September 29, 2025 • 28 mins
The fourth and final bonus episode of Season 3 and our first ever LIVE episode of The Girlfriends!
Recorded in front of a live audience from Wilderness Festival in Oxfordshire, UK, Anna is joined by author Kate Summerscale to discuss her book, “The Peepshow” and the wider impact of the True Crime genre.
If you’re affected by any of the themes in this show please reach out to NO MORE at https://www.nomore.org a domestic violence charity we’ve partnered with.
The Girlfriends: Jailhouse Lawyer is produced by Novel for iHeart Podcasts. For more from Novel, visit https://novel.audio/.
You can listen to new episodes of The Girlfriends: Jailhouse Lawyer completely ad-free and 1 week early with an iHeart True Crime+ subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, Girlfriends, it's Anna here. This is Bonus episode four,
the final one, and this one's really special because it
was recorded live at Wilderness Festival back in August. It's
going to include a lot of discussion about murder and
violence against women, and it's going to touch on the
topic of abortion. But it's also really fascinating discussion about
(00:22):
the ethics of true crime and the roles we all
play as part of it.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
So to the festival.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Hello, and welcome to our very first live podcast recording
of The Girlfriends.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
It is so great to be here at Wilderness Festival.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
I've got a crick in my neck because I slept
badly last night in a tent.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Awful, but it was so nice as well.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
I'm Anna Sinfield and today I'm joined by Kate summer Scale,
the author of The Peak Show, which is a true
crime book about a set of eight shocking murders that
happened in London in the nineteen forties and fifties. The
book deep dives on the serial killer John Christie, his
female victims, and the circumstances that allowed him to go
(01:09):
uncourt for so long and potentially caused another man to
be hanged for his crime, but it also brings up
lots of interesting questions about the impact and role of
true crime reporting, which is basically what we're going to
be talking about today. So, without any further ado from
(01:31):
the teams at Novel and iHeart Podcasts, this is the
Girlfriend's Jail House Lawyer. Okay, So fans of the Girlfriends
(02:08):
will know that our later series Your House Lawyer.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
I wrestle with figuring out my role.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
In reporting that story, and also, more broadly, with the
ethics of true crime reporting, of turning something so kind
of awful into a sense of like morbid entertainment. And
I know that that's something that you've had to wrestle
with yourself in your book The Peak Show, Kate. And
so before we get a little too existential about our jobs,
(02:36):
I was wondering if you could tell me first what
drew you to this story out of all the grizzly
murders in the world.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
It felt as if I'd always dimly known about it,
like a horrible fairy tale. I saw the wax statue
of reg Christie at the Madame Tusword's Chamber of Horrors
when I was about eight, and I saw the film
tenon Place on late night TV when I was in
my teens, and I remembered it when there were the
(03:07):
murders of several women in London in twenty twenty twenty
one who had been killed by strangers, Sarah Everard among them,
and I started thinking about that phenomenon, men who kill
women who are strangers to them just because they are women,
And I started wondering why, and I remembered the Rillington
(03:30):
Place story. I didn't even remember Red Christie's name at
the time, but when I looked it up, I saw
various parallels and echoes with the more recent crimes, and
I thought that by studying him and his world, I
could get a better sense of the connections between a culture,
a society, and the violence it produces than by looking
(03:53):
at my own time, which is almost too close up
to see.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Yeah, I mean, when you looked at those crimes of
before and compared them to the crimes that you had
been experiencing in the early twenties, seeing these women murdered
by strangers, did you feel like there was difference? Did
you notice a difference between them or does it just
feel like this sad trope of male violence has just
continued in the same form.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
I did notice more the similarities and the differences. He
was not least Christie, I discovered, like Wayne Cousins, was
serving as a policeman when he committed his first known murder.
He was a reserve policeman during the Second World War,
which was an amazing opportunity for catching women unawares and
(04:39):
concealing crimes of violence.
Speaker 4 (04:42):
So yes, I noticed the parallels, but it was.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
Sort of easier to see at a distance in the fifties,
the way that Christie's attitudes were so closely echoed in
the press, in the police force, in the way that
pathologists talked about the victims, and so it helt easier
to understand him as a product of his society as
well as of his individual life.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
You brought up the press there, and a big part
of your book focuses on this crime reporter called Harry Procter,
and you say in the book, and I'm going to
quote this, that he was successful because he didn't just
tell a story, he infiltrated it.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
He embedded himself.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
I know that I lose myself in so many of
the cases that I work on, and they're pretty kind
of hardcore stories of people being killed or experiencing violence
in some respect, Are you as obsessive about your stories
as Harry Procter and me.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
Yeah, I love the research more than any other part
of the composition of a book. I mean, most of
my research, because I write historical stories, is in archives,
and so I'm going through old papers, witness statements, in
police files, transcripts of trials, photographs, maps, floor plans, and
(06:04):
I get completely lost in it. And it feels, you know,
as you literally are sort of touching the past. You're
holding the same documents as the people who you're writing
about and thinking about, and so I find it very,
very absorbing.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
I mean, I don't know about you, But on my desk,
my writing desk at home now, I've got a kind
of really quite weird and perverse collection of belongings and
things that have been owned by victims in some of
my stories or their families, and I've been gifted them
or you know, loaned them so that i can do
(06:40):
my research, and it always feels so different holding you know,
for example, I've got a version of a book that
was owned by this woman called Heidi's Family in the
second series of the girlfriends. We identify this woman called
Heidi who had been murdered, and I've got her dad's
version of a book that was written about her murder.
(07:01):
And it feels so strange to own that artifacts and
to hold it in my hand. It feels different from
the version that I had when it was just from
the library. Do you feel strange touching the past in
that way.
Speaker 4 (07:13):
Yes, i'd have.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
I mean maybe because they happened seventy years ago. I
don't have so many objects in my possession, but they
are just open to the public. It feels kind of
miraculous that you can just order up these papers and
artifacts sometimes and sort of be with them and touch them.
And sometimes there are weird coincidences. I'll order a second
(07:35):
hand book on the internet and when it arrives, open
it and find it's sort of being inscribed to one
of the characters in the story. And then you feel
part of actually a strangely close knit network or world,
and you feel like you're sort of participating in it,
albeit over time you're not their live, but the aspiration
(07:56):
is to sort of be live, And in moments like that,
you feel like it almost is unfolding in real time.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
There's a line in your book that really stood out
to me because it's been something I've been pulling my
hair out a little bit over. Is you wrote being
complicit in a culture that made morbid entertainment of women's bodies.
I believe you were talking about the journalism of the time.
But as a true crime writer today, do you think
that's changed and what do you think your role is
(08:46):
in that?
Speaker 4 (08:47):
I think it's much more starkly visible.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
In the nineteen fifties, the ways in which the tabloid
press in particular, but also movies and posters and adverts
entered women was so sort of glaringly sexualized and objectified,
and for entertainment, you know, for pleasure, for male flecture principally,
(09:11):
But of course there are versions of that now, but
it's less in your face, so you kind of see
it more clearly. And in fact, there were murders that
took place in North London in twenty twenty near where
I live. Bieber Henry and Nicole Smallman, who sisters, were
killed in a park. They were killed by a stranger
who had a mission to kill a certain number of women,
(09:34):
and afterwards the police circulated photographs of their bodies and
talk about a peep show, talk about making a morbid entertainment.
But the press does the same. A book like mine
does that. It's trying to tell a story that will
(09:55):
engage in gross script the reader and the subject is
the of these women. So there's some degree of complicity,
but there are different ways of doing it. There are
different ways of thinking and feeling about it and presenting it.
And in fact, in my book, I made the decision
to not include a photo section because there seemed no
(10:17):
way of illustrating this book without having a sort of
gallery of victims mugshots. So that's sort of try to
use Harry Procter in a way, who was also troubled
by some of these issues and was the style crime
reporter for one of the best selling tabloids in the country.
(10:42):
Use him to help me think about what I'm doing
and what we do and what we do as readers
of true crime or listeners to through crime podcasts and
so on, and to at least reflect on that as
I go.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
Yeah, well, I mean that was going to be one
of my next questions was in Harry Potter's autobiography in
relation to people criticizing his reporting, He says, it was
tougher for me to do than for you to read it,
So why the hell do we do it?
Speaker 4 (11:14):
That sounds very defensive to me of Harry Procter.
Speaker 5 (11:17):
It.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
It's not a little I mean, I wouldn't do it
unless I did enjoy it and find it rewarding and
feel I was some gripped and learnt things by doing it.
And he goes on in that passage to sort of
he blames his editors for sending him out on these stories,
and in fact, he did eventually have a nervous breakdown
(11:39):
because they wouldn't take him off. So he blames his editors,
He blames his bosses for sending him out on the stories,
and he blames his readers. He says, I only give
it to you because you want it, you know, before
you back through a moral outrage at me, you're the
ones who want it. So it all sounds very troubled
and defensive to me, as if he really he really
(12:00):
is struggling with his role in this material and the
ways in which he and many in Fleet Street carried
out their inquiries at the time is quite shocking by
today's standards, but that doesn't you know, it's still a
it's all on a spectrum.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Yeah, I mean, obviously, as a true homewriter, I also
am going to endorse that it's a good medium. But
I do think that there are some genuine upsides to
some of the stuff we do, and you point out
some in your book. For example, some of the essays
and works around Tim Evans, the man who was hanged
prior to Christie's arrest, that helped move the needle on
(12:40):
conversations around the death penalty. So like, actually that writing
helped make a difference.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
Yeah, And Harry Proctor was desperate to get Christy to
confess to the murder of the little girl, one year
old girl for which Tim Evans had hanged, And it
wasn't just a search for justice this particular case, but
also to expose the way that the justice system could
(13:07):
malfunction and innocent people because there was capital punishment, could
be sent to their deaths and so there was no
way of correcting the error. So the Evans case was
really instrumental in getting the death penalty abolished in the
nineteen sixties. It took that long, but Harry Propter was
part of that push to expose the truth, and the government.
Speaker 4 (13:31):
Was very keen to.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Move on and cover up this stuff because they wanted
to defend the justice system, but also the existence of
the death penalty, continuation of the death penalty, So it
was quite a political story in those ways, but it
also brought to light the reporting on the case, the
publicity given to it also brought to light quite a
(13:53):
lot of fractures and tensions in British society, and quite
a lot of desperate practices, such as an awareness about
illegal abortion and how dangerous it was and how desperate
single women often were when they became pregnant and this
(14:15):
was their only recourse at back street abortion because Christy
posed as and I think acted as a backstreet abortionist,
and this was one of the means by which he
lured women to his home, and so the vulnerability, it
was a particularly dramatic manifestation of the danger of back
street abortion. You wouldn't normally expect to be murdered, but
(14:38):
it was a fairly risky procedure in which women did sometimes.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Die and were very easily exploited.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
Yeah, I mean, both of those examples are examples of
crime reporting that's actually making a difference.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
It's having a cultural impact.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Do you think that crime reporting always needs to you know,
the north Star needs we have an impact, We change things,
we do something different.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
I don't think you always know what the impact will be,
So I don't think needs to be justified by that.
I think stories are worth telling. Terrible events are worth
exploring to find out where they come from, what form
they take, how they manifest themselves. And also some stories
(15:27):
very interested in the way that some of these terrible
stories express the fears and fantasies, often the unspoken fears
and fantasies of a wider world. So as a writer,
as a researcher, writing about crime feels like getting access
to a kind of underground emotional life of a society.
Speaker 4 (15:47):
Of a culture, as a nation.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
You start to see the things that animate people, that
scare them, that they fantasize about. And so there are
lots of ways, not all of them practical, in where
which a crime story, a story of violence can help
us learn who we are and where we come from
and how the world worked.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
Well, that was one of the things that I thought
was great about your book, because you really pointed the
finger back at the audience at all of the kind
of sickos in the room today who like to listen
about murders and read about murders and grizzly things and
the darkest parts of society, and you kind of say,
(16:31):
why is it that you want to participate in this
grizzly peep show? And there are examples of it in
the book as well. There was a group of women
who tried to break in after it was kind of
all boarded up, just because they presumably wanted to be
in this place where so much darkness had happened to
other women. And people want to know the worst details,
don't they. Why do you think people are so obsessed
(16:54):
with true crime?
Speaker 3 (16:55):
Such a big question when I read about the women
who tried to break in through the bay window at
Tamorylington Place, and I thought war weird, you know, And
then I thought, it's what I'm doing.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
You're breaking into the window, breaking into the window and
trying to get inside the house.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
You know, it's not so different. And people clamored at
the courthouses to see Christy, to see him, and it
was remarked upon sometimes that a lot of them were women.
And now true crime podcasts at two thirds of the
audiences are women, so that as a route to why
are we so fascinated by it? I mean, one quite
(17:36):
compelling idea to me is that there are stories that
get told through these crimes that are not often aired,
stories about domestic violence, about maratal unhappiness, about betrayal, about
problems between parents and children, about unwanted pregnancies, that a
lot of the domestic difficulty that many women kind of
(17:59):
deal with it isn't aired so much in the pages
of the press, and certainly didn't used to be in
the nineteen fifties, unless through a story of a violent crime.
So it gives us access to things that we sort
of know about or half know about, or want to
talk about. Another thing would be that it's a kind
(18:20):
of knowing your enemy impulse. Do you want to see
the man who might kill you, or what that kind
of man looks like, or what makes him, how to
identify him, what circumstances the women who were killed by
him found themselves in that that happened to them, So
a self protective instinct perhaps does at work as well. Also,
(18:43):
I think there are just our own anger fear. Maybe
even violent stories finds an outlet in thinking about and
learning about these things, it can act as some kind
of vent or self expression. Reading as well as writing,
can be that kind of self express.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
I get that. Okay, So now I've called your sickos.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
I was just wondering if any of you had any
questions for me or Kate, No pressure, Lovely over here,
ll wait for the microphone.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
We've got to get it on the podcast.
Speaker 4 (19:43):
So dark stuff.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
So do you have some sort of cleansing for yourself
once you've done some detailed research and you've written the
book to step away?
Speaker 4 (19:54):
Do you need to do that at all? It feels
a big relief.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
Maybe this is the case for a writer, but with
a story as intense as this, and I did work
on it very intensely, partly because there was so much material,
I needed to go fast to kind of keep it
in my head, to keep the story straight. And there's
a great relief in sharing it with other people, in
the first instance, your editor, a publishing team, that it
(20:21):
stops being just yours. So publication is in itself a
kind of lifting of the story from a private sphere
into a public sphere, and people can read it converse
with you about it. So something that has been internal
conversations becomes something that can be talked about and that
feels good, that feels really nice. I mean perhaps you're
(20:44):
asking about during the process of writing. I think it
feels like any job I need, you know, company, different
things going on. I don't feel that it's a particularly
more difficult thing to bear than any other. It's something
I'm interested in enjoy. I don't feel poisoned by it,
(21:06):
you know. I don't feel I need to be cleansed
as I go. I just need sort of light and shade,
as anyone would doing things for fun instead of things
that are intense and purposeful.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
Yeah, I think in short, hate's made of strong stuff.
I don need some cleansing after all of my shows
any more questions? Got one over here just in front.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
Hello. Do you when you go back to the start
of your career to now, do you reflect on how
it's perhaps shaped you as a person in your response
to the world.
Speaker 3 (21:39):
Well, I've had a big change of career in that
I worked as a journalist for many years for newspapers.
Speaker 4 (21:46):
I was an editor.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
Rather than a writer, and I left to write a
book which was successful Beyond my dreams and need to
continue writing books and that's all I do. That's been
a huge change because I get to decide what I
(22:07):
do every day. I get to sort of follow my nose,
follow my curiosity, and I miss the company of the
newspaper office. It's quite a solitary work I do now,
but I love being able to determine my own path
all the time, and I'm sure that has changed me
(22:29):
as a person and how I feel my place in
the world.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
I think we've got time, but one more question then
I've got to wrap it up.
Speaker 5 (22:37):
Hi, So you were talking about why people listen to
true crime. Do you think that because in the media
killers are kind of shown as like monsters and stuff.
Do you think there's like a need to feel separated
from those people. What are your thoughts on that.
Speaker 4 (22:56):
Oh, I think totally yes.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
And I really noticed in the coverage of Christie how
eager the press was to sort of monster him, you know,
to either talk about him as a psychopath, a word
I find quite problematic, just the way you're saying, like,
not like me, you know, a monster, a creature, and
the desire to distance oneself from the murderer and to
(23:21):
be reassured that you're not that is. I think one
of the pleasures of reading about crime, whether it's fictional
or factual, and it's a totally understandable impulse, but one
of its effects is to sort of say that this
person has nothing to do with the society in which
he lived, and I think there is more complicity than that.
(23:44):
I was eager neither to glamorize Christie as this sort
of great serial killer, you know, cunning, but nor to
distance him in the way that the press did at
the time, and to make him so different, so kind
of exceptional. And I could see he was in some ways.
(24:05):
He wasn't exceptional. The things he ultimately did were, but
his sort of fantasies and assumptions and prejudices were perfectly ordinary,
I mean, frighteningly ordinary. And I'm sure it's shared across
the society. And I totally agree with you that one
of the pleasures of especially like if you read a
crime novel and you get to the end and you're
one of the pleasures is it wasn't me, you know,
(24:27):
knowing to do with me, So feelings of kind of
unease or guilt are dispelled by the identification of the
murderer and the assignment of blame.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
On the Girlfriend's Joe House Lawyer, which is the podcast
that's coming out at the moment, We've actually tried to
go on the other side of kind of exploring.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
What it means to be a villain.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
We're trying to understand what happens when you fall in
the in between, which is where all of us fall,
I'm sorry to say, is we're neither perfect nor are
we totally bad. And even the perpetrators that I actually
spend time interviewing. I'm interviewing people who've been convicted of
murder on the show, and it's realizing that they have passed.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
That have led them up to that point.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
And when you start to kind of try and stop
seeing them just as monsters, but as people who are
a product of their circumstances, it forces you to look
inwards as well, which is a scary place to be looking.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Okay, well, that is a fun note to end on.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Look, that's all we've got time for today, So thank
you so much, Kate.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
This has been brilliant. Could everyone give her a big.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Run of a pause, So do make sure to pick
up Kate's book, The Peak Show at All the usual
spots and check out The Girlfriends wherever you get your podcasts,
which is where you hear me. Thank you, Thank you
(25:56):
so much to Kate and to Wilderness Festival for having me,
and thank you for listening.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
We've finally come to the end of season three.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
The Girlfriends will return with a brand new season very soon,
and I won't give you any spoilers, but let's just
say I've heard some of it and you're in for
one hell of a story. Plus, make sure you check
out The Girlfriend's Spotlight two where you can hear more
incredible stories of women winning.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
That's it from me, so I'll see you soon.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
The Girlfriend's Gelhouse Lawyer is produced by Novel for iHeart Podcasts.
For more from Novel, visit novel dot Audio. The show
is hosted by me Anna Sinfield and is written and
produced by me and Lee Meyer, with additional production from
Jaco Taivich and Michael Jinno. Our assistant produce is Madeline Parr.
(27:01):
The editors are Georgia Moody and me Annasinfield. Production management
from Sarie Houston, Joe Savage, and Charlotte Wolfe.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
Our fact checker is Daniel Suleiman.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Music supervision by me Alis Infield, Lee Meyer, and Nicholas Alexander.
Original music composed by Nicholas Alexander, Daniel Kempson and Louisa Gerstein.
Story development by Nell Gray Andrews and Willard Foxton. Creative
director of novel, Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan are executive
producers for novel, and Katrina Norvell and Nicki Eator are
(27:36):
the executive producers for iHeart Podcasts, and the marketing lead
is Alison Cantor. Thanks also to Carry Lieberman and the
whole team at WME
Hey, Girlfriends, it's Anna here. This is Bonus episode four,
the final one, and this one's really special because it
was recorded live at Wilderness Festival back in August. It's
going to include a lot of discussion about murder and
violence against women, and it's going to touch on the
topic of abortion. But it's also really fascinating discussion about
(00:22):
the ethics of true crime and the roles we all
play as part of it.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
So to the festival.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Hello, and welcome to our very first live podcast recording
of The Girlfriends.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
It is so great to be here at Wilderness Festival.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
I've got a crick in my neck because I slept
badly last night in a tent.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Awful, but it was so nice as well.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
I'm Anna Sinfield and today I'm joined by Kate summer Scale,
the author of The Peak Show, which is a true
crime book about a set of eight shocking murders that
happened in London in the nineteen forties and fifties. The
book deep dives on the serial killer John Christie, his
female victims, and the circumstances that allowed him to go
(01:09):
uncourt for so long and potentially caused another man to
be hanged for his crime, but it also brings up
lots of interesting questions about the impact and role of
true crime reporting, which is basically what we're going to
be talking about today. So, without any further ado from
(01:31):
the teams at Novel and iHeart Podcasts, this is the
Girlfriend's Jail House Lawyer. Okay, So fans of the Girlfriends
(02:08):
will know that our later series Your House Lawyer.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
I wrestle with figuring out my role.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
In reporting that story, and also, more broadly, with the
ethics of true crime reporting, of turning something so kind
of awful into a sense of like morbid entertainment. And
I know that that's something that you've had to wrestle
with yourself in your book The Peak Show, Kate. And
so before we get a little too existential about our jobs,
(02:36):
I was wondering if you could tell me first what
drew you to this story out of all the grizzly
murders in the world.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
It felt as if I'd always dimly known about it,
like a horrible fairy tale. I saw the wax statue
of reg Christie at the Madame Tusword's Chamber of Horrors
when I was about eight, and I saw the film
tenon Place on late night TV when I was in
my teens, and I remembered it when there were the
(03:07):
murders of several women in London in twenty twenty twenty
one who had been killed by strangers, Sarah Everard among them,
and I started thinking about that phenomenon, men who kill
women who are strangers to them just because they are women,
And I started wondering why, and I remembered the Rillington
(03:30):
Place story. I didn't even remember Red Christie's name at
the time, but when I looked it up, I saw
various parallels and echoes with the more recent crimes, and
I thought that by studying him and his world, I
could get a better sense of the connections between a culture,
a society, and the violence it produces than by looking
(03:53):
at my own time, which is almost too close up
to see.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Yeah, I mean, when you looked at those crimes of
before and compared them to the crimes that you had
been experiencing in the early twenties, seeing these women murdered
by strangers, did you feel like there was difference? Did
you notice a difference between them or does it just
feel like this sad trope of male violence has just
continued in the same form.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
I did notice more the similarities and the differences. He
was not least Christie, I discovered, like Wayne Cousins, was
serving as a policeman when he committed his first known murder.
He was a reserve policeman during the Second World War,
which was an amazing opportunity for catching women unawares and
(04:39):
concealing crimes of violence.
Speaker 4 (04:42):
So yes, I noticed the parallels, but it was.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
Sort of easier to see at a distance in the fifties,
the way that Christie's attitudes were so closely echoed in
the press, in the police force, in the way that
pathologists talked about the victims, and so it helt easier
to understand him as a product of his society as
well as of his individual life.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
You brought up the press there, and a big part
of your book focuses on this crime reporter called Harry Procter,
and you say in the book, and I'm going to
quote this, that he was successful because he didn't just
tell a story, he infiltrated it.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
He embedded himself.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
I know that I lose myself in so many of
the cases that I work on, and they're pretty kind
of hardcore stories of people being killed or experiencing violence
in some respect, Are you as obsessive about your stories
as Harry Procter and me.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
Yeah, I love the research more than any other part
of the composition of a book. I mean, most of
my research, because I write historical stories, is in archives,
and so I'm going through old papers, witness statements, in
police files, transcripts of trials, photographs, maps, floor plans, and
(06:04):
I get completely lost in it. And it feels, you know,
as you literally are sort of touching the past. You're
holding the same documents as the people who you're writing
about and thinking about, and so I find it very,
very absorbing.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
I mean, I don't know about you, But on my desk,
my writing desk at home now, I've got a kind
of really quite weird and perverse collection of belongings and
things that have been owned by victims in some of
my stories or their families, and I've been gifted them
or you know, loaned them so that i can do
(06:40):
my research, and it always feels so different holding you know,
for example, I've got a version of a book that
was owned by this woman called Heidi's Family in the
second series of the girlfriends. We identify this woman called
Heidi who had been murdered, and I've got her dad's
version of a book that was written about her murder.
(07:01):
And it feels so strange to own that artifacts and
to hold it in my hand. It feels different from
the version that I had when it was just from
the library. Do you feel strange touching the past in
that way.
Speaker 4 (07:13):
Yes, i'd have.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
I mean maybe because they happened seventy years ago. I
don't have so many objects in my possession, but they
are just open to the public. It feels kind of
miraculous that you can just order up these papers and
artifacts sometimes and sort of be with them and touch them.
And sometimes there are weird coincidences. I'll order a second
(07:35):
hand book on the internet and when it arrives, open
it and find it's sort of being inscribed to one
of the characters in the story. And then you feel
part of actually a strangely close knit network or world,
and you feel like you're sort of participating in it,
albeit over time you're not their live, but the aspiration
(07:56):
is to sort of be live, And in moments like that,
you feel like it almost is unfolding in real time.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
There's a line in your book that really stood out
to me because it's been something I've been pulling my
hair out a little bit over. Is you wrote being
complicit in a culture that made morbid entertainment of women's bodies.
I believe you were talking about the journalism of the time.
But as a true crime writer today, do you think
that's changed and what do you think your role is
(08:46):
in that?
Speaker 4 (08:47):
I think it's much more starkly visible.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
In the nineteen fifties, the ways in which the tabloid
press in particular, but also movies and posters and adverts
entered women was so sort of glaringly sexualized and objectified,
and for entertainment, you know, for pleasure, for male flecture principally,
(09:11):
But of course there are versions of that now, but
it's less in your face, so you kind of see
it more clearly. And in fact, there were murders that
took place in North London in twenty twenty near where
I live. Bieber Henry and Nicole Smallman, who sisters, were
killed in a park. They were killed by a stranger
who had a mission to kill a certain number of women,
(09:34):
and afterwards the police circulated photographs of their bodies and
talk about a peep show, talk about making a morbid entertainment.
But the press does the same. A book like mine
does that. It's trying to tell a story that will
(09:55):
engage in gross script the reader and the subject is
the of these women. So there's some degree of complicity,
but there are different ways of doing it. There are
different ways of thinking and feeling about it and presenting it.
And in fact, in my book, I made the decision
to not include a photo section because there seemed no
(10:17):
way of illustrating this book without having a sort of
gallery of victims mugshots. So that's sort of try to
use Harry Procter in a way, who was also troubled
by some of these issues and was the style crime
reporter for one of the best selling tabloids in the country.
(10:42):
Use him to help me think about what I'm doing
and what we do and what we do as readers
of true crime or listeners to through crime podcasts and
so on, and to at least reflect on that as
I go.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
Yeah, well, I mean that was going to be one
of my next questions was in Harry Potter's autobiography in
relation to people criticizing his reporting, He says, it was
tougher for me to do than for you to read it,
So why the hell do we do it?
Speaker 4 (11:14):
That sounds very defensive to me of Harry Procter.
Speaker 5 (11:17):
It.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
It's not a little I mean, I wouldn't do it
unless I did enjoy it and find it rewarding and
feel I was some gripped and learnt things by doing it.
And he goes on in that passage to sort of
he blames his editors for sending him out on these stories,
and in fact, he did eventually have a nervous breakdown
(11:39):
because they wouldn't take him off. So he blames his editors,
He blames his bosses for sending him out on the stories,
and he blames his readers. He says, I only give
it to you because you want it, you know, before
you back through a moral outrage at me, you're the
ones who want it. So it all sounds very troubled
and defensive to me, as if he really he really
(12:00):
is struggling with his role in this material and the
ways in which he and many in Fleet Street carried
out their inquiries at the time is quite shocking by
today's standards, but that doesn't you know, it's still a
it's all on a spectrum.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Yeah, I mean, obviously, as a true homewriter, I also
am going to endorse that it's a good medium. But
I do think that there are some genuine upsides to
some of the stuff we do, and you point out
some in your book. For example, some of the essays
and works around Tim Evans, the man who was hanged
prior to Christie's arrest, that helped move the needle on
(12:40):
conversations around the death penalty. So like, actually that writing
helped make a difference.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
Yeah, And Harry Proctor was desperate to get Christy to
confess to the murder of the little girl, one year
old girl for which Tim Evans had hanged, And it
wasn't just a search for justice this particular case, but
also to expose the way that the justice system could
(13:07):
malfunction and innocent people because there was capital punishment, could
be sent to their deaths and so there was no
way of correcting the error. So the Evans case was
really instrumental in getting the death penalty abolished in the
nineteen sixties. It took that long, but Harry Propter was
part of that push to expose the truth, and the government.
Speaker 4 (13:31):
Was very keen to.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Move on and cover up this stuff because they wanted
to defend the justice system, but also the existence of
the death penalty, continuation of the death penalty, So it
was quite a political story in those ways, but it
also brought to light the reporting on the case, the
publicity given to it also brought to light quite a
(13:53):
lot of fractures and tensions in British society, and quite
a lot of desperate practices, such as an awareness about
illegal abortion and how dangerous it was and how desperate
single women often were when they became pregnant and this
(14:15):
was their only recourse at back street abortion because Christy
posed as and I think acted as a backstreet abortionist,
and this was one of the means by which he
lured women to his home, and so the vulnerability, it
was a particularly dramatic manifestation of the danger of back
street abortion. You wouldn't normally expect to be murdered, but
(14:38):
it was a fairly risky procedure in which women did sometimes.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Die and were very easily exploited.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
Yeah, I mean, both of those examples are examples of
crime reporting that's actually making a difference.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
It's having a cultural impact.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Do you think that crime reporting always needs to you know,
the north Star needs we have an impact, We change things,
we do something different.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
I don't think you always know what the impact will be,
So I don't think needs to be justified by that.
I think stories are worth telling. Terrible events are worth
exploring to find out where they come from, what form
they take, how they manifest themselves. And also some stories
(15:27):
very interested in the way that some of these terrible
stories express the fears and fantasies, often the unspoken fears
and fantasies of a wider world. So as a writer,
as a researcher, writing about crime feels like getting access
to a kind of underground emotional life of a society.
Speaker 4 (15:47):
Of a culture, as a nation.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
You start to see the things that animate people, that
scare them, that they fantasize about. And so there are
lots of ways, not all of them practical, in where
which a crime story, a story of violence can help
us learn who we are and where we come from
and how the world worked.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
Well, that was one of the things that I thought
was great about your book, because you really pointed the
finger back at the audience at all of the kind
of sickos in the room today who like to listen
about murders and read about murders and grizzly things and
the darkest parts of society, and you kind of say,
(16:31):
why is it that you want to participate in this
grizzly peep show? And there are examples of it in
the book as well. There was a group of women
who tried to break in after it was kind of
all boarded up, just because they presumably wanted to be
in this place where so much darkness had happened to
other women. And people want to know the worst details,
don't they. Why do you think people are so obsessed
(16:54):
with true crime?
Speaker 3 (16:55):
Such a big question when I read about the women
who tried to break in through the bay window at
Tamorylington Place, and I thought war weird, you know, And
then I thought, it's what I'm doing.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
You're breaking into the window, breaking into the window and
trying to get inside the house.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
You know, it's not so different. And people clamored at
the courthouses to see Christy, to see him, and it
was remarked upon sometimes that a lot of them were women.
And now true crime podcasts at two thirds of the
audiences are women, so that as a route to why
are we so fascinated by it? I mean, one quite
(17:36):
compelling idea to me is that there are stories that
get told through these crimes that are not often aired,
stories about domestic violence, about maratal unhappiness, about betrayal, about
problems between parents and children, about unwanted pregnancies, that a
lot of the domestic difficulty that many women kind of
(17:59):
deal with it isn't aired so much in the pages
of the press, and certainly didn't used to be in
the nineteen fifties, unless through a story of a violent crime.
So it gives us access to things that we sort
of know about or half know about, or want to
talk about. Another thing would be that it's a kind
(18:20):
of knowing your enemy impulse. Do you want to see
the man who might kill you, or what that kind
of man looks like, or what makes him, how to
identify him, what circumstances the women who were killed by
him found themselves in that that happened to them, So
a self protective instinct perhaps does at work as well. Also,
(18:43):
I think there are just our own anger fear. Maybe
even violent stories finds an outlet in thinking about and
learning about these things, it can act as some kind
of vent or self expression. Reading as well as writing,
can be that kind of self express.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
I get that. Okay, So now I've called your sickos.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
I was just wondering if any of you had any
questions for me or Kate, No pressure, Lovely over here,
ll wait for the microphone.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
We've got to get it on the podcast.
Speaker 4 (19:43):
So dark stuff.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
So do you have some sort of cleansing for yourself
once you've done some detailed research and you've written the
book to step away?
Speaker 4 (19:54):
Do you need to do that at all? It feels
a big relief.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
Maybe this is the case for a writer, but with
a story as intense as this, and I did work
on it very intensely, partly because there was so much material,
I needed to go fast to kind of keep it
in my head, to keep the story straight. And there's
a great relief in sharing it with other people, in
the first instance, your editor, a publishing team, that it
(20:21):
stops being just yours. So publication is in itself a
kind of lifting of the story from a private sphere
into a public sphere, and people can read it converse
with you about it. So something that has been internal
conversations becomes something that can be talked about and that
feels good, that feels really nice. I mean perhaps you're
(20:44):
asking about during the process of writing. I think it
feels like any job I need, you know, company, different
things going on. I don't feel that it's a particularly
more difficult thing to bear than any other. It's something
I'm interested in enjoy. I don't feel poisoned by it,
(21:06):
you know. I don't feel I need to be cleansed
as I go. I just need sort of light and shade,
as anyone would doing things for fun instead of things
that are intense and purposeful.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
Yeah, I think in short, hate's made of strong stuff.
I don need some cleansing after all of my shows
any more questions? Got one over here just in front.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
Hello. Do you when you go back to the start
of your career to now, do you reflect on how
it's perhaps shaped you as a person in your response
to the world.
Speaker 3 (21:39):
Well, I've had a big change of career in that
I worked as a journalist for many years for newspapers.
Speaker 4 (21:46):
I was an editor.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
Rather than a writer, and I left to write a
book which was successful Beyond my dreams and need to
continue writing books and that's all I do. That's been
a huge change because I get to decide what I
(22:07):
do every day. I get to sort of follow my nose,
follow my curiosity, and I miss the company of the
newspaper office. It's quite a solitary work I do now,
but I love being able to determine my own path
all the time, and I'm sure that has changed me
(22:29):
as a person and how I feel my place in
the world.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
I think we've got time, but one more question then
I've got to wrap it up.
Speaker 5 (22:37):
Hi, So you were talking about why people listen to
true crime. Do you think that because in the media
killers are kind of shown as like monsters and stuff.
Do you think there's like a need to feel separated
from those people. What are your thoughts on that.
Speaker 4 (22:56):
Oh, I think totally yes.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
And I really noticed in the coverage of Christie how
eager the press was to sort of monster him, you know,
to either talk about him as a psychopath, a word
I find quite problematic, just the way you're saying, like,
not like me, you know, a monster, a creature, and
the desire to distance oneself from the murderer and to
(23:21):
be reassured that you're not that is. I think one
of the pleasures of reading about crime, whether it's fictional
or factual, and it's a totally understandable impulse, but one
of its effects is to sort of say that this
person has nothing to do with the society in which
he lived, and I think there is more complicity than that.
(23:44):
I was eager neither to glamorize Christie as this sort
of great serial killer, you know, cunning, but nor to
distance him in the way that the press did at
the time, and to make him so different, so kind
of exceptional. And I could see he was in some ways.
(24:05):
He wasn't exceptional. The things he ultimately did were, but
his sort of fantasies and assumptions and prejudices were perfectly ordinary,
I mean, frighteningly ordinary. And I'm sure it's shared across
the society. And I totally agree with you that one
of the pleasures of especially like if you read a
crime novel and you get to the end and you're
one of the pleasures is it wasn't me, you know,
(24:27):
knowing to do with me, So feelings of kind of
unease or guilt are dispelled by the identification of the
murderer and the assignment of blame.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
On the Girlfriend's Joe House Lawyer, which is the podcast
that's coming out at the moment, We've actually tried to
go on the other side of kind of exploring.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
What it means to be a villain.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
We're trying to understand what happens when you fall in
the in between, which is where all of us fall,
I'm sorry to say, is we're neither perfect nor are
we totally bad. And even the perpetrators that I actually
spend time interviewing. I'm interviewing people who've been convicted of
murder on the show, and it's realizing that they have passed.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
That have led them up to that point.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
And when you start to kind of try and stop
seeing them just as monsters, but as people who are
a product of their circumstances, it forces you to look
inwards as well, which is a scary place to be looking.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Okay, well, that is a fun note to end on.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Look, that's all we've got time for today, So thank
you so much, Kate.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
This has been brilliant. Could everyone give her a big.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Run of a pause, So do make sure to pick
up Kate's book, The Peak Show at All the usual
spots and check out The Girlfriends wherever you get your podcasts,
which is where you hear me. Thank you, Thank you
(25:56):
so much to Kate and to Wilderness Festival for having me,
and thank you for listening.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
We've finally come to the end of season three.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
The Girlfriends will return with a brand new season very soon,
and I won't give you any spoilers, but let's just
say I've heard some of it and you're in for
one hell of a story. Plus, make sure you check
out The Girlfriend's Spotlight two where you can hear more
incredible stories of women winning.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
That's it from me, so I'll see you soon.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
The Girlfriend's Gelhouse Lawyer is produced by Novel for iHeart Podcasts.
For more from Novel, visit novel dot Audio. The show
is hosted by me Anna Sinfield and is written and
produced by me and Lee Meyer, with additional production from
Jaco Taivich and Michael Jinno. Our assistant produce is Madeline Parr.
(27:01):
The editors are Georgia Moody and me Annasinfield. Production management
from Sarie Houston, Joe Savage, and Charlotte Wolfe.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
Our fact checker is Daniel Suleiman.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Music supervision by me Alis Infield, Lee Meyer, and Nicholas Alexander.
Original music composed by Nicholas Alexander, Daniel Kempson and Louisa Gerstein.
Story development by Nell Gray Andrews and Willard Foxton. Creative
director of novel, Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan are executive
producers for novel, and Katrina Norvell and Nicki Eator are
(27:36):
the executive producers for iHeart Podcasts, and the marketing lead
is Alison Cantor. Thanks also to Carry Lieberman and the
whole team at WME
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