The reason that the house at 10 Rillington Place achieved notoriety was the series of events that occurred at the premises between the years 1943 to 1953. No fewer than eight people were murdered at this small, mean house over the period with their bodies being disposed of either within the house or in the outbuildings and garden. To this day, controversy  remains as to whether there were two murderers living at 10 Rillington Place or just one - two men, John Reginald Halliday Christie and Timothy John Evans, were hanged for murder but Evans was subsequently pardoned after extensive campaigning by family, politicians and others who believed that he had been wrongly convicted, albeit partially on the basis of his own confessions, but also on the evidence of Christie who was now a convicted murderer himself.

John Reginald Halliday Christie was born on 8 April 1899 in Shibden, near Halifax, West Yorkshire in England. The registrar was informed of the birth by his mother on 19 May 1899 (Link). He was the fifth of the six surviving children born to his textile designer father. His upbringing was austere and disciplined, characteristic of the period, and his childhood and adolescence were difficult in ways which were later to impinge upon his behaviour and personality as an adult.  In 1916 he was called up to join the army and saw active service in France during the First World War being injured by a mustard gas shell in 1918 which led to his repatriation. The gassing affected his voice and he claimed he was unable to speak at all for some time afterwards and remained quietly spoken for the rest of his life.

In May 1920 Christie married Ethel Simpson Waddington in Halifax but they separated in 1924 and he moved to live in London. Finding work as a postman he was later convicted of stealing postal orders and imprisoned for nine months in September 1924. Christie was sentenced to two further terms of imprisonment: six months hard labour in May 1929 for an attack on a prostitute with whom he was then living and a three-month term in 1933 for the theft of a motor vehicle. In 1934 Christie was reconciled with his wife who moved to London to be with him in. In June 1937 they moved into the ground floor rooms at 10 Rillington Place, London W11.

Despite convictions for theft and assault, Christie was recruited to the War Reserve Police in September 1939 and served with some distinction as a special constable at the Harrow Road police station for the following four years. The lack of available manpower and confusion of war meant that no checks into his character and background had been made, thereby allowing him to assume a position of power and apparent trustworthiness that were to be of assistance to him in his early career as a serial killer. Christie was discharged at his own request in December 1943 by which time he had already killed once.

Christie’s first known victim was a twenty-one year old Austrian student nurse named Ruth Margarete Christine Fuerst who may also have been a part-time prostitute. Christie strangled her in his bed while his wife was away on one of her frequent trips to Sheffield visiting relatives. It was Summer 1943. Her body was initially stored beneath the floorboards of the front room but was then transferred to the wash-house and thence to a shallow grave dug in the garden. It is believed that her skull was discovered sometime later by Christie who placed it in a dustbin used to incinerate garden refuse as the later discovery of human remains led to the charred fragments, over one hundred in number, being forensically reconstructed and identified as hers.

The next victim was Muriel Amelia Eady, a thirty-two year old worker at the same factory where Christie was employed and who he lured to the house on the pretext of having a remedy for her bronchial catarrh – by using a makeshift device resembling a form of crude respirator, the town gas that was then used for domestic cooking and lighting (and highly poisonous due to containing carbon monoxide) was administered following which strangulation with a ligature occurred. This was in October 1944. Muriel’s body was also disposed of by burial in the garden. When her skull was later unearthed by Christie’s dog it was disposed of by being thrown into a bombed and derelict nearby building at 131 St Mark’s Road. Her disappearance was attributed to the aerial bombardment of London at that time by the V1 flying bombs and V2 rockets.

On 20 September 1947 Timothy John Evans married Beryl Susanna Thorley at Kensington Register Office. Beryl was aged nineteen, he was twenty-two. At Easter 1948 they moved into the top rooms at 10 Rillington Place and on 10 October of that year their baby Geraldine was born. By Summer of the next year Beryl was once again pregnant and due to their impoverished circumstances and unstable relationship Beryl wanted a termination. Evans was initially reluctant but subsequently agreed to allow Reginald Christie to perform an illegal abortion utilising his professed but imaginary medical knowledge acquired during his days as a special constable. During the course of this purported operation on 8 November 1949, Beryl was gassed and strangled. On discovering that his wife had not survived the procedure, Evans was convinced by Christie to depart the house for his native Wales and keep quiet lest it be thought that he had killed his wife in one of their well-known and sometimes violent arguments. He left on 14 November. However, overcome with remorse Evans initially confessed on 30 November to local police that he had killed his wife, perhaps in a misguided attempt to protect Christie by whom he was intimidated and who he thought had been trying to help him. At this stage Evans believed his daughter was still alive and being cared for by people in East Acton, London W3 as Christie had assured him that he would arrange for this. Before leaving, Christie had told Evans that he would assist him by disposing of Beryl’s body in a drain outside no. 10. As a result of Evans claiming this as his own act in his confession to them, the Merthyr Tydfil police contacted officers at Notting Hill who made an inspection (of both the manhole directly in front of Christie’s bay window and the sewer cover in the middle of the road) but found nothing.

Much confusion, controversy and several more contradictory statements by Evans ensued but it is likely that Christie murdered the infant Geraldine two or three days after having killed her pregnant  mother. On 2 December 1949 the police discovered both bodies together in the wash house to the rear of 10 Rillington Place – both were similarly wrapped in bedding and tied into bundles. When initially confronted with this by the police, Evans confessed to both murders but subsequently withdrew these confessions and instead accused Christie. At the subsequent trial for murder, Christie appeared as the principal witness for the prosecution. Evans’s unsophistication and many changes of story, together with Christie’s perjurious but more convincing evidence, and demeanour as a reformed and now respectable citizen who had previously served king and country, led to Evans being convicted of the murder of baby Geraldine. He was hanged at Pentonville Prison on 9 March 1950.

On 14 December 1952, Reginald Christie killed his own wife in their bed and placed her body, wrapped in sheets, under the floorboards of their front room. Initially, Christie was to claim that he had awoken to find that Ethel convulsive, having taken an overdose of her sedative medication but the subsequent autopsy revealed none in her system; he therefore changed the story that, as with some of his other victims, she was suffering and so his action was effectively a mercy killing.

Between January and March 1953, Christie committed three further murders - those of Kathleen Maloney (26), Rita Nelson (25) who was six months pregnant, and Hectorina Maclennan (26). All of their bodies were concealed in an alcove in the ground floor kitchen.

On Friday 20  March 1953, Christie moved out of the house having purported to sublet the flat without consent to a young couple, Mr & Mrs Reilly, for £7-13-0 which constituted three months’ rent. Upon discovering this the landlord required them to leave - all within the space of twenty-four hours. Four days later the bodies in the alcove were uncovered and removed by police who were called following a report by an upstairs tenant, Beresford Brown, to whom the landlord had given permission to use the now-vacated ground floor kitchen. Brown had set about clearing out the kitchen and, whilst looking for a place to affix a shelf for his radio, had come across the alcove concealed behind a layer of wallpaper. Early the next day, the body of Ethel was discovered, beneath the front-room floorboards where it had lain since the previous December.

By now almost a vagrant and the subject of a major manhunt, Reginald Christie was recognised on 31 March 1953 by Pc V400 Thomas Ledger on Embankment, just west of Putney Bridge, and arrested. He was tried at the Old Bailey for the murder of his wife, convicted, and hanged on 15 July 1953 and on the same gallows as Timothy Evans some three years previously. Christie had confessed to the murders of all six women whose remains were found at the house, including his wife, and later to that of Beryl Evans (although it has been argued that this confession was untrue and was intended only to support a defence of insanity). He never admitted to having murdered baby Geraldine.

NB - the above account, as it relates to the murders of Beryl and Geraldine Evans, is based upon the “standard version” of events as set out in perhaps the best-known work on the subject: Ten Rillington Place by Ludovic Kennedy (1961). There are, however, alternative accounts such as that given by John Eddowes in his bookThe Two Killers of Rillington Place (1994), which supports the view that Timothy Evans was not innocent of the murders of his wife and infant daughter. A public enquiry in 1966 under Mr Justice Brabin concluded that, on the balance of probability, Timothy Evans did murder his wife but not his baby daughter, the only crime for which he was tried and of which he was convicted and, as a consequence, he was granted a posthumous royal pardon on 18 October 1966. His remains were disinterred from the precincts of Pentonville Prison and transferred to the consecrated ground of St Patrick’s (Roman Catholic) Cemetery, Leytonstone (Link).

By November 2004, although the Criminal Cases Review Commission decided against a referral to  the Court of Appeal to quash his conviction (a pardon only representing an absolution of a crime that has still  been committed) partly on grounds of cost, there was nevertheless acceptance that no jury would properly have convicted Evans of the murder of his wife had he been tried for that crime. Neither of these amount to acknowledgment of innocence in the formal, legal sense for which Evans’s surviving family have always campaigned.

The case, still controversial today, was instrumental in the final abolition, in December 1969, of the death penalty for murder in the United Kingdom.

Further public interest surrounded the reporting in the press of these events in 1953 as they were in stark and lurid counterpoint to the celebrations taking place for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. In addition, the early racial tensions which found fertile ground in the squalor and poverty of the Notting Hill of the day, leading to the “race riots” of 1958, came into play even in this case with Christie citing at his trial the harassment and provocation by “coloureds” overcrowding the house following its acquisition in 1950 by Jamaican landlord Charles Brown as grounds for his unsuccessful plea of insanity.*

* Christie’s complaints in this regard may not have been without justification - in his 1987 book, Crime In London, Gilbert Kelland, the Assistant Commissioner (Crime) at New Scotland Yard between 1977 and 1984 and a serving Metropolitan Police officer since 1946, describes how the same landlord, Charlie Brown, later ran 10 Ruston Close as an illegal out-of-hours drinking club, the “Celebrity Club” where he would send patrons of the more legitimate club in Kingly Street, Soho, where he worked as a doorman, once it had closed for the evening.