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A review by mwgerard
The Peepshow: The Murders at Rillington Place by Kate Summerscale
dark
informative
sad
medium-paced
4.25
Read my full review: https://www.mwgerard.com/reviews-very-english-murders/
In post-war England, just as rations began to ease but neighborhoods were still rebuilding from the Blitz, and the Windrush generation began to populate the suburbs, a gritty, impenetrable fog blanketed London for five days in 1952. By the time it lifted, an estimated 4,000 people died from asthma and heart attacks and road accidents. In the months following another 8,000 people died from lingering health complications. Not included in the death toll were the bodies of murder victims stuffed in the walls of Reg Christie’s flat at Rillington Place.
In post-war England, just as rations began to ease but neighborhoods were still rebuilding from the Blitz, and the Windrush generation began to populate the suburbs, a gritty, impenetrable fog blanketed London for five days in 1952. By the time it lifted, an estimated 4,000 people died from asthma and heart attacks and road accidents. In the months following another 8,000 people died from lingering health complications. Not included in the death toll were the bodies of murder victims stuffed in the walls of Reg Christie’s flat at Rillington Place.
Notting Hill was not the quirky, desirable neighborhood it is today. It was a cheap, grungy area with sooty row houses divided into apartments. When a tenant attempted to hang a shelf in the tiny kitchen, the wall plaster crumbled and he made an unwelcome discovery. The false wall had been concealing three dead bodies. Police found more in the back garden. But it was reporter Harry Procter who realized that he had been to this location before, when a resident of another apartment in the same building was arrested for killing his wife and baby in the late 1940s. At the time he interviewed Reg Christie, an oddly calm neighbor who was now missing. Procter suspected Tim Evans was the wrong man, caught in 1949, and the real murderer has remained free – and kept killing.
Summerscale walks us through the Christie’s crimes but with a focus on each of the victims. For some, there is little more known than a name and a few biographical details, but with others – like Christie’s own wife – Summerscale has uncovered a wealth of information.
Summerscale walks us through the Christie’s crimes but with a focus on each of the victims. For some, there is little more known than a name and a few biographical details, but with others – like Christie’s own wife – Summerscale has uncovered a wealth of information.
George Stonier of the New Statesman visited North Kensington as dusk was falling on Monday in the spring of 1953. He walked past a nun, in a black-and-white coif and tunic, and a couple of West Indian men ‘with strange gaities of shirt peeing out from raincoats’, before he turned into Rillington Place. There he joined more than twenty bystanders, most of the women, who were watching No 10 in silence from the facing pavement. Every detail of the house seemed sister to him: the cracks in the front door, the shiny patches were its green paint had worn away, the five windows shrouded with curtains. ~Pg. 64
Most interestingly, she stitches in the narratives of Harry Procter and his attempt to clear the name of the wrongly convicted Evans, as well as the writing of Fryn Tennyson Jesse. Herself a prominent journalist, writer, criminologist, and novelist, she attacked the story from a different angle, though no less intense angle as Procter.
Like sensational cases do, this one attracted the attention of notable persons including Robert Sherwood, Terence Rattigan, Margaret Leighton, Christianna Brand, Anthony Berkeley Cox, and Cecil Beaton.
A man sitting next to Cox whispered to him that he had been to every Old Bailey murder trial since that of Dr Crippen, hanged in 1910 for the murder of his wife, and he thought this one unlikely to be very satisfying. ‘There’s no excitement, you see,’ he said. ‘It’s not like not knowing whether he really did it or not; he’s confessed; it’s just his sanity that’s being tried.” ~Pg.150
For Summerscale, the story to be investigated is how the puzzle fits together. There is no mystery to be solved. Rather, it is how did this thing happen? What were the dominoes that had to fall? More importantly, what had to be ignored in order for Christie to get away with it as long as he did.