John Christie (serial killer)

John Reginald Halliday Christie
File:Christie.gif
Born	John Reginald Halliday Christie
Cause of death	Hanged
Other names	The Monster of Rillington Place
Criminal penalty	Death sentence
Details
Victims	Ruth Fuerst, Muriel Amelia Eady, Beryl Evans (disputed), Geraldine Evans (disputed), Ethel Christie, Kathleen Maloney, Rita Nelson, Hectorina MacLennan
Span of crimes	1943–1953
Country	United Kingdom (England)
Date apprehended	31 March, 1953

John Reginald Halliday Christie (8 April 1899 Halifax – 15 July 1953) was an English serial killer active in the 1940s and 1950s. He murdered at least six women and was implicated in the murder of two other victims, which has been the subject of ongoing controversy. He was arrested, tried, and hanged for the murder of his wife, Ethel Christie, in 1953.

Prior to his arrest, he was involved in another murder trial, as a principal witness for the Crown in the trial of his fellow tenant, Timothy Evans. Evans was accused of the murders of his own wife and daughter, and subsequently convicted of, and executed for, the murder of the baby. Some critics have concluded that Christie committed the murders and framed Evans for them, while others have suggested that there could have been two separate murderers living in the same shared house at the same time. Mr Justice Brabin stated in 1966 that it was "more probable than not" that Evans killed his wife and that he did not kill his daughter Geraldine.

Christie though, confessed to the homicide of Beryl Evans prior to his execution. In a 2004 legal appeal, Justice Burnton accepted that Timothy Evans was not guilty of the murder of his wife or child, though the court could not formally declare Evans's innocence since that was outside its jurisdiction. Evans had received a posthumous pardon for the murder of his daughter in 1966.

Christie's crimes sparked substantial public controversy over the earlier trial and conviction of Evans. This contributed to the suspension of the death penalty for murder in the United Kingdom in 1965; it was later abolished outright for all crimes.

Early life

Christie was raised in Halifax, then in the West Riding of Yorkshire. He was abused by his father, a strict disciplinarian, and dominated by his mother and sisters. In 1907, at the age of eight, he was witness to the open coffin of his maternal grandfather. In later years, Christie spoke of how profound this experience was to him, seeing the dead body of a man who had previously frightened him.

Christie won a scholarship to Halifax Secondary School when he was 11. He excelled particularly at mathematics and algebra. Manually dexterous, he was skilled at detailed work. It was later found he had an IQ of 128. He sang in the choir and became a scout, but he was unpopular with his fellow pupils. Upon leaving school at the age of 15, Christie became an assistant movie projectionist.

Christie had a lifelong problem with impotence; his first attempts at sex were failures, branding him as "Reggie-No-Dick" and "Can't-Do-It-Christie" throughout adolescence. His difficulties with sex remained throughout his life, however, and most of the time he could only perform sex with prostitutes.

In September 1916, Christie enlisted as a signalman in World War I. In June 1918, he was hospitalized after a mustard gas attack, claiming to have been blinded. He spent a month in a military hospital in Calais. No record of his blindness has ever been traced, however. In Ten Rillington Place, author Ludovic Kennedy wrote that Christie exaggerated his blindness, as well as the three-year period afterward in which he was mute. The reason for this, according to Kennedy, is that Christie was a hypochondriac and hysteric who exaggerated or feigned illness as a ploy to get attention.

Christie married Ethel Waddington from Sheffield, on 10 May 1920 at Halifax Register Office. It was a dysfunctional union, as Christie was impotent and frequented prostitutes. They separated after four years, when Christie moved to London and Ethel lived with relatives.

Early criminal career

Over the next decade, Christie was convicted for many petty criminal offences. These included: three months' imprisonment for stealing postal orders while working as a postman on 12 April 1921; being bound over and put on twelve months' probation for obtaining money by false pretences and violent conduct in early 1923; nine months in Uxbridge jail in September 1924 for theft; six months' hard labour for assaulting a prostitute (with whom he was living in Battersea) in May 1929; and three months' imprisonment in 1933 for stealing a car from a priest who had befriended him. Christie and his wife reconciled after his release in November 1933. While Christie was able to break his cycle of petty crime following this, he did not reform; he continued to seek out prostitutes in his wife's absence.

In December 1938, Christie and his wife moved into the ground floor apartment of 10 Rillington Place in the Ladbroke Grove neighbourhood of Notting Hill. On the outbreak of World War II, he applied to join the police Special Constabulary and was accepted despite his previous convictions (the police did not check his background). He was assigned to Harrow Road police station. Christie began an affair with a woman working at the police station whose husband was a serving soldier. The relationship lasted until December 1943, when he resigned. During the relationship the woman's husband caught the two in bed together and assaulted Christie.

Murders

First murders

The first person Christie admitted to killing, or is known about, was Ruth Fuerst, an Austrian-born munitions worker who also engaged part-time in prostitution. Christie claimed to have met Fuerst either while she was on the beat or in a snack-bar in Ladbroke Grove. Christie impulsively strangled her during sex at 10 Rillington Place in August 1943. Christie then buried her body in the building's communal garden, after having initially hidden it underneath the floorboards of the front living room.

Following his resignation from the police force, Christie was successful in applying for new employment as a clerk at a radio factory. It was here that he met his second victim, Muriel Amelia Eady, a co-worker. In October 1944, he invited Eady back to his flat with the promise that he had concocted a "special mixture" that could cure her bronchitis. The special mixture was in fact a mixture designed to disguise the smell of domestic gas containing carbon monoxide that would render a person unconscious. Once Eady was knocked out, Christie raped her and then choked her to death. Christie buried her alongside Fuerst's body in the backyard garden.

Later murders

In April 1948, Timothy Evans and his wife, Beryl, moved into the top-floor apartment of 10 Rillington Place. On 11 January 1950, Timothy Evans was put on trial for the murder of his baby daughter, Geraldine (see below). Evans had also been charged with the murder of his wife but the prosecution only proceeded with the murder of Geraldine. Evans was found guilty of the murder and was hanged on 9 March.

Following Timothy Evans's trial, nearly three years passed without incident for Christie. Then on the morning of 14 December 1952, Christie murdered his wife Ethel in bed by strangulation. She had last been seen alive two days earlier. The day after he murdered her, he altered the date of a letter she had written to her sister from 10 December to 15 December, explaining that Ethel had no envelopes so he sent the letter from work. On 16 December, he took his wife's wedding ring to a jewellery shop and sold it. On 23 December 1952, he sold her watch. He kept writing letters to her sister in Sheffield up to late January 1953, claiming that rheumatism had prevented her from writing. After then, he ignored further letters.

On 6 January 1953, Christie sold most of his furniture for £12. He kept three chairs, a kitchen table and a mattress to sleep on. A month later, on the morning of 2 February 1953, he forged his wife's signature on her bank account and emptied it. Christie received £10, 15 shillings and 2d.

Between 19 January and 6 March 1953, Christie murdered three more women he invited back to 10 Rillington Place: Kathleen Maloney from Southampton, Rita Nelson and Hectorina Maclennan. Maloney was a prostitute from the Ladbroke Grove area and Nelson had been in London on a visit to see her sister, who lived in Ladbroke Grove. Christie first met Maclennan, who was living in London with her boyfriend Baker, in a cafe. On a later occasion when they met, Christie convinced Maclennan to meet him at his apartment, where he murdered her. He was able to convince her boyfriend, who came to Rillington Place looking for her, that he had not seen Maclennan. Christie kept up this pretence for a number of days, meeting Baker to see if he had any news of her whereabouts.

By the time Christie murdered his final three victims, he had perfected the gassing technique he had first used on Muriel Eady. In each of his last three victims, Christie either convinced or forced them to breath from a tube indirectly connected to the gas supply. This would render them unconscious, allowing Christie to rape and then kill by strangulation his victims.

Arrest

Christie moved out of 10 Rillington Place on 20 March 1953. He defrauded a couple who took up residence by taking £7 - 13 - 00 from them, as he was not authorised by the landlord of the property to do so. They were forced to move out within 24 hours. Christie booked a room at the King's Cross Rowton Houses under his real name and address. He asked for seven nights, but only stayed for four, leaving on 24 March 1953.

That same day, the new tenant, Beresford Dubois Brown, discovered the bodies hidden in a wallpapered-over coal cellar in the kitchen. Pathological tests later revealed carbon monoxide in their bodies. The bodies were examined by Francis Camps, the forensic pathologist, who produced a book on his meticulous examination. He called the police and a nationwide manhunt began on 25 March.

After he left Rowton House, Christie wandered all over London. Sometimes during the daytime he would visit the cinema or a cafe. He slept largely on park benches at night. The search for him ended on the morning of 31 March when he was arrested on Embankment by Putney Bridge after being challenged about his identity by a policeman. When arrested, he had with him his identity card, a ration book, his union card, an ambulance badge, and an old newspaper clipping about the remand of Timothy Evans. The following day he was charged with his wife's murder. On 15 April, he was charged with murdering the three women.

Trial and execution

While in custody, Christie confessed to murdering the three women found in the kitchen alcove, Ethel Christie and the two women buried in the back garden. He also admitted to killing Beryl Evans, which Timothy Evans had been charged with during the police investigation in 1949. He never admitted to killing Geraldine Evans (Kennedy accused Christie of murdering both Beryl and Geraldine and believed his denial of the murder of Geraldine was because the murder of an innocent baby may have been sufficiently horrifying for him to later try to "forget" it).

Christie's trial began on 22 June 1953, in the same court where Evans had been tried. He was on trial solely for the murder of his wife. Christie pleaded insanity and claimed to have a poor memory of the events. The jury rejected the plea and, after 22 minutes, found him guilty of murdering his wife.

On 29 June, Christie said he would not appeal against the death sentence, but he would apply to the Home Secretary, David Maxwell-Fyfe, for mercy. This was of no avail as Maxwell-Fyfe said on 13 July that he would not grant a reprieve as there were no physical or psychological grounds for doing so. Some MPs tried to postpone the execution so that Christie could talk more about the earlier murders, but Maxwell-Fyfe refused to grant this also. Christie himself refused to meet MPs in his cell during the final days of his life or talk about the murders. He was hanged at 9am on 15 July 1953 by Albert Pierrepoint at Pentonville Prison, on the same gallows as Timothy Evans.

Timothy Evans

The murders of Beryl and Geraldine Evans

Six months after Timothy and Beryl Evans had moved into Rillington Place, Beryl gave birth to Geraldine. Twelve months passed without any apparent incident, but in the late summer of 1949, Beryl Evans found out she was pregnant again, and feared they could not afford another child. She made discrete inquiries into having an abortion and then discussed this option with Timothy. After some deliberation, Timothy Evans agreed to this proposition. Evans later told police that Christie had said to the couple that he could abort the foetus.

Some weeks later, on 30 November 1949, Evans informed police at Merthyr Tydfil, Wales that he had killed his wife. His initial confession was that he had accidentally killed her by giving her something in a bottle that a man had given him to abort the foetus; he had then disposed of her body in a sewer drain outside 10 Rillington Place. He told the police that, after arranging for Geraldine to be looked after, he had gone to Wales. When police examined the drain outside the front of the building, however, they found nothing and, furthermore, discovered that the manhole cover required the combined strength of all three officers to remove it.

When re-questioned, Evans changed his story and said that Christie had offered to perform an abortion on Beryl. After some deliberation between Evans and his wife, they had both agreed to take up Christie's offer. On 8 November, Evans had returned home from work to be informed by Christie that the abortion had not worked and that Beryl was dead. Christie had said that he would dispose of the body (abortion being illegal in England at the time) and would make arrangements for a couple from East Acton to look after Geraldine. He said that Evans should leave London for the meantime. On 14 November, Evans left for Wales to stay with relatives. Evans later said he returned to 10 Rillington Place to ask about Geraldine, but Christie had refused to let him see her.

In response to Evans's second statement, the police performed a preliminary search of 10 Rillington Place but did not uncover anything incriminating. On a more thorough search on 2 December, the police found the body of Beryl Evans, wrapped in a tablecloth in the wash-house in the back garden. Significantly, however, the body of Geraldine was also found, alongside Beryl's body - Evans had not mentioned he had killed his daughter in either of his statements. Beryl and Geraldine had both been strangled. When Evans was shown the clothing taken from the bodies of his wife and child, he was also asked whether he was responsible for their deaths. This was, according to Evans's statement, the first occasion in which he was informed that his baby daughter had been killed. To this, Evans responded, "yes, yes". He then confessed to having strangled Beryl during an argument over debts and strangling Geraldine two days later, after which he left for Wales.

This confession, along with other, contradictory statements Evans made during the police interrogation, is often cited as proof of his guilt. Kennedy, however, argued his interrogation was worded by the investigating officers and carried out over the course of late evening and early morning hours to the physical and emotional detriment of the accused, a mentally impaired man.

Evans's trial and conviction

Evans was put on trial for the murder of his daughter on 11 January 1950 (in accordance with legal practice of the time, the prosecution proceeded only with the murder of Geraldine; Beryl's murder, which Evans was still formally charged with, was "left on file", though evidence from this murder was allowed to be used to prove his murder of Geraldine). Evans recanted his confession during consultations with his solicitor and charged that Christie had been responsible for the murders all along. This was to be the basis of his defence in his trial and what he continually maintained happened till his execution.

Christie and his wife were key witnesses for the prosecution. They gave evidence that on the night of the murder, they had heard a loud thud come from above them (at the time, the only people living above the Christies were the Evanses). Christie denied Evans's accusation that he had said he would abort Beryl's baby. Evans's defence largely became a case of his word against Christie's, and Christie's calm testimony left a better impression on the jury than Evans's, whose defence was already marred by his earlier confessions. The course of the trial rapidly turned against Evans. Evans was found guilty two days later, where the jury took just 40 minutes to come to its decision. After a failed appeal on 20 February, Evans was hanged on 9 March 1950.

This outcome was severely criticised when Christie's other murders later became known. During interviews with police and psychiatrists prior to his execution, Christie admitted several times that he had been responsible for the murder of Beryl Evans as well as his other victims (see below). It is speculated that if these confessions were true, Evans's second statement detailing Christie's offer to abort Beryl's baby is the true version of events that took place at Rillington Place on 8 November 1949. Kennedy provided one possible reconstruction of how the murder took place, where an unsuspecting Beryl lets Christie into her apartment, expecting the abortion to be carried out, and is instead attacked and then strangled. Christie claimed to have possibly engaged in sexual intercourse on Beryl after death (he could not remember the precise details) but her autopsy had failed to uncover evidence of sexual intercourse. In his confessions on Beryl's death, Christie did not corroborate the version of events given by Evans in his second police statement; that is, he did not say he had agreed to carry out an abortion on Beryl. He instead claimed to have strangled her while being intimate with her or that she had wanted to commit suicide and he helped her do so.

Controversy and Evans's pardon

The grave of Timothy Evans

Because Christie's evidence in Timothy Evans's trial had played a large role in securing the latter's conviction, there was widespread controversy when Christie's own crimes were uncovered, which undermined the reliability of his evidence. Christie confessed to murdering Beryl Evans while in police custody and although he neither confessed to nor was convicted of the killing of Geraldine Evans, public opinion at the time widely considered him guilty of both murders, casting doubt onto the fairness of Evans's trial and raising the possibility that an innocent man had been hanged.

This prompted the serving Home Secretary, David Maxwell-Fyfe, to commission an inquiry led by John Scott Henderson QC, the Recorder of Portsmouth, to determine whether Evans had been innocent of his crimes and if a miscarriage of justice had occurred. Henderson interviewed Christie prior to his execution as well as another twenty witnesses. He concluded that Evans was guilty of both murders and that Christie's confessions of murdering Beryl Evans were unreliable and made in the context of furthering his own defence, that he was insane.

This did not end the matter as questions continued to be raised in Parliament concerning Evans's innocence as well as a number of books that were published which made similar claims. These, together with the unusual coincidence entailed that if Evans and Christie had both been guilty, two strangler-murderers would have been living in the same property at the same time, kept alive the issue that a miscarriage of justice had taken place in Evans's trial.

These prompted a second inquiry, chaired by High Court judge, Sir Daniel Brabin, and conducted over the winter of 1965-–66. Brabin collected statements from many of the witnesses involved in both cases and examined some of the arguments for Evans's innocence. His report's conclusion was that Evans had probably killed his wife but not his daughter, whose death Christie had been responsible for, possibly because her continued presence would have alerted people to Beryl's disappearance. For this reason, Evans was granted a posthumous pardon, since the murder of his daughter was what he had been tried on and executed for. The report did not overrule Evans's other charge since it maintained his probable guilt in the murder of Beryl.

In January 2003, the Home Office awarded Timothy Evans's half-sister, Mary Westlake, and his sister, Eileen Ashby, ex-gratia payments as compensation for the miscarriage of justice in Timothy Evans's trial. The independent assessor for the Home Office, Lord Brennan QC, accepted that "the conviction and execution of Timothy Evans for the murder of his child was wrongful and a miscarriage of justice" and that "there is no evidence to implicate Timothy Evans in the murder of his wife. She was most probably murdered by Christie." Lord Brennan believed that the Brabin Report's conclusion that Evans probably murdered his wife should be rejected given Christie's confessions and conviction.

However, a legal appeal by Mrs Westlake in the Criminal Cases Review Commission to have Evans's convictions formally quashed in the Court of Appeal was rejected in March 2004. The Commission ruled that even though there was a real possibility that Evans's convictions would be formally overturned, such a decision would not have any tangible benefits since Evans had already been pardoned and the Court of Appeal had no power to amend the Brabin Report's finding of Evans's probable guilt in the murder of his wife. Mrs Westlake subsequently appealed against the Criminal Cases Review Commission's decision in the High Court on 16 November 2004. In his decision, Justice Burnton upheld the Criminal Cases Review Commission's ruling, agreeing that the court did not have the authority to overrule the Brabin Report's findings if Evans had not been tried on them. Justice Burnton did accept, however, Evans's innocence in the murder of his wife and child, noting that the 1966 pardon and the compensation awarded later to his family had established that.

Supporters of Evans's innocence have often pointed to the unlikelihood of two people living in the same property who were guilty of murdering people in the same way, that Evans's sub-normal intelligence made him easily manipulable for Christie and that there may have been police impropriety in securing Evans's confessions as justification. Critics of this view point out that Evans confessed to the crimes on a number of occasions, that the evidence that Evans could have been either manipulated or influenced by shock to confess to a crime he did not commit is unconvincing and that the pathologists from both cases as well as the medical officer who interviewed both Evans and Christie prior to their executions all upheld Evans's guilt in the crimes. However, the Home Office's awarding compensation to Evans's family and the High Court's statements on Evans in 2004 have added support to the view that Evans was innocent. The complete story of what happened at 10 Rillington Place is likely to never be known.

Other murders

It has been speculated that Christie was responsible for the murders of other victims besides those at 10 Rillington Place. The basis for this is in a collection of pubic hair that Christie took from his victims. Christie claimed that the four different clumps of hair in the collection came from Mrs Christie and the three bodies in the kitchen alcove. However, only one of the clumps was of the same hair type as those on the bodies - that of Mrs Christie. Two could have come from the bodies of Fuerst and Eady, which had by then decomposed into skeletons. That still left one clump of hair unaccounted for. (The clump also could not have come from Beryl Evans, as no pubic hair had been removed from her body.)

Professor Keith Simpson, one of the pathologists who worked on the case, considered it "odd" that "Christie should have said hair came from the bodies in the alcove if in fact it had come from those now reduced to skeletons; not very likely that in his last four murders the only trophy he took was from the one woman with whom he did not have peri-mortal sexual intercourse; and even more odd that one of his trophies had definitely not come from any of the unfortunate women known to have been involved".

In popular culture

Christie and Timothy Evans's story was turned into a movie, 10 Rillington Place, directed by Richard Fleischer and starring Richard Attenborough as Christie. A reconstruction of Christie's execution at HMP Pentonville can be seen in the Chamber Of Horrors at Madame Tussauds in London. The protagonist of Thirteen Steps Down, a psychological thriller novel by Ruth Rendell, is obsessed with John Christie. A fictional play based around the resurrection of John Christie was written by Howard Brenton.

Location of Rillington Place

Rillington Place was a row of Victorian three-storey terraced houses built during the 1860s, along with much of Notting Hill and North Kensington. The name was changed to Ruston Close in 1954 at the request of the residents due to the heightened public interest. Sightseeing trips around 10 Rillington Place continued until the street was demolished in the early 1970s. By 1977 the street had been redeveloped as Bartle Road with a new housing development which was completed in 1978 by William Old Construction Ltd. The site of 10 Rillington Place lies beneath the buildings to the west side of St Andrew's Square. Ruston Mews, on the opposite (eastern) side of St Marks Road is frequently and erroneously visited by tourists believing they are at the location of Rillington Place.

Further reading

• Daniel Brabin (1999). Rillington Place. London: The Stationery Office. ISBN 0-11-702417-1. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

• John Eddowes (1995). The Two Killers of Rillington Place. London: Warner Books. ISBN 0-7515-1285-0. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

• Ludovic Kennedy (1961). Ten Rillington Place. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

• Edward Marston (2007). John Christie. Surrey: The National Archives. ISBN 978-1-905615-16-2. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

External links

• Murder UK - John Reginald Halliday Christie
• Location and Mythology
• Bartle Road / Rillington Place location in Ladbroke Grove (Google)

See also

• Timothy Evans