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The John Christie Murders of Notting Hill

As seen in the movie of the same name, Notting Hill is a very fashionable part of London. But there was a time when it was a grimy slum that one of England’s most vile beasts made his private killing field.

John Reginald Halliday Christie and his wife Ethel took up residence in the small, rundown ground-floor apartment of a terrace house at 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill in 1938. A timid clerk with a bald head and thick glasses, Christie had grown up with a violent father and four domineering sisters. From an early age Christie developed a love-hate relationship with females – no doubt brought about by his bullying sisters. To make matters worse, when some of his first amorous encounters with females ended in failure, he earned the nickname ‘Can’t-make-it Christie’. He was plagued by impotence for the rest of his life.

After World War I broke out, Christie left school at 15 and joined the army as a signalman. After leaving the service, Christie became a clerk and married Ethel Waddington in 1920. Christie’s long-time practice of seeing prostitutes carried on into his marriage. He became a postman and was sent to prison for three months for stealing postal orders. On his release he moved to London, leaving Ethel at home at Sheffield.

When Christie was 29, he was sent back to jail for nine months for stealing. From jail Christie contacted Ethel and asked her to come back and the couple were reunited in London in 1933, after a decade apart. In 1939, with World War II brewing and now living in Notting Hill, Christie joined the War Reserve Police. Not bothering to check his record, police issued Christie with a uniform in the rank of Special Constable with the Harrow Road Police Station.

In a position of authority for a change, for the first time in his life Christie was happy. He stayed in the position for four years, and was so intent on maintaining law and order he was nicknamed ‘the Himmler of Rillington Place’. Little did people know he used his position to illicitly follow women and spy on them undressing.

In 1949, newlyweds 19-year-old Beryl and 24-year-old Timothy Evans and their baby daughter Geraldine moved into the flat above. The lorry driver Evans was a short man with a quick temper and a fondness for alcohol, with an IQ of around 70, who could barely read or write. What little money Evans brought in barely covered their living costs. They fought, often physically, and the baby was neglected.

To make matters worse, Beryl found herself pregnant again. She tried various methods to terminate the pregnancy, and spoke to several people – including the Christies – about her desire to get an abortion. Soon after, according to Christie, Tim Evans told them that Beryl had moved back to Bristol. A day after that, he told the Christies that he was selling up and joining his wife. But when he left town it was by train to his aunt’s house in Merthyr Vale in South Wales. He returned six days later, informing Christie that Beryl had left him, then he went back to Merthyr Vale where he informed the local police that his wife had been murdered.

The police contacted their colleagues in Notting Hill, who went around to 10 Rillington Place, where they eventually found Beryl Evans and her baby Geraldine both strangled to death in the washhouse. Evans was arrested and went on to confess that he had murdered Beryl because she kept getting the family into debt. He said they had fought and that he had hit her before strangling her with a piece of rope. Two days after that, he quit his job and killed his baby girl, strangling her with a tie and placing her body with her mother’s in the washhouse.

The confession was so contradictory to the facts that popular belief was that the police had led the not-so-bright Evans through his statement and that he was also threatened with physical violence if he didn’t admit to the murders. Evans then changed his tune and said that his wife Beryl died during an abortion attempt by Christie, who also murdered their baby afterwards. But no one believed him.

Evans faced court at the Old Bailey on 11 January 1950, charged with the murder of his daughter. The soft-spoken, unassuming Christie was the main witness for the prosecution, telling the court how Tim Evans beat his family and was more than capable of murder. Also against Evans were four separate confessions he had made, and after a trial that saw the defence try to pin the blame on Christie, Evans was found guilty and was hanged on 9 March 1950.

Nothing further was heard from 10 Rillington Place until three years later; Ethel Christie disappeared and John Christie told neighbours she had gone to Sheffield, where he would soon join her. Around this time, he began laying a strong-smelling disinfectant about the house and garden and sold his furniture and Ethel’s wedding ring. With no job, Christie forged his wife’s signature and took all the funds from her bank account. He then had his dog put down, gave his cat to the neighbours and left.

When new tenants moved into the Christie house they discovered Ethel’s putrefying body under the floorboards, along with the bodies of three women in a large wall cavity behind recently applied wallpaper. Police also discovered the remains of two other females who had been buried in the backyard for six years.

Broke and with nowhere to stay, Christie was soon picked up and taken to Putney police station, where he openly spoke about the six murdered women found at his house. It seemed as though due to his impotence he preferred his sexual partners to be dead so they couldn’t make fun of his inadequacies. This also explained why he kept the corpses in and around his house long after their deaths.

While in Brixton Prison awaiting trial, Christie confessed to killing the baby Geraldine but not her mother Beryl. Charged with murdering his wife, Christie pleaded insanity. The jury took just 80 minutes to find him both sane and guilty and he was hanged on 15 July 1953.

In the following years there were numerous public inquiries to clear Timmy Evans’ name. A 1965 government inquiry stated that Timothy Evans had killed his wife, but that Christie had murdered Geraldine Evans. As a result, Evans was granted a posthumous pardon for the murder of his little girl and reburied in consecrated ground. Also in 1965, and largely due to the fact that an innocent man had been hanged, the death penalty was abolished in Britain.

In 2003, the British Home Office awarded Timothy Evans’ family compensation for the miscarriage of justice. The independent assessor for the Home Office, Lord Brennan QC, said that ‘the conviction and execution of Timothy Evans for the murder of his child was wrongful and a miscarriage of justice’, and added that ‘there is no evidence to implicate Timothy Evans in the murder of his wife. She was most probably murdered by Christie’.

In 1971, the spine-chilling movie 10 Rillington Place, featuring Richard Attenborough and John Hurt, was filmed at the address where it all happened. In 1972, 10 Rillington Place, which had become more popular than 10 Downing Street as a tourist destination, was bulldozed and replaced with a housing development renamed Bartle Road, Notting Hill.