Ruston Mews is the old Rillington Place

Sometimes believed but wrong – stemming no doubt from the fact that Rillington Place was renamed Ruston Close in 1954 following demands by residents who justifiably felt aggrieved by the associations with the name and the influx of ghoulish sightseers. Ruston Mews has always been there but lies over to the opposite side of St Marks Road – its residents have long been bemused and indeed irritated by the constant flow of misinformed visitors to this now private road in the belief that they are seeing the infamous Rillington Place.

As some sort of eerie mark of respect there is no number 10 in Bartle Road

Indeed there is - it can be seen on the map and duly appears in the electoral register. The southeastern corner of the garden behind the modern building coincides with and just overlaps the northwestern tip of the plot on which the old house stood.

The site of the old house is now a small garden

Not really the case as this Website demonstrates. The garden actually coincides with the section of the old roadway of Rillington Place in front of house no. 9 and nos. 12 & 13 (opposite), the location of just the front door of no. 10 being at the extreme rear of the garden.

Ruston Close was demolished to make way for the Westway

(The Westway is a 2.5 mile-long elevated section of road in west London running east-west from Paddington to North Kensington.)

As can be seen from any contemporary map or aerial photograph of the area, the Westway lies to the north of the railway line which is itself north of where Ruston Close was so, as the railway line remains where it always was, there is no connection between the demolition of Ruston Close and the construction of the Westway. In any event, construction work began in September 1966, at which time the street was still fully occupied, and acquisition of the necessary land would of course have taken a number of years prior to that. The Westway opened in July 1970 at which time the whole of Ruston Close remained standing and still at least partially occupied (see below) and there are, of course, new buildings on the same site now - hardly possible if the old buildings had been removed to make way for a motorway.

Demolition

When did the old house finally disappear?

In the opening sequences, Christie is depicted in the uniform of a special constable when he receives Muriel Eady to the house. However, Christie met Eady whilst they both worked for Ultra Electric Ltd, Western Avenue, Acton (London W3) and her murder took place in October 1944 by which time Christie had long left the police service (in December 1943).

When Timothy and Beryl Evans first come to view the vacant flat at 10 Rillington Place the film is captioned “1949” whereas they moved into the flat at Easter 1948. The film also shows them as already having baby Geraldine at that time but she was not born until October 1948 - some six months after they had taken up occupation.

There is no record of Beryl having had a friend by the name of Alice (as played by Isobel Black) and this character appears to be a composite of two real-life friends, Lucy Endecott and Joan Vincent. In the standard version of events, Lucy Endecott was the friend who stayed at the Evans’s flat briefly thereby precipitating an argument between Beryl and Timothy, whereas it was Joan Vincent who came to visit Beryl unannounced on 8 November 1949, just after Christie had committed her murder, and who was prevented by Christie from opening the door to the kitchen.

Neither at the first autopsy in 1949 nor following exhumation in May 1953 was there any forensic or other evidence to indicate that Beryl had been gassed.

The workmen who came to carry out works to the house arrived on 31 October 1949 - not on 8 November 1949, the day of Beryl’s murder.

It is not certain that Geraldine was killed on the same day as Beryl, 8 November 1949. Also, there is no evidence that Mrs Christie had any awareness of either murder on 8 November 1949, only when the bodies were discovered by police on 2 December 1949. Mr Kitchener, the first-floor tenant, was at home on that day.

Evans did not leave the house until a week after Beryl’s murder - 14 November 1949.

Beryl’s father, William Thorley, did not contact Evans’s relatives in Wales, Mr & Mrs Lynch, by telegram - it was his mother, Mrs Probert, who wrote a letter (the exact text of which is known).

There is no indication that Evans’s aunt, Mrs Lynch, visited him whilst he was in prison in London.

Beresford Brown is depicted as arriving at the house post-Christie’s departure in March 1953 whereas it is known that he already resided on the top floor and was included in the electoral register for 1952 and so must have lived there since at least 20 November 1951.

The chronology provided on the DVD contains the “standard” factual errors: (Christie’s date of birth, the year of his arrival in Rillington Place, Ethel’s maiden name - Simpson, not Waddington which was her brother’s addition to his own name - the length of sentence imposed on Christie in 1924, and the reference to his assault victim, a Mrs Coles, being a prostitute - there is no evidence for this).