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shyscyberchamber.com
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UNSOLVED CRIMES |
Date
Added |
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House of Horror |
June 2003 |
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When Timothy Evans walked into the
police station at Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales, he was distressed and
confused. He told the desk sergeant: 'I want to give myself up.
I have disposed of the body of my wife.'
Evans went on to explain that he was spending a lonely self-imposed
exile in Wales with relatives and that the body of his dead wife would
be found in a drain at their home in London, at 10 Rillington Place,
Notting Hill, where Evans rented the top floor flat.
The first police search on 30th November 1949, produced nothing.
But Evans, a 24 year old semi-literate van driver insisted that his
wife was dead, the result of an attempted abortion carried out by
their downstairs neighbour, John Reginald Halliday Christie.
A fresh search by police produced evidence of a grisly double murder.
In a small back yard wash house they found the body of Beryl Evans.
And they found a dead baby, Evan's daughter Geraldine.
Evans seemed shattered by his daughter's death but quietly and
morosely, confessed to both murders. At his trial a few months
later, he retracted his admissions and blamed Christie for the
murders. His accusations agaist his respectable neighbour hardly
carried any weight in court.
Christie, aged 55, was a diligent Post Office Savings Bank clerk who
had done his duty as a reserve Metropolitan policeman a few years
earlier during World War II.
Evans tried to claim in court that Christie, who often pretended to
have some medical knowledge, had bungled an abortion on Beryl and she
had died. Confused and hesitant, Evans insisted that Christie
had promised that he would dispose of Beryl's body down the drain and
arrange for baby Geraldine to be cared for by a young couple who lived
nearby. Evans had given up his job and left the baby behind for
'adoption', going off to live in Wales until he could bear his guilty
secret no longer. Under cross-examination he floundered deeper
and deeper into hopeless excuses about why he had confessed to the
murders and then turned his story round to implicate his neighbour.
Reginald Christie, who had lived quietly at Rillington Place for a
dozen years with his wife Ethel, gave his evidence with calm assurance
and heard the prosecution describe his as 'this perfectly innocent
man'.
That was enough for the jury. They found Timothy Evans guilty of
the murder of baby Geraldine and had no need to proceed on the charge
of the murder of Beryl.
Evans was hanged and the murders dismissed as a squalid tragic case of
a rather stupid young man who had cracked under the pressure of living
in the London slums, earning a pittance and trying to support his
family. That, it appeared at the time, was all there was to it.
What the jury and the police did not know was that 10 Rillington Place
was not just the temporary crypt of Beryl and Geraldine Evans.
The nondescript terrace house was a veritable graveyard. And
Reginald Christie was far from the pompous, respectable minor civil
servant he pretended to be.
When the police began their first search for the body of Beryl Evans,
they had literally been standing on the top of the bodies of the
previous victims of Christie's bizarre sexual killings.
As the detectives had surveyed Christie's barren patch of back garden,
discussing the possibilities of digging there, Christie's little
mongrel dog began scratching the soil and pawing at the skull of one
of the two women he had already murdered, Muriel Eady. Christie
shooed the dog away and casually kicked the earth back into place.
The police decided to have another pry around the drains and
outbuildings. When they found bodies in the wash house they were
satisfied. Christie, close to panic, unearthed the skull that
night and hurried off across Notting Hill with it tucked under his
raincoat. He threw it into the remains of a gutted building
where it was found the next day by two schoolboys. And Muriel
Easy was duly logged by police as an unidentified and previously
undiscovered victim of the wartime bombing blitz.
Christie had a close call when the police came to investigate the
deaths of Beryl and Geraldine Evans. But as the nervous shock
subsided, his lust to kill again overcame his fear.
Christie's wife, Ethel had no reason to suspect that two murder
victims were already buried in the garden. But she may have
thought that her husband was more involved in the deaths of Beryl and
Geraldine than he admitted to her. She was silenced anyway by
Christie, strangled and her body hidden beneath the floorboards of the
sitting room floor. In quick succession Christie lured three
more women to his flat, all prostitutes, and killed them. It was
said that he could only gain sexual satisfaction from dead women.
With the remains of six bodies buried in the garden, dumped into a
crudely papered-over kitchen cupboard and hunched underneath the
floorboards, Christie left Rillington Place and moved to other
lodgings.
On 24th March 1953, a prospective new tenant looking over the flat
detected a foul smell from the sealed kitchen cupboard. He
picked away at the wallpaper until he could glance inside - and then
went straight away to the police.
They arrested Reginald Christie and then began the long
re-investigation into the guilt or innocence of Timothy Evans who had
been hanged three years earlier.
The wave of public outcry over the murders and the execution of Evans
provoked a story debate in Parliament and led to the suspension of
capital punishment for five years. But not before Reginald
Christie was convicted, sentenced and hanged for murder.
Christie had hoped to cheat the noose by confessing gleefully to mass
murder and having the jury judge him insane. 'The more the
merrier', he confessed.
He outlined his bizarre method of killing his victims - first getting
them drunk, then forcing them to inhale coal gas from the mains supply
until they were unconscious. He then strangled and raped them.
Christie confessed to murdering Beryl Evans, although strangely, he
denied killing baby Geraldine - a murder that Timothy Evans had
already confessed to after admitting to the murder of his wife.
Was it possible that two men, both strangers and both unaware of each
other's murderous characters, had lived together under the same roof?
Such a coincidence seemed unbelievable.
In 1966 a judicial review of the case under Mr Justice Brabin
concluded it more probable that Evans murdered his own wife but not
his baby daughter.
No one knows for sure who killed Beryl Evans. Her husband
Timothy and Reginald Christie both took their terrible secrets to the
gallows with them. Only one of the two men knew the complete
certainty whether of not the other one was lying. |
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