The Peepshow, the page-turning and meticulously researched latest book from the award-winning author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher and The Haunting of Alma Fielding, investigates the horrifying crimes of Reg Christie – one of the most notorious serial killers and rapists in British History – and the miscarriages of justice that took place before his ultimate conviction. In this exclusive piece, Kate Summerscale takes the readers of the blog to the 'House of Horror,' 10 Rilligton Place in London's Notting Hill where he carried out his crimes.
In March 1953 the remains of six women were discovered at 10 Rillington Place, a squalid terrace house in Notting Hill. Reporters, photographers and sightseers flocked to the ‘House of Horror’, while the police launched a nationwide manhunt for its ground-floor tenant, a middle-aged clerk called Reg Christie. 10 Rillington Place was to become the most notorious crime scene in British history.
In part, the address became so famous because it seemed to embody human depravity. Reg Christie had gassed most of his victims before raping and strangling them, then hidden their bodies inside the kitchen walls of No 10, under its floorboards, and beneath the flowerbeds in its back garden.
The house also became a symbol of the degradation of post-war Britain. In this grimy little building, abutting a brick wall at the end of a crumbling Victorian terrace, the rooms were lit by gas, and nine tenants shared a filthy lavatory in the back yard. After years of war and austerity, housing was in short supply in London, and Christie’s fellow lodgers paid a premium for their small upstairs rooms. As immigrants from the West Indies, they were routinely turned down for lodgings and jobs, refused entry to clubs and pubs, and insulted on the street. Christie had himself treated them with contempt.
One of these tenants, a jazz musician called Beresford Brown, had called the police to the house when he found the first body in Christie’s kitchen on 24 March. Two days later, he received a letter addressed to ‘Mr Beresford Brown (coloured), 10 Rillington Place.’ ‘Mr “Beresford” BLACK,’ read the scrawled note: ‘Quit England and our boarding houses, you dirty stinking Black n*****s we dont want you here doing all your filthy breeding. Leave our white women alone or there will be trouble.’ Brown and the other tenants were evicted from No 10 so that the police could search the house.
Most of the young women who Christie killed had also moved to London in search of freedom and opportunity. One of them worked in the sex trade, which had been booming in the city since the war, while the others had low-paid jobs in factories, pubs and cafés. They aspired to better lives — one hoped to be a nurse, another an artist — but in the meantime they slept in dank basements or boarding houses, occasionally in public lavatories or all-night cafés. Christie had lured them to No 10 with promises: of a modelling session, a glass of brandy, a bed for the night, an abortion, or a few pairs of nylon stockings.
As details of the murders emerged in the press, said the Daily Chronicle, the public caught ‘a brief but vivid glimpse of a strange and sordid half-life that most of us never see, a shabby underworld of bleak lodgings and even bleaker homes through which shadowy figures flit without permanence or purpose.’
Christie was arrested at the end of March, but Rillington Place continued to be besieged by reporters and sightseers. One of Christie’s neighbours, furious to find a photographer outside his house when he got home from the pub, grabbed the man’s camera and threw it to the ground.
In early June, four days after Elizabeth II was crowned at Westminster Abbey, the residents tried to restore the street’s reputation by staging a lavish Coronation party. They adorned all the buildings, even No 10, with bunting, flags, and portraits of the new Queen. ‘We want to give the kids the best time of their lives,’ one woman said, ‘especially since the bad publicity of this street must have had a terrible effect on their little minds.’
Reg Christie was convicted of murder that month, and hanged in July. The next year, at the residents’ request, Rillington Place was renamed Ruston Close.
But public attention returned to the street 11 years later, when the government launched an inquiry into a double murder that had taken place in Christie’s house in 1949. A young van driver called Timothy Evans had been hanged for those killings, but many now believed that Christie had framed him. One of the campaigners for Evans’ innocence bought No 10 for £2,000, and invited journalists and politicians to see the property. He argued that this building had not housed two stranglers, but a serial killer who had engineered the execution of his neighbour. The Labour government temporarily suspended the death penalty in 1965, partly because of the controversy about this case.
The government made several social reforms over the next few years: in 1967 it decriminalised abortion; in 1968 it banned racial discrimination in employment and housing; and in 1969 it finally abolished the death penalty for murder. The crimes at Rillington Place had helped bring an end to capital punishment in Britain, and Reg Christie was the last serial killer to be put to death by the state.
In October 1970, a local man sold 40 tickets for a ‘murder tour’ of the abandoned house at No 10, and then discovered that the building had just been destroyed in a slum demolition programme. Since No 2 was still standing, he put a sign reading ‘No 10’ on its door and mocked up a murder scene inside. He showed his customers around, opening a cupboard door to reveal three bodies wrapped in blankets (he had hired assistants to impersonate the victims), and pointing out a chalk outline that represented another body beneath the living-room floor. The story of 10 Rillington Place was already becoming a kind of fantasy, a dark London tale that was transforming into myth.
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