Serial Killer of the Month: John Reginald Halliday Christie
Archived
Serial killers tend to share two characteristics common to psychopaths. They have the ability to remain completely calm under intense and stressful situations. They can also appear to be so completely normal, that no one, not even a highly trained investigator, would suspect a person with such an outwardly dull facade as the culprit of hideous and dark crimes. Certainly John Reginald Halliday Christie possessed both of these characteristics, and cunningly used them over the span of approximately 10 years to kill seven women and one of the victims’ infant daughter. At the end of a decade of killing, when 10 Rillington Place was searched and remnants of bodies were found in the walls, under the floor, in alcoves and in the garden, the house became so synonymous with terror that it was renamed to Ruston Mews.
Christie, as many serial killers do, had an unpleasant upbringing. One of seven children, John was frequently beaten and humiliated by his father, and complained that his sisters were always bossing him around. Outwardly, he appeared normal. He was good at school, and mechanical handiwork. He was also a choir boy and a boy scout. As an adolescent he failed his first attempt at sexual intercourse, and was tagged by his peers as “Can’t Do-It Reggie.” From that point on he preferred watching women from afar. Though he was quite sure he had the sex appeal of French film star Charles Boyer, and claimed that women were constantly chasing him.
At 17, he was caught stealing and his father banned him from the house. He wandered as a vagrant and eventually joined the army. After Christie was released from the army in 1919, he spent many days in the underworld of British society and many days in jail for theft, obtaining money by false pretenses, larceny, car theft and clubbing a prostitute with a cricket bat.
During World War Il when Britain was desperate for able-bodied workers, Christie applied for a job as a special constable. At that time, police were not checking records of applicants and Christie was hired. In his fourth year on the force, Christie committed his first murder. The victim was a 21-year-old prostitute whom he had met during his rounds. He waited until his wife went to visit her parents and invited the young woman to his home. By his account, they had sex and he strangled her during the act. She was carried out to the backyard and buried.
About a year later, he quit the force and went to work at a radio factory. There he met his next victim, Muriel Eady. She was not a prostitute; she simply suffered from bronchial inflammation. Christie told her he had a remedy for it and invited her over for tea. The mechanically handy Christie had devised a gadget, a supposed inhaler for the suffering Eady that was hooked up to a kitchen gas outlet. When Eady became dizzy, he tied her up, raped her and strangled her. She was also put in the garden. This murder seemed to satisfy Christie for a while, and he paused.
In 1948 he saw an opportunity to resume murdering. He acquired new neighbors: Timothy Evans, 23, an illiterate laborer and his pregnant wife, Beryl. After the child was born, Christie noticed that the couple were starting to have marital difficulties. Beryl, pregnant again and very unhappy with her situation, allowed Christie to help her with an illegal abortion. During the abortion he beat her, raped her and strangled her. When Timothy arrived, Christie told him that she had died due to complications during the illegal operation and convinced him that they were partners in this obscene murder. Evans, tortured by guilt, confessed to the murder of his wife. Christie, not sure of what to do with the motherless infant, killed her as well and buried her with Beryl. As the investigation progressed and as Beryl was unearthed, Evans was shocked to find his child dead as well. Christie had led Evans to believe that his child would be taken care of until he could manage the task. He was sure that Christie had murdered his child but the case had grown complicated. Christie was questioned but denied all knowledge of the abortion, murder, or anything else. Timothy Evans was hanged at Pentonville Prison for two murders he never committed.
For three years after the narrowly escaped murder of Beryl and child, Christie did not kill. The next murder after the three year dry spell would be his wife. He left her body in bed for three days and then put her body in the living room under loose floorboards. Within a month he lured another prostitute named Kathleen Maloney to his notorious residence at Rillington Place. That night he gassed her with another devised contraption some have called the killing chair, a lawn chair with a gas tube underneath. After she was dazed, he killed and raped her. Her body was stuffed into a small alcove behind a movable cupboard. A few days later another prostitute, Rita Nelson, met the same fate. His last victim, Hectorina McLennan, also died under similar circumstances.
Eventually Christie moved from his home and silently disappeared for a while. A tenant that occupied 10 Rillington Place after his disappearance was trying to put up brackets to mount a radio and noticed a hollow space behind the wall. When he removed the paneling he found Hectorina. After the entire house was searched, a manhunt began to find Christie. Finally, he was found and arrested while staring over a bridge on the Thames. He was placed in Brixton Prison, the same one that had once held Evans, and was led to the gallows where he was hanged by the neck until dead. —St. Mad Raven
Digging through the archives? Read more:
CD Reviews: April 1998
Crass Dismissed: April 1998
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