Isabella Mueller (crime writer)
In the spring of 1953, Beresford Brown moved into the ground floor apartment of a terraced house at 10 Rillington Place in London’s Notting Hill district, which became world famous thanks to the Hollywood blockbuster of the same name starring Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant. Brown enthusiastically began renovating his new home and made a gruesome discovery. Behind the kitchen unit, he found the naked, walled-up corpse of a woman. He immediately alerted the police, who on March 24, 1953, discovered three more walled-up female corpses in the kitchen wall and one female corpse under the living room floor. The three female corpses in the kitchen wall were identified as the prostitutes Hectorina Mac Lennan, Kathleen Maloney, and Rita Nelson, who had disappeared without a trace in the 1950s. Who could have guessed that they were walled up in a wall? The body under the living room floor was not a prostitute and led the police to the perpetrator. The body was that of Ethel Christie, the wife of the previous tenant. Further human skeletal remains were found in the garden, which belonged to Ruth Fürst, who had been missing since 1943, and her colleague Muriel Eady, who had been missing since autumn 1944. Other body parts and pubic hair found could not be matched to the identified female corpses. John Christie was arrested immediately and promptly made a full confession. He admitted to drugging all the women with coal gas, strangling them, and then having sex with their dead bodies. This act satisfied his strong necrophilic fantasies. But who was this serial killer who had even killed his own wife? John Christie was born on April 8, 1899, in Yorkshire, the fifth child of four sisters. He was a mama’s boy and a hypochondriac who desperately sought his father’s approval. Then he met Ethel Simpson Waddington, whom he married in 1920. John worked as a postal clerk until he embezzled a money order, for which he received a seven-month prison sentence. In 1938, the couple moved into the apartment at 10 Rillington Place, where John Christie became a necrophiliac serial killer. This would probably never have come to light, or only after his death, if John Christie had not given notice and moved out in 1953. John Christie was considered a nice neighbor. No one had the slightest suspicion that John Christie was a killer of women. John Christie himself accepted that his neighbor, truck driver Timothy Evans, was convicted of the murders and hanged on March 9, 1950. This miscarriage of justice led to the de facto abolition of the death penalty and the legalization of abortion in Great Britain. Timothy Evans was in financial difficulties when his wife Beryl, who had recently given birth to their daughter Geraldine, became pregnant again. On November 30, he turned himself in to the police and confessed that he had killed his wife with an abortifacient and then hidden her body in a canal. However, Beryl’s body was not found in the canal. Confronted with this, Timothy Evans recanted his confession. He confessed that his neighbor Christie, who lived below him, had performed the abortion and hidden Beryl’s body in the canal. His daughter Geraldine had been left in the care of John Christie’s mother. But when the police searched the terraced house, they found the bodies of Beryl and her daughter Geraldine, both of whom had been strangled, in the garden shed. When Timothy Evans was confronted with this, he confessed to killing them both. Timothy Evans was charged with double murder. His trial began on January 11, 1950, at the Old Bailey. He recanted his earlier confessions and pleaded not guilty. He testified that John Christie, who testified against Timothy Evans as the main witness for the prosecution, had committed the murders. Finally, on January 13, 1950, the jury found Timothy Evans guilty, and he was sentenced to death by the judge. An appeal was rejected. Timothy Evans was hanged on March 9, 1950, at Pentonville Prison in London by Albert Pierrepoint. This fate was now also to befall John Christie. On June 25, 1953, he was sentenced to death by the court at London’s Old Bailey and, like Timothy Evans, was hanged by the same executioner in the same prison on July 15, 1953. Karma is a bitch. Timothy Evans received justice in that he was posthumously rehabilitated in 1966. As early as 1954, the name of the street where the house of horror stood was changed to Ruston Close, and at the end of 1970, the house and the entire street were demolished. Since then, the street has been called Bartle Road, where there is no house with the number 10, but only a gap between house numbers 9 and 11. To this day, the crimes of the London Strangler, as John Christie was known, continue to inspire the media world to produce numerous films and books.
