THE PEEPSHOW—Kate Summerscale

London, 1953. Police discover the bodies of three young women hidden in a wall at 10 Rillington Place, a dingy terrace house in Notting Hill. On searching the building, they find another body beneath the floorboards, then an array of human bones in the garden. But they have already investigated a double murder at 10 Rillington Place, three years ago, and the killer was hanged. Did they get the wrong man?
A nationwide manhunt is launched for the tenant of the ground-floor flat, a softly spoken former policeman named Reg Christie. Star reporter Harry Procter chases after the scoop. Celebrated crime writer Fryn Tennyson Jesse begs to be assigned to the case. The story becomes an instant sensation, and with the relentless rise of the tabloid press the public watches on like never before. Who is Christie? Why did he choose to kill the women, and to keep their bodies near him? As Harry and Fryn start to learn the full horror of what went on at Rillington Place, they realize that Christie might also have engineered a terrible miscarriage of justice—in plain sight.
In this riveting true story, Kate Summerscale mines the archives to uncover the lives of Christie's victims, the tabloid frenzy that their deaths inspired, and the truth about what really happened inside that house. Joining me to discuss, THE PEEPSHOW: The Murders at Rillington Place— Kate Summerscale
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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
killers in true crime history and the authors that have
written about them Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK Every
week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,

(00:30):
journalist and author Dan Zufanski.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
Good Evening, London, nineteen fifty three, police discover the bodies
of three young women hidden in a wall at ten
Relinketon Place, a dingy terrace house in notting Hill. On
searching the building, they find another body beneath the floorboards,

(01:00):
then an array of human bones in the garden. But
they have already investigated a double murder at ten Rillington
Place three years before, and the killer was hanged. Did
they get the wrong man? A nationwide manhunt is launched
for the tenet of the ground floor flat. A softly

(01:21):
spoken former policeman named reg Christie, Star reporter Harry Procter
chases after the scoop. Celebrated crime writer Fern Tennys and
Jesse begs to be assigned to the case. The story
becomes an instant sensation and with the relentless rise of

(01:42):
the tabloid press. The public watches on like never before.
Who is reg Christie? Why did he choose to kill
those women and to keep their bodies near him? As
Harry and Ferns start to learn the full horror of
what went on at Rillington Place, they realized that Christy

(02:03):
might also have engineered a terrible miscarage of justice in
plain sight. In this riveting true story, Kate Summerscale minds
the archives to uncover the lives of Christie's victims, the
tabloid frenzy that their deaths inspired, and the truth about

(02:24):
what really happened inside that house. The book that we're
featuring this evening is the peep Show The Murders at
ten Rillington Place, with my special guest journalist and award
winning author, Kate summer Scale. Welcome to the program and

(02:44):
thank you very much for this interview. Kate summer Scale, Well,
thank you, it's great to be here. Thank you so much,
and congratulations on this book. I know it came out
previously in the UK, but we're talking about this American
release of this book, ten reallyked in Place.

Speaker 3 (03:02):
Yes, it came out in a few months ago in
the UK and justin now in the Spring in the US.

Speaker 2 (03:10):
You take us initially in this book you call it
the in the Walls, and you take us to March
twenty fourth, nineteen fifty three, and you introduced a central
figure in this book, Harry Proctor from the Sunday Pictorial.
Can you tell us about Harry Procter and introduce this

(03:31):
chapter in the Walls.

Speaker 3 (03:35):
Harry Procter was a star crime reporter for the Sunday Pictorial,
which was one of the leading tabloids in Britain at
a time of great competition and prosperity in Fleet Street
the British Press. He was a working classman from the
north of England who had risen by his wits to

(03:57):
this preeminent position. He was charming, quite devious in getting
his stories, extremely ambitious. He was determined to get the
scoop on the Christie case. When the bodies of six
women were discovered in this tiny terrace house in notting Hill,

(04:20):
West London. The bodies were concealed in the crevices of
the building in its garden, so there were three bodies
behind the kitchen wall, one beneath the floorboards in the
front room. The bones of two further women in the backyard,
and the tenant of the house, a man called Reg Christie,

(04:43):
an apparently respectable, middle aged office worker, had gone on
the run when Harry Proctor turned up at this street
one foggy evening in nineteen fifty three to ask the
police what was going on, And the real shock for
Harry was that he realized he had been to this

(05:06):
exact same address three years earlier and had interviewed Christie,
the man who the police were now seeking about another
double murder in the very same house, for which another
man eventually hanged. And this man, Timothy Evans, had at

(05:26):
one point accused Christie of killing his wife and daughter,
but the jury did not believe him and had Evans
was put to death. Now that all these bodies had
been found and the premises, and Christie was the chief suspect,
it became obvious to some, including Harry, that he might

(05:50):
tim Evans might have been telling the truth. Christy might
have committed this double murder of a woman and her
baby daughter in nineteen forty nine. And worst of all,
for Harry, he had himself that he prided himself on
his journalistic prowess, missed the story he'd interviewed Christie. He

(06:10):
like the jury had believed him to be innocent, and
as a result, Christy had been left free to carry
on killing.

Speaker 2 (06:20):
So you say that Harry Procter felt some guilt in
being duped by Regg Christi originally with the Tim Evans case.
So what was his vow now in light of that
guilt and in light of what had happened at ten
Rillington in the Discoveries.

Speaker 3 (06:38):
Yes, Harry felt guilt, remorse, shame. He also felt humiliated
about his journalistic skills, and he was determined to put
it right. He felt bad too for Tim Evans, the
man who had hanged. This was possibly one of the
worst miscarriages of just this in English legal history, and

(07:05):
is so Harry wanted, for all these reasons, for remorse, ambition,
and a quest for justice. He wanted to get Christy
to confess to the murders, not only of the six
women who had been found in the house that March,
but of Beryl and Geraldine Evans, the woman and child
killed three years earlier, because that confession would clear Tim

(07:27):
Evans's name and be a sensational scoop for Harry's newspaper.
So he went about trying to secure an exclusive with Christie.
Even while Christy was still on the run before the
police had caught him, Harry still sort of set about
making plans for how he could get a story and
get it before and hear all his rivals and have

(07:50):
it himself. And to do this he went to the
north of England, back down Christie's family and secured an
interview with his brother Percy, and he persuaded Percy that
if he signed an agreement that the story should go
exclusively to the Sunday Pictorial, the Pictorial would pay all

(08:14):
of Christie's defense costs and pay for psychiatrists to interview
him to assess whether he was insane, to do everything
possible to help him. This was a strange kind of
pact with the devil that Harry was making. He was
undertaking to support Christie's defense. His paper would do that

(08:37):
in return for a story that would ultimately condemn Christy
as a man who had let another man hang in
his place.

Speaker 2 (08:48):
You say the Pictorial Pictorial was going to fund the defense,
so did they have defense attorneys? Solicitors?

Speaker 3 (08:56):
In mind, Harry had a friend who was a solicitor.
These kinds of deals were becoming increasingly common in Fleet Street.
They were a bit below the radar. They weren't strictly
illegal or legal, so it was all on the hush hush.
So Harry got in touch with his solicitor friend, who

(09:19):
in turn pointed a barrister to represent Christie in court.
All this was sort of firmed up only once Christie
was apprehended, which was a week after the murders were discovered.
He was found by the Thames by a policeman. Christie
sort of endorsed the agreement that his brother had made

(09:42):
with the Pictorial and agreed to write his story while
he was in Brixton Prison awaiting trial or Harry, so
that the Pictorial could publish it as soon as the
verdict was in.

Speaker 2 (09:57):
You introduce another central carearacter, fern Tennyson Jesse, and she's
an acclaimed novelist, and you write about the notable British
Trials series. Tell us about that this was.

Speaker 3 (10:12):
A series that had been running for more than half
a century, quite acclaimed and influential, sort of high brows
series of They were trial transcripts, so the famous trials
would be printed in full in these books and with
an introduction by a celebrated author, crime writer and friend,

(10:37):
Tennis and Jesse was one of one of the most
acclaimed of the crime writers, true crime writers of the
interwar years, and she had written several essays for introductions
to the notable British Trial series already, and she'd also
published fiction, some of which drew on real crime story.

(11:00):
So she was absolutely fascinated by true crime and in
particular by the psychology of murderers. And she was quite
a pioneer in this field in writing essays that tackled
and a psychological and unconscious motive as well as the
nitty gritty of who done it and how, and so

(11:22):
she was she read about Christie's the discovery of the
bodies at ten Rillington Place and Christie's arrest in the papers,
and again even before he was arrested, she was pleading
with her editor at Notable British Trials to give her
the commission on this story because she wanted to be
able to get a ticket to the Old Bailey trial

(11:45):
of Christie and then to write. She wrote a long
essay in which she considered his psychology and his methods
and also try to unpack the mystery of whether he
had indeed killed Tim Evans' wife and child. The main

(12:09):
argument against that it would seem almost obvious that he
had because these bodies have been found in the wash
house behind his flat at ten Rillington Place in nineteen
forty nine. Yet the strange thing was Tim Evans, even
though he'd accused Christie of being a murderer, had at
another point made a very full and detailed confession to

(12:32):
having murdered Beryl and Geraldine Evans himself. So it was
a very perplexing case, and there were arguments on both side.
Campaigners on both sides both Tim Evans innocence, but others
others believed in his guilt and thought it was indeed
a coincidence that these two stranglers had shared a house.

Speaker 2 (12:56):
You're right about that. Once Christy is apprehended, the police
obvious questioned him. So throughout this book is the various
answers to the questions that police have for him. Tell
us about the first questioning and what is called a confession?
What does he actually say that he confesses to.

Speaker 3 (13:19):
Well, the police, to Harry, the frustration of Harry Procter
and others didn't really question Christie at all about the
Evans murders. The establishment, from the police to the courts,
and the government didn't want to rock the vote on
this previous conviction. They didn't want the scandal of a

(13:41):
miscarriage of justice, especially because there was a big furia
at the time about whether capital punishment should be abolished
in England. So the police asked Christy about the women
whose bodies had been found in his house that much.
His first was really bizarre. He claimed that most of

(14:04):
his victims had attacked him and he had killed them
in self defense. He's claimed that these women much younger
than him, had forced their way into his house or
refused to leave, had demanded sex, had got violent, and
it was a really strange kind of reversal of what

(14:26):
must really have happened, a straight kind of projection of
what he'd done to them and framing it as what
they'd done to him. And the forensic evidence completely discredited
these stories of his and in a couple of cases,
including that of his wife Ethel, whose body was found

(14:48):
beneath the floorboards in the front room, he claimed that
he had carried out a mercy killing, that she had
wanted to die and she had taken a lot of
sleeping pills and then and because they didn't work, he'd
sort of finished the job for her. That this was
not credible either, And it emerged after the very sophisticated

(15:12):
and wide ranging forensic analysis of the bodies and the
crime scene that the women, most of the women that
had been found, had been gassed with carbon dioxide from
the household the main pipes, and they'd been raped by
Christie and then they'd been strangled. So his stories of

(15:36):
being the victim of these sort of wild attacks by
women was completely discredited.

Speaker 2 (15:44):
What information came out, and it would be regarding the
motive possibly for killing any of these women. And what
I'm speaking to is his role as an abortionist.

Speaker 3 (15:58):
Yeah, this was something that was also sort of slightly
hushed up at the time, but it seems obvious from
going through the archives and reading all the statements by neighbors,
by former lodgers, by local police that Christy was practicing
as a backstreet abortionist and this may well have been

(16:21):
the way that he lured many of his victims to
his house. I realized as I was researching that almost
everyone had been pregnant or rumored to be pregnant at
the time of their deaths. This was a period when
abortion was illegal in Britain, and backstreet abortions were relatively common.

(16:47):
That are risky, dangerous to the life of the mother.
The women who were impoverished, as many were this time,
it was the almost impossible to bring up a child
by oneself. So if they had given birth to this,

(17:08):
to this unwonted child they would have had they would
have been parted from it immediately, it would have been
taken into into care. So many women did seek out
abortions because, you know, for financial reasons, they simply couldn't have.
Unmarried women couldn't afford to raise children and read Christy.
This may well be why he had this gassing device

(17:29):
that he used on his victims as well. And there's
an interesting question of whether his wife Ethel eventually one
or of his victims, was complicit in this activity. It
seems likely.

Speaker 2 (17:46):
You talk about the that in preparation for this trial
and Harry Procter's publishers funding this defense that he had
Reginald Christy give him, which he was able to be
used eventually for the pictorial publication. So tell us some

(18:08):
of the information that Christy gave to Harry and was
part of his incredible notes.

Speaker 3 (18:16):
The notes were they're an extraordinary document and they were
written over many weeks while Christie was waiting to be
tried and sitting in his cell in Brixton Prison. There
are quite a few fragments about his early life which
are interesting. He talked about his father being very domineering.

(18:39):
He talked about the fact that he had seen his
grandfather's dead body when he was a child, laid out
in the parlor, and he had looked on it with
no emotion, and he said ever since, dead bodies had
held a fascination for him. He talked about how he
had been gassed as a soldier in the First World War.

(19:03):
He was caught up in a mustard gas attack on
the Western Front, and the effect of this was to
he temporarily was blinded and lost his voice, and his
voice didn't come back for six months and not fully
for three years. Even now, even in his fifties. He

(19:26):
spoke with a whisper and the doctors at the time
and thereafter concluded that this was a psychosomatic condition. It
was a form of shell shop that he'd reacted to.
The trauma of the gas attack by balling silent, So
he sort of portrayed in fragments this his earlier life,

(19:49):
but a lot of the statement is taken up. He
also does describe the murders, but often in a very
detached and vague way. As he said to the police
it must have been me. It was almost as if
he was talking of a third person. And even in
this confession for Harry, there's that tone of voice, rather distant, unemotional,

(20:15):
slightly bewildered, as if he he is a spectator of
his own atrocities rather than the perpetrator. And weirdly, there's
this thing that even when he was arrested, he insisted
to the police on what a kind of moral, high minded,

(20:36):
educated man he was, And in the statement for Harry,
he goes to great lengths to impress upon him how
sober he is, how he doesn't drink heavily, how he
doesn't swear, how he's very fond of animals and even
rescued a cat once. Even as he's confessing to murder,
he's still insisting on this image of himself as this upright,

(21:00):
almost Victorian figure who has extremely high moral standards and
disapproves of prostitution, disapproves of pubs and liquor. And so
this kind of jarring disjunction between the acts he's admitting
to and the persona that he stood it persists in presenting.

Speaker 2 (21:22):
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
these messages. Now you explain the I guess unique aspect
of the British judicial system that they would only be
able to try one murder at a time. So what
do does a prosecution choose as the first murder to prosecute,

(21:44):
and also what is the seemingly the only option for
the defense In terms of defense, the.

Speaker 3 (21:55):
Crown prosecution decided to charge Christie in court with the
murder of his wife Ethel. She was the victim that
he claimed to have put to death because she was
suffering so much and wanted to die, and he said
that he put her body beneath the floorboards in the

(22:17):
front room because he wanted her to still be near him.
He claimed to have loved her very much, acted only
out of pity. The reason that the prosecution chose this
murder was that they had the most evidence that Christy
had consciously permitted it. It was not an act of

(22:39):
momentary madness, and the evidence for this was that he
made preparations to kill her. He had afterwards covered up
the crime really quite deviously by sort of forging altering
dates on letters, sending Christmas car to her family, saying

(23:01):
I was so sorry Ethel can't write this herself as
she's got terrible rheumatism in her hands. Don't worry, I'm
going to cook the Christmas dinner, and claiming to his
neighbors that she was visiting her six sister, that she
sent a telegram. So they were very, very elaborate cover
up in the case of Ethel's death, which of course

(23:22):
he didn't need to do in the case of the
other women who nobody knew had even come to his house,
nobody knew had died, so that seemed the easiest one
to pin on him. And importantly this they guessed that
Christie Lawyers would claim insanity as a defense. It was

(23:45):
the only possible defense because the evidence against him was
so great, and Ethel's death was the one that most
clearly was sort of rational, alculating, consider premeditated, and so
it was the best one to use as to sort

(24:06):
of rebut the claims of insanity. That was his lawyers
claimed that he was mad when the case came to trial,
and their main argument was really the horror of what
he'd done. The fact that he had had sex with
these women's dead or unconscious bodies, is said, was a

(24:29):
perversion so great that there was no other way of
explaining it other than insanity. So that was the defense case.

Speaker 2 (24:39):
You're right about the state of journalism at that time.
We always think of a tabloid journalism and sensationalistic journalism
and headlines of something that's more recent. But tell us
about the state of journalism that time and the tabloids
and sensationalism in the media.

Speaker 3 (24:59):
In the wake of the Second World War, the tabloid
journalism really boomed. There were lots more photographs used in papers,
often a semi clad young women pin ups, which I
think had been popularized in part during the war with
sort of pilots and soldiers taking magazines with them, and

(25:22):
now it became sort of part of the mainstream press,
and the stories were, you know, sex and violence were
big sellers of papers, and papers were huge, like more
people read a newspaper in Britain in the nineteen fifties
than in any other country in the world, and there

(25:42):
were eighty percent of people read a paper every day,
and then when papers published several times a day, it
was almost like a sort of live streaming situation where
you'd get an afternoon paper that was updated a couple
of hours later and then again and on an unfolding
sensational case. Getting the latest news was the source of

(26:05):
great appeal to readers, and journalists competed really fiercely to
get to get their first, to get get their scoops.
As a result, there was quite a lot of money
at Fleet Street. As somebody's worked in newspapers more recently.
It was amazing to read and how Harry Procter would

(26:27):
bury his contact about taking role, taking them in a
rolls Royce to the Old Bailey for their trial, and
the Daily Expresscott bought a helicopter to get it to
the scenes of breaking news stories more quickly in its rivals.
So it was really, you know, it was quite unscrupulous,

(26:49):
no expense spared, lots of money paid to informance as well,
which has obviously potential for corruption and fictional fictional life
of stories, but don't imagine it sounds like a very
exciting and stressful life, heavy drinking, heavy smoking, absolutely relentless,

(27:12):
long hours and fierce competition.

Speaker 2 (27:17):
You mentioned the necessary state of prostitution and its necessary state,
but what was even Harry Procter's attitude and the newspaper's
attitude towards prostitution.

Speaker 3 (27:32):
The number of prostitutes in London had increased hugely during
the Second World War because of all the servicemen passing
through the capitol, and there were an estimated one hundred
thousand prostitutes on the streets of London in nineteen fifty one.

(27:52):
People were very anxious, the authorities were very anxious that
this would mark the city when all the tourists came
for the Queen's coronation in the summer of nineteen fifty three,
and there was big public campaign to sort of clean
up the streets, and this was popular, you know, in
the tabloids as well as among the police. So there'd

(28:16):
be these disapproving article about the women of the streets.
Harry joined in with that. He in particular track do
I mean most of the women who sold sex on
the streets of London were relatively boor and they could
make a lot more money as prostitutes, and they could
as shop girls or waitresses in cafes or similar. It

(28:38):
was a time when most women's work was very poorly paid,
much lower waveless than men, but prostitution was relatively well paid.
And Harry tracked down a ring of high class prostitutes,
sort of an elite lot who worked in places like Mayfair,
and he personated a punter, and he and a fellow

(29:03):
journalist sort of work their way into one of these
high class brothels. And then he wrote a great big
expose and claimed that now that his identity and his
ruse had got out, all the high class madams in
London were quaking in their boots at being discovered by him.

(29:24):
So he presented this as sort of doing his part
to rid the city of sex workers. But of course
was also like a very exciting story for the Sunday
Pictorial to splash across its pages, and the tone was
pretty sort of excitable as well as disapproving, a familiar

(29:48):
combination in the tabloid press.

Speaker 2 (29:53):
You write about Roy Arthur and you could tell us
who this person is, and also the idea that he
would try to get a psychiatrist named Jack Hobson to
interview reg Christie again, so tell us about this ongoing
push for Harry to get a confession from Reginald Christy,

(30:15):
but also that they were funding the defense with Jack Hobson.

Speaker 3 (30:20):
Roy Arthur was an old friend of Harry's and a
clerk for the solicitors who hired to represent Christy. Harry
was banned from entering Brixton Prison, having married out an
interview with another prisoner and published it in the pictorial
a few months earlier, so now no journalists were allowed

(30:43):
to visit prisoners, but he used Roy Arthur as his
kind of agent, so roy Arthur had full access, being
a part of the solicitors firm that was employed on
Christy's behalf, so he'd go in and he would asked
Christy questions on Harry's behalf. Report back prompted Christy to

(31:06):
write about certain subjects in the statement he was writing for.
Harry and Roy Arthur also arranged for a psychiatrist called
doctor Jack Hobson to come to the prison interviewed Christy
and assess whether he was insane, and they chose a
psychiatrist who they thought would be sympathetic to the defense.

(31:29):
Jack Hobson had recently testified in at least one other
case of murder where he had managed to get the
man the charges brought down to manslaughter or to an
insanity defense had proved successful. So he was a known
quantity as somebody who could convince the court that somebody

(31:50):
who committed a vicious murder might be insane. And Jack
Hobson was a founding member of the Society for the
Abolition of Capital Punishisment, so he had, you could say,
a vested interest in using his expertise to help spare

(32:10):
somebody the death penalty. And if they proved that Christy
was insane, his sentence would be commuted and he would
have be sent to the Broadmoor Hospital for Criminal lunatics
rather than banged at Pentonville. So this was, you know,
he was carefully chosen, and indeed he did with caveats,

(32:33):
but he did, after his interviews with Christie, agree that
he could testify and court that Christy was insane.

Speaker 2 (32:43):
Can you explain this dichotomy that Harry is looking for
in a confession. He's pushing for a confession and he's
very curious, obviously about Christie's role in Beryl Evans's wife
and the daughter Gerald Dean. But that confession that he's
pushing for and that information therein is to be used

(33:06):
after this trial is judicated and not to be used
in terms of obviously any type of defense for the
client that his paper is paying for. So can you
just tell us how he wrestled with this conundrum basically,

(33:28):
with having this kind of information yet still being part
of the funding this insanity defense for Reginald Christy.

Speaker 3 (33:37):
Yeah, he was trying to exploit the situation for his
own ends and to see justice done, to perhaps write
miscarriage of justice or get or clear the name of
Tim Evans. But the Evans case didn't directly have any
part in the trial that was coming up that summer

(33:59):
at the Old Bailey, Christie's trial for the murder of
his wife Ethel. The way Carrie sort of reconciled his
you know, desperate hunt for a confession, you know pressure
for a confession to these earlier murders was on the
grounds that, as the psychiatrist Dr Hobson agreed, the more

(34:21):
murders Christie confessed to, the more convincing his insanity defense
might be. So that was the excuse for pressing him
on Beryl Evans's death in particular, was as somebody said
to Christie someone on the defense team, the more the merrier.
But if they're not, there's the numbers of his victims grew,

(34:44):
the more he would look like an out of control
madmen rather than a scheming murderer. And so that was
I mean, to my mind, it seems like it wasn't
really Harry's motive was to improve his chances of escaping
the death penalty. His motive was to get the scoop,

(35:07):
to get the record corrected. On Tim Evans having said that,
I suppose it was. I don't think Harry was very
comfortable with the death penalty himself. He wasn't a supporter
of it. And if Christy had been spared, maybe Harry
would have got more access to him, Maybe there would

(35:29):
have been more interviews, maybe he could have gone further
and got more scoops. So perhaps he did want him
to but he did want the defense to succeed, even
if for fairly cynical reasons, rather than because he had
any sort of feeling for Christie himself. All the evidences
he'd found him despicable. So yes, it was a morally

(35:52):
complicated one to swing to sort of to sort of
proceed as if he was doing something in pursuit of
just for Harry, he was pursuing justice, but also supporting
the defense of this serial killer while plotting to sort
of get these other crimes pinned on him and trying

(36:14):
to persuade him to confess to them. It's very sort
of interesting mix of mix of motives and a real
ethical quagmire really, as was the very fact of funding
his defense. I mean, in effect, Harry and the Sunday
Pictorial were colluding with Christy. It an uncomfortable area I

(36:39):
think for Harry.

Speaker 2 (36:42):
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
these messages. You say it's uncomfortable. But also the paper
eventually publishes photos provided by Christy. What does Harry and
what do the attorneys do with the forensic evidence that

(37:02):
refutes Christie's claimed that his wife had overdosed on sleeping pills.

Speaker 3 (37:08):
The toxicology reports established definitively that Ethel Christie had not
had barbiturates in her blood stream, that she had not
taken any drugs as Christie claimed, so that undid his
whole story about her trying to kill herself and him
strangling her as a way of compassionately ending her life.

(37:33):
They didn't try to argue with the forensic evidence in court.
What they did was just say, what man who loved
his wife so much, who they'd lived together for thirty years,
he must have been mad. They applied the sort of
insanity braining to that. But of course there were other

(37:54):
arguments as to why Christie might have killed his wife,
one being clear the way to killing other women, because
it was after he killed Ethel in December nineteen fifty
two that he went on a free and killed three
other women in his flat in the next three months.

(38:16):
And another reason for killing her might have been that
she suspected him of the murders of Beryl and Geraldine Evans.
In nineteen forty nine, a lodger came forward, spoke to
the press, also gave a very full statement to the police,
which was not used and not made public again the

(38:38):
police did not want to go there with anything touching
on the Evans case. But this lodger claimed that Ethel
had confided in her in nineteen fifty one that she
thought her husband had something to do with the deaths
of Beryl and Geraldine, and Ethel was very shaken by
this thought because she had been extremely fond of the baby.

(39:02):
Ethel being unable to have children herself, loved having children
around her and she used to babysit Geraldine Evans and
even offered to adopt her when she realized that Tim
and Beryl Evans marriage was in trouble.

Speaker 2 (39:18):
Let's talk about the run up to the trial and
also fern Tennyson Jesse. She is very interested in attending
this trial, so she goes out of her way to
try to secure that assurance that she'd be able to
attend that trial and write about it.

Speaker 3 (39:35):
Yeah, she asked her editor, a notable British trial to
get her a ticket for the Old Bailey. He said
he was unable to do so, he didn't have the influence,
well know the right people. Although it was a very
prestigious series, it was based in Edinburgh and he wasn't
really plugged into the British legal so the English legal scene.

(39:58):
So she then just wrote to everyone you could think
of who might be able to get her in. From
her a friend of her osteopaths, to Sir Norman Burkett,
an extremely eminent lawyer who had served at the Nuremberg
trials a few years earlier. She eventually succeeded in getting
a seat and a seat for her secretary, Joan all

(40:24):
throughout the trial, which in the event lasted four days.
Frinn was going blind at the time. She was sixty five.
She had cataracts. She was also ailing in other ways,
and she was a morphine addict she had been since
she hit an accident in her twenties. Was treated the

(40:47):
pain was treated with morphine, and she had a doctor
come to her house in North London every day to
inject her with morphine. So she needed her secretary's support.
A secretary acted as her chauffeur as well, and she
only learned for An, only learn a couple of days
before the trial began that she definitely had a seat

(41:09):
in the courtroom and she was thrilled.

Speaker 2 (41:14):
You're right about the prosecutor Lionel Held and also the
defense attorney Curtis Bennett, and Curtis Bennett makes in his
opening statement, my case is insanity, so clearly putting out
that they're going to defend him with this insanity defense.

(41:36):
Tell us how this trial proceeds, and before we talk
about the most dramatic parts of this trial in that
Jack Hobson testifies for the defense and also Reginald Christy
takes the stand.

Speaker 3 (41:53):
Yeah, So the main part, the early part of the
her trial was mostly the Lionel Healed, who was the
Attorney General, so a member of the British government unusually
was deputed to lead the prosecution in this case. And
presumably it was because it was such a huge story.

(42:13):
It had dominated the headlines alongside the coronation of Queen
Elizabeth which took place in the same month, and the
country was agog for news about Christie. But it was
also that Lionel Healed was appointed to lead the prosecution,
I think because it was such a political case, because

(42:35):
of the Evans angle, because Christie's prosecution and the discovery
of his crimes raised a lot of misgivings and unease
about the safety of the English legal system and whether
an innocent man had been put to death, And a
lot of what he did in court was to try

(42:56):
to suppress any discussion of the Evans case, to insist
it was irrelevant to this one. So he was acting
as a government agent in that sense, in that he
was trying to keep a lid on that and to
insist that the focus be only on the case against
Christy for the murder of his wife, Ethel. And to

(43:19):
this end he called a string of witnesses who testified
to various events and acts that not only confirmed the
time and lace of Ethel's death, but also Christie's efforts
to cover it up. And again, Hild was intent on

(43:40):
showing how rationally Christy had been acting at this time
because he knew the defense was going to try to
argue otherwise. So Christie's lawyer, Curtis Bennett would sort of
interrupt with questions about the Evans case and also with

(44:00):
questions that he crossed Egamin people to try to raise
doubts about Christie's sanity or to point out moments at
which he had behaved apparently irrationally. So that was the
sort of dynamic for the first day and a half.

Speaker 2 (44:23):
Tell us about the dramatic testimony. There's days of it,
but tell us of the dramatic testimony that begins with
Reginald Christy.

Speaker 3 (44:34):
So Curtis Bennett called Christy to the witness stand, well
not two defense witnesses. This caused a big excitement in
the court because there was no obligation for a defendant
to testify at his trial, and in fact it was
pretty rare, especially in terrible murder cases like this. So

(44:58):
people were very surprised see Christy make his sort of
faltering way to the stand and then speak about the
crimes and answer questions from first his lawyer and then
the prosecution lawyer about what had happened in Rillington place,
and he whispered from the stand. I mean, interestingly, he

(45:20):
had been in the same same witness stand three years
earlier as the chief witness for the prosecution of Tim Evans,
the man convicted of the worders of his wife and child,
and so he had whispered then. And he had come
across as a rather frail and genteel figure. And here

(45:40):
too he was sort of he had his round glasses,
was balding, he was in a suit. He seemed very
sort of tremulous and diffident to begin with, in the
way he spoke and address the court. After on the
second day of his evidence, the prosecution arranged for a

(46:01):
microphone to be fitted to the witness stand so that
Christy could be heard better, and apparently the effect was transformational.
He sounded much more assertive, and was even rather as
if he was enjoying being in the limelight, as he
was enjoying commanding the attention of this wrapped audience that

(46:24):
was gathered before him, And he was as vague as ever.
He didn't deny the murders of Ethel or anyone else
apart from the child Geraldine. By now he decided to
confess to the killing of Beryl Evans on the grounds
that them all the merrier, But he still denied killing

(46:47):
the child, which was quite inexplicable. How should somebody have
killed you know, their bodies had been found together, seemed
extremely likely that the murder of one was not the
murder of the other. But he he sort of distanced him,
seemed as detached as he had to the police, to

(47:07):
the psychiatrist, to the prison officers. He just it was
the kind of well, it must have been me. I
must have done it, lots of I can't remember. When
asked about specific assaults on women, and when he talked
about the death of his wife, Ethel, he wept. He

(47:28):
said how much he loved her, how he wanted her
near him. This sort of played to the defense's argument
that the murdering her was not a rational act, that
something must have come over him. Dr Jack Hobson, when
he appeared to testify as the psychiatrist on truth Christie's behalf,

(47:50):
he said he believed that Christie, on balance, was insane.
He hadn't known what he was doing when he murdered
these women, and he suggested quite lightly, but he brought
up the shell shock that Christie had suffered in the
First World War. Christie's barrister shockingly brought up as a

(48:15):
possible cause of his mental dislocation and breakdown that he
had had to that he had been sharing his house
with black people. They were recent immigrants from the West Indies,
and Christie's landlord was himself a Jamaican, a Jamaican boxer,
and there are plenty of evidence that both Christie and

(48:37):
Effe were extremely racist and appalled at having to share
their house with these people who were not white. But
it seems a very cynical and ugly maneuver for his
lawyer to try to suggest that this was that this
situation had put so much mental and emotional pressure on

(48:59):
Christie that he'd been driven to murder.

Speaker 2 (49:04):
Let's use as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages.
Now you say that his testimony continues, and there's a
dramatic scene when they bring in this rope deck chair.
And what does this rope deck chair demonstrate to the
jury and to the courts.

Speaker 3 (49:24):
The rope deck chair is like a deck chair frame that,
instead of having a piece of cloth as it's the
part you sit in, had been strung with old bits
of rope. So it's kind of rather sordid, very impoverished object.
And Christie at one point in his statement to Harry Procter,

(49:47):
said that he had strangled one of his victims with
a piece of rope he'd pulled off the deck chair.
He referred to the debt chair a few times in
describing what happened when the women came into his house.
This was where he would invite them to sit. It
was set up in his kitchen, tiny kitchen at the

(50:09):
back of the property, and the gas supply was nearby.
So it was a close shocking moment when it was
brought into the court because until then all the evidence
had been heard orally or pictorially, and here it was
like a solid piece of evidence, something real, almost living

(50:31):
from the crime scene. At Rillington Place, and for some,
including the society photographer Cecil Beaton, who was in the
courtroom watching, it seemed an emblem of the degradation not
only of Christie's life, but the deprivation of the lives
of the women who he killed. This seemed kind of

(50:52):
emblematic of how basic, rough and unlovely the living conditions
were this section of society, and these crimes did one
among other things, they did cause a stir for the
for the poverty and desperation that they brought to light.

(51:13):
Nearly all the women who found themselves in Christie's clutches
had ended up there because they were desperate, whether it's
because they were pregnant, as they were poor, because they
couldn't find housing. There was an acute housing shortage in
London at the time, and so the case kind of
opened a window on a very degraded section of society,

(51:38):
not far from the center of London.

Speaker 2 (51:40):
In notting Hill, You're right, very dramatic. Attorney General Hill
asked the final question about Burl Evans. He says, you
swear you did, you swear you didn't. How do you
expect the jury to believe you? And Christy left that

(52:01):
witness box that day.

Speaker 3 (52:04):
Yeah, and that was you know, the overriding sense of
him was just how nothing added up. He would say anything.
It felt as if everything was unreliable, everything was a lie,
everything was expedient. So he would say he would say
one thing, the women attacked me in order to absolve

(52:26):
himself with murder, and then he would say another thing, Oh,
yes I did attack them, and Beryl Evans too, in
order to proclaim insanity. So his evidence was so strangely dissociated, detached,
almost relaxed, but utterly unreliable, and nobody quite knew what

(52:50):
they'd seen or what it meant, and whether the weirdness
of his demeanor was evidence of insanity or just callousness.
I mean the idea of the psychopath, which recently been
popularized by an American psychiatrist, Harley Cleckley during the Second

(53:13):
World War, and so ideas of psychopathy of people who
kind of had some sort of missing emotional capacity, who
had sort of soulness, And this category in itself hovers
somewhere between sanity and insanity. So it was very difficult
to know what to make of Christie and whether the

(53:37):
extreme horror of the acts he carried out would persuade
the jury that he must be insane because it was
so ugly and inexplicable, or whether the insanity defense was
a cunning and cynical way of escaping the death penalty

(53:58):
and he'd learn exactly what he was doing. As the
prosecution lawyer said, evidence its sexual perversity is not evidence
of insanity, and that was in a way what the
jury had to consider, because Christie's lawyer was implying well,

(54:19):
was claiming that the extreme nature of Christie's acts was
in itself evidence of insanity.

Speaker 2 (54:28):
You're right too that doctor Hobson is grilled by Attorney
General Hilt and amidst that it would be wholly inappropriate
to describe Christy as hopelessly and utterly mad, and the
doctor had to respond, I would agree that it's inappropriate.

Speaker 3 (54:51):
Right. This was a very big fracture that opened in
the course of the trial. The Hobson, though he wanted
to be helpful and did believe he could legitimately make
the case that Christie was insane, did not go as
far as Christie's attorney Curtis Bennett, in his descriptions of him.

(55:11):
So Curtis Bennett had a great sort of rhetorical flourishes,
describing Christie, his client as mad as a march hare,
hopelessly insane, you know, really ramped up the rhetoric about
about his madness. And when the Attorney General challenged the

(55:32):
psychiatrist whether he would concur with that the defense characterization
of Christian these ways, Hodman had to admit that no,
he wouldn't. The kind of insanity he was describing was
more more subtle and less pronounced than what Curtis Bennett

(55:53):
had been trying to portray. And this, I think was
really decisive, the fact that the one defense witness apart
from Christie himself, had in effect criticized or undermined the
argument made by the attorney who had called him to

(56:14):
the witness stand.

Speaker 2 (56:18):
You're right that the jury deliberates for just an hour
and a half. What is the verdict and what is
Reginald Christie's reaction?

Speaker 3 (56:28):
At the jury returned yes, very swiftly. They hadn't been
expected to return till at least midnight. They declared read
Christie guilty. They did not accept the insanity defense, and
Christie just turned his head away and was led down

(56:52):
from the dock into the cells. There was a staircase
leading directly from the dock all the way down the cells,
two stories beneath where he would sit and wait for
the van to take him to Pentonville Prison, the jail
in North London where executions were carried out, and he

(57:12):
knew he probably had a couple of weeks until the
death sentence was enacted.

Speaker 2 (57:21):
We mentioned that the Pictorial was ready to publish Harry's
information that he garnered from Reginald Christy, those confessions, but
because there was an appeal pending, he couldn't publish those yet.
But you write about the reaction from all of the
other competitive media at that time at the Verdict itself, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (57:45):
Chris f Harry, to his frustration, couldn't yet run his
exclusive had to because there was Christie's lawyers were launching
an appeal against the death sentence. In the meantime, the
other papers and the Pictorial itself ran a slew of
stories from which were absolutely fascinating to read. Women who

(58:09):
had encountered Christie but who had escaped him by sort
of stories from neighbors, family stories. You know, there were
lots of surrounding stories that had not been It had
not been possible to publish before the trial for fear
of content at court, but there was now kind of

(58:29):
nearly open season, and so that there was a lot
of material published at that time. And it was very
interesting for me and heartening to read stories from women
who had he had tried to assault, but who had
one way or another resisted or outwitted him, because it

(58:50):
gave us more information about how he operated, and much
more sort of after all the vagueness that he brought
to anything, here was some kind of reliable witnesses to
what he'd actually done and how.

Speaker 2 (59:09):
You write that. Harry's scoop was advertised in rival publications
and on posters all over the country. And was my
urge to kill ten women, ran the headline on the
first installment July fifth, and thou shalt not kill is
a commandment that has haunted me all my life, was
a quote from Reg Christie.

Speaker 3 (59:33):
Yes, it was interesting actually to compare the version of
Christie's statement that was published in the Sunday Pictorial over
three weeks. I think it was. They really milk this
story for all it was worth, and it put on
a huge amount of circulation for the paper. But to

(59:53):
compare the published version with the notes that Christie wrote
for Harry, which have been preserved and are in the
National Archives in London. And there are some things that
appear in Harry's story that do not appear that look
as if they're sort of embroideries that he's put in,
as you know, was the way with many tabloid stories

(01:00:16):
of that period. And I suppose he didn't really fear
that Christy would contradict him if he sort of cited
all the sort of commandments that had haunted him all
his life and so on. That commandment is not mentioned
in Christie's statement. And so Harry procter, seasoned tabloid journalist,

(01:00:39):
did he flammed it up a bit, you know, He's
he gave a bit of you know, light and shade
and drama for Christie's story, which in reality was delivered
more in a sort of dead pan, almost deadened way
on the page. So Harry laive it up. He didn't

(01:01:02):
invent any details though, that were not accurate in terms
of the murders themselves, what Christy had confessed to, all
the language that he'd used around those, it was all
the kind of Pallas stuff about his background and so on.
That was slightly enhanced the facts of the case, who

(01:01:23):
Harry conveyed scrupulously, including the facts about the Evans case, which,
to Harry's intense frustration, he had still not been able
to get Christy to confess to the murder of the baby.
So he faithfully reported that that fact that Christie had
not confessed to Eryl Evans, to Geraldine Evans murder.

Speaker 2 (01:01:48):
You also write about fern Tennyson Jesse. She's writing what
she considered her most important essay, but she hadn't read
and received the transcripts as of yet tell us about
this essay and her declining health as well.

Speaker 3 (01:02:05):
So for in Tennis and Jesse was she needed the
transcripts that were going to form the bulk of the
book that she was writing an introduction for, and her
publisher had decided that they would include the transcripts of
both the Christie and the Evans trials because the key,
the big story here was whether Tim Evans was innocent

(01:02:29):
or guilty, and so her editor wanted her to analyze
that and to come up with a conclusion. So the
essay was in effect as sort of who done it?
The murders of Beryl and Geraldine Evans. But the British
government really dragged their feet and releasing the transcript of

(01:02:49):
Tim Evans trial because they did not want the scandal
buss that would accrude and that the political capital that
their enemies, those who wanted to abolish capital punishment, would
make of this apparent miscarriage of justice. So she had
to wait for many many months before before she could

(01:03:12):
see the transcripts of both trials. In the meantime, I mean,
she'd been to the trial herself, so she had that
to work with and many many newspaper stories about the case.
But she also a set to interviewing all the main
players in both cases. She invited to her home for lunch,

(01:03:36):
police detectives, lawyers, pathologists, and the family. She went to
meet the family of Tim Evans and she tried to psychiatrists,
people who worked in the prisons. So she tried to
interview everyone connected to the case and to work out
what had really happened, in particular with the Evans story,

(01:04:01):
but also she was very interesting in what was going
on in read Christie's head. She eventually got the trial
transcript then analyzed those and she was going blinder by
the month, but her faithful secretary Joan acted as her
She dictated to Joan, who typed up all her notes,

(01:04:21):
and they eventually got the thing finished in nineteen fifty six,
three years after Christie's trial, and it was published soon afterwards,
and it was one hundred page essay, detailed forensic and

(01:04:42):
Brittan arrived at her judgment about what had happened. She
believed that Christie had killed both Beryl and Geraldine Evans,
and she admitted that she hadn't been able to solve
every contradiction in the story, but she thought this was
the the solution that best fitted the facts of the

(01:05:03):
case and the psychology of those involved.

Speaker 2 (01:05:07):
You're right that reg Christie was executed, but also that
Harry was fired from the pictorial eventually, but he was
earnestly trying to write his memoir about his experiences in
Fleet Street.

Speaker 3 (01:05:25):
Yeah, Harry, after that, he was really nearly broken by
the Christie case. So I'm most severely disappointed that he
had not been able to secure the confession that he
was after, and maybe troubled by the complicity with which
he'd behaved, you know, in supporting Christie's defense, he asked

(01:05:48):
his editors not to assign him to any more crime stories.
He said he wanted to do the lighter stuff, sort
of human interest stories and interviews, but they were like,
no way, you're too good on crime, we're not taking
you off it. So they kept sending him on quite
disturbing cases stories, and he finally sort of cracked when

(01:06:12):
he was sent to a company to church a young
woman whose twin children had been killed in a fire
on a houseboat, and it was widely believed that this
woman had herself have set fire to the boat in
order to run off with her lover. But Harry had
to sort of in order to get her exclusive to

(01:06:35):
rend her her accompany her to the funeral, and he'd
finally like he'd had enough, and he walked out. He
was he had a nervous breakdown. He had two nervous
breakdowns over the next few years, and eventually he was
fired from the pictorial and he then proceeded to write

(01:06:58):
a memoir of his life on Fleet Street, which was
an important source for my book, My Telling of the
Rillington Place story, in which he describes all the excitements,
the humiliations, the things he's ashamed of having done as
a reporter, the things he was proud of, and he

(01:07:21):
talks about his bosses and the pressure that was put
on him and the atmosphere in Fleet Street at the time,
and it really is quite the expose of practices in
the journalistic world in England in the nineteen fifties.

Speaker 2 (01:07:40):
And you also include and we won't get into it,
but there was a controversy in the House of Commons
and in Parliament over Tim evans execution over the killing
of his wife and daughter. There was always still controversy
on whether he was actually guilty or Reginald Christy had
some major involvement in those deaths.

Speaker 3 (01:08:04):
Yeah, it continued. So although neither Harry nor Norbryn was
able to definitively prove that Christy was guilty of the
murder for which Tim Evans had hanged, the disquiet about
the case, especially after Friend's Essay was published and then
an influential book by another journalist called Ludovic Kennedy. It

(01:08:27):
was one of the main cases that were used by
those who were campaigning for the abolition of capital punishment,
and eventually in nineteen sixty five, the death penalty was
suspended and Tim Evans was pardoned by the Queen. A
public inquiry was set up to look into the case

(01:08:48):
all over again, and that lasted for months. You know.
Finally the Tim Evans name was cleared, although his sentence
was ever overturned. It was just that he was pardoned
and if Christy hadn't been, and of course there would
still have been a possibility that we might have learned

(01:09:10):
the truth about it from him at some point in
the future, but maybe not. So there's still a sort
of eerie kind of unease over the cases, even though
it seems that Tim Evans has been vindicated. And then
I came across a document in the archives that suggested

(01:09:33):
a new solution to what had happened that explains a
bit more about the relationship between the two men. It
was a confession that Christy had made to prison guard
as he was sitting in his cell beneath the old
Bailey Wait after having been sentenced to death, and for

(01:09:53):
the first and only time, he confessed to killing the
baby Geraldine Evans. It might have been another lie, another
bid for attention, but I think that he was finally
telling the truth. He felt he didn't have anything to
lose and the brief account he gave quite casually to
this guard was goes a long way to explaining why

(01:10:17):
there were so many contradictions in Tim Evans's stories about
what happened. And so it was very excited to find
this document. And I then found some letters in the
Home Office files that showed how for Lionel Heal, the
Attorney General who prosecuted Christie, and a senior civil servant

(01:10:40):
knew about this prison guard's memo and had decided not
to make it public. They pretty much denied its existence
when something about it was leak to the press and
it remained locked up, you know, in sealed archives or
forty years and again it was a sort of it

(01:11:02):
was a politically motivated cover up because dial or Healed
was part of a Tory government that was in favor
of retaining the death penalty and did not want anything
that would help the labor MPs who were campaigning against it.

Speaker 2 (01:11:22):
Incredible. I want to thank you so much, Kate Summerscale
for coming on and talking about your extraordinary the peep
show the murders at Rullington Place for those that might
want to find out more about your other work and
this work. Do you have a website that people could
refer to? And do you do any social media?

Speaker 3 (01:11:43):
No social media, but yes I have a website and
it's katethommascale dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:11:51):
Thank you so much, Kate Summerscale for coming on and
talking about the peep show, the murders at Rellington Place. Thanks,
thank you so much and you have a great evening you.

Speaker 3 (01:12:03):
Too, you two. Thanks bye bye bye