Two Killers at 10 Rillington Place?

Seventy years ago on 15th July, one of Britain's worst serial killers, John Christie, was hanged. But were there really two killers at work at his infamous address as some have claimed?

At 9 am on 15^th July 1953- after being pinioned by the prolific No.1 hangman Albert Pierrepoint- John Reginald Halliday Christie, the merciless killer of seven women and a baby, dropped to his death. Minutes earlier, after his hands had been pinioned behind his back ready for the scaffold at London’s Pentonville Prison, Christie had grumbled that his nose was itching. ‘It won’t bother you for long,' said Pierrepoint. 

Christie had been found guilty of only the murder of his wife of over thirty years, Ethel, but he had also killed six other women- Ruth Fuerst, Muriel Eady, Rita Nelson, Kathleen Maloney, Hectorina Maclennan, Beryl Evans, and Beryl’s 13-month-old daughter Geraldine. All these murders had taken place at the Christies’ home, a tenement slum terrace at 10 Rillington Place, close to Portobello Road in London’s Notting Hill, over ten years between 1943 and 1953. 

John Christie in the back garden of 10 Rillington Place 

Christie was a sexually deviant predator and lured most of his victims to the house by offering remedies for catarrh and bronchitis, drugging them with a toxic mixture administered through a gas mask and makeshift pipe, before strangling them and sexually assaulting their bodies. Two women, Fuerst and Eady, were eventually found buried in the back garden, Christie’s wife Ethel under the floorboards in the living room, and three other women, Nelson, Maloney and Maclennan, were trussed up and hidden in a papered-over alcove in the kitchen.  

But Beryl Evans was a tenant, and she was killed and abused and dumped in a wash-house in the back garden after a botched abortion, which Christie had promised he was qualified to carry out, which he was most certainly not. Beryl Evans’ husband Timothy, an almost illiterate and childlike Welsh van driver with a low IQ and in his early twenties, had reluctantly agreed to Christie performing an abortion on Beryl, as they were already struggling financially and emotionally with their first baby, Geraldine. But little did Tim know that there were already the remains of two women in the garden at this time. 

Timothy Evans under arrest  

Tim came home one evening from work and was informed by his landlord Christie that Beryl had died during the highly illegal procedure, that nothing could be done, and that he would arrange to dispose of Beryl’s body. Tim was devastated, and Christie told him that he should go away for a while. Christie also said that he and Ethel would look after baby Geraldine until Tim returned. And Tim, heartbroken and confused, took up the offer and went to stay with relatives in Wales.  

But long after Tim left, Christie also murdered Geraldine, and when Tim briefly returned to see her, Christie fobbed him off, saying that she was being cared for by others. Back in Wales, the close-to-breaking-point Tim Evans walked into Merthyr Tydfil police station not far from Cardiff and confessed to killing his wife, saying that he’d given Beryl the contents of a bottle recommended by ‘someone’, to bring on and abortion. A search was made of 10 Rillington Place back in London, but nothing was found. Although, on a second search, the bodies of both Beryl and baby Geraldine were found in the wash-house. Beryls’ face was bruised, and a sixteen-week male foetus was also discovered, the unborn child. 

When Tim Evans heard that Geraldine was dead, he made another statement, this time implicating John Christie. But the police were convinced that Evans was the killer of his wife and child, and there was no other evidence against the married and outwardly respectable landlord Christie. There is also compelling evidence that the impressionable and jumpy Tim was subjected to police ‘verballing’, bullying and intimidation, in those days when police interviews were not recorded. Tim went to trial, and both John and Ethel Christie were the chief prosecution witnesses. 

Timothy Evans was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint at Pentonville Prison on 9^th March 1950, when he was twenty-five, by the same executioner and on the same gallows where John Christie was despatched just over three years and four months later, after murdering his wife and his final three known victims, to add to the two already in the garden, the bodies of all of whom were discovered in March 1950 after Christie moved out, sub-letting 10 Rillington Place. 

10 Rillington Place (courtesy of squaremileofmurder.com) 
 

But were there two killers at 10 Rillington Place? 

Timothy Evans was pardoned in 1966, after efforts made by those seeking justice, including journalists such as David Astor, editor of the Observer, the future legendary editor of the Sunday Times Harold Evans, then editor of the Northern Echo, and politicians. And Ludovic Kennedy’s classic 1961 investigative book Ten Rillington Place, which laid out all the facts in detail had a deep impact. It was adapted into the 1971 film of the same name starring Richard Attenborough as John Christie and John Hurt as Timothy Evans. Tim Evans was finally exonerated in the High Court in 2004, the court accepting that he didn’t murder either Beryl or Geraldine. 

But in the mid-1990's, an author published a book which set out the theory proclaiming that Timothy Evans had killed both Beryl and Geraldine, while Christie was guilty of the murders of the six other unfortunate women. And in a 2019 book, another author largely regurgitated that argument, claiming that Timothy Evans did not deserve either his pardon or exoneration. But both writers offer almost no solid evidence to support their claims, aside from Evans’s first confession, given at a time when this man of limited mental capacity was traumatised by his wife’s death, blamed himself for allowing her to have Christie’s illegal abortion, and in hindsight we can see that Tim was perversely trying to protect Christie from prosecution.  

Most people believe that Christie killed all the victims that were found in his house, wash-house and garden, including Beryl Evans and baby Geraldine, and understand that Timothy Evans was the victim of one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British legal history. But there are some who buy into the misleading and sensationally irresponsible ‘two killers’ theory, and that is unfair to both Evans and his family. 

Just recently, Timothy Evans’s sister Mary, now aged 94, gave her first interview about her brother’s ordeal to the investigative journalist Louise Shorter on her CBS Reality show Wrongly Accused. The pain and trauma that Tim’s treatment and judicial murder had caused to her family over more than seven decades was very obvious and sad to see, and tarnishing his name again now, with no evidence, is both opportunistic and dishonest. 

Timothy Evans deserves his pardon and exoneration and should never have been executed for John Christie’s vile and inhuman crimes, for which Christie was rightfully hanged seventy years ago. 

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Neil Root is the author of Frenzy! How the Tabloid Press Turned Three Evil Serial Killers into Celebrities which covers the John Christie/Timothy Evans cases.