The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place by Kate Summerscale Review

“Oh, England’s fantastic for this kind of thing,” - Alfred Hitchcock on the 10 Rillington Place murders

Reg and Ethel Christie had lived at 10 Rillington Place, London, since 1938 but strange things had happened in the winter of 1952/53. Nobody had seen Ethel since December and Reg disappeared from the flat altogether in March 1953. When their landlord instructed a workman to clean up the Christies’ kitchen, the workman found what appeared to be human remains behind an alcove. Three womens’ corpses were stuffed in there. And the mystery of Ethel’s absence was soon solved: her corpse was under the front room’s floor. As the manhunt for Reg Christie began, the police would soon unearth more horrors on the property…

Kate Summerscale’s recounting of the 10 Rillington Place murders in The Peepshow is an incredible read - a masterful true crime book in the style of a nonfiction novel, pioneered by Capote with In Cold Blood and of the same high quality. It also helped that I knew nothing of Reg Christie prior to this book so the surprise of the twists and turns of the case made this one all the more compelling. What a piece of work this guy Christie was.

The most notorious London serial killer since Jack the Ripper, John Reginald “Reg” Halliday Christie murdered a total of 8 people - 7 women and 1 baby - 4 in the 1940s and 4 in the 1950s. Posing as an unlicensed medical professional, he would lure prostitutes who were pregnant into his house, telling them that he could perform abortions, gassing them into unconsciousness, then strangling them to death with a piece of rope and having sex with their corpses. Yes: not just a serial killer, nor a serial rapist, but a necrophiliac to boot.

The central part of the narrative concerns the bizarre case of the two murders on the property in 1949: Tim Evan’s killing of his wife Beryl and their baby Geraldine. Bizarre because it seemed that her husband, Tim, was their murderer - and he confessed as much to it - but when you had an active serial killer living below you, and Beryl died in a similar way to his other victims, and you factor in that he was much more intelligent that simple Tim and could’ve manipulated him, it begins to look like the whole case was a miscarriage of justice. Not least as it led to Tim’s wrongful hanging (capital punishment was still in force in Britain at the time - it would be banned in 1969) but also inadvertently allowed Christie to go on to murder four more women a few years later.

It’s one of many fascinating aspects to this whole case and Kate Summerscale tells it all superbly. She not only relates the life story of Reg Christie - who certainly experienced a lot of trauma, including being gassed in the First World War, but nothing to explain his motivations for what he would go on to do in later life - but gives equal biographical space to all of his victims, so that they’re presented as real people and not just stats or a gory footnote.

The story has two “main characters” so to speak: Harry Procter, star reporter of The Sunday Pictorial (later renamed The Sunday Mirror), who had the scoop on the Christie case; and Fryn Tennyson Jesse, a journalist and criminologist who covered Christie’s trial. We see how both writers approached the story - Harry’s was the more sensationalist, tabloid-y style, while Fryn’s was more intellectual, attempting to understand what would drive a person to do such things. Two different kinds of “peepshow” writing for the public but still a peepshow regardless.

Both are captivating people, all the more so because of their flaws. Harry was a hardworking and tenacious journalist who came from nothing and ended up a minor celebrity in his own right, posing in pictures with the likes of King George VI, President Truman and Marilyn Monroe. But he also did a lot of underhand things to get the front page stories, which eventually wore him down and ruined his health. He covered the Evans murders in 1949 and felt guilty that he hadn’t figured out it was Christie at the time. In 1953, he was searching for redemption by looking for a confession from Christie for killing Beryl and Geraldine.

Fryn was going blind from cataracts by the time of the Christie trial and was a hopeless morphine addict, stemming from an aeroplane propeller accident that severed some of her fingers years ago. She too fought for the truth in the Rillington Place murders but had the same reprehensible racist opinions that much of society had back then.

Part of the brilliance of Summerscale’s book is in how vividly she brings the world of 1950s London to life. We might think of this era as being rather innocent or repressed when it was anything but. The seedy world of late night cafes and the squalor that people lived in back then, the prevalence of sex workers, the racial tensions brought about by the British Nationality Act of 1948 that allowed thousands of immigrants from the West Indies to emigrate to the UK (Christie hated having to share a house with black people), the public fear of young people doing bad things - handguns were everywhere in the post-war years as soldiers returned home en masse. One such case of a teenager shooting a policeman is mentioned, though it was the more “normal”-looking men, like Reg Christie, supposedly the backbone of society, who, in Reg’s case, were ironically committing far worse crimes behind closed doors.

Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in the summer of 1953 and the country was abuzz with this “fresh start” with the young Queen. And there was the Great Smog of London in December 1952, a freak natural event, which lasted for 4 days and killed thousands.

All of that isn’t so much for background colour - although it does provide that as well - but to provide an understanding of that world and how ripe it was for real societal change for the better. The book highlights the importance of progressiveness, especially with regards to women’s rights. You could argue that because of abortion being illegal at the time, prudishness about pornography, no protection against domestic abuse, and unequal pay/limited job prospects, designed to keep women in thrall to men, they were all factors that helped drive these women into the clutches of a lunatic like Christie. Especially as these women seemed to choose a life of prostitution as it gave them more power and money in a society that provided them little of both.

Summerscale also contributes her bit to the Rillington Place murders canon by positing her own interpretation of why Tim Evans confessed to murdering his wife and child when it was actually Reg Christie. It seems to me the most plausible of all the theories presented - but we’ll also never know at this point so speculation is all that’s left.

Rillington Place was renamed Ruston Close not long after Christie’s execution by hanging - it’s still called that today - and No. 10, along with the other decaying houses on that street, were torn down and replaced in the ‘70s. To this day, on that street, there is a vacant lot in between the houses, where 10 Rillington Place once stood. The horrors that Reg Christie enacted on that property still echoes down through the decades.

I’m as guilty of being part of the “peepshow” as anyone else who finds this material morbidly interesting but this is still an undeniably gripping read. Written and researched expertly by Kate Summerscale, I tore through this in no time and enjoyed every part of it, not least because Christie was such a foul creature and his crimes staggeringly evil. An especially thoughtful true crime book with a keen eye to historical context, it doesn’t get much better than The Peepshow.