British Serial Killer John Christie: 10 Rillington Place Revealed

John Reginald Halliday Christie was a British serial killer responsible for the murder of at least six women - maybe even eight and including a child - during the period between 1943 and 1953. Christie and his wife - who eventually became of his victims - lived in the ground floor flat at 10 Rillington Place in Ladbroke Grove, Notting Hill, London. His usual modus operandi was to render the women unconscious and then strangle and rape them. Bodies were hidden in various places, including in the back garden, beneath the floorboards, in the toolshed and in a small pantry adjacent to the kitchen.

The most controversial of the killings was that of Beryl Evans and her baby daughter, Geraldine, in November 1949, for which Beryl's mentally challenged husband, Timothy, was arrested, tried, convicted and executed. It was only later, when evidence came to light that Christie had already killed several women by November 1949, that people realized that he had most probably killed Beryl and baby Geraldine as well. Christie may have killed them but Timothy Evans, the grieving father and husband, had been punished for it. And it now made sense that the star witness for the prosecution in the Evans trial had been Christie himself. In 1966 this miscarriage of justice was reversed and Evans was granted a posthumous pardon. Nothing they could do, however, could give Evans back his life...

Another of Christie's victims was his own wife, Ethel Waddington Christie, whom he strangled during December 1952 and whose corpse he then hid beneath the floorboards of their own flat. In a Landru like way, he then continued writing to Ethel's relatives, explaining that she could not write them herself because of her rheumatism.

After disposing of his wife, Christie murdered three prostitutes in quick succession. Apparently tired of hiding bodies in the garden or under the floorboards, he hid the three new corpses in the small pantry adjoining his kitchen and then papered over the pantry entrance. Wanting a change of scenery, he then illegally sub-let his flat to two new tenants. His landlord discovered the illegal tenants, kicked them out and then allowed a second floor tenant access to Christie's ground floor kitchen.

Inevitably, the bodies hidden in the pantry were discovered by the upstairs tenant and things happened rather quickly after that. The police lost no time in locating and arresting Christie and then charging him with murder. The case went to trial on 22 June 1953 and he was soon found guilty and sentenced to death. He was hanged on 13^th July 1953, a mere twenty three days after his trail had begun, which goes to show that justice was remarkably swift in post-World War II Britain.

An interesting aside is that Timothy Evans was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint, the most famous member of the Pierrepoint family of official British hangmen, as was John George Haigh, the Acid Bath Murderer, and also...John Reginald Halliday Christie.

Sources:
John Christie Wikipedia
10 Rillington Place Wikipedia
Albert Pierrepoint Wikipedia
Schechter, Harold. The Serial Killer Files. New York: Ballantine Books (2003)
Timothy Evans Wikipedia
Katherine Ramsland John Christie True TV Crime Library
Linda Stratmann 10 Rillington Place Revisited Linda's Crime Notes