The Dark History of 10 Rillington Place: John Christie's Reign of Terror

Derelict, desolate and still ravaged from the constant raids and bombings of the World Wars, 10 Rillington Place was a desperate home for desperate people. Jutting out of the war-torn street of Notting Hill in London, rubble, refuse and even human remains were a common sight for those unfortunate enough to call this three-storey house home. Each floor had been broken up into a separate apartment with no bathrooms and only a common outhouse at the end of the garden. There was nowhere for people to wash and for those on the third floor, there wasn’t even a kitchen.

This would be the homestead of one of the most disturbing serial killers Britain has ever known.

His name was John Reginald Halliday Christie, although he often went by Reggie. He’d been born on April 8th, 1899 in Halifax and was the sixth out of seven children. His father, Ernest John Christie was a strict disciplinarian who didn’t believe in showing his wife, or even his children, affection. Growing up, punishments and beatings were in no short supply for John Christie, but strangely enough, the same could also be said for loving attention. John’s mother and his older sisters absolutely adored him and overcompensated for the punishments his father would dole out by doing their best to spoil John.

It was a confusing and troubling home to grow up in, but, by his own admission, the defining moment of John’s childhood had been the death of his maternal grandfather, David Halliday. David had been a contemptuous man, even quicker to anger than John’s father Ernest. John had once been completely terrified of him, but after watching David slowly deteriorate and eventually die from being ill, John was in heaven. The man he had so greatly feared his whole life was dead and there John was: young, fit and healthy and he had never felt better about himself.

John then turned his attention to academics. He won a scholarship to attend a private school and then one to go to boarding school, where he sang in the church choir and was a boy scout.

But socially, John was an outcast.

Former classmates described him as a “queer lad” who “kept to himself” and “was not very popular,” and this was, unfortunately, how many people would see John for the rest of his life. 

But things only became worse when John tried to get a girlfriend. He had very little success with the ladies and the girls who did end up giving him a chance usually ended up breaking up with him shortly after. This was all allegedly because John had difficulties sexually performing and once news about this got out, his peers began calling him things like “Reggie-No-Dick” and “Can’t-Do-It-Christie.”

An already psychologically delicate young man was then drafted into the army to go and fight in the First World War. He saw combat, but in June 1918 he was critically injured in a mustard gas attack. John later said that even after months of treatment, he was still left blind and mute for three and a half years.

However, records show that John was released from hospital and sent back to the front lines. It’s highly unlikely that a soldier who was both blind and mute would be allowed back into combat and not discharged from the military, so we should take John’s claims here with a pinch of salt.

He did, however, return to Halifax in 1919, where he met eighteen-year-old Ethel Simpson. People who knew Ethel around the 1920’s and the 1930’s described her as “a refined, well-bred and educated young woman” who was “extremely attractive.” She was a talented shorthand typist and she often found work as a secretary wherever she went. This was the woman that John married in 1920, but only a few years into their marriage and people began describing Ethel as meek, unattractive and someone who seemed to have a desperate need for male attention.

Part of the shift in their marriage had come from a tragic loss the young couple had experienced very early on when Ethel suffered a miscarriage. This traumatic event seemed to drive a wedge between husband and wife.

After that, John returned to an old vice: soliciting prostitutes. And when the brief excitement that provided lost its appeal, he began stealing. John was later caught in the act and arrested. He was sentenced to three months in prison.

Far from being deterred, John was convicted again in 1923, this time for obtaining money under false pretenses and under the threat of violence. Up until then, Ethel had stood by her wayward husband, but when he was later released on bond and moved to London instead of coming home, she went her own way too.

There were rumors to explain why Ethel didn’t follow her husband and they said that Ethel was having an affair with her employer, but people who knew the couple at the time didn’t put much weight in the gossip. Instead they pointed the finger at John, at his life of crime, at his constant solicitation of prostitutes and the rumors that he had stolen from his very own parents as the reasons why the couple had parted ways. On paper, and in the eyes of the law, the Christies were still married, but they wouldn’t actually see each other again for another ten years.

Despite his history, John joined the Royal Air Force and Ethel went to live with her family. During the years, John was in and out of prison and buried thick in a life of crime, but Ethel was desperately trying to rebuild her life with a man who loved her.

His name was Vaughan Brindley and he had two goals in life. The first was to become financially stable enough to support a family and the second was to marry Ethel Christie. But when Vaughan stood on Ethel’s doorstep, proposing to her in 1932, she had to come clean.

She’d told him that her husband John had died in the war, but, as we all now know, he was still very much alive and living in London. Ethel would first have to find him and then get him to agree to a divorce if she were ever to marry Vaughan, but the second piece of news she had to break to the man standing in front of her had the potential to be a real dealbreaker.

Ethel had discovered that she was unable to have children.

This news destroyed Vaughan, who then called their whole relationship off and left Ethel.

With her dreams also crushed, Ethel caught wind of John’s latest arrest and went to visit him in prison. There, between cold, metal prison bars, husband and wife saw each other again for the first time in over a decade. A tentative truce was formed, one where John promised to forgo his life of crime and one where Ethel agreed to leave the peaceful and beautiful home she had with her family in Halifax and move in with John.

She can’t have been overly impressed by the destitute street of Rillington Place and even less so with the condition of the apartment she was now to live in, but it was a fresh start. She and John occupied the ground floor, which gave them direct access to the garden, and the Christies found a new lease on life. John kept his promise and found steady work and Ethel was able to catch the train and visit her family in Sheffield whenever she wanted.

John would use Ethel’s trips to see her family to solicit prostitutes, but this time it seemed like Ethel was at least aware of what he was doing.

But what she wasn’t aware of is what happened in 1943, when John brought home the twenty-one-year-old Ruth Fuerst. Ruth wasn’t a prostitute per se, but worked in a factory and resorted to prostitution when she couldn’t make ends meet. She’d met John at a bar and had agreed to sleep with him back at his apartment in 10 Rillington Place. There, however, thick in the throes of passion, John tied a rope around Ruth’s neck and strangled her to death. He then buried her under the floorboards in the kitchen and used the cover of darkness the following night to bury her in the communal back garden.

In 1944, he brought home one of his colleagues from work. Thirty-one-year-old Muriel Amelia Eady suffered from bronchitis and John claimed that he had the perfect cure. He put a mixture of pungent things into a jar and inserted a tube, telling Muriel that all she had to do was breathe in through the tube and that would be it. Muriel listened, but she didn’t see when John inserted another tube into the jar that connected to the gas pipe in the kitchen. Muriel went out cold. John then sexually assaulted her several times before he strangled her to death. He buried her out in the garden beside Ruth.

In the meantime, new neighbors had moved in upstairs. They were both young, both suffered from learning disabilities and had just had a baby. Timothy Evans was said to be an insecure young man with a wild imagination. He often told stories about himself that made him seem brighter and more exciting than he actually was, but truth was, he had an IQ of only about 70. He often drank most of his wages, leaving his eighteen-year-old wife Beryl with little to feed herself and the baby. Beryl also struggled with numbers and whenever the money ran out, Timothy would beat her.

John often went upstairs to break up the fights between them and he was there again when the couple found out that they were pregnant with their second child. With things being as tight as they were, Beryl wanted an abortion, but they were illegal in Britain at the time. Desperate, the young couple turned to John and John told them that he could perform the procedure for them.

During Ethel’s next trip to Sheffield, Beryl made her way downstairs to John’s flat and that was the last time that her husband Timothy ever saw her alive. Later that evening, when Timothy went down to check on her, John blocked the door to the apartment and told Timothy that Beryl was dead. He then convinced Timothy to leave town and to leave his young daughter Geraldine behind too.

Timothy listened, but a short time later, in his hometown of Merthyr Tydfil (Merther Tidvil) in Wales, Timothy handed himself in to the police and told them that he had accidentally killed Beryl. He said that he had accidentally poisoned her when trying to abort the baby and that he had put her body in the drain outside of the house. The police investigated his claim and found John at home in Rillington Place, but that was about all they did find.

They didn’t find Beryl, her daughter Geraldine, Muriel or Ruth, who were still buried in the back garden. They searched the property again on December 8th. This time the bodies of Beryl, Geraldine and a sixteen-week old fetus were discovered in the outside washhouse in the garden. An autopsy revealed that both Beryl and Gerladine had died from strangulation. 

It was only then that Timothy found out that Geraldine was also dead and when asked if he was the one responsible for their deaths, he simply replied, “Yes.”

Timothy was then taken to court and the star witness against him was none other than John Christie himself. Timothy was found guilty of murdering his wife and daughter and he was sentenced to hang on the 31st of January.

Meanwhile at 10 Rillington Place, the Christies had new upstairs neighbours, but John and Ethel both absolutely hated them. They were a family of immigrants from the West Indies and neither of the Christies were very happy about having black neighbours.

On December 6th, 1952, John then used the excuse of these neighbours to do something despicable. In his own words: “...My wife has been suffering a great deal from persecution and assaults from the black people in the house 10 Rillington Place and had to undergo treatment at the doctor for nerves…

“On 14 December I was awakened by my wife moving about in bed. I sat up and saw that she appeared to be convulsive, her face was blue and she was choking. I did what I could to try to restore breathing but it was hopeless. It appeared too late to call for assistance. That's when I couldn't bear to see her, so I got a stocking and tied it around her neck to put her to sleep. 

“...I left her in bed for two or three days and didn't know what to do. Then I remembered some loose floorboards in the front room… Then I believe I went back and put her in a blanket or a sheet or something and tried to carry her, but she was too heavy so I had to sort of half carry and half drag her and put her in that depression and cover her up with earth. I thought that was the best way to lay her to rest..."

On January 19th, 1953, John brought home the twenty-five-year-old Rita Nelson, another prostitute from Belfast who was also pregnant. John told her that he could perform an abortion for her and Rita agreed to go back with him to his apartment. She inhaled gas from a jar, not knowing that John was pumping gas from the stove into it as well. He then repeatedly assaulted her and then strangled her to death. He then wrapped her in a blanket and hid her in an alcove in the kitchen, which he covered with wallpaper.

In February of that same year, he brought Kathleen Maloney, a twenty-six-year-old prostitute from Ladbroke, back to the apartment. He raped, strangled her and then hid her body in the same alcove.

About a month later, he struck again. This time he targeted twenty-six-year-old Hectorina MacLennan, who was actually a former roommate. She and her boyfriend had once lived with John for months at Rillington Place and she didn’t think anything of being invited back to the same house after bumping into John on the streets.

There, she received the same treatment as Rita and Kathleen had before her.

Almost unbelievably, John then sublet his apartment.

With four bodies hidden away in his kitchen and more in the garden, John moved out of 10 Rillington Place. One thing then led to another and the bodies hidden behind the wallpaper in the kitchen were finally discovered. 

John Christie was arrested and at first he only admitted to the murders of the women in the alcove and his wife, Ethel, but when the skeletons in the back garden were also finally found, he confessed that he’d murdered them as well. He then admitted to killing Beryl Evans too.

At court, John was found guilty and sentenced to death for his crimes.

On July 15th, he was led to the gallows at HM Prison Pentonville, the same gallows with the same executioner as Timothy Evans had been only a few years before, and his sentence was carried out. Timothy Evans was then posthumously awarded an official pardon.