‘You never seem to get a good murder nowadays.’ With this ‘fretful complaint’ George Orwell imagined newspaper readers bemoaning the decline of the classic English murder. Gone were the ‘old domestic poisoning dramas’ – a solicitor or dentist killing his wife in a quiet suburban home – which made the perfect News of the World spread to curl up with after Sunday lunch. In their place was an altogether more brutish type of murder committed by ruthless serial killers.
Everyone seemed to want to peep behind the curtains of 10 Rillington Place
Orwell was writing in 1946. Seven years later, one of the most notorious serial killers in British criminal history was hanged at Pentonville. His name was John Christie – ‘Reg’ to neighbours at his ground-floor flat in that ‘dingy little Victorian house of doom’, 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill. Christie had killed at least seven women, strangling them and subjecting all but one of them to sexual assault at the point of death, or just afterwards. The exception was Christie’s wife, Ethel, whose body was found underneath the floorboards. Human remains, dating back over a decade, were disinterred from the garden. The bodies of three prostitutes were uncovered in the charnel house itself, behind a kitchen alcove.
But there was more. Three years before Christie’s arrest his upstairs neighbour Timothy Evans had been convicted and executed for the murder of his baby daughter. She, along with her mother Beryl, had been discovered strangled in Christie’s washhouse. Evans initially signed confessions to the murders of mother and daughter, but went to the gallows swearing that ‘Christie [had] done it’ in the process of aborting the Evans’ unborn second child.
‘What a wicked man he is,’ Christie was heard to remark, almost in sorrow, at Evans’s trial, where he was chief prosecution witness. More than a decade later, Evans was granted a posthumous free pardon. His hanging has long been seen as a terrible miscarriage of justice, playing a significant role in the abolition of the death penalty in Britain.
Kate Summerscale’s book conducts us through the grisly details of the murders like a ghoulish chamber of horrors tour guide, and is probably best read on an empty stomach. The latest in a long line of studies of the case, it’s every bit the gripping, page-turning treat that true-crime fanatics salivate for. What sets it apart is the author’s decision to use this classic murder story to expose the rotten underside of post-war Britain in the early 1950s. She paints a backdrop of grime and squalor, of flickering gas lamps, toxic smogs and bombed-out dereliction, bringing to the fore a society that routinely demeaned women and eroticised violence against them, particularly through a flourishing tabloid press. She exposes London’s overt racism, not least in Rillington Place itself, where verbal abuse of black tenants was rife. And she quotes Maxwell Fyfe, a future Conservative home secretary, who said in 1948 that anyone who thought an innocent man could be hanged in Britain was living ‘in a realm of fantasy’.
Central to the narrative are two figures caught up in the furore surrounding Christie’s trial in that coronation summer of 1953. Harry Procter, the chief reporter on the Sunday Pictorial, eager for a scoop and determined to prove that Christie had murdered Evans’s wife and daughter, but eventually sickened by the ‘most lurid and lucrative account of sexual violence in his news-paper’s history’; and Fryn Tennyson Jesse, a novelist hungry for a story to restore her declining reputation, who covered the proceedings for the Notable British Trials series. Like others at the Old Bailey, they observed Christie’s veneer of respectability, this former Boy Scout, soldier and policeman in his smart pinstripe suit, but also the reptilian gaze that sent a chill through Terence Rattigan, watching from the benches.
The book’s title is a nod to Jesse’s fictional account of the Thompson-Bywaters murder of 1922, A Pin to See the Peepshow. To Summerscale, the Christie murders turned Britain into a nation of voyeurs. The newspaper coverage titillated the sadistic impulses that lie dormant in many of us (she never pauses to consider the status of her own book and the suspect genre of true crime in all this). Everyone seemed to want to peep behind the curtains of 10 Rillington Place. A group of women attempted to break into the house, while the trial was a hot ticket. Cecil Beaton rushed from photographing the new young Queen to hear this tale of ‘incredible terrible sordidness’ at first hand.
Jesse’s book about the trial became a study of Christie’s killer psyche. Of one thing she was certain: ‘It could not have been Evans.’ Or could it? Many people down the years have protested Evans’s innocence, including a former editor of this magazine, Ian Gilmour. Yet Summerscale ends her book with a new theory: that Evans was complicit in the murder of his wife and had asked Christie to kill Beryl for him.
Evans was undoubtedly guilty of past violence towards Beryl. Like the protagonist of Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, was he attracted by the offer of a casual acquaintance to kill his wife? More than 70 years after the murders at Rillington Place, the distorting perspectives of this peepshow mean that it’s highly unlikely we’ll ever know.
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