Author interview: One of Britain’s darkest killers gripped the nation for decades

It is one one of the most notorious murder cases in British history, a true crime story that fascinated and repulsed a nation, lingering long in the public imagination. 

In March 1953, the bodies of six women were discovered at 10 Rillington Place, a terraced house in Notting Hill, London. 

A manhunt for missing tenant John Christie ensued — the body of his wife Ethel was found under the floorboards of the front room in their flat. 

Christie, later chillingly portrayed by Richard Attenborough in the film 10 Rillington Place, was quickly tried for the murder of his wife and hanged. 

Christie was later held to be responsible for the killings of Beryl Evans and her baby daughter Geraldine at the same address three years previously, a crime for which Beryl’s husband Timothy Evans was executed.

In her latest book The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place, author Kate Summerscale sets out to reframe the circumstances surrounding the infamous killings.

“It was the most notorious murder of the ’50s and for those who were born in the next 20 or 30 years, which includes me, it almost had a quality of a myth or urban folk tale,” says Summerscale. 

“I saw the film on late-night TV, some time in my teens, and it was really horrifying and very bleak.”

I remember seeing the wax effigy of Christie in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds when I was about eight.

Christie’s victims — Ruth Fuerst, Muriel Eady, Rita Nelson, Kathleen Malone, Hectorina MacLennan, as well as his wife Ethel, and Beryl Evans — were all women existing precariously in a profoundly misogynistic society. 

Summerscale doesn’t need to spell out the parallels today with violence against women and cases of femicide on the increase.

“Most other treatments of it have addressed the question of who was to blame for the murder of Beryl and Geraldine Evans, as a sort of murder mystery.

“But my starting point was the mystery of why a man chooses to kill women. This particular crime, coming so soon after the war, did seem like a new kind of crime in England.

“That’s how it was understood at the time, a spree killer, a serial killer, somebody who acted without a motive of personal hatred or anger, but with a more generic kind of misogyny.

“There’s also the subtext of domestic violence against women. Tim Evans, whether or not he killed his wife, certainly beat her up. And this was taken as just ordinary behaviour.”

The Peepshow has been compared with The Five, by Hallie Rubenhold, a groundbreaking book about the Jack the Ripper murders which focuses on the victims rather than the killer. 

Shining a light on Christie's victims

Summerscale says she was also very aware of shining a light on Christie’s victims in her narrative.

“That was definitely one of my considerations, how to deal with the victims in the story,” Summerscale says. 

“I looked hard for details of these women’s lives and their relationships in the archives, and they were there, but they hadn’t been treated with any seriousness or interest at the time, because it was easier to conceptualise these women as all of the same type, part of an underclass who were almost inevitably going to be drawn into dangerous situations and whose lives were in some way dispensable.

“There was also the fact that Christie was never actually tried for the murders of any of the women other than his wife, because the courts only tried one murder at a time, and that meant that their stories were not aired, either in the courts or in the press.

“It felt important to be able to recover some of the things that made them distinct from one another, their aspirations and their histories and to not treat them as sexual objects, objects of violence and anger, as Christie had.”

The book serves as a fascinating social history of Britain at a time when racism was rife.

Summerscale opens the book with a disquieting vignette of Christina Maloney, a woman who had just moved to London from Ireland, encountering Christie and arranging to go back to his flat the next day. 

He doesn’t turn up and she sees his picture in the newspaper a week later.

Several of the women he targeted were Irish.

Summerscale says: “There had been a big influx of Irish people to London in the wake of the war, and there was very marked discrimination against them in the same way as against the West Indian arrivals.

“This may have contributed to Christie’s entitled sense of their disposability. He targeted recent arrivals, precisely for the reason that they were less likely to have people come looking for them.”

Summerscale came to prominence with her award-winning 2008 book The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, a gripping account of a real-life Victorian detective working on a murder case, which became a huge commercial success and was later adapted into a television series.

The Wicked Boy was an exploration of another infamous Victorian murder. Her eye for an ingenious angle and her ability to keep the pages turning are also evident in The Peepshow. 

She frames the narrative through the perspectives of two people who chronicled the case at the time — the tabloid journalist Harry Procter and Fryn Tennyson Jesse, a pioneer of true-crime writing who attended Christie’s trial.

“All of the other books I’ve written have been about obscure cases and the challenge, the excitement and adventure, is trying to find out enough about them so the story makes sense,” Summerscale says.

“This was the first time I had an overwhelming amount of readily available material in newspaper archives, and also in the police files and the Home Office files in the National Archives — there were thousands and thousands of pages of evidence and witness statements.

“So I did need a way to steer myself and the reader through all that material and having a couple of observers on the ground as it were, in the form of Harry Procter and Fryn Tennyson Jesse, gave me a way to tell the story as it unfolded.”

Summerscale’s passion for meticulous research underscores her projects, something that germinated in her previous work with The Daily Telegraph, where she worked on the obituary desk.

“I would go to the library, get out files of newspaper cuttings and try to piece together a life,” she says. 

“I just loved going through the old newspapers and putting together the stories, and most of the stories I have written since, that’s been a primary source — how they were covered at the time, the language that was used about them. It’s an amazing source of cultural history.”

Such analogue methods may have been superseded by the advent of the internet but for Summerscale, it is still hard to beat the tactile and transportive power of print. 

“I remember halfway through researching and writing Mr Whicher, new technology became available whereby you could search The Times digital archive by keyword, and it felt like a miracle. Of course, since then, many more newspapers and archives have come online. 

“It’s a huge boon, especially if you’re researching obscure cases and individuals. But I miss the feel of the old yellowing newspaper cuttings.

“Very often, the connections that you make when you’re researching, the patterns you see, are across the pages of a newspaper, or they’re in the way that a bunch of papers in the archives have been filed together — that physical touch, the feeling of handling the same objects that people at the time wrote on and produced, I’m quite nostalgic for that.”