After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Bodies in the Walls: Postwar London's Darkest Crime

Episode Date: October 10, 2024

John Reginald Christie was the most notorious murderer of his era. On the outside he was every inch the Old Fashioned Englishman, respectable norms personified. But inside the walls and under the floors of his flat at 10 Rillington Place were the bodies of the women and babies he had killed.Our guest today is Kate Summerscale, groundbreaking true-crime writer whose new book is The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place. She guides Maddy Pelling and Anthony Delaney through this shocking history that shows 1950's Britain's ugliest face.Edited by Tomos Delargy, Produced by Sophie Gee, Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code AFTERDARKYou can take part in our listener survey here.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

Buried in the depths of the internet is The Kill List, a cache of chilling documents containing hundreds of names, photos, addresses and specific instructions for their murders. Kill List is a true story of how I ended up in a race against time to warn those whose lives were in danger. Follow Kill List on the Wanderer app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Kill List and more exhibit C true crime shows like Morbid. Early and ad free right now by joining Wandery+. Welcome to After Dark.

Today, we are turning our attention to a very dark story indeed, and one which contains murder, infanticide, and sexual assault. So please proceed with caution. If you think this one might not be for you, head over to our back catalog where you'll find many other episodes there. But for those of you who are still with us, it's time to head back to Tuesday, 24th March, 1953. Beresford Wallace Brown trundles down the stairs of No. 10, Rillington Place. Wooden steps announce his descent from his room on the top floor with hollow thumps and

creaks. Jamaican, he's been living in the UK since 1950 and works at a dairy in Shepherds Bush. If you ask him though, he's a jazz musician. Today, however, he's a handyman. His landlord, Charles Brown, has asked that he clear and clean the rooms on the bottom of the building, floors beneath his own home. The tenant, who is occupying it, has left unannounced, still owing rent. Beresford enters the flat, which, much like the rest of the building, is all thin walls and uneven flooring.

Light from grimy windows highlights the dust that rises in clouds with each of Beresford's steps, though it's not enough to fully peel back the shadows that linger in the corners of the room. Moving through, Beresford deposits a small toolkit on the table in the kitchen, looking around for a space to put his transistor radio. None forthcoming, he decides to put up a shelf to accommodate it. It'll be a long day if he can't listen to music as he works. Before attaching the brackets, he taps the kitchen wall to test its sturdiness. It's hollow. Strange. Beresford even heads outside to the back of the house looking for an explanation.

Concluding that there must be a cellar of some sort in that corner, he goes back inside and pulls the wallpaper away. There's a hole in the wooden panel beneath. The 43-year-old jazz musician turned handyman brushes the dust from his front, puzzled, and climbs the staircase back up through the rest of the house and to his own room. From it, he fetches a torch before heading down again to stare into that hole in the wall. He bends down to peer inside. His breath catches. There is a cellar, after all, but that isn't what's

caught his attention. Because there in front of him, in the walls of this now abandoned flat, is the bare back of a human being. Hello and welcome to After Dark. I am Antony. And I'm Maddy. And today we have a super special episode because without getting too sycophantic, Maddie and I are trying to control our excitement because we have, I don't know, I think a woman who changed the game when it comes to true crime writing and authoring crime, and that is Kate Summerscale.

Now, you may know her as the author of The Suspicions of Mr. Witcher, which, of course, we have done an episode on that particular crime ourselves on After Dark, but also books like The Wicked Boy and The Haunting of Alma Fielding, which I just read myself a couple of months ago. Her new book is The Peep Show, The Murders at 10 Rillington Place. This is a particularly dark period and a dress in time. And Kate, we are so, so happy to have you on After Dark today. Thank you so much for giving us your time. Thank you so much for having me. I want to know, first of all, what draws you to these histories specifically? I mean, I think,

you know, Maddy and I are equally drawn to them, I think, in other ways. But as I said in the introduction there, you have changed this game. Whether you set out to do it or not, I think you have, and you've really informed it, and you've set a really incredible template for the ways in which historic true crime writing particularly can be undertaken. But what brings you to your subjects? How do you decide what you're going to investigate next? The process is always rather mysterious, what draws you to a particular story and all the more mysterious to be drawn to such dark stories so often. I think in this case, the peep shows look about a serial killer of women. And I think there were some crimes in the summer of 2020 and then the abduction of Sarah Everard in 2021, that made me suddenly kind of look like baffled

and curious of what were these men up to who specifically wanted to kill women, women who weren't even known to them. And I remember the Christie case, the Rillington Place case, from seeing a film about it a long time ago. And then sometimes I find that kind of going back in time can help cast light on the present. You can get perspectives and a different distance.

And you can through a very lurid, sensational story that attracted a lot of attention at the time. Christie was the most notorious killer of his era. You can also somehow get access to the emotional life of that time, the fears and fantasies of the people who reported on the case, the neighbours, the ordinary British people as well, of course, as the murderer himself and his victims. It's a sort of heightened emotional moment in which you can sort of see beneath the surface somehow. Kate, you mentioned the film about this particular crime, and I think for a lot of people that will be the way into this story, and that's maybe how they know it. But for people who

have never come to this case before and know nothing about it. Let's start with the flat that is empty that we've just heard about. Can you tell us who the occupants of that were? Yes. Until recently, the occupants had been a middle-aged couple in their early 50s called Reg and Ethel Christie. Apparently very proper, respectable. They were thought of as the poshest residents of the street. And he was a white collar worker. He was an accounts clerk. And Ethel was a very sort of demure, quiet woman who just sort of said good morning to her neighbors as she went by. Ethel has disappeared in December, it was now March. And Reg had left the flat, abandoned the flat, just a few days before Beresford Brown made his discovery in the kitchen. The police immediately launched a manhunt for

him because what they found in the alcove was not just one body, but the bodies of three young women who had evidently been murdered in the last three months. And then beneath the floorboards in the front room when they started to dismantle the house, they found the body of Ethel Christie, Reg's wife, who had been lying there for even longer. So yes, Reg Christie was the clear chief suspect in the case and a huge search operation began all over the country. So you mentioned there, Kate, that we have Ethel found in the floorboards, but who were the women that were found in the wall then? Because they were the initial discovery, weren't they? Yes, at the time they were dismissed as prostitutes or of prostitute type.

They were poor women, but without families in London. But in fact, they had quite varied histories. One of them, called Kathleen Maloney, was the first one that Christie killed in this particular spree after killing his wife. And she was a professional prostitute. She earned a living by selling sex to men around Paddington and Hyde Park and Notting Hill. And she evidently had quite a bad alcohol problem and her work funded her drinking. Basically, she hung out

in pubs in the Edgeware Road, Prade Street, Harrow Road, and she slept in a lavatory, public lavatory in the corner of Harrow Road and Edgeware Road. So she was essentially homeless. But she had great friendships with the other working girls and with people in the pubs and so on. And she inspired great loyalty and protectiveness in her friends. So she was the first woman who Christy strangled and placed in the alcove. Then there was Rita Nelson, who came from Belfast, and she'd been living in London a couple of years, having escaped a sort of mental health order. She had a child, an illegitimate child back in Northern Ireland, as Kay Maloney had left five children in Southampton. And Rita called herself an arts student. She worked in cafes, but she had just been sacked from her last job at a Lion's Corner house because

she was again pregnant. And then the last woman was Hectorina McLennan, who led a rather sort of precarious life in London. She'd come down from Scotland. So all these women were immigrants, one sort or another, recent arrivals. And she was very down on her luck, also pregnant, absolutely desperate for money. And we've got testimony from like her last boyfriends, her lovers in the last

year of her life, who seem to have absolutely adored her and sent her these notes. So she lived a very vivid and fragile, very dangerous life, Hectorina. construct so much of these women's lives beyond the moment of their death and that's so wonderful. The world that you open up to us here Kate is quite an interesting one that's full of these different social strata. There's a lot of diversity in terms of social class, in terms of racial identity. At the heart of it we have this really monstrous serial killer himself, Christy. You mentioned that they were considered to be the poshest people on their streets, certainly in their building. Where did he see his position in this world? Did he see himself as superior, as separate in some way

from the other human beings around him? He does seem to have adopted a very sort of supercilious attitude to his neighbours and to people he worked with. He was a man who liked authority, he liked being in charge, he liked watching others. He took photographs of women and also of the VE Day celebrations on his street, the local children. During the war he was constantly reporting his neighbours for a chink in their blackout curtains. He served as a policeman in the war. He'd served as a soldier in the First World War. So he adhered to all the respectable norms. He was very proud of the fact he didn't drink much and he didn't go to pubs,

latter of which was not true because he picked up several of his victims in those circumstances. because he picked up several of his victims in those circumstances. So he's a very curious, chilling figure because he placed so much value on his propriety and uprightness. He was like an old fashioned Englishman with the highest moral standards. And he somehow didn't seem to see any conflict between that and his capacity to randomly kill women and then conceal their bodies. So there's a sort of emptiness in him and a split in him between this kind of cartoon 1950s upright gentleman and this absolutely sort of monstrous un unbridled appetite that he privately indulged. There is something particularly chilling about him that even separates him from other serial killers. And I think it's that duality, the supposed uprightness and then what's actually happening behind closed doors. And it's always that what happens when the door is closed is very intriguing for us as humans

I think because that's where you're getting to the heart of someone's reality or somebody's real personality but what we have at this moment is three female bodies in the wall, the body of Ethel, Christie under the floorboards and Reg is missing and there ens, as Maddie is about to tell us, a pretty dramatic manhunt. After the discovery of the bodies at Rillington Place on the 24th of March 1953, a manhunt breaks out across London, then to the country, all looking for John Reginald Christie. The newspapers zither with excitement, and people on their way home from work rush to buy the evening papers like seagulls swooping in for food. The story is shocking, and yet no one seems quite able to look away. Women are more watchful now.

Children lie awake at night worrying this man, this ghoul, might burst through their bedroom doors. It's as if the nation were caught trapped in the closing frames of a horror film. Scotland Yard is inundated with sightings of Christie. Their records read more like a series of vignettes of post-war British life than they do credible encounters. Christie's reportedly seen in the gent's lavatory at Golders Green and on the trolleybus from Acton to Ealing Hat in hand. He's seen in a tea shop near King's Cross, and pacing up and down the train from

Bognorigis, a frightened look reportedly in his eyes. He's on the 625 from Brighton and the Northern line to Edgeware Road. He's running to catch a taxi. He's reported by pawnbrokers and carpenters in smoke-filled Italian cafes and on the back rows of the cinema. The manhunt goes on for a week, until at last one of the phantom sightings proves real. On the 31st of March, London falls silent as the horse-drawn hearse of Queen Mary, the widow of George V, passes crowds gathered for the funeral. Down on the River Thames, two brothers are unloading timber from a barge near Putney Street. A man watches them from the towpath above. He's gaunt, unshaven, and wears a

battered brown trilby hat. One of the brothers feels eyes on him as he works and turns to look back towards his silent witness. He mutters to his brother, that fellow up there looks just like Christie. His brother waves him off, plenty of people look like Christie. But a passing policeman notices the same man and has the same thought as the brother. He asks the gentleman to take off his hat, and when he sees the bald head underneath, he's sure he's caught the man the nation is looking for. John Reginald Christie comes without a struggle, admitting his identity in the police van on the way to jail. So we have him and we have him relatively quickly. And once he is officially apprehended, he comes without much of a struggle, as Maddie just said, and admits his identity, that he is the person that they are looking for.

But I have a feeling it's not going to be that straightforward, Kate. So can you tell us, what does he tell police initially during their questioning of him? What does he tell them happened within his flat? KB Well, they put to him that they found the bodies of four women, including his wife, at his flat, and that they have strong suspicions that he is the perpetrator of these murders. He confesses. He confesses to all of the murders, but he does so in a sort of weird way. It's as if he's sort of saying, well, I must have done it, as if he's just complying with the police that, oh, well, if they found the bodies and he can only half remember the killings and he cast them all as sort of accidents or mercy killings, which seems plainly ridiculous since they're repeated,

that he should accidentally kill one woman, maybe, but four. But he insists that the three young women who were virtual strangers to him forced their way into his flat or pushed themselves on him demanding sex or attacked him. And he killed them in self-defense, their clothes got tangled around their neck, that kind of thing. And he says that Ethel, who was the first one he killed, that he had woken one morning to find her convulsing and he noticed that all the sleeping pills in her bedside table had gone and he'd deduced that she tried to commit suicide. So he had simply been trying to help put her out of her misery. So he had these accounts of the murders, which both sort of took responsibility,

but also didn't, also kind of pushed it away, which sort of chimes with this split personality of him, that he was at once guilty, but also somehow a victim of his circumstances who couldn't possibly have actually chosen to do these things, these women chose him to die by almost. I'm intrigued by this victim blaming that he falls back on. And I wonder, Kate, if you've come across in your research of this, what the initial police reaction is to this. You

know, you've drawn parallels with cases today and there are so many conversations we're having now about institutional misogyny. And I wonder what the police in the 1950s think of Christie's excuses and the way that he paints these women as crazed, sex mad, as having thrust themselves onto him. Do they buy it in any way, shape or form, or do they see his reasoning as ridiculous as we do today? Well, I think that his story seemed implausible from the start. It just didn't really add up that this should have happened four times over in effect, that he accidentally or out of kindness helped women to die. But certainly the way that the women were characterized, the three who

were found in the alcove were all seen as sort of rackety women who put themselves in danger. By the work they pursued or the choices they made, they were at very least somehow complicit in what happened to them. Ethel, his wife, was depicted as a very downtrodden, dowdy figure, a very passive figure. So there was certainly very little coverage of the fuller lives of these women and the detail of their backgrounds, their personalities, their histories. They were almost comic book, loose women who'd come to a bad end. One of the pathologists in the case much later wrote a book in which he reflected on the many strangled prostitutes who he had come across on which he had performed

post-mortems. His conclusion was, are better off out of this world really. They were never going to live a happy or useful life. So there was an extremely dismissive attitude to them for sure. But that didn't quite mean that people believed Christie when he said that they had assaulted him. And of course, luckily for both Hectorina and for Kathleen, there were some witnesses, weren't there, that could attest to the fact that there was a more long-standing relationship with Christie than he had claimed. Yes. These witness statements in the archives are really sort of rich and fascinating. And by interviewing the friends and boyfriends of the women, they plainly contradict Christie's account of how things happened. He invited these women to the house, every one of them.

He sought them out. He even chased them down, like repeatedly going to the welfare office, where he knew they collected their weekly payments, offering them accommodation, offering them treats, drinks, clothes, his late wife's clothes. And so he lured them to his flat, which was not something he confessed to in any form. And what was more, it was not really brought out at the time, maybe partly because it was such a taboo topic, but nearly all the women he killed were either pregnant or rumored to be pregnant at the time of their deaths. And although the idea was sort of slapped down at the time of his trial, it seemed to me pretty obvious that many of them might have, if not all, might have gone to him for illegal abortions.

Abortion was illegal at the time and backstreet procedures were fairly common. There were many rumours that Christie practised as an abortionist, charging say a pound a time to get rid of a baby for a woman who couldn't afford to have one. All these women, if they had given birth, their babies would have been taken away from them at birth because they would have been utterly unable to support them. And that was the norm then. So it seems to me plausible that that was a large part of the holds that he had over them. And it's so horrifying that women didn't have access to those services that today in

some many parts of the world, women are still fighting for those basic rights. But it's even more horrifying that a man like Christie took advantage of that loophole and the fact that this was an underground backstreet service that you would have to seek out and that wasn't monitored in any way. We know that there are the victims' bodies that are in the house, but there are also victims' bodies found in the garden, aren't there Kate? Yes, the police having sort of ransacked the house, they also turned to the garden and they dug there because the Christies, as the tenants of the ground floor flat, also had access to the garden, sole access to the planted part of the garden. In the soil, they found many bones, pieces of

cloth, hair, and so on. They sorted out the human bones from the animal bones and the forensic scientists. In a really impressive piece of reconstruction, it was very pioneering, the forensics on this case. They put together the skeletons of two women by which they could assess their ages, their heights and builds. One of them was missing a skull, which was later discovered. And yeah, they started to try to search for the identities of these women.

Strangely, their biggest lead came from Christie himself. He was on remand in Brixton Prison, and he read about the fact that these bones had been found in his garden. And he told his solicitors, oh, yes, those are two women I killed in the war. And he couldn't remember their names, but he gave some identifying details about where they worked, their nationalities and so on. And with those, the police were able to discover who they were.

Christie's first victim was a woman called Ruth First, who was a Jewish refugee from Austria, who had come to England with the help of a Quaker association just before the war when Hitler invaded to go over her country. And she hoped to become a nurse. But the war buffeted her around a lot. She was interned in a camp for enemy aliens on the Isle of Man for a period. She had an illegitimate daughter who was taken away from her. And she had various jobs like an ammunition factory in Mayfair. And then she met Christie in Notting Hill in 1941, visited his flat a couple of times while his wife was away. And on, I think, the third of these visits, he killed her.

The other one was Muriel Eadie, who came from East London. And she was this daughter of small, quite shy woman who worked with Christie at a factory in Acton. And he invited her back with her gentleman friend. Her mother had died when she was very young. She lost a friend in a bombing raid in 1941. So the Christie's befriended her and again while Ethel was away, Christie killed her. Just thinking about these additional women who were murdered. Something that's occurring to me is obviously how brutal and how deeply tragic this story is. The more you hear about these individuals

that had their lives taken by Christie, the more outraged you feel. It's so abhorrent and it's so dark. But something that's striking me while you're talking is just how much looking at this case gives us a snapshot into the social history of Britain during the war and then in this post-war period. We're talking here about Jewish refugees coming to the country. We're talking about women who have very varied experiences actually, women from the working classes, women who are in some cases, the poorest of the poor. It's such an incredible snapshot of those moments. And have you found Kate in reconstructing their lives that you've been able to open this world up and to take some of the limelight away from Christie himself? Because I suppose that's always the danger,

isn't it? That the focus is always on the serial killer themselves. Have you found this a useful way to to zoom out of that story and to reconstruct something of the wider context? He is a fascinating figure in a terrible way but it feels very important not to fixate on him in a way that he might have enjoyed and to sort of restore the perspective to the other players in the case, principally those women he killed, but also incidental characters like his neighbours and so on, you know, what it felt like to know him or to be in his orbit. Part of what draws me to these stories are the fantastic archives that are accidentally gathered by the police of parts of society that often go unrecorded.

So in the statements of these women's friends, family, neighbors, you get detailed minutiae about their lives. You get an insight into their feelings and their experiences of distress, their excitement of coming to London, but you also just get the real sort of gritty detail of what colour clothes they like to wear, where they did their washing, what drinks they preferred, where they hung out, what

cafes they went to, and all this stuff that you just don't really get in more official histories and things that people don't usually think worth recording at the time. A police investigation, especially into a real atrocity, does capture almost paradoxically these really banal details of everyday life. you have this lurid crime and all the sensation and the high emotion, but the material that that unearths is often very intimate and ordinary and sort of beautifully detailed about just how people were living their lives, kind of off camera as it were. I'm Matt Lewis, host of the Echoes of History podcast where every week we'll be delving into the real life history that inspires the locations, characters and storylines of the legendary Assassin's Creed franchise. Join us as we explore the narrow streets of Medici-ruled Florence, cross sand dunes in the

shadow of ancient pyramids, climb the rigging of 18th century brig sailing across the Caribbean, and come face to face with some of history's most significant individuals. Whether you're a history fan, a gamer, or just someone who loves a good story, Echoes of History is the podcast for you. Make sure to catch every episode by following Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by HistoryHit, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Matt Lewis, host of the Echoes of History podcast where every week we'll be delving into the real life history that inspires the locations, characters and storylines of the legendary Assassin's Creed franchise.

Join us as we explore the narrow streets of Medici-ruled Florence, cross sand dunes in the shadow of ancient pyramids, climb the rigging of 18th century brig sailing across the Caribbean and come face to face with some of history's most significant individuals. Whether you're a history fan, a gamer or just someone who loves a good story, Echoes of History is the podcast for you. Make sure to catch every episode by following Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by HistoryHit, wherever you get your podcasts.

And I think that's one of the things that comes through so blatantly in your work, actually, Kate, is those details and those lives, they initially quite slowly bleed through, but then you get a really good sense of what these lives might have looked like. So with that in mind, let's take those women with us as we venture into the next part of the story and Maddie is going to guide us through the court case as it began to unfold. going to guide us through the court case as it began to unfold. Court One at the Old Bailey has been renovated just in time for the trial. It's a dense jigsaw of dark wood panelling and platforms, oak desks and benches that creak as 200 people crowd in, all lit from the glass domed ceiling above.

Members of the public have queued all night on the street for entry, sipping tea and eating sandwiches to stay warm. There are also members of the London Literati here. Pullets are prize-winning playwrights, newspaper editors, and celebrated crime writers. Perhaps they're drawn by the inverted nature of this trial – the murderer is, after all, known. He's confessed. The only questions still to settle are the motive and the full number of his figures. Reporters are ready, pens in hand to take down every twist of the trial. One of them is more personally invested than the rest. Harry Proctor, the Sunday Pictorial's crime reporter, has been obsessed by this case since the beginning, but now his insides are churning. Only four years ago, he reported

on another double murder at 10 Rillington Place. He sat in this very courtroom as another man Timothy Evans pleaded in vain for his life. The man had even accused Christie himself, but no one listened. Were the two cases linked? And could Harry have done more then to uncover the truth? Had he missed the signs right in front of him? At 11am on Monday the 22nd of June 1953, an usher raps three times. The judge enters and the clerk of the court calls out, Bring up John Reginald Halliday Christie. The prisoner emerges from the floor of the courtroom climbing a staircase from the holding cells below straight into the dock.

And with that, the trial, tasked with making sense of Christie's appalling crimes, begins. Let's focus in on Harry Proctor for just a second, because I think this is a whole new piece of information for a lot of our listeners, and that is that there was another trial and another man linked to other killings at this exact same address. And that is essentially unbelievable, but it had happened. Kate, take us into that world. How had this unfolded and what were the consequences for Christie's trial? Through Harry Proctor's eyes, he was a star crime reporter for one of the best-selling tabloids in the country. And he had gone to 10 Rillington Place

three years before Christie was caught to interview him, Christie, about one of his neighbors who had been charged with murdering his wife and daughter. His bodies had been found in the wash house in the back garden. This neighbor, Timothy Evans, had confessed to the killings, but he also gave various other stories about them, one of which was that his wife, Beryl, had accidentally died during an abortion at Christie's hands. He accused Christie of killing

her, but nobody believed him, especially since he'd confessed. And Christie seemed to have no, there were no apparent motive for killing another man's wife and child. And so Timothy Evans was hanged. Harry Proctor was horrified when he went back to Rillington Place and then watched Christie at the Old Bailey and realized that he hadn't thought to suspect him. He just believed everything Christie had told him back in 1949. And now that Christie had been revealed as a serial killer of women who like to gas, strangle and rape his victims, he thought to his horror that he might have not asked the right questions,

not pressed him hard enough, and in effect left him free to kill more women while an innocent man was hanged. So this issue of whether there had been a miscarriage of justice in the Evans case of 1949 hung over Christie's trial in 1953. And it was extremely politically sensitive because there were calls at the time, campaigns to abolish the death penalty. And a miscarriage of justice would have been really explosive material for abolition. And so there was a very tense atmosphere in the courtroom about whether the Evans case would be raised, whether Christie would confess to having killed Beryl Evans and her baby. It was actually the murder of the baby for

which Tim Evans had been hanged. That was an added drama hanging over something which was already intensely dramatic with all the forensic evidence and the evidence being given of necrophilia and gassings in this tiny terraced house. It was already the most lurid case probably that had been reported on in the British press. Do you think that one of Harry Proctor's blind spots was social class in his initial reporting around Evans' trial. We know that Evans was a member of the working class, and I think I'm right in saying that he was actually illiterate, whereas what we know about Christie is, as you said Kate,

he served as a soldier in World War I, he occupied this very seemingly outwardly respectable position in his neighbourhood in society at large. Do you think that's the reason why Harry Proctor maybe didn't push him as hard as he should have? I think it probably is. When Harry Proctor met Christie in 1949, Christie was very ingratiating, giving cups of tea, bonding with him over their shared heritage. They both came from Yorkshire. And yes, impressing him as a sort of genteel, refined older gentleman. And so I think it were like many people at the time, they thought it was sort of ridiculous to suggest that this middle-aged man had committed this crime. Well, yeah, middle-aged white collar man, and that it was much more likely that the illiterate 25-year-old van

driver upstairs had done it. So I think that there was a certain amount of deference, yes, which played into this story from Harry Proctor and the police. And the police, of course, didn't push Christie very hard either. That may well have been also to do with the fact he had served with the police force during the war. He was a war reserve policeman at the Harrow Road station, which was a neighboring station to Notting Hill. So some of the officers knew him in that capacity. So it was kind of unthinkable that an accounts clerk and policeman then around 50 years old would be involved in such a thing. So social class and deference to various kinds of establishment authority and his record as a war veteran definitely protected him from suspicion.

GW I want to go back to the courtroom, Kate, for a second, because at some point somebody surely will have had to question Christie's sanity based on the horrendous nature of the crimes that he had committed. Was that something that his defence team deployed or was that something that the media were questioning at the time? His only possible defence was insanity. He'd confessed there was so much evidence, forensic evidence against him. The defense barrister argued that these crimes were self-evidently insane, specifically his desire to have sex with unconscious or dead women was so beyond

the pale that it could only be construed as a kind of compulsion and an insanity. So that was the argument that he had lost his mind. And it was sort of supported a bit by Christie's extreme forgetfulness. He sort of appeared to blank out or erase the very moments of his own violence as if he became dissociated, as if he was... And he showed so little emotion. And the barrister actually said to him before the trial, that's fine. Not showing emotion will support the insanity defense. And so he made, he pushed it pretty hard. The defense barrister, he called him mad as a march hare and crazy. But there was so much evidence of calculation as well, which

obviously the prosecution played on. He had groomed these women and invited them back. He said he kept a strangling rope in his toolbox. In his notes for Harry Proctor, he'd said that. When he killed the women, he hid their bodies and went to some lengths, especially in the case of his wife Ethel, to deceive his neighbors, her family about her whereabouts. He forged her signature. He wrote notes on her behalf. He impersonated a telegram from her. So he was extremely, he was a clever man. His IQ was pretty high, and he was extremely cunning in the way that he concealed at least some of his crimes. The prosecution had made a great deal of that, said, this is not an insane man, this is a methodical planner set on killing

women. On the question of insanity, I'm wondering if there was any discussion during the trial about the effect of Christie's experiences maybe during the First World War and obviously not serving during the Second World War but presumably living in London. And of course, we have to caveat that by saying that even if there was an understanding of shell shock, so-called shell shockck PTSD in the decades after the First World War, most of those men did not go on to become serial killers. But was there any consideration given to that? Did that play a part in the conversation around his mental health?

The defence psychiatrist who was called to give evidence for the defence and evidence that Christie was mentally ill, disturbed. He did mention that Christie had been gassed in the First World War and suffered shell shock. He was overcome with mustard gas and he was blinded for a while because his eyes were so inflamed. He also lost his voice. He couldn't speak because his throat was so inflamed. And even when the throat healed, and this was the shock bit, the psychological trauma, he couldn't speak at more than a whisper for the next three and a half years. And even now in 1953, he had rather a sort of whispery voice as if carrying the trace, the memory of that kind of paralysis and horror in the First World War.

So it was mentioned, but not much was made of it. It was just in passing. It didn't form any part of his defense counsel's closing speech, for example, or of the judges summing up. It was mentioned in passing. It seemed to me more significant than they had made of it. Maybe in the wake of the Second World War, maybe at just that moment in medical history, it was not a condition that had much traction or that garnered that much sympathy or that attracted that much attention. I was surprised by how they passed over it, given that there was a lot of research on shell shock after the First World War, a tremendous amount. But as he

said, it wouldn't have formed a justification for an excuse for the kinds of things he did. But to me, it did provide some clues to some of his character and his dissociative states. So we've heard the attack that the defence took, we've heard what the prosecution had to say. What was the outcome? How did this story end, Kate? The trial took four days and the jury took less than an hour and a half to agree that Christie was guilty and sane. And the judge therefore passed the death sentence on him and a date was set for his execution by hanging at Pentonville prison. After that, there were appeals launched by his lawyers and so on as he waited in Pentonville. And some of the press really went to town on the Evans case. And in effect, the story really doesn't end until decades later,

when the full ramifications of the Evans case and the possible miscarriage of justice and so on had a serious transformational effect on British justice system. In my research in the archives, the home office archives in particular, I found some documents that have been suppressed at the time that Harry Proctor, for example, hadn't been able to see, none of the press or the people covering the case had, which suggested a slightly different narrative about what happened at Temerlington Place in 1949 between Evans and Christie. So it's been a very contentious issue ever since because people have been campaigning ferociously for the fact that Tim Evans must have been framed by

Christie and that he had been hanged in error. And that fact has helped overturn the death penalty in Britain in the 1960s. But yes, it's a story with many repercussions. It brought to light so many social problems as well, but it was in some ways a kind of revolutionary moment and the explicit discussions in court and in the papers were both very disturbing, but also there was a certain amount of truth telling about things like backstreet abortion, domestic violence. And so it was a kind of opening and a kind of prelude to the 1960s and some of the issues it opened up, which became much more discussed 10 years later, the plight of single women who became pregnant, for example.

And here we are in 2024, and there is another person I supposed to add into this alongside Proctor potentially. And in a way, that's you, Kate, because you're about to bring this story to a wider audience again. And I'm just wondering, in your work, let's talk about this book specifically, how did these people infiltrate your own life or haunt your own day-to-day being as somebody who, as you say, you're immersed in these archives, you're finding things that potentially people have not seen before, you're coming across unique parts of this history, but that must have an impact on you to a certain extent. It can feel quite dark at times. It's mostly too riveting to me, getting the detail, finding the things that would... On the other hand, that can sometimes make you forget the reality of what

you're dealing with, the emotional reality of it, and sometimes it hits you from the side. It hits me from the side and I suddenly remember what I'm dealing with, the horror of it and sometimes it hits you from the side, it hits me from the side and I suddenly remember what I'm dealing with, the horror of it and the sadness of it. That can be very unsettling. In this book, I've got a couple of figures who I follow or most shadow. One is Harry Proctor who we've discussed and another who's a tabloid journalist covering the case. The other is a woman called Fringe, Tennyson, Jesse, who was more sort of highbrow crime writer, analyst for a prestigious series. They were both obsessed with the case and by having that in some ways they serve as ways of me thinking about what I'm doing, because I'm thinking about what they're

doing, why they were interested, what that was like for them, whether there was a sinister edge to it, whether there was a dangerous edge to it of turning murder into entertainment. And all those thinking about that in their cases is a way of sort of reflecting on it in my case as well. So I suppose those figures in the story are a way of me processing what I'm doing as I go along. This is a conversation that we always have on After Dark actually about the responsibilities of talking about true crime in the past as well as in the present. I suppose I want to end Kate with asking why you wanted to tell this particular story now, and do you see yourself as having a responsibility to tell it in a certain way? Obviously you want to be as accurate

as possible, but do you see a need to shape it to our own moments specifically? Is that something that is in your mind as you're going? Not consciously to shape it to our moment, but obviously every choice I make is sort of informed by what I watch and hear around me and my own history. So I said the idea was planted in me, I think, by some horrific reports of women being murdered by strangers in London three or four years ago. Just recently there's been a report come out from the police saying we're facing an epidemic of sexual violence against women. Women are not actually more likely to be killed than men. Men are much more likely to be murdered. But that particular figuring of sexual violence and the way that that can haunt women, whether or not they've

experienced it, does feel like a live issue and one that I want to unpick for myself, where it comes from, what it's about, what feelings it channels, what feelings it arouses in women and how it develops. And I think it's easier to consider these things at a slight distance to have a bit of a historical perspective. And I think all the things I found, all the things I noticed at least in the Christie case, the Wellington Place murders resonated with now.

It's not like a comforting story about how much worse everything used to be, really. It sort of feels more like a story about the seeds of the present in the past. I think that's an absolutely perfect place to leave it. Kate Summerscale's new book, The Peep Show, The Murders at 10 Rillington Place. I, for one, cannot wait to read this. And gentlemen, please do go out and buy this book because there are so many incredible female historians and journalists and investigators who are bringing a light to some of the situations in which women in the past and in the present, as both Maddie and Kate have been pointing

out, have had to work around. And it is our responsibility to take part in those conversations too, because we need to be aware of the legacy of masculinity in which we are present even in 2024. Thank you for listening to After Dark. And if you have discovered this podcast recently, we have a whole back catalogue of other episodes that you can discover for yourself. Leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts that helps other people discover us too. And until next time, sleep tight. Buried in the depths of the internet is The Kill List, a cache of chilling documents containing

hundreds of names, photos, addresses and specific instructions for their murders. Kill List is a true story of how I ended up in a race against time to warn those who lives were in danger. Follow Kill List on the Wandery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Kill List and more exhibit C true crime shows like Morbid, early and ad free right now by joining Wanderer Plus. you