Inside 10 Rillington Place: John Christie and me, the untold truth

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In shock, and despondent over the news, he confesses to both crimes, though he is guilty of neither.

In British true crime history, there is one address that has stood out and been remembered for shocking and tragic reasons. Reg had a troubled childhood, often subjected to regular beatings by his father, his mother, and his older sisters. Three years later, on March 21, 1953, Christie left Rillington Place and three days after that Beresford Brown, a new tenant, found six bodies in the garden, kitchen and under the sitting room floor. However, this is of course merely academic given Christie’s subsequent fate for his own crimes little more than three years later.Here it was valuable to read Peter’s quotation of Matheson’s words more fully than I’d seen them before: “My interviews with him [Evans] suggest that he has an inadequate psychopathic personality which, with his low intelligence, makes him less able to adjust himself satisfactorily to reality, and tends to make him act impulsively with little or no foresight or consideration for others. Further feedback/opinions welcome – perhaps I’m on to something significant and long overlooked here. Indeed, such was the commitment to realism that the actual Rillington Place was used for external shots and the staircase, shortly before being demolished, with interior rooms shot in the studio. Suppose Christie had said to him: “:I’ll help you–but if you ever breathe a word of this to anyone, you’re going to hang for it. Evans said at trial he didn’t kill Beryl, he once again said John Christie was the one who killed his wife.

It was adapted by Clive Exton from the book Ten Rillington Place by Ludovic Kennedy (who also acted as technical advisor to the production). I would have loved to have had a chat with her, We did leave a card with my phone number on it but doubt she got to see that, both cards as well as the flowers have since been removed. Up to a point he was even capable of believing the lies he’d made up, the “reality” he’d constructed in his own head, which is how he was able to pretend to the Lynches that Geraldine was still alive even though she wasn’t. Thank you Peter for giving me your time and sharing your memories in such an amazing and insightful interview.

This gives the reader the impression that the judge did not give a summation and left the jury with only the barristers’ last words to consider before they brought in their verdict. As some point, Eileen and Maureen, or possibly Eileen alone, sent a telegram to Beryl’s father William Thorley, asking whether Beryl was still staying with him. Though Christie is by no means upper class, his war service and his fawning obsequiousness establish him as a trustworthy patriot in the blinkered eyes of the Judge and jury (despite Evans’ defence eviscerating him over his past convictions for dishonesty and violence). I already have a copy of Jonathan Oates book, my father having had quite a dialogue with the author ahead of it’s publication. Why would Evans go to the police with a crazy cock-and-bull story about “putting his wife down the drain”?

Perhaps aware that he would soon be found out, Christie killed three more women over the next three months.

Compulsion (1959) presents a thinly fictionalised version of Leopold and Loeb, whose crime also inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope(1948). It was at this terraced house in Notting Hill that John Reginald Halliday Christie killed at least six women including his wife Ethel between 1943 and 1953.

A new underclass, using a neglected flat which literally stinks of death, and clearly has not been investigated with due care by either the police or the landlord, they are forced to do the dirty work of a complacent establishment and uncover the bodies flimsily hidden behind a wallpapered alcove.I did suspect when reading earlier in the book about Beryl frequently swapping clothes with Joan Vincent that this would foreshadow some suggestion that Joan was mistaken for Beryl when Beryl was supposedly sighted by Jones leaving the house on the 8th. It is interesting that Peter believes Beryl was killed on Monday the 7th, not on Tuesday the 8th, and I found it confusing that he did not highlight and explain this inconsistency between his narrative and what other more or less “established” sources have to say about Beryl being seen alive on the Tuesday. The dull, claustrophobic house almost becomes an extension of Christie, closing in on the doomed couple (denied even the use of the scrappy back garden beyond the outside toilet by their controlling neighbour).