A SET OF human bones found in thfe garden of the three-storey house at No. 10 Rillington Place near Ladbroke Grove, Notting Hill, where John Christie was a lodger, was of great interest – not least because one of the thoracic vertebrae, later identified as that of murder victim Ruth Fürst, had a root growing through it. The rate of growth of the root helped to determine the period of time for which the body had been buried. A reconstructed skull of Ruth Fürst showed that one of her teeth had a metal crown with signs of a dental technique not normally practised in Britain. Fürst was an Austrian who had come to England in 1939 and had last been seen alive in August 1943. Other exhibits include a tobacco tin containing pubic hair from four of John Christie’s murder victims, apparently collected as trophies.
On 24 March 1953, a tenant from No. 10 Rillington Place was pulling away wallpaper in the corner of the kitchen in the ground-floor flat, prior to fixing a bracket for his radio, when he found a wooden partition with a gap in it. Looking through the gap with a torch, he saw a dead body. Another tenant, 54-year-old John Christie, had sold all his furniture and left the flat a few days before; he had gone to live in a Rowton House hostel for the homeless, subletting his flat without the landlord’s permission. The landlord discovered the new tenants, evicted them the following day, and had then allowed the other tenant to use the ground-floor kitchen. On the discovery of the body, the police were called and started an investigation led by Detective Chief Inspector Albert Griffin. The body was that of 26-year-old Hectorina MacLennan. The police also found two other bodies behind the partition, those of Kathleen Maloney, 26, and Rita Nelson, 25. All three women were known to be prostitutes and had been missing for between four and twelve weeks. All had died from asphyxiation and carbon monoxide poisoning, and there was evidence of sexual intercourse having occurred around the time of death.
The discovery of these bodies led to further searches. The body of Christie’s wife Ethel, aged 55, was found under the floorboards of the front room. She had been strangled with a ligature, but, unlike the other victims, there was no evidence of gas poisoning nor sexual interference. When the police dug up the garden, they found a large number of bones from which two almost complete female skeletons were reconstructed. One was that of 21-year-old Ruth Fürst whose vertebra had the root growing through it, and the other of Muriel Eady, 32, who had died in 1944. The time in which they had died and were buried there was important.
The police went to the Rowton House hostel to arrest Christie, but he had already moved on. On 31 March 1953, PC Tom Ledger was patrolling near Putney Bridge when he saw a shabby, unshaven man who had been living rough and questioned him. The man gave a false name, but when the officer asked him for proof of his identity and to remove his hat, he recognised Christie, whose picture had been circulated as wanted for murder, and arrested him. In due course, Christie admitted to killing all six women and was sentenced to death at the Old Bailey in July 1953 despite a defence of insanity. He apparently considered that the more deaths he admitted to, the higher his chances of being found insane. Christie had sexual difficulties and used the services of prostitutes; he became violent and strangled them, sometimes subjecting them to partial gas poisoning by means of a rubber tube connected to a gas pipe, with a bulldog clip to control the gas flow. Christie had been a petty criminal but also served as a special constable during the war, when he had claimed not to have any convictions and the war-stretched police did not make a thorough check of his fingerprints.
The major complication of the case was that five years earlier in 1948 a young married couple, Timothy and Beryl Evans, had been tenants in the house. They then had a baby girl, Geraldine, and Beryl became pregnant again in the summer of 1949. This created financial difficulties for them and they discussed an abortion. John Christie persuaded them that he could conduct the operation. (There had in fact been rumours of the house being used for illegal abortions with which Christie may or may not have been connected.) On 8 November 1949, at around lunchtime, Christie, according to his own, possibly unreliable, account, went to the flat upstairs whilst Evans was at work, brought his gas pipe that he claimed would ease the pain of the procedure and then, as Beryl prepared herself for an abortion, attacked and killed her in a sexual frenzy. When Evans arrived home from work, Christie told him the bad news that the abortion procedure had not worked and that Beryl had died from septic poisoning of the stomach. Christie pointed out that Timothy Evans, who was very impressionable, was effectively an accessory to the crime of trying to give his wife an abortion. Christie persuaded him that Beryl’s body should be concealed, and that they should tell people that mother and daughter had gone away to Bristol. Christie told Evans that he would make arrangements for his daughter Geraldine to be cared for by a married couple from Acton. In reality, the infant was strangled to death.
Timothy Evans disconsolately disposed of his furniture, left the flat and travelled to Merthyr Vale in Wales to visit his uncle and aunt, telling them that his wife had gone to Brighton. After a few days, he returned to London to try to see Christie, but Christie refused to talk to him. Evans then returned to Wales, under great pressure from family members because different accounts were circulating about his wife’s whereabouts. He went to Merthyr Tydfil police station on 30 November and gave himself up to Detective Constable Gwynfryn Evans for ‘disposing of his wife’. His first confession was to the effect that he had given his wife some pills for an abortion that had killed her and had then disposed of her body down a drain. The police in Wales notified Notting Hill police station, where officers went to the street outside No. 10 Rillington Place and inspected the drain, which was empty. Evans’ second statement included Christie’s role in procuring the abortion and Christie’s promise to put Beryl’s body down a drain.
The Notting Hill police searched Evans’ flat and found a stolen briefcase, inside which were newspaper cuttings about the case of Donald Hume who had cut up the body of his victim, Stanley Setty. The briefcase had been supplied by Beryl’s friends. Detective Inspector Black and Detective Sergeant Corfield went to arrest Evans on a holding charge of handling the stolen briefcase and brought him back to London. Christie was arrested but stoutly denied involvement with the abortion, claiming that Timothy and Beryl Evans were constantly arguing and that Beryl had been risking her life by trying to conduct an abortion on herself. Ethel Christie, then still alive, was present when the police searched the wash house where they found not only the body of Beryl Evans, but also the strangled body of little Geraldine. Detective Chief Inspector Jennings confronted Evans with the clothing found on the two bodies, and Evans agreed that he had been responsible for their deaths. A confession, recorded by Jennings in his notebook, recounted how Evans had strangled both his wife and his daughter and then hidden their bodies in the wash house. A later written statement gave more detail and Evans was duly charged with the murders, the charge book being preserved in the museum. The timing of the crime, as given in Evans’ statements, was in conflict with the fact that decorators had been working in the wash house when the bodies were supposed to have been left there, but the workmen made further statements that a pile of wood might have been in the wash house and that they might not have noticed the bodies hidden under the wood.
In prison, Evans told his solicitors about Christie’s involvement, but this was probably too late. At Evans’ trial at the Old Bailey, Christie gave evidence that he had heard a bump in the middle of the night and the sound of something heavy being dragged across the floor. He denied Evans’ accusations against him, and probably made a better impression on the jury than Evans. The jury found Evans guilty of killing his daughter Geraldine and he was executed on 9 March 1950.
When Christie’s crimes came to light, he confessed to killing Beryl Evans but not Geraldine. Christie was trying to promote a defence of insanity and stated, in partially withdrawing his confession, that the more victims he accounted for, the better his chances of success with this defence. This confession by a second man of murdering the same victim prompted an inquiry by Mr John Scott Henderson QC, who concluded that Christie’s confession to killing Beryl Evans had been false. In 1965 the case was reheard by a High Court judge, Sir Daniel Brabin, who concluded that it was ‘more probable than not’ that Evans was guilty of killing his wife and that he did not kill his daughter. As Evans had been convicted of killing Geraldine and not Beryl, he was given a posthumous free pardon in 1966. It was a complex case: there were two arguably unreliable confessions to killing Beryl; one probably unreliable confession by Evans to killing Geraldine; and one unreliable denial of killing Geraldine by Christie.
The case has retained an infamy for many years, not least because Christie appears to have given evidence against Evans and seen him hanged for a crime that he himself later confessed to committing. Had the police investigating the deaths of Beryl and Geraldine Evans dug up the garden when investigating Timothy Evans, they would undoubtedly have found two further bodies, and it is speculation to wonder how that find would have affected the investigation. The case is a reflection of a time when illegal backstreet abortions took place, when the death penalty removed any chance of redressing unsafe convictions and when suspects did not have routine access to solicitors in police stations. It also illustrates the inconsistent and sometimes unreliable verbal and written confessions that defendants can make, especially when they have an interest in retracting incriminating statements, or in increasing the severity of their wrongdoing. This type of case also gives cause for reflection that the criminal justice process does not always guarantee that the truth will be confidently uncovered.