THE PEEPSHOW: The Murders at Rillington Place, by Kate Summerscale
In 1953, a man putting up a shelf in an apartment in North Kensington, London, uncovered something dreadful: the bodies of three young women stashed behind a makeshift wall. A fourth corpse, that of a middle-aged resident named Ethel Christie, was beneath the floor; Ethel’s husband, Reg, was suspiciously absent from the premises.
A killer was on the loose.
“Every hour he is at liberty, the life of a girl or a woman in any part of the country may suddenly come to a terrible end,” the police warned, darkly alluding to sexual assault and necrophilia. “If the murderer is not caught, there is nothing to stop him from carrying out his bestial practices.”
Kate Summerscale’s excavation of this notorious case, “The Peepshow,” is not a whodunit, so it is no spoiler to reveal that Reg did, indeed, do it. Summerscale, the multiple-award-winning author of five previous books, brings a novelist’s eye and a sociologist’s understanding to a trove of thrilling material.
In 1953, 80 percent of Britain’s 50 million people read a daily newspaper. The most popular were the tabloids, which fed their readers’ appetite for illicit sex, criminality and violence.
No one was better at murder stories than Harry Procter, the chief reporter of the widely-read Sunday Pictorial. In a strange turn of events, he’d interviewed Reg Christie four years earlier, when the bodies of Beryl Evans and her 13-month-old daughter were found in a different flat in Christie’s building.
Beryl’s husband, Tim, initially confessed. Though he later changed his story and pointed the finger at Christie, Tim was convicted and put to death by hanging. But was Christie the real culprit? It seemed likely, especially when investigators unearthed the bones of two more victims in the back garden (along with, gruesomely, a tin of pubic hair) and realized they had a depraved serial killer on their hands.
Procter — such a colorful character he might have stepped out of Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop” — had a laissez-faire attitude toward professional ethics. Once, having beaten a rival to a public telephone booth when both were trying to call their editors, he ripped off its handset after finishing his call.
In 1938, as a lark, he applied for a job on a German newspaper controlled by Joseph Goebbels. In reply, he received a package containing an English translation of “Mein Kampf,” tickets to Berlin and an offer of a high-level position in the German Ministry of Propaganda. (He declined.)
He plied his subjects with money and liquor; he exposed a high-society call girl ring by posing as a customer; he investigated slumlords, fake doctors and swindlers; and in 1947 he and a photographer crashed Philip Mountbatten’s stag party, right before Philip married the future queen of England.
In Christie’s case, he brokered a deal — apparently typical at the time — whereby The Pictorial would pay Christie’s legal fees in exchange for exclusive rights to his story. Procter had an ulterior motive; he hoped to prove that Christie was guilty of the Evans murders, too.
The story is peppered with eccentric figures and interesting asides. There’s Fryn Tennyson Jesse, a novelist, essayist, opium enthusiast and part of “a golden generation of female crime writers,” who blustered her way into the courtroom.
There’s Charles Brown, Christie’s landlord, the former heavyweight boxing champion of Jamaica. And there’s Ambrose Appelbe, one of Christie’s lawyers, who — along with George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells — founded something called the Smell Society, whose aim was “to promote pleasant smells.”
Christie confessed to the crimes; the purpose of his trial was to determine whether, in the words of his often-drunk lawyer, he was “as mad as a March hare.” Spectators included Bernard Tussaud, Madame Tussaud’s great-great-grandson, who was making sketches for a wax model of Christie to put in the museum; Cecil Beaton, fresh off photographing the new Queen Elizabeth, who observed that Christie had “a tongue like an adder”; the renowned British playwright Terence Rattigan; and, oddly, the American writer Robert Sherwood, who had won an Academy Award for his screenplay of “The Best Years of Our Lives.”
But Summerscale gives equal time to Christie’s unfortunate victims, treating them as real people rather than pawns in someone else’s story. And she skillfully examines the racism, sexism, economic privation and class prejudices that permeated postwar England.
No. 10 Rillington Place was a mini melting pot, occupied by Black immigrants from the West Indies as well as working-class white Britons. It was also, it seems, a hotbed of lawlessness, rife with extramarital sex, prostitution and illegal abortion (in addition, of course, to murder).
There’s so much to admire in this engaging, deeply researched book. But though nothing Summerscale writes is dull, her story loses steam, and a bit of focus, after the conclusion of Christie’s trial, about three-quarters of the way through.
As serial killers go, Christie remains a frustrating cipher, more opportunistic than cunning — and lucky in having particularly unobservant neighbors. (No one seemed to notice that the stick propping up the gate at No. 10 was in fact a human femur.) He continually changed his story, had a habit of railing against his Black neighbors and deployed a kind of “I Shot the Sheriff” argument about the Evans murders — confessing to killing Beryl, but maintaining, at least most of the time, that he had not killed her baby.
The Christie case provoked a great deal of soul-searching about the role of the newspapers in whipping up the public’s interest in its seamy details. Speaking at a church in Birmingham three days after sentencing Christie to death, the judge in the case, Mr. Justice Finnemore, urged the congregation to examine their own role in the spectacle.
“Have you ever stopped to ask yourself, ‘Am I partially responsible?’” he said. “‘Have I any part of this guilt to bear myself?’”
THE PEEPSHOW: The Murders at Rillington Place | By Kate Summerscale | Penguin | 310 pp. | $30
Sarah Lyall is a writer at large for The Times, writing news, features and analysis across a wide range of sections.
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