura Thompson, about the disappearance of Lord Lucan. You can find the link in the episode description of this podcast to catch up on that one.
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Ellie Cawthorn
Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Jack Bateman.