Christie, John Reginald Halliday
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Wikipedia-Article "John Reginald Halliday Christie"
John Reginald Halliday Christie (1898-1953) was a British serial killer active in the 1940s and '50s. He was arrested and hanged in 1953 after being involved in one of the most sensational murder trials in British legal history, in which his tenant Timothy Evans was executed for the murders of his own wife and child; some critics have speculated that Christie actually committed the murders and framed Evans for it. While neither Christie's guilt nor Evans' innocence have ever been conclusively proven, the case sparked massive public outrage, contributed to the suspension of the death penalty in Britain in 1964, and later abolition, and remains controversial to this day.
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Early Life
Born and raised in Yorkshire, Christie was abused by his father and dominated by his mother and sisters. His one happy childhood memory was of seeing his grandfather's corpse as it lay in state in the family home; he felt powerful in front of the dead, helpless body of a man he had once feared. By the time he reached puberty, he already associated sex with death, dominance and violent aggression, rendering him impotent unless in complete control. His first attempts at sex were failures, branding him as "Reggie-No-Dick" and "Can't-Make-It-Christie" throughout adolescence.
Christie enlisted as a signalman in WWI, during which he was hospitalized after a mustard gas attack, claiming to have been blinded. No record of his supposed blindness exists, however; in 10 Rillington Place, considered the definitive Christie biography, author Ludovic Kennedy wrote that Christie, a hysteric since childhood, exaggerated his blindness, as well as the three-year period after the attack in which he was mute, as a ploy to gain attention.
Christie married Ethel Waddington in 1920. It was a dysfunctional union, as Christie was impotent with her and frequented prostitutes. Friends and neighbors gossiped that she stayed with him out of fear. They separated after three years, during which Christie drifted through a series of dead-end jobs; in each job, he earned a reputation among coworkers as a bully and fanatic for rules. He was also jailed more than once during this period for assault and theft. He and his wife reconciled in 1933, but Christie did not reform, continuing to seek out prostitutes to relieve his increasingly bizarre, violent sexual urges, which included necrophilia.
Murders
Christie's first known victim was a mistress, Ruth Fuerst, whom he impulsively strangled during sex in 1943. The following year, he murdered a neighbor, Muriel Eady, by promising to cure her bronchitis with a "special mixture," a gas he had concocted which contained carbon monoxide that would render a person unconscious; once Eady was knocked out, Christie strangled her to death, and raped her corpse. It was a ritual Christie would compulsively act out for the rest of his life.
Christie was the landlord of 10 Rillington Place in North Kensington, London, where he and his wife had lived since 1938. He buried both Fuerst and Eady in the building's communal garden plot. He took on new tenants in 1948: Timothy Evans and his wife, Beryl, who soon gave birth to a daughter, Geraldine. In November 1949, she became pregnant again, but feared that they could not afford another child. According to Christie's later confession, he promised the couple that he could abort the baby.
On November 8, he used his "special gas" to incapacitate Beryl, whom he strangled and raped. When Evans returned from work that night, Christie told him his wife had died during the procedure and that they had to hide the body to avoid prison, as abortion was, at the time, illegal in England. Christie then convinced Evans, whom Kennedy describes as a gullible man with an IQ of 70, to stay with a relative in Wales and leave Geraldine in his care. Evans later said that he returned to the flat several times to ask about Geraldine, but Christie had refused to let him see her, saying that it was too soon to take her back.
On November 30, Evans went to the police in Merthyr Tydfil and confessed to accidentally killing Beryl by giving her "abortion pills," and then disposing of her body in a sewer drain. He told the police that, after arranging for Geraldine to be looked after, he had gone to Wales. When police examined the drain, however, they found nothing. When re-questioned, Evans said that Christie had offered to provide an abortion for Beryl. Evans had returned home from work on November 7 to find Beryl dead. He said Christie then disposed of the body and made arrangements for some people to look after Geraldine while Evans laid low.
During a search of 10 Rillington Place, on December 2, 1949, the police found the bodies of Beryl and Geraldine hidden in the wash house in the back garden. Both had been strangled. When Evans was shown the clothing taken from the bodies of his wife and child, he was asked whether he was responsible for their deaths, and said “Yes.” He now confessed to having strangled Beryl during an argument over debts on November 8, 1949, and strangling Geraldine two days later, after which he left for Wales.
This confession, along with other, contradictory statements Evans made during the police interrogation, is often cited as proof of his guilt, although Kennedy writes that the interrogation he went under was brutal and manipulative. In any event, Evans recanted, and the case went to trial. Christie was a key witness for the prosecution, and was instrumental in Evans being found guilty. Evans was hanged on March 9, 1950.
Christie murdered four women over the next three years, including his wife. He moved out of 10 Rillington Place in 1953. Soon after, a maintenance man discovered the bodies in the cellar. A citywide manhunt ensued, ending weeks later when Christie was arrested while looking for dock work.
While in prison, Christie confessed to murdering all of the women found in the celler, as well as Beryl Evans. He was found guilty of murdering his wife and hanged in 1953. Evans was granted a posthumous pardon in 1966.
Controversy
While Christie neither confessed to nor was convicted of killing Geraldine Evans, public opinion widely found him guilty, casting serious doubt onto the fairness of Evans' trial and execution. Christie, after all, had been a key witness against him; if he did kill Geraldine, then Evans was executed on the basis of perjury. Kennedy calls it unlikely that two strangler-murderers were living and killing in the same apartment building at the same time, and cites the fact that Beryl's rape had been suppressed at trial; other critics cite Evans' confession, volatile temper, and motive of wanting to dispose of an unwanted pregnancy. To date, there exists no definitive evidence to prove or disprove either theory.
In 1970, the movie 10 Rillington Place was released, based largely on Kennedy's book, starring Richard Attenborough as Christie and John Hurt as Evans.