Speaker 1: You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
Speaker 1: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
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Speaker 1: journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Speaker 2: Good Evening, London, nineteen fifty three, police discover the bodies
Speaker 2: of three young women hidden in a wall at ten
Speaker 2: Relinketon Place, a dingy terrace house in notting Hill. On
Speaker 2: searching the building, they find another body beneath the floorboards,
Speaker 2: then an array of human bones in the garden. But
Speaker 2: they have already investigated a double murder at ten Rillington
Speaker 2: Place three years before, and the killer was hanged. Did
Speaker 2: they get the wrong man? A nationwide manhunt is launched
Speaker 2: for the tenet of the ground floor flat. A softly
Speaker 2: spoken former policeman named reg Christie, Star reporter Harry Procter
Speaker 2: chases after the scoop. Celebrated crime writer Fern Tennys and
Speaker 2: Jesse begs to be assigned to the case. The story
Speaker 2: becomes an instant sensation and with the relentless rise of
Speaker 2: the tabloid press. The public watches on like never before.
Speaker 2: Who is reg Christie? Why did he choose to kill
Speaker 2: those women and to keep their bodies near him? As
Speaker 2: Harry and Ferns start to learn the full horror of
Speaker 2: what went on at Rillington Place, they realized that Christy
Speaker 2: might also have engineered a terrible miscarage of justice in
Speaker 2: plain sight. In this riveting true story, Kate Summerscale minds
Speaker 2: the archives to uncover the lives of Christie's victims, the
Speaker 2: tabloid frenzy that their deaths inspired, and the truth about
Speaker 2: what really happened inside that house. The book that we're
Speaker 2: featuring this evening is the peep Show The Murders at
Speaker 2: ten Rillington Place, with my special guest journalist and award
Speaker 2: winning author, Kate summer Scale. Welcome to the program and
Speaker 2: thank you very much for this interview. Kate summer Scale, Well,
Speaker 2: thank you, it's great to be here. Thank you so much,
Speaker 2: and congratulations on this book. I know it came out
Speaker 2: previously in the UK, but we're talking about this American
Speaker 2: release of this book, ten reallyked in Place.
Speaker 3: Yes, it came out in a few months ago in
Speaker 3: the UK and justin now in the Spring in the US.
Speaker 2: You take us initially in this book you call it
Speaker 2: the in the Walls, and you take us to March
Speaker 2: twenty fourth, nineteen fifty three, and you introduced a central
Speaker 2: figure in this book, Harry Proctor from the Sunday Pictorial.
Speaker 2: Can you tell us about Harry Procter and introduce this
Speaker 2: chapter in the Walls.
Speaker 3: Harry Procter was a star crime reporter for the Sunday Pictorial,
Speaker 3: which was one of the leading tabloids in Britain at
Speaker 3: a time of great competition and prosperity in Fleet Street
Speaker 3: the British Press. He was a working classman from the
Speaker 3: north of England who had risen by his wits to
Speaker 3: this preeminent position. He was charming, quite devious in getting
Speaker 3: his stories, extremely ambitious. He was determined to get the
Speaker 3: scoop on the Christie case. When the bodies of six
Speaker 3: women were discovered in this tiny terrace house in notting Hill,
Speaker 3: West London. The bodies were concealed in the crevices of
Speaker 3: the building in its garden, so there were three bodies
Speaker 3: behind the kitchen wall, one beneath the floorboards in the
Speaker 3: front room. The bones of two further women in the backyard,
Speaker 3: and the tenant of the house, a man called Reg Christie,
Speaker 3: an apparently respectable, middle aged office worker, had gone on
Speaker 3: the run when Harry Proctor turned up at this street
Speaker 3: one foggy evening in nineteen fifty three to ask the
Speaker 3: police what was going on, And the real shock for
Speaker 3: Harry was that he realized he had been to this
Speaker 3: exact same address three years earlier and had interviewed Christie,
Speaker 3: the man who the police were now seeking about another
Speaker 3: double murder in the very same house, for which another
Speaker 3: man eventually hanged. And this man, Timothy Evans, had at
Speaker 3: one point accused Christie of killing his wife and daughter,
Speaker 3: but the jury did not believe him and had Evans
Speaker 3: was put to death. Now that all these bodies had
Speaker 3: been found and the premises, and Christie was the chief suspect,
Speaker 3: it became obvious to some, including Harry, that he might
Speaker 3: tim Evans might have been telling the truth. Christy might
Speaker 3: have committed this double murder of a woman and her
Speaker 3: baby daughter in nineteen forty nine. And worst of all,
Speaker 3: for Harry, he had himself that he prided himself on
Speaker 3: his journalistic prowess, missed the story he'd interviewed Christie. He
Speaker 3: like the jury had believed him to be innocent, and
Speaker 3: as a result, Christy had been left free to carry
Speaker 3: on killing.
Speaker 2: So you say that Harry Procter felt some guilt in
Speaker 2: being duped by Regg Christi originally with the Tim Evans case.
Speaker 2: So what was his vow now in light of that
Speaker 2: guilt and in light of what had happened at ten
Speaker 2: Rillington in the Discoveries.
Speaker 3: Yes, Harry felt guilt, remorse, shame. He also felt humiliated
Speaker 3: about his journalistic skills, and he was determined to put
Speaker 3: it right. He felt bad too for Tim Evans, the
Speaker 3: man who had hanged. This was possibly one of the
Speaker 3: worst miscarriages of just this in English legal history, and
Speaker 3: is so Harry wanted, for all these reasons, for remorse, ambition,
Speaker 3: and a quest for justice. He wanted to get Christy
Speaker 3: to confess to the murders, not only of the six
Speaker 3: women who had been found in the house that March,
Speaker 3: but of Beryl and Geraldine Evans, the woman and child
Speaker 3: killed three years earlier, because that confession would clear Tim
Speaker 3: Evans's name and be a sensational scoop for Harry's newspaper.
Speaker 3: So he went about trying to secure an exclusive with Christie.
Speaker 3: Even while Christy was still on the run before the
Speaker 3: police had caught him, Harry still sort of set about
Speaker 3: making plans for how he could get a story and
Speaker 3: get it before and hear all his rivals and have
Speaker 3: it himself. And to do this he went to the
Speaker 3: north of England, back down Christie's family and secured an
Speaker 3: interview with his brother Percy, and he persuaded Percy that
Speaker 3: if he signed an agreement that the story should go
Speaker 3: exclusively to the Sunday Pictorial, the Pictorial would pay all
Speaker 3: of Christie's defense costs and pay for psychiatrists to interview
Speaker 3: him to assess whether he was insane, to do everything
Speaker 3: possible to help him. This was a strange kind of
Speaker 3: pact with the devil that Harry was making. He was
Speaker 3: undertaking to support Christie's defense. His paper would do that
Speaker 3: in return for a story that would ultimately condemn Christy
Speaker 3: as a man who had let another man hang in
Speaker 3: his place.
Speaker 2: You say the Pictorial Pictorial was going to fund the defense,
Speaker 2: so did they have defense attorneys? Solicitors?
Speaker 3: In mind, Harry had a friend who was a solicitor.
Speaker 3: These kinds of deals were becoming increasingly common in Fleet Street.
Speaker 3: They were a bit below the radar. They weren't strictly
Speaker 3: illegal or legal, so it was all on the hush hush.
Speaker 3: So Harry got in touch with his solicitor friend, who
Speaker 3: in turn pointed a barrister to represent Christie in court.
Speaker 3: All this was sort of firmed up only once Christie
Speaker 3: was apprehended, which was a week after the murders were discovered.
Speaker 3: He was found by the Thames by a policeman. Christie
Speaker 3: sort of endorsed the agreement that his brother had made
Speaker 3: with the Pictorial and agreed to write his story while
Speaker 3: he was in Brixton Prison awaiting trial or Harry, so
Speaker 3: that the Pictorial could publish it as soon as the
Speaker 3: verdict was in.
Speaker 2: You introduce another central carearacter, fern Tennyson Jesse, and she's
Speaker 2: an acclaimed novelist, and you write about the notable British
Speaker 2: Trials series. Tell us about that this was.
Speaker 3: A series that had been running for more than half
Speaker 3: a century, quite acclaimed and influential, sort of high brows
Speaker 3: series of They were trial transcripts, so the famous trials
Speaker 3: would be printed in full in these books and with
Speaker 3: an introduction by a celebrated author, crime writer and friend,
Speaker 3: Tennis and Jesse was one of one of the most
Speaker 3: acclaimed of the crime writers, true crime writers of the
Speaker 3: interwar years, and she had written several essays for introductions
Speaker 3: to the notable British Trial series already, and she'd also
Speaker 3: published fiction, some of which drew on real crime story.
Speaker 3: So she was absolutely fascinated by true crime and in
Speaker 3: particular by the psychology of murderers. And she was quite
Speaker 3: a pioneer in this field in writing essays that tackled
Speaker 3: and a psychological and unconscious motive as well as the
Speaker 3: nitty gritty of who done it and how, and so
Speaker 3: she was she read about Christie's the discovery of the
Speaker 3: bodies at ten Rillington Place and Christie's arrest in the papers,
Speaker 3: and again even before he was arrested, she was pleading
Speaker 3: with her editor at Notable British Trials to give her
Speaker 3: the commission on this story because she wanted to be
Speaker 3: able to get a ticket to the Old Bailey trial
Speaker 3: of Christie and then to write. She wrote a long
Speaker 3: essay in which she considered his psychology and his methods
Speaker 3: and also try to unpack the mystery of whether he
Speaker 3: had indeed killed Tim Evans' wife and child. The main
Speaker 3: argument against that it would seem almost obvious that he
Speaker 3: had because these bodies have been found in the wash
Speaker 3: house behind his flat at ten Rillington Place in nineteen
Speaker 3: forty nine. Yet the strange thing was Tim Evans, even
Speaker 3: though he'd accused Christie of being a murderer, had at
Speaker 3: another point made a very full and detailed confession to
Speaker 3: having murdered Beryl and Geraldine Evans himself. So it was
Speaker 3: a very perplexing case, and there were arguments on both side.
Speaker 3: Campaigners on both sides both Tim Evans innocence, but others
Speaker 3: others believed in his guilt and thought it was indeed
Speaker 3: a coincidence that these two stranglers had shared a house.
Speaker 2: You're right about that. Once Christy is apprehended, the police
Speaker 2: obvious questioned him. So throughout this book is the various
Speaker 2: answers to the questions that police have for him. Tell
Speaker 2: us about the first questioning and what is called a confession?
Speaker 2: What does he actually say that he confesses to.
Speaker 3: Well, the police, to Harry, the frustration of Harry Procter
Speaker 3: and others didn't really question Christie at all about the
Speaker 3: Evans murders. The establishment, from the police to the courts,
Speaker 3: and the government didn't want to rock the vote on
Speaker 3: this previous conviction. They didn't want the scandal of a
Speaker 3: miscarriage of justice, especially because there was a big furia
Speaker 3: at the time about whether capital punishment should be abolished
Speaker 3: in England. So the police asked Christy about the women
Speaker 3: whose bodies had been found in his house that much.
Speaker 3: His first was really bizarre. He claimed that most of
Speaker 3: his victims had attacked him and he had killed them
Speaker 3: in self defense. He's claimed that these women much younger
Speaker 3: than him, had forced their way into his house or
Speaker 3: refused to leave, had demanded sex, had got violent, and
Speaker 3: it was a really strange kind of reversal of what
Speaker 3: must really have happened, a straight kind of projection of
Speaker 3: what he'd done to them and framing it as what
Speaker 3: they'd done to him. And the forensic evidence completely discredited
Speaker 3: these stories of his and in a couple of cases,
Speaker 3: including that of his wife Ethel, whose body was found
Speaker 3: beneath the floorboards in the front room, he claimed that
Speaker 3: he had carried out a mercy killing, that she had
Speaker 3: wanted to die and she had taken a lot of
Speaker 3: sleeping pills and then and because they didn't work, he'd
Speaker 3: sort of finished the job for her. That this was
Speaker 3: not credible either, And it emerged after the very sophisticated
Speaker 3: and wide ranging forensic analysis of the bodies and the
Speaker 3: crime scene that the women, most of the women that
Speaker 3: had been found, had been gassed with carbon dioxide from
Speaker 3: the household the main pipes, and they'd been raped by
Speaker 3: Christie and then they'd been strangled. So his stories of
Speaker 3: being the victim of these sort of wild attacks by
Speaker 3: women was completely discredited.
Speaker 2: What information came out, and it would be regarding the
Speaker 2: motive possibly for killing any of these women. And what
Speaker 2: I'm speaking to is his role as an abortionist.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this was something that was also sort of slightly
Speaker 3: hushed up at the time, but it seems obvious from
Speaker 3: going through the archives and reading all the statements by neighbors,
Speaker 3: by former lodgers, by local police that Christy was practicing
Speaker 3: as a backstreet abortionist and this may well have been
Speaker 3: the way that he lured many of his victims to
Speaker 3: his house. I realized as I was researching that almost
Speaker 3: everyone had been pregnant or rumored to be pregnant at
Speaker 3: the time of their deaths. This was a period when
Speaker 3: abortion was illegal in Britain, and backstreet abortions were relatively common.
Speaker 3: That are risky, dangerous to the life of the mother.
Speaker 3: The women who were impoverished, as many were this time,
Speaker 3: it was the almost impossible to bring up a child
Speaker 3: by oneself. So if they had given birth to this,
Speaker 3: to this unwonted child they would have had they would
Speaker 3: have been parted from it immediately, it would have been
Speaker 3: taken into into care. So many women did seek out
Speaker 3: abortions because, you know, for financial reasons, they simply couldn't have.
Speaker 3: Unmarried women couldn't afford to raise children and read Christy.
Speaker 3: This may well be why he had this gassing device
Speaker 3: that he used on his victims as well. And there's
Speaker 3: an interesting question of whether his wife Ethel eventually one
Speaker 3: or of his victims, was complicit in this activity. It
Speaker 3: seems likely.
Speaker 2: You talk about the that in preparation for this trial
Speaker 2: and Harry Procter's publishers funding this defense that he had
Speaker 2: Reginald Christy give him, which he was able to be
Speaker 2: used eventually for the pictorial publication. So tell us some
Speaker 2: of the information that Christy gave to Harry and was
Speaker 2: part of his incredible notes.
Speaker 3: The notes were they're an extraordinary document and they were
Speaker 3: written over many weeks while Christie was waiting to be
Speaker 3: tried and sitting in his cell in Brixton Prison. There
Speaker 3: are quite a few fragments about his early life which
Speaker 3: are interesting. He talked about his father being very domineering.
Speaker 3: He talked about the fact that he had seen his
Speaker 3: grandfather's dead body when he was a child, laid out
Speaker 3: in the parlor, and he had looked on it with
Speaker 3: no emotion, and he said ever since, dead bodies had
Speaker 3: held a fascination for him. He talked about how he
Speaker 3: had been gassed as a soldier in the First World War.
Speaker 3: He was caught up in a mustard gas attack on
Speaker 3: the Western Front, and the effect of this was to
Speaker 3: he temporarily was blinded and lost his voice, and his
Speaker 3: voice didn't come back for six months and not fully
Speaker 3: for three years. Even now, even in his fifties. He
Speaker 3: spoke with a whisper and the doctors at the time
Speaker 3: and thereafter concluded that this was a psychosomatic condition. It
Speaker 3: was a form of shell shop that he'd reacted to.
Speaker 3: The trauma of the gas attack by balling silent, So
Speaker 3: he sort of portrayed in fragments this his earlier life,
Speaker 3: but a lot of the statement is taken up. He
Speaker 3: also does describe the murders, but often in a very
Speaker 3: detached and vague way. As he said to the police
Speaker 3: it must have been me. It was almost as if
Speaker 3: he was talking of a third person. And even in
Speaker 3: this confession for Harry, there's that tone of voice, rather distant, unemotional,
Speaker 3: slightly bewildered, as if he he is a spectator of
Speaker 3: his own atrocities rather than the perpetrator. And weirdly, there's
Speaker 3: this thing that even when he was arrested, he insisted
Speaker 3: to the police on what a kind of moral, high minded,
Speaker 3: educated man he was, And in the statement for Harry,
Speaker 3: he goes to great lengths to impress upon him how
Speaker 3: sober he is, how he doesn't drink heavily, how he
Speaker 3: doesn't swear, how he's very fond of animals and even
Speaker 3: rescued a cat once. Even as he's confessing to murder,
Speaker 3: he's still insisting on this image of himself as this upright,
Speaker 3: almost Victorian figure who has extremely high moral standards and
Speaker 3: disapproves of prostitution, disapproves of pubs and liquor. And so
Speaker 3: this kind of jarring disjunction between the acts he's admitting
Speaker 3: to and the persona that he stood it persists in presenting.
Speaker 2: Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
Speaker 2: these messages. Now you explain the I guess unique aspect
Speaker 2: of the British judicial system that they would only be
Speaker 2: able to try one murder at a time. So what
Speaker 2: do does a prosecution choose as the first murder to prosecute,
Speaker 2: and also what is the seemingly the only option for
Speaker 2: the defense In terms of defense, the.
Speaker 3: Crown prosecution decided to charge Christie in court with the
Speaker 3: murder of his wife Ethel. She was the victim that
Speaker 3: he claimed to have put to death because she was
Speaker 3: suffering so much and wanted to die, and he said
Speaker 3: that he put her body beneath the floorboards in the
Speaker 3: front room because he wanted her to still be near him.
Speaker 3: He claimed to have loved her very much, acted only
Speaker 3: out of pity. The reason that the prosecution chose this
Speaker 3: murder was that they had the most evidence that Christy
Speaker 3: had consciously permitted it. It was not an act of
Speaker 3: momentary madness, and the evidence for this was that he
Speaker 3: made preparations to kill her. He had afterwards covered up
Speaker 3: the crime really quite deviously by sort of forging altering
Speaker 3: dates on letters, sending Christmas car to her family, saying
Speaker 3: I was so sorry Ethel can't write this herself as
Speaker 3: she's got terrible rheumatism in her hands. Don't worry, I'm
Speaker 3: going to cook the Christmas dinner, and claiming to his
Speaker 3: neighbors that she was visiting her six sister, that she
Speaker 3: sent a telegram. So they were very, very elaborate cover
Speaker 3: up in the case of Ethel's death, which of course
Speaker 3: he didn't need to do in the case of the
Speaker 3: other women who nobody knew had even come to his house,
Speaker 3: nobody knew had died, so that seemed the easiest one
Speaker 3: to pin on him. And importantly this they guessed that
Speaker 3: Christie Lawyers would claim insanity as a defense. It was
Speaker 3: the only possible defense because the evidence against him was
Speaker 3: so great, and Ethel's death was the one that most
Speaker 3: clearly was sort of rational, alculating, consider premeditated, and so
Speaker 3: it was the best one to use as to sort
Speaker 3: of rebut the claims of insanity. That was his lawyers
Speaker 3: claimed that he was mad when the case came to trial,
Speaker 3: and their main argument was really the horror of what
Speaker 3: he'd done. The fact that he had had sex with
Speaker 3: these women's dead or unconscious bodies, is said, was a
Speaker 3: perversion so great that there was no other way of
Speaker 3: explaining it other than insanity. So that was the defense case.
Speaker 2: You're right about the state of journalism at that time.
Speaker 2: We always think of a tabloid journalism and sensationalistic journalism
Speaker 2: and headlines of something that's more recent. But tell us
Speaker 2: about the state of journalism that time and the tabloids
Speaker 2: and sensationalism in the media.
Speaker 3: In the wake of the Second World War, the tabloid
Speaker 3: journalism really boomed. There were lots more photographs used in papers,
Speaker 3: often a semi clad young women pin ups, which I
Speaker 3: think had been popularized in part during the war with
Speaker 3: sort of pilots and soldiers taking magazines with them, and
Speaker 3: now it became sort of part of the mainstream press,
Speaker 3: and the stories were, you know, sex and violence were
Speaker 3: big sellers of papers, and papers were huge, like more
Speaker 3: people read a newspaper in Britain in the nineteen fifties
Speaker 3: than in any other country in the world, and there
Speaker 3: were eighty percent of people read a paper every day,
Speaker 3: and then when papers published several times a day, it
Speaker 3: was almost like a sort of live streaming situation where
Speaker 3: you'd get an afternoon paper that was updated a couple
Speaker 3: of hours later and then again and on an unfolding
Speaker 3: sensational case. Getting the latest news was the source of
Speaker 3: great appeal to readers, and journalists competed really fiercely to
Speaker 3: get to get their first, to get get their scoops.
Speaker 3: As a result, there was quite a lot of money
Speaker 3: at Fleet Street. As somebody's worked in newspapers more recently.
Speaker 3: It was amazing to read and how Harry Procter would
Speaker 3: bury his contact about taking role, taking them in a
Speaker 3: rolls Royce to the Old Bailey for their trial, and
Speaker 3: the Daily Expresscott bought a helicopter to get it to
Speaker 3: the scenes of breaking news stories more quickly in its rivals.
Speaker 3: So it was really, you know, it was quite unscrupulous,
Speaker 3: no expense spared, lots of money paid to informance as well,
Speaker 3: which has obviously potential for corruption and fictional fictional life
Speaker 3: of stories, but don't imagine it sounds like a very
Speaker 3: exciting and stressful life, heavy drinking, heavy smoking, absolutely relentless,
Speaker 3: long hours and fierce competition.
Speaker 2: You mentioned the necessary state of prostitution and its necessary state,
Speaker 2: but what was even Harry Procter's attitude and the newspaper's
Speaker 2: attitude towards prostitution.
Speaker 3: The number of prostitutes in London had increased hugely during
Speaker 3: the Second World War because of all the servicemen passing
Speaker 3: through the capitol, and there were an estimated one hundred
Speaker 3: thousand prostitutes on the streets of London in nineteen fifty one.
Speaker 3: People were very anxious, the authorities were very anxious that
Speaker 3: this would mark the city when all the tourists came
Speaker 3: for the Queen's coronation in the summer of nineteen fifty three,
Speaker 3: and there was big public campaign to sort of clean
Speaker 3: up the streets, and this was popular, you know, in
Speaker 3: the tabloids as well as among the police. So there'd
Speaker 3: be these disapproving article about the women of the streets.
Speaker 3: Harry joined in with that. He in particular track do
Speaker 3: I mean most of the women who sold sex on
Speaker 3: the streets of London were relatively boor and they could
Speaker 3: make a lot more money as prostitutes, and they could
Speaker 3: as shop girls or waitresses in cafes or similar. It
Speaker 3: was a time when most women's work was very poorly paid,
Speaker 3: much lower waveless than men, but prostitution was relatively well paid.
Speaker 3: And Harry tracked down a ring of high class prostitutes,
Speaker 3: sort of an elite lot who worked in places like Mayfair,
Speaker 3: and he personated a punter, and he and a fellow
Speaker 3: journalist sort of work their way into one of these
Speaker 3: high class brothels. And then he wrote a great big
Speaker 3: expose and claimed that now that his identity and his
Speaker 3: ruse had got out, all the high class madams in
Speaker 3: London were quaking in their boots at being discovered by him.
Speaker 3: So he presented this as sort of doing his part
Speaker 3: to rid the city of sex workers. But of course
Speaker 3: was also like a very exciting story for the Sunday
Speaker 3: Pictorial to splash across its pages, and the tone was
Speaker 3: pretty sort of excitable as well as disapproving, a familiar
Speaker 3: combination in the tabloid press.
Speaker 2: You write about Roy Arthur and you could tell us
Speaker 2: who this person is, and also the idea that he
Speaker 2: would try to get a psychiatrist named Jack Hobson to
Speaker 2: interview reg Christie again, so tell us about this ongoing
Speaker 2: push for Harry to get a confession from Reginald Christy,
Speaker 2: but also that they were funding the defense with Jack Hobson.
Speaker 3: Roy Arthur was an old friend of Harry's and a
Speaker 3: clerk for the solicitors who hired to represent Christy. Harry
Speaker 3: was banned from entering Brixton Prison, having married out an
Speaker 3: interview with another prisoner and published it in the pictorial
Speaker 3: a few months earlier, so now no journalists were allowed
Speaker 3: to visit prisoners, but he used Roy Arthur as his
Speaker 3: kind of agent, so roy Arthur had full access, being
Speaker 3: a part of the solicitors firm that was employed on
Speaker 3: Christy's behalf, so he'd go in and he would asked
Speaker 3: Christy questions on Harry's behalf. Report back prompted Christy to
Speaker 3: write about certain subjects in the statement he was writing for.
Speaker 3: Harry and Roy Arthur also arranged for a psychiatrist called
Speaker 3: doctor Jack Hobson to come to the prison interviewed Christy
Speaker 3: and assess whether he was insane, and they chose a
Speaker 3: psychiatrist who they thought would be sympathetic to the defense.
Speaker 3: Jack Hobson had recently testified in at least one other
Speaker 3: case of murder where he had managed to get the
Speaker 3: man the charges brought down to manslaughter or to an
Speaker 3: insanity defense had proved successful. So he was a known
Speaker 3: quantity as somebody who could convince the court that somebody
Speaker 3: who committed a vicious murder might be insane. And Jack
Speaker 3: Hobson was a founding member of the Society for the
Speaker 3: Abolition of Capital Punishisment, so he had, you could say,
Speaker 3: a vested interest in using his expertise to help spare
Speaker 3: somebody the death penalty. And if they proved that Christy
Speaker 3: was insane, his sentence would be commuted and he would
Speaker 3: have be sent to the Broadmoor Hospital for Criminal lunatics
Speaker 3: rather than banged at Pentonville. So this was, you know,
Speaker 3: he was carefully chosen, and indeed he did with caveats,
Speaker 3: but he did, after his interviews with Christie, agree that
Speaker 3: he could testify and court that Christy was insane.
Speaker 2: Can you explain this dichotomy that Harry is looking for
Speaker 2: in a confession. He's pushing for a confession and he's
Speaker 2: very curious, obviously about Christie's role in Beryl Evans's wife
Speaker 2: and the daughter Gerald Dean. But that confession that he's
Speaker 2: pushing for and that information therein is to be used
Speaker 2: after this trial is judicated and not to be used
Speaker 2: in terms of obviously any type of defense for the
Speaker 2: client that his paper is paying for. So can you
Speaker 2: just tell us how he wrestled with this conundrum basically,
Speaker 2: with having this kind of information yet still being part
Speaker 2: of the funding this insanity defense for Reginald Christy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he was trying to exploit the situation for his
Speaker 3: own ends and to see justice done, to perhaps write
Speaker 3: miscarriage of justice or get or clear the name of
Speaker 3: Tim Evans. But the Evans case didn't directly have any
Speaker 3: part in the trial that was coming up that summer
Speaker 3: at the Old Bailey, Christie's trial for the murder of
Speaker 3: his wife Ethel. The way Carrie sort of reconciled his
Speaker 3: you know, desperate hunt for a confession, you know pressure
Speaker 3: for a confession to these earlier murders was on the
Speaker 3: grounds that, as the psychiatrist Dr Hobson agreed, the more
Speaker 3: murders Christie confessed to, the more convincing his insanity defense
Speaker 3: might be. So that was the excuse for pressing him
Speaker 3: on Beryl Evans's death in particular, was as somebody said
Speaker 3: to Christie someone on the defense team, the more the merrier.
Speaker 3: But if they're not, there's the numbers of his victims grew,
Speaker 3: the more he would look like an out of control
Speaker 3: madmen rather than a scheming murderer. And so that was
Speaker 3: I mean, to my mind, it seems like it wasn't
Speaker 3: really Harry's motive was to improve his chances of escaping
Speaker 3: the death penalty. His motive was to get the scoop,
Speaker 3: to get the record corrected. On Tim Evans having said that,
Speaker 3: I suppose it was. I don't think Harry was very
Speaker 3: comfortable with the death penalty himself. He wasn't a supporter
Speaker 3: of it. And if Christy had been spared, maybe Harry
Speaker 3: would have got more access to him, Maybe there would
Speaker 3: have been more interviews, maybe he could have gone further
Speaker 3: and got more scoops. So perhaps he did want him
Speaker 3: to but he did want the defense to succeed, even
Speaker 3: if for fairly cynical reasons, rather than because he had
Speaker 3: any sort of feeling for Christie himself. All the evidences
Speaker 3: he'd found him despicable. So yes, it was a morally
Speaker 3: complicated one to swing to sort of to sort of
Speaker 3: proceed as if he was doing something in pursuit of
Speaker 3: just for Harry, he was pursuing justice, but also supporting
Speaker 3: the defense of this serial killer while plotting to sort
Speaker 3: of get these other crimes pinned on him and trying
Speaker 3: to persuade him to confess to them. It's very sort
Speaker 3: of interesting mix of mix of motives and a real
Speaker 3: ethical quagmire really, as was the very fact of funding
Speaker 3: his defense. I mean, in effect, Harry and the Sunday
Speaker 3: Pictorial were colluding with Christy. It an uncomfortable area I
Speaker 3: think for Harry.
Speaker 2: Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
Speaker 2: these messages. You say it's uncomfortable. But also the paper
Speaker 2: eventually publishes photos provided by Christy. What does Harry and
Speaker 2: what do the attorneys do with the forensic evidence that
Speaker 2: refutes Christie's claimed that his wife had overdosed on sleeping pills.
Speaker 3: The toxicology reports established definitively that Ethel Christie had not
Speaker 3: had barbiturates in her blood stream, that she had not
Speaker 3: taken any drugs as Christie claimed, so that undid his
Speaker 3: whole story about her trying to kill herself and him
Speaker 3: strangling her as a way of compassionately ending her life.
Speaker 3: They didn't try to argue with the forensic evidence in court.
Speaker 3: What they did was just say, what man who loved
Speaker 3: his wife so much, who they'd lived together for thirty years,
Speaker 3: he must have been mad. They applied the sort of
Speaker 3: insanity braining to that. But of course there were other
Speaker 3: arguments as to why Christie might have killed his wife,
Speaker 3: one being clear the way to killing other women, because
Speaker 3: it was after he killed Ethel in December nineteen fifty
Speaker 3: two that he went on a free and killed three
Speaker 3: other women in his flat in the next three months.
Speaker 3: And another reason for killing her might have been that
Speaker 3: she suspected him of the murders of Beryl and Geraldine Evans.
Speaker 3: In nineteen forty nine, a lodger came forward, spoke to
Speaker 3: the press, also gave a very full statement to the police,
Speaker 3: which was not used and not made public again the
Speaker 3: police did not want to go there with anything touching
Speaker 3: on the Evans case. But this lodger claimed that Ethel
Speaker 3: had confided in her in nineteen fifty one that she
Speaker 3: thought her husband had something to do with the deaths
Speaker 3: of Beryl and Geraldine, and Ethel was very shaken by
Speaker 3: this thought because she had been extremely fond of the baby.
Speaker 3: Ethel being unable to have children herself, loved having children
Speaker 3: around her and she used to babysit Geraldine Evans and
Speaker 3: even offered to adopt her when she realized that Tim
Speaker 3: and Beryl Evans marriage was in trouble.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about the run up to the trial and
Speaker 2: also fern Tennyson Jesse. She is very interested in attending
Speaker 2: this trial, so she goes out of her way to
Speaker 2: try to secure that assurance that she'd be able to
Speaker 2: attend that trial and write about it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she asked her editor, a notable British trial to
Speaker 3: get her a ticket for the Old Bailey. He said
Speaker 3: he was unable to do so, he didn't have the influence,
Speaker 3: well know the right people. Although it was a very
Speaker 3: prestigious series, it was based in Edinburgh and he wasn't
Speaker 3: really plugged into the British legal so the English legal scene.
Speaker 3: So she then just wrote to everyone you could think
Speaker 3: of who might be able to get her in. From
Speaker 3: her a friend of her osteopaths, to Sir Norman Burkett,
Speaker 3: an extremely eminent lawyer who had served at the Nuremberg
Speaker 3: trials a few years earlier. She eventually succeeded in getting
Speaker 3: a seat and a seat for her secretary, Joan all
Speaker 3: throughout the trial, which in the event lasted four days.
Speaker 3: Frinn was going blind at the time. She was sixty five.
Speaker 3: She had cataracts. She was also ailing in other ways,
Speaker 3: and she was a morphine addict she had been since
Speaker 3: she hit an accident in her twenties. Was treated the
Speaker 3: pain was treated with morphine, and she had a doctor
Speaker 3: come to her house in North London every day to
Speaker 3: inject her with morphine. So she needed her secretary's support.
Speaker 3: A secretary acted as her chauffeur as well, and she
Speaker 3: only learned for An, only learn a couple of days
Speaker 3: before the trial began that she definitely had a seat
Speaker 3: in the courtroom and she was thrilled.
Speaker 2: You're right about the prosecutor Lionel Held and also the
Speaker 2: defense attorney Curtis Bennett, and Curtis Bennett makes in his
Speaker 2: opening statement, my case is insanity, so clearly putting out
Speaker 2: that they're going to defend him with this insanity defense.
Speaker 2: Tell us how this trial proceeds, and before we talk
Speaker 2: about the most dramatic parts of this trial in that
Speaker 2: Jack Hobson testifies for the defense and also Reginald Christy
Speaker 2: takes the stand.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So the main part, the early part of the
Speaker 3: her trial was mostly the Lionel Healed, who was the
Speaker 3: Attorney General, so a member of the British government unusually
Speaker 3: was deputed to lead the prosecution in this case. And
Speaker 3: presumably it was because it was such a huge story.
Speaker 3: It had dominated the headlines alongside the coronation of Queen
Speaker 3: Elizabeth which took place in the same month, and the
Speaker 3: country was agog for news about Christie. But it was
Speaker 3: also that Lionel Healed was appointed to lead the prosecution,
Speaker 3: I think because it was such a political case, because
Speaker 3: of the Evans angle, because Christie's prosecution and the discovery
Speaker 3: of his crimes raised a lot of misgivings and unease
Speaker 3: about the safety of the English legal system and whether
Speaker 3: an innocent man had been put to death, And a
Speaker 3: lot of what he did in court was to try
Speaker 3: to suppress any discussion of the Evans case, to insist
Speaker 3: it was irrelevant to this one. So he was acting
Speaker 3: as a government agent in that sense, in that he
Speaker 3: was trying to keep a lid on that and to
Speaker 3: insist that the focus be only on the case against
Speaker 3: Christy for the murder of his wife, Ethel. And to
Speaker 3: this end he called a string of witnesses who testified
Speaker 3: to various events and acts that not only confirmed the
Speaker 3: time and lace of Ethel's death, but also Christie's efforts
Speaker 3: to cover it up. And again, Hild was intent on
Speaker 3: showing how rationally Christy had been acting at this time
Speaker 3: because he knew the defense was going to try to
Speaker 3: argue otherwise. So Christie's lawyer, Curtis Bennett would sort of
Speaker 3: interrupt with questions about the Evans case and also with
Speaker 3: questions that he crossed Egamin people to try to raise
Speaker 3: doubts about Christie's sanity or to point out moments at
Speaker 3: which he had behaved apparently irrationally. So that was the
Speaker 3: sort of dynamic for the first day and a half.
Speaker 2: Tell us about the dramatic testimony. There's days of it,
Speaker 2: but tell us of the dramatic testimony that begins with
Speaker 2: Reginald Christy.
Speaker 3: So Curtis Bennett called Christy to the witness stand, well
Speaker 3: not two defense witnesses. This caused a big excitement in
Speaker 3: the court because there was no obligation for a defendant
Speaker 3: to testify at his trial, and in fact it was
Speaker 3: pretty rare, especially in terrible murder cases like this. So
Speaker 3: people were very surprised see Christy make his sort of
Speaker 3: faltering way to the stand and then speak about the
Speaker 3: crimes and answer questions from first his lawyer and then
Speaker 3: the prosecution lawyer about what had happened in Rillington place,
Speaker 3: and he whispered from the stand. I mean, interestingly, he
Speaker 3: had been in the same same witness stand three years
Speaker 3: earlier as the chief witness for the prosecution of Tim Evans,
Speaker 3: the man convicted of the worders of his wife and child,
Speaker 3: and so he had whispered then. And he had come
Speaker 3: across as a rather frail and genteel figure. And here
Speaker 3: too he was sort of he had his round glasses,
Speaker 3: was balding, he was in a suit. He seemed very
Speaker 3: sort of tremulous and diffident to begin with, in the
Speaker 3: way he spoke and address the court. After on the
Speaker 3: second day of his evidence, the prosecution arranged for a
Speaker 3: microphone to be fitted to the witness stand so that
Speaker 3: Christy could be heard better, and apparently the effect was transformational.
Speaker 3: He sounded much more assertive, and was even rather as
Speaker 3: if he was enjoying being in the limelight, as he
Speaker 3: was enjoying commanding the attention of this wrapped audience that
Speaker 3: was gathered before him, And he was as vague as ever.
Speaker 3: He didn't deny the murders of Ethel or anyone else
Speaker 3: apart from the child Geraldine. By now he decided to
Speaker 3: confess to the killing of Beryl Evans on the grounds
Speaker 3: that them all the merrier, But he still denied killing
Speaker 3: the child, which was quite inexplicable. How should somebody have
Speaker 3: killed you know, their bodies had been found together, seemed
Speaker 3: extremely likely that the murder of one was not the
Speaker 3: murder of the other. But he he sort of distanced him,
Speaker 3: seemed as detached as he had to the police, to
Speaker 3: the psychiatrist, to the prison officers. He just it was
Speaker 3: the kind of well, it must have been me. I
Speaker 3: must have done it, lots of I can't remember. When
Speaker 3: asked about specific assaults on women, and when he talked
Speaker 3: about the death of his wife, Ethel, he wept. He
Speaker 3: said how much he loved her, how he wanted her
Speaker 3: near him. This sort of played to the defense's argument
Speaker 3: that the murdering her was not a rational act, that
Speaker 3: something must have come over him. Dr Jack Hobson, when
Speaker 3: he appeared to testify as the psychiatrist on truth Christie's behalf,
Speaker 3: he said he believed that Christie, on balance, was insane.
Speaker 3: He hadn't known what he was doing when he murdered
Speaker 3: these women, and he suggested quite lightly, but he brought
Speaker 3: up the shell shock that Christie had suffered in the
Speaker 3: First World War. Christie's barrister shockingly brought up as a
Speaker 3: possible cause of his mental dislocation and breakdown that he
Speaker 3: had had to that he had been sharing his house
Speaker 3: with black people. They were recent immigrants from the West Indies,
Speaker 3: and Christie's landlord was himself a Jamaican, a Jamaican boxer,
Speaker 3: and there are plenty of evidence that both Christie and
Speaker 3: Effe were extremely racist and appalled at having to share
Speaker 3: their house with these people who were not white. But
Speaker 3: it seems a very cynical and ugly maneuver for his
Speaker 3: lawyer to try to suggest that this was that this
Speaker 3: situation had put so much mental and emotional pressure on
Speaker 3: Christie that he'd been driven to murder.
Speaker 2: Let's use as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages.
Speaker 2: Now you say that his testimony continues, and there's a
Speaker 2: dramatic scene when they bring in this rope deck chair.
Speaker 2: And what does this rope deck chair demonstrate to the
Speaker 2: jury and to the courts.
Speaker 3: The rope deck chair is like a deck chair frame that,
Speaker 3: instead of having a piece of cloth as it's the
Speaker 3: part you sit in, had been strung with old bits
Speaker 3: of rope. So it's kind of rather sordid, very impoverished object.
Speaker 3: And Christie at one point in his statement to Harry Procter,
Speaker 3: said that he had strangled one of his victims with
Speaker 3: a piece of rope he'd pulled off the deck chair.
Speaker 3: He referred to the debt chair a few times in
Speaker 3: describing what happened when the women came into his house.
Speaker 3: This was where he would invite them to sit. It
Speaker 3: was set up in his kitchen, tiny kitchen at the
Speaker 3: back of the property, and the gas supply was nearby.
Speaker 3: So it was a close shocking moment when it was
Speaker 3: brought into the court because until then all the evidence
Speaker 3: had been heard orally or pictorially, and here it was
Speaker 3: like a solid piece of evidence, something real, almost living
Speaker 3: from the crime scene. At Rillington Place, and for some,
Speaker 3: including the society photographer Cecil Beaton, who was in the
Speaker 3: courtroom watching, it seemed an emblem of the degradation not
Speaker 3: only of Christie's life, but the deprivation of the lives
Speaker 3: of the women who he killed. This seemed kind of
Speaker 3: emblematic of how basic, rough and unlovely the living conditions
Speaker 3: were this section of society, and these crimes did one
Speaker 3: among other things, they did cause a stir for the
Speaker 3: for the poverty and desperation that they brought to light.
Speaker 3: Nearly all the women who found themselves in Christie's clutches
Speaker 3: had ended up there because they were desperate, whether it's
Speaker 3: because they were pregnant, as they were poor, because they
Speaker 3: couldn't find housing. There was an acute housing shortage in
Speaker 3: London at the time, and so the case kind of
Speaker 3: opened a window on a very degraded section of society,
Speaker 3: not far from the center of London.
Speaker 2: In notting Hill, You're right, very dramatic. Attorney General Hill
Speaker 2: asked the final question about Burl Evans. He says, you
Speaker 2: swear you did, you swear you didn't. How do you
Speaker 2: expect the jury to believe you? And Christy left that
Speaker 2: witness box that day.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that was you know, the overriding sense of
Speaker 3: him was just how nothing added up. He would say anything.
Speaker 3: It felt as if everything was unreliable, everything was a lie,
Speaker 3: everything was expedient. So he would say he would say
Speaker 3: one thing, the women attacked me in order to absolve
Speaker 3: himself with murder, and then he would say another thing, Oh,
Speaker 3: yes I did attack them, and Beryl Evans too, in
Speaker 3: order to proclaim insanity. So his evidence was so strangely dissociated, detached,
Speaker 3: almost relaxed, but utterly unreliable, and nobody quite knew what
Speaker 3: they'd seen or what it meant, and whether the weirdness
Speaker 3: of his demeanor was evidence of insanity or just callousness.
Speaker 3: I mean the idea of the psychopath, which recently been
Speaker 3: popularized by an American psychiatrist, Harley Cleckley during the Second
Speaker 3: World War, and so ideas of psychopathy of people who
Speaker 3: kind of had some sort of missing emotional capacity, who
Speaker 3: had sort of soulness, And this category in itself hovers
Speaker 3: somewhere between sanity and insanity. So it was very difficult
Speaker 3: to know what to make of Christie and whether the
Speaker 3: extreme horror of the acts he carried out would persuade
Speaker 3: the jury that he must be insane because it was
Speaker 3: so ugly and inexplicable, or whether the insanity defense was
Speaker 3: a cunning and cynical way of escaping the death penalty
Speaker 3: and he'd learn exactly what he was doing. As the
Speaker 3: prosecution lawyer said, evidence its sexual perversity is not evidence
Speaker 3: of insanity, and that was in a way what the
Speaker 3: jury had to consider, because Christie's lawyer was implying well,
Speaker 3: was claiming that the extreme nature of Christie's acts was
Speaker 3: in itself evidence of insanity.
Speaker 2: You're right too that doctor Hobson is grilled by Attorney
Speaker 2: General Hilt and amidst that it would be wholly inappropriate
Speaker 2: to describe Christy as hopelessly and utterly mad, and the
Speaker 2: doctor had to respond, I would agree that it's inappropriate.
Speaker 3: Right. This was a very big fracture that opened in
Speaker 3: the course of the trial. The Hobson, though he wanted
Speaker 3: to be helpful and did believe he could legitimately make
Speaker 3: the case that Christie was insane, did not go as
Speaker 3: far as Christie's attorney Curtis Bennett, in his descriptions of him.
Speaker 3: So Curtis Bennett had a great sort of rhetorical flourishes,
Speaker 3: describing Christie, his client as mad as a march hare,
Speaker 3: hopelessly insane, you know, really ramped up the rhetoric about
Speaker 3: about his madness. And when the Attorney General challenged the
Speaker 3: psychiatrist whether he would concur with that the defense characterization
Speaker 3: of Christian these ways, Hodman had to admit that no,
Speaker 3: he wouldn't. The kind of insanity he was describing was
Speaker 3: more more subtle and less pronounced than what Curtis Bennett
Speaker 3: had been trying to portray. And this, I think was
Speaker 3: really decisive, the fact that the one defense witness apart
Speaker 3: from Christie himself, had in effect criticized or undermined the
Speaker 3: argument made by the attorney who had called him to
Speaker 3: the witness stand.
Speaker 2: You're right that the jury deliberates for just an hour
Speaker 2: and a half. What is the verdict and what is
Speaker 2: Reginald Christie's reaction?
Speaker 3: At the jury returned yes, very swiftly. They hadn't been
Speaker 3: expected to return till at least midnight. They declared read
Speaker 3: Christie guilty. They did not accept the insanity defense, and
Speaker 3: Christie just turned his head away and was led down
Speaker 3: from the dock into the cells. There was a staircase
Speaker 3: leading directly from the dock all the way down the cells,
Speaker 3: two stories beneath where he would sit and wait for
Speaker 3: the van to take him to Pentonville Prison, the jail
Speaker 3: in North London where executions were carried out, and he
Speaker 3: knew he probably had a couple of weeks until the
Speaker 3: death sentence was enacted.
Speaker 2: We mentioned that the Pictorial was ready to publish Harry's
Speaker 2: information that he garnered from Reginald Christy, those confessions, but
Speaker 2: because there was an appeal pending, he couldn't publish those yet.
Speaker 2: But you write about the reaction from all of the
Speaker 2: other competitive media at that time at the Verdict itself, Yeah.
Speaker 3: Chris f Harry, to his frustration, couldn't yet run his
Speaker 3: exclusive had to because there was Christie's lawyers were launching
Speaker 3: an appeal against the death sentence. In the meantime, the
Speaker 3: other papers and the Pictorial itself ran a slew of
Speaker 3: stories from which were absolutely fascinating to read. Women who
Speaker 3: had encountered Christie but who had escaped him by sort
Speaker 3: of stories from neighbors, family stories. You know, there were
Speaker 3: lots of surrounding stories that had not been It had
Speaker 3: not been possible to publish before the trial for fear
Speaker 3: of content at court, but there was now kind of
Speaker 3: nearly open season, and so that there was a lot
Speaker 3: of material published at that time. And it was very
Speaker 3: interesting for me and heartening to read stories from women
Speaker 3: who had he had tried to assault, but who had
Speaker 3: one way or another resisted or outwitted him, because it
Speaker 3: gave us more information about how he operated, and much
Speaker 3: more sort of after all the vagueness that he brought
Speaker 3: to anything, here was some kind of reliable witnesses to
Speaker 3: what he'd actually done and how.
Speaker 2: You write that. Harry's scoop was advertised in rival publications
Speaker 2: and on posters all over the country. And was my
Speaker 2: urge to kill ten women, ran the headline on the
Speaker 2: first installment July fifth, and thou shalt not kill is
Speaker 2: a commandment that has haunted me all my life, was
Speaker 2: a quote from Reg Christie.
Speaker 3: Yes, it was interesting actually to compare the version of
Speaker 3: Christie's statement that was published in the Sunday Pictorial over
Speaker 3: three weeks. I think it was. They really milk this
Speaker 3: story for all it was worth, and it put on
Speaker 3: a huge amount of circulation for the paper. But to
Speaker 3: compare the published version with the notes that Christie wrote
Speaker 3: for Harry, which have been preserved and are in the
Speaker 3: National Archives in London. And there are some things that
Speaker 3: appear in Harry's story that do not appear that look
Speaker 3: as if they're sort of embroideries that he's put in,
Speaker 3: as you know, was the way with many tabloid stories
Speaker 3: of that period. And I suppose he didn't really fear
Speaker 3: that Christy would contradict him if he sort of cited
Speaker 3: all the sort of commandments that had haunted him all
Speaker 3: his life and so on. That commandment is not mentioned
Speaker 3: in Christie's statement. And so Harry procter, seasoned tabloid journalist,
Speaker 3: did he flammed it up a bit, you know, He's
Speaker 3: he gave a bit of you know, light and shade
Speaker 3: and drama for Christie's story, which in reality was delivered
Speaker 3: more in a sort of dead pan, almost deadened way
Speaker 3: on the page. So Harry laive it up. He didn't
Speaker 3: invent any details though, that were not accurate in terms
Speaker 3: of the murders themselves, what Christy had confessed to, all
Speaker 3: the language that he'd used around those, it was all
Speaker 3: the kind of Pallas stuff about his background and so on.
Speaker 3: That was slightly enhanced the facts of the case, who
Speaker 3: Harry conveyed scrupulously, including the facts about the Evans case, which,
Speaker 3: to Harry's intense frustration, he had still not been able
Speaker 3: to get Christy to confess to the murder of the baby.
Speaker 3: So he faithfully reported that that fact that Christie had
Speaker 3: not confessed to Eryl Evans, to Geraldine Evans murder.
Speaker 2: You also write about fern Tennyson Jesse. She's writing what
Speaker 2: she considered her most important essay, but she hadn't read
Speaker 2: and received the transcripts as of yet tell us about
Speaker 2: this essay and her declining health as well.
Speaker 3: So for in Tennis and Jesse was she needed the
Speaker 3: transcripts that were going to form the bulk of the
Speaker 3: book that she was writing an introduction for, and her
Speaker 3: publisher had decided that they would include the transcripts of
Speaker 3: both the Christie and the Evans trials because the key,
Speaker 3: the big story here was whether Tim Evans was innocent
Speaker 3: or guilty, and so her editor wanted her to analyze
Speaker 3: that and to come up with a conclusion. So the
Speaker 3: essay was in effect as sort of who done it?
Speaker 3: The murders of Beryl and Geraldine Evans. But the British
Speaker 3: government really dragged their feet and releasing the transcript of
Speaker 3: Tim Evans trial because they did not want the scandal
Speaker 3: buss that would accrude and that the political capital that
Speaker 3: their enemies, those who wanted to abolish capital punishment, would
Speaker 3: make of this apparent miscarriage of justice. So she had
Speaker 3: to wait for many many months before before she could
Speaker 3: see the transcripts of both trials. In the meantime, I mean,
Speaker 3: she'd been to the trial herself, so she had that
Speaker 3: to work with and many many newspaper stories about the case.
Speaker 3: But she also a set to interviewing all the main
Speaker 3: players in both cases. She invited to her home for lunch,
Speaker 3: police detectives, lawyers, pathologists, and the family. She went to
Speaker 3: meet the family of Tim Evans and she tried to psychiatrists,
Speaker 3: people who worked in the prisons. So she tried to
Speaker 3: interview everyone connected to the case and to work out
Speaker 3: what had really happened, in particular with the Evans story,
Speaker 3: but also she was very interesting in what was going
Speaker 3: on in read Christie's head. She eventually got the trial
Speaker 3: transcript then analyzed those and she was going blinder by
Speaker 3: the month, but her faithful secretary Joan acted as her
Speaker 3: She dictated to Joan, who typed up all her notes,
Speaker 3: and they eventually got the thing finished in nineteen fifty six,
Speaker 3: three years after Christie's trial, and it was published soon afterwards,
Speaker 3: and it was one hundred page essay, detailed forensic and
Speaker 3: Brittan arrived at her judgment about what had happened. She
Speaker 3: believed that Christie had killed both Beryl and Geraldine Evans,
Speaker 3: and she admitted that she hadn't been able to solve
Speaker 3: every contradiction in the story, but she thought this was
Speaker 3: the the solution that best fitted the facts of the
Speaker 3: case and the psychology of those involved.
Speaker 2: You're right that reg Christie was executed, but also that
Speaker 2: Harry was fired from the pictorial eventually, but he was
Speaker 2: earnestly trying to write his memoir about his experiences in
Speaker 2: Fleet Street.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Harry, after that, he was really nearly broken by
Speaker 3: the Christie case. So I'm most severely disappointed that he
Speaker 3: had not been able to secure the confession that he
Speaker 3: was after, and maybe troubled by the complicity with which
Speaker 3: he'd behaved, you know, in supporting Christie's defense, he asked
Speaker 3: his editors not to assign him to any more crime stories.
Speaker 3: He said he wanted to do the lighter stuff, sort
Speaker 3: of human interest stories and interviews, but they were like,
Speaker 3: no way, you're too good on crime, we're not taking
Speaker 3: you off it. So they kept sending him on quite
Speaker 3: disturbing cases stories, and he finally sort of cracked when
Speaker 3: he was sent to a company to church a young
Speaker 3: woman whose twin children had been killed in a fire
Speaker 3: on a houseboat, and it was widely believed that this
Speaker 3: woman had herself have set fire to the boat in
Speaker 3: order to run off with her lover. But Harry had
Speaker 3: to sort of in order to get her exclusive to
Speaker 3: rend her her accompany her to the funeral, and he'd
Speaker 3: finally like he'd had enough, and he walked out. He
Speaker 3: was he had a nervous breakdown. He had two nervous
Speaker 3: breakdowns over the next few years, and eventually he was
Speaker 3: fired from the pictorial and he then proceeded to write
Speaker 3: a memoir of his life on Fleet Street, which was
Speaker 3: an important source for my book, My Telling of the
Speaker 3: Rillington Place story, in which he describes all the excitements,
Speaker 3: the humiliations, the things he's ashamed of having done as
Speaker 3: a reporter, the things he was proud of, and he
Speaker 3: talks about his bosses and the pressure that was put
Speaker 3: on him and the atmosphere in Fleet Street at the time,
Speaker 3: and it really is quite the expose of practices in
Speaker 3: the journalistic world in England in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 2: And you also include and we won't get into it,
Speaker 2: but there was a controversy in the House of Commons
Speaker 2: and in Parliament over Tim evans execution over the killing
Speaker 2: of his wife and daughter. There was always still controversy
Speaker 2: on whether he was actually guilty or Reginald Christy had
Speaker 2: some major involvement in those deaths.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it continued. So although neither Harry nor Norbryn was
Speaker 3: able to definitively prove that Christy was guilty of the
Speaker 3: murder for which Tim Evans had hanged, the disquiet about
Speaker 3: the case, especially after Friend's Essay was published and then
Speaker 3: an influential book by another journalist called Ludovic Kennedy. It
Speaker 3: was one of the main cases that were used by
Speaker 3: those who were campaigning for the abolition of capital punishment,
Speaker 3: and eventually in nineteen sixty five, the death penalty was
Speaker 3: suspended and Tim Evans was pardoned by the Queen. A
Speaker 3: public inquiry was set up to look into the case
Speaker 3: all over again, and that lasted for months. You know.
Speaker 3: Finally the Tim Evans name was cleared, although his sentence
Speaker 3: was ever overturned. It was just that he was pardoned
Speaker 3: and if Christy hadn't been, and of course there would
Speaker 3: still have been a possibility that we might have learned
Speaker 3: the truth about it from him at some point in
Speaker 3: the future, but maybe not. So there's still a sort
Speaker 3: of eerie kind of unease over the cases, even though
Speaker 3: it seems that Tim Evans has been vindicated. And then
Speaker 3: I came across a document in the archives that suggested
Speaker 3: a new solution to what had happened that explains a
Speaker 3: bit more about the relationship between the two men. It
Speaker 3: was a confession that Christy had made to prison guard
Speaker 3: as he was sitting in his cell beneath the old
Speaker 3: Bailey Wait after having been sentenced to death, and for
Speaker 3: the first and only time, he confessed to killing the
Speaker 3: baby Geraldine Evans. It might have been another lie, another
Speaker 3: bid for attention, but I think that he was finally
Speaker 3: telling the truth. He felt he didn't have anything to
Speaker 3: lose and the brief account he gave quite casually to
Speaker 3: this guard was goes a long way to explaining why
Speaker 3: there were so many contradictions in Tim Evans's stories about
Speaker 3: what happened. And so it was very excited to find
Speaker 3: this document. And I then found some letters in the
Speaker 3: Home Office files that showed how for Lionel Heal, the
Speaker 3: Attorney General who prosecuted Christie, and a senior civil servant
Speaker 3: knew about this prison guard's memo and had decided not
Speaker 3: to make it public. They pretty much denied its existence
Speaker 3: when something about it was leak to the press and
Speaker 3: it remained locked up, you know, in sealed archives or
Speaker 3: forty years and again it was a sort of it
Speaker 3: was a politically motivated cover up because dial or Healed
Speaker 3: was part of a Tory government that was in favor
Speaker 3: of retaining the death penalty and did not want anything
Speaker 3: that would help the labor MPs who were campaigning against it.
Speaker 2: Incredible. I want to thank you so much, Kate Summerscale
Speaker 2: for coming on and talking about your extraordinary the peep
Speaker 2: show the murders at Rullington Place for those that might
Speaker 2: want to find out more about your other work and
Speaker 2: this work. Do you have a website that people could
Speaker 2: refer to? And do you do any social media?
Speaker 3: No social media, but yes I have a website and
Speaker 3: it's katethommascale dot com.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much, Kate Summerscale for coming on and
Speaker 2: talking about the peep show, the murders at Rellington Place. Thanks,
Speaker 2: thank you so much and you have a great evening you.
Speaker 3: Too, you two. Thanks bye bye bye