JOHN CHRISTIE
WANT TO AVOID GOING TO THE GALLOWS? SIMPLY ACT AS A KEY WITNESS AT THE TRIAL OF YOUR NEIGHBOUR AND SEE HIM HANG FOR YOUR CRIMES. IT WORKED FOR JOHN CHRISTIE… AT LEAST, FOR A WHILE…
It is 9 March 1950. Four months ago, Timothy Evans, a 25-year-old lorry driver from Merthyr Tydfil, lost his wife and baby daughter. Now he is about to lose his own life. He has been accused and convicted of the murder of his daughter. Throughout the trial he has protested his innocence, and continues to protest to the very end.
But Evans’ executioner, Albert Pierrepoint – already a veteran of hundreds of hangings – will spare him only one mercy: that of “dignity in dying and death”.
Whether the experience of being hanged by the neck until dead can ever be a dignified one is highly debatable, but what is no longer in question is that Timothy Evans did not murder his wife and daughter. It later transpired that the killer of Beryl and Geraldine Evans, as well as at least six other victims, was Evans’ neighbour – and key witness in his trial – John Christie, otherwise known as the Rillington Place Strangler.
Evans received a royal pardon in 1966 and, in 2004, a judicial review described his execution as “an historic and unique injustice”, although the same review declined his sister’s request to have his conviction formally quashed. The case really was historic too, having been cited as a key example in the campaign to abolish capital punishment in the UK, which finally succeeded in 1965.
So how did it happen? How did an innocent man go to the gallows? How was the real killer able to frame him so brazenly? The answer is an entire catalogue of police incompetence, negligence, prejudice and possibly even corruption. Detectives simply took the word of Christie (an ex-special constable) over Evans’, while literally failing to dig up evidence that would have proven Evans’ innocence.
CAREER KILLER
Beryl and Geraldine Evans were not John Christie’s first victims. He had killed twice before.
While Christie generally claimed to have only very vague memories of his crimes, he seemed to remember his first murder very well: “[It] was thrilling because I had embarked on the career I had chosen for myself,” he said. “The career of murder.”
This “career” began in 1943. By then, Christie had been married to his wife Ethel for more than two decades, but it was not a happy marriage, and apparently never had been.
The couple had married in Halifax in 1920, separated in 1923, then reunited in London about a decade later.
They may have been back together, but the ground-floor flat of 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill was sti
