Inside 10 Rillington Place: John Christie and me, the untold truth

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This uncertainty led to a second inquiry, chaired by High Court judge Sir Daniel Brabin, which was conducted over the winter of 1965–1966. Brabin re-examined much of the evidence from both cases and evaluated some of the arguments for Evans' innocence. His conclusions were that it was "more probable than not" that Evans had killed his wife but not his daughter Geraldine, for whose death Christie was responsible. Christie's likely motive was that her presence would have drawn attention to Beryl's disappearance, which Christie would have been averse to as it increased the risk that his own murders would be discovered. [132] Brabin also noted that the uncertainty involved in the case would have prevented a jury from being satisfied beyond reasonable doubt of Evans' guilt had he been re-tried. [133] These conclusions were used by the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, to recommend a posthumous pardon for Evans, which was granted, as he had been tried and executed for the murder of his daughter. [134] [135] Jenkins announced the granting of Evans' pardon to the House of Commons on 18 October 1966. [135] Evans' remains were subsequently exhumed and returned to his family, who arranged for him to be reburied in a private grave. [134] There was already debate in the United Kingdom over the judicial killing. Evans' execution and other controversial cases contributed to the 1965 suspension, and subsequent abolition, of capital punishment in the United Kingdom. [136]

I knew there and then what I know now. It was him, Evans. I knew his temper, and I knew he’d told Beryl he was going to do it. There was never any doubt in my mind.” The evidence of builders working at Rillington Place was ignored, [60] and their interviews with Evans suggest that the police concocted a false confession. [61] It should have been clear from the first statement made by Evans on 30 November 1949 that he was ignorant of the resting place of the body of his wife or how she had been killed. He claimed that his wife's body was in either a manhole or a drain at the front of the house, [62] but a police search failed to find remains there. That should have prompted a thorough search of the residence, wash-house and garden, but no further action was taken until later, when the two bodies were found in the wash-house. Evans was also unaware at his first interview that his daughter had been killed. The film dramatises the case of British serial killer John Christie, who committed many of his crimes in the titular London terraced house, and the miscarriage of justice involving his neighbour Timothy Evans. Hurt received a BAFTA Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Evans. John Christie was born on 8 April 1899 in Northowram, near Halifax in the West Riding of Yorkshire, [3] [4] the sixth in a family of seven children. He had a troubled relationship with his father, carpet designer Ernest John Christie, an austere and uncommunicative man who displayed little emotion towards his children and would punish them for trivial offences. John was also alternately coddled and bullied by his mother and older sisters. On 24 March 1911, Christie's grandfather David Halliday died aged 75 in Christie's house after a long illness. Christie later said that seeing his grandfather's body laid out on a trestle table gave him a feeling of power and well-being; a man he had once feared was now only a corpse. [5] Captured after being on the run for a few days, Christie confessed to multiple murders. He also said he murdered Beryl Evans. He was found guilty of murder and hanged on July 15, 1953.Eddowes, John (1994). The Two Killers of Rillington Place. New York City: Little, Brown. p.5. ISBN 978-0316909464.

Filming also took place in the village of Merthyr Vale, the real life hometown of Timothy Evans. The pub scenes were filmed at the Victoria Hotel on Burdett Road in east London. The pub was subsequently demolished as part of the redevelopment of the area in 1972–73. Lease Agreement, St Andrew's Square" (PDF). Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea . Retrieved 25 August 2020.Murderpedia Timothy John Evans, the man who would later be blamed for a murder committed by John Christie. Peter: The trial of Evans lasted only three days. That would be ridiculous by the standards of today. There was so much to be criticised. For a start, the numerous people who knew Evans and his capabilities and threats towards Beryl. These included her brother Basil who did very little to support her. There were many others including her closest friend Joan Vincent who was so well aware of Beryl’s marital problems. Neighbours saw and heard the regular violent rows in the Evans household. Also, several workmen had been present at No.10 for nearly three weeks. Not one of these people was called to give evidence at his trial. Had they done so there would have been no question of his guilt. For me, this has been a lifetime of frustration and regret. Why did Christie tell Evans’s stepsister Maureen that “Tim wouldn’t thank them for going to the police, and he knew more about it than she thought he did”? Doesn’t this show that Christie had some knowledge of what had happened at Rillington Place?–even if he hadn’t killed Beryl or the baby himself. And so, just as his detailed confession made apparent, it really does seem that Evans indeed did strangle to death his young pregnant wife and his infant daughter – the latter crime for which he was tried and convicted – and for which he suffered the only penalty available under the law of the day. Painfully for her youngest brother, no conviction in respect of Beryl’s murder was ever obtained. While in Brixton Prison, he boasted his goal had been to kill 12 women and compared himself to John George Haigh, the acid bath murderer.

Hardy, Phil (1997). The BFI Companion to Crime. University of California Press. p.319. ISBN 978-0-520-21538-2. Evans’s behavior fits the clinical portrait of a psychopath in many ways. That didn’t make him a “serial killer” like Christie, which is the mistaken notion many people have of a “psychopath.” Among the relevant traits, he was a habitual, almost compulsive liar, Even Kennedy had to admit that. Some of Evans’s lying was to cover up for his own inadequacies, but it went far beyond that. Up to a point he was even capable of believing the lies he’d made up, the “reality” he’d constructed in his own head, which is how he was able to pretend to the Lynches that Geraldine was still alive even though she wasn’t. Then there were his addictions, to drink and gambling: also typical of psychopathy, the constant need for stimulation to compensate for inner emotional emptiness and boredom. There was the stimulation of risk-taking behavior too, seen in his gambling among other places. And to a certain degree his lust for sexual fulfillment. He did not, like some psychopaths, seduce multiple partners in a constant quest for sex, but he had made much use of prostitutes in his earlier days, and was not above making use of Lucy Endicott when the opportunity arose. He had a notoriously bad temper, and his behavior was certainly impulsive, disregarding long term consequences not only to others, but even to himself. The film, the books, they’ve clouded everybody’s judgement,” Lea says, sitting beside Thorley in their garden. “There has only ever been that one version of events. Nobody approached Peter’s family.” Thorley nods. “You would have thought she was an orphan.”

The film is resolutely unglamorous, its depressed post-World War II setting feeling painfully authentic and lived-in. Indeed, such was the commitment to realism that the actual Rillington Place was used for external shots and the staircase, shortly before being demolished, with interior rooms shot in the studio. Denys Coop’s superbly unobtrusive, naturalistic cinematography records a drab, run-down everyday world, where everything seems to be a shade of greyish brown. There is almost grim humour in Christie’s puffed-up pride when showing off the profoundly miserable upstairs flat to let at No. 10 to the ill-fated Timothy and Beryl Evans (John Hurt and Judy Geeson). Even without his stifling presence, it is a grimy little room in an exhausted, shabby London.

For the murders of his final three victims, Christie modified the gassing technique he had first used on Eady; he used a rubber tube connected to the gas pipe in the kitchen which he kept closed off with a bulldog clip. [83] He seated his victims in the kitchen, released the clip on the tube, and let gas leak into the room. The Brabin Report pointed out that Christie's explanation of his gassing technique was not satisfactory because he would have been overpowered by the gas as well. It was established that all three victims had been exposed to carbon monoxide. [84] The gas made his victims drowsy, after which Christie strangled them with a length of rope. [83] Four years later in August 1943 he committed his first murder, strangling Ruth Fuerst, an Austrian munitions factory worker, in his bed while his wife was away. Lusher, Adam; Rimmer, Alan (9 April 2006). "My father deserved to be hanged by Pierrepoint". The Daily Telegraph. Australian artist Brett Whiteley produced a series of paintings based on the Christie murders while living in London in the 1960s. [140] Timothy Evans, who had a low IQ, confessed on four separate occasions that he was responsible, claiming he had killed his wife in a fit of temper. But after being charged with murder he told officers: ‘Christie did it.’According to WalesOnline, Evans originally said to the police that a concoction he created to terminate his wife’s pregnancy accidentally caused her death, and that he had disposed of her body under a nearby drain. The book is not without its errors, mainly as to matters of more minor detail, but a little disappointing nonetheless; it is understood that this was at least contributed to by an inordinate degree of intervention by copy editors for the publisher leading up to the final text which resulted in mistakes being introduced or indeed reintroduced despite correction in earlier drafts.