Final Serial Murders of 10 Rillington Place Part 3 of 4[Mature Content]

Final Serial Murders of 10 Rillington Place part 3 of 4[mature content] I pulled away a small cupboard in the corner and gained access to a small alcove. -John Reginald Halliday Christie, 1953 For nearly 10 years, beginning in 1943, serial killer John Reginald Halliday Christie had gotten away with murder. A largely sexually impotent man (stemming from adolescent failures that earned him the disparaging monikers "Reggie No-Dick" and "Can't-Do-It Christie") he found his main means of sexual release could only be met by undemanding, submissive prostitutes. Though married in 1920, Christie continued to visit prostitutes the rest of his adult life. In 1943, he murdered a part-time prostitute, Austrian-immigrant munitions worker Ruth Fuerst, strangling her during sex. After burying her in the back yard, Christie's appetite for the morbid thrill of climaxing as Ruth had died weighed upon his mind. He devised a glass jar he hoped to use as a means of killing other women so he could have absolute power over their unconscious bodies while he ravaged them as he pleased. The jar had two holes in it: one led to a tube a victim would inhale from, smelling only an aromatic home remedy in the jar, and the other tube went to his apartment's gas line. His first chance to use the jar came in late 1944 when a co-worker, Muriel Eady, complained of bronchitis. Christie talked her into coming home with him: he had a "special mixture", he said, that would cure her respiratory problems. In his flat, Muriel used his jar; overcome by the gas, she passed out. Christie raped her as he strangled her. He buried her in the back yard near Ruth. On Easter 1948 a young married couple, Tim and Beryl Evans, moved into the top floor of Christie's building, 10 Rillington Place. Beryl was expecting a child; she gave birth in October of that year. Beryl's husband Tim was almost 60 IQ points shy of Reg Christie--his tested IQ of 70 put him in the borderline mentally retarded range. Tim, however, had a job driving a delivery van despite the fact he could only read and write his own name. Over a year after the Evans' arrival, Beryl turned up pregnant again and wanted to abort her developing baby. In early November 1949, Christie, under the pretext of being an expert abortionist, went up to her apartment while her husband Tim was at work and murdered her. He made up a story of the abortion having gone wrong that the simpleton, Tim Evans, believed when he came home from work and found his wife dead. Reg Christie said he would dispose of Beryl Evans' body. He and Tim moved it to a temporarily vacant apartment on the second floor. Christie took care of the Evans' 13-month-old daughter for a couple of days, saying he would arrange for the now- motherless girl to be put in care of a couple he knew. Tim, unsure of himself and deferring to Christie, let this happen. Instead, on November 19 (two days after he had murdered Beryl) Christie took the child up to the second-floor apartment and strangled her, leaving the body alongside her dead mother. Believing his daughter was in safe hands, Tim let Christie talk him into selling off his possessions and leaving town. He retreated to his childhood hometown in Wales, living with an aunt. Suspicions of his mother (who lived in London) about her grandchild's and daughter-in-law's whereabouts led Tim to turn himself in to a Welsh police station where he claimed he had stuffed his wife's dead body down a storm drain. After much convoluted discussion, police there asked for help from police in London to investigate Tim's former residence. Notting Hill police found no body in the drain, but enough strangeness accompanied the case that, after they found a stolen briefcase in Tim's vacant apartment, they used that as an excuse to charge him with a crime so he could be extradited to London. There, Tim crazily added to his "confession" about his wife's death, implicating himself in a cover-up, but claiming Christie had caused her death during an abortion attempt. Their bodies were found in a communal washhouse in the apartment building's back yard. Upon learning his daughter was dead, Tim Evans then made more confessions, all fraught with factual errors, but used by British authorities to bring him up on charges of murdering his daughter (the Crown held the murder of Beryl in reserve in case he was acquitted). Christie appeared as the star witness for the prosecution at the three-day trial. Tim was handily convicted of murder, and on March 9, 1950, Timothy John Evans was hanged for murdering his infant daughter. Through all this, Christie sweated. Two bodies were buried in his back yard. A femur had surfaced from one of his burial sites. He had used it to prop up a sagging wooden fence that bisected the back yard. Police failed to notice it when searching the grounds after Tim's statements to Welsh police. Later, after a second search had yielded Beryl's and the baby's bodies, Christie discovered the skull of one of his early victims had been dug up by his dog and was lying on top of the soil. Police hadn't seen that, either--Christie tossed it into a neighborhood building that had been bombed during World War II's German Blitz of London. It seemed that in the wake of Tim Evans' execution for murders Christie had committed John Reginald Halliday Christie was never going to be touched by the long arm of the law. "Darkies Upstairs" Relative peace reigned in the Christie household but for the middle-aged couple's racism. Both Reg and his wife, Ethel, found their new West Indian--and very black--neighbors loathsome. The third- floor flat (previously occupied by the Evans family) had been let to a Jamaican man. The second-floor tenants (in the wake of that apartment's becoming available when previous occupant, Mr. Kitchener, had moved out) were also people of color from the Caribbean. The Christies considered their new neighbors their inferiors (despite the fact that the Christies themselves could be typified easily as what is known as "white trash" today). And Ethel's racism was as bad as Reggie's: ever class-conscious as the British are, she thought the English- Africans from the Caribbean were of low status. She was also afraid of them, but mostly she detested sharing close quarters with them (particularly since she and all the residents of 10 Rillington Place had to use the same outhouse to answer Nature's call). The Christies complained ceaselessly about their new housemates to the landlord. They hated the smells of the native Jamaican foods cooking in the building. They hated the Caribbean music the new people preferred. Living in harmony was not to be: Ethel brought a criminal action against a neighbor for allegedly assaulting her. And "Reggie No-Dick" scored a coup when through the use of a law service catering to lower income people he managed to legally secure his (long-claimed but never documented) exclusive use of "the back garden". This meant no one in the house, other than he and Ethel Christie should walk past the falling wooden fence that cut the yard in half. This, at least, gave Christie some peace of mind about no one discovering the strange things he'd "planted" in the garden (Ruth Fuerst and Muriel Eady). Nagging Too Much Christie learned as a child to get attention by faking illnesses or by conflating minor injuries into major complaints guaranteed to generate sympathy. Right after Tim Evans' trial, he sank into a depression (more likely a mild shock-like condition stemming from the close call to being exposed as a murderer). He lost weight, about 28 pounds. Christie had been working for the Post Office Savings Bank before Tim Evans' trial. In court, the defense brought up Christie's past criminal behavior (from 1920 through 1933 he had been arrested and convicted multiple times for petty theft, and in one case, in 1929, of malicious wounding he used a cricket bat to batter a prostitute with whom he was living while separated from his wife). His conservative employer learned of Christie's criminal history from reports of Evans' trial. Christie was fired from his job. On top of that, his job loss from the bank (as a result of disclosures about his criminal history) meant he was home more often, with Ethel nagging him to find work. His hypochondria and its attendant whining grew worse. He complained of all sorts of nervous and gastro-intestinal problems. Probably for no other reason but to get a break from his limited responsibilities at home (and to get away from Ethel) he checked himself into a hospital for a three- week observation period. A staff psychiatrist felt he should be hospitalized for analysis--had Christie not been worried about the two bodies in his back yard such a "rest' would have been welcomed. Instead, though, he claimed he couldn't leave Ethel alone much longer, and he declined the offer. He did, however, see his own doctor for many imaginary complaints: 33 visits over the next eight months were documented. As time wore on, Ethel became more of a nag. She constantly complained about the West Indians overhead. In the past Reg formerly had gotten some relief from her because she spent time away from 10 Rillington Place on visits to her family in Sheffield (in northern England).

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