Houses of Death (True Crime) by Gordon Kerr

feigned illnesses to attract attention to himself as well as to avoid work. He had married Ethel in 1920, but the marriage failed and they separated. Ten years later, however, they got back together, moving to London to start afresh.
    Christie, while separated from Ethel, had been convicted and imprisoned several times for petty criminal offences – stealing postal orders while employed as a postman, car theft and assaulting a prostitute. Strangely, at the outbreak of World War II, this raft of offences did not prevent him from becoming a policeman. Neither did his reconciliation with his wife prevent him from continuing to sleep with prostitutes, especially when Ethel was away visiting relatives.
    In April 1948, Timothy Evans and his pregnant wife, Beryl, moved into the top-floor flat at 10 Rillington Place and six months later, Beryl gave birth to a daughter, Geraldine. Evans was a Welshman of limited intelligence, who worked as a lorry driver. He and his wife often engaged in loud and sometimes violent arguments, mostly over Beryl’s inability to make ends meet. Matters were made worse in late 1949, when she informed her husband that she was pregnant again.
    Beryl insisted immediately that she wanted an abortion, but Evans, a Roman Catholic, was against the idea. She, however, confided in Christie and, although he had absolutely no previous experience, he told her that he knew how to carry out abortions, having learned how to do it during the war. He persuaded her to let him carry out the procedure, but it ended disastrously. When Evans came home later that day, 8 November 1949, Christie informed him that Beryl had died during the operation. Christie told Evans that he would dispose of the body down a nearby drain and that he would also find someone to look after the baby, Geraldine. He told Evans to leave London.
    Evans returned to Wales, but eventually went to a police station a few weeks later to tell the police that he had disposed of his wife’s body after she had taken something to make her abort her baby. The police did not find the body down the drain where Evans said he had put it, but when they searched the wash house at 10 Rillington Place, they found the bodies of both Beryl and baby Geraldine. Evans inexplicably confessed to killing his wife no fewer than four times during lengthy police interrogations.
    At Evans’s trial, six weeks later, Christie denied that he had agreed to perform an abortion on Beryl, and his testimony, plus Evans’s poor performance in the witness box, resulted in a guilty verdict. Timothy Evans was sentenced to death and hanged at Pentonville Prison on 9 March 1950.
    In late 1952, Ethel Christie suddenly disappeared. Christie told friends that she had moved back to Sheffield and he was going to join her when he had settled their affairs in London. He gave up his job, sold all his furniture and rented out his flat to a couple. After they had stayed there just one night, however, they learned that the flat was not Christie’s to rent and were thrown out. The landlord rented the flat to a Jamaican immigrant named Beresford Brown. Tidying up the kitchen one day, Brown peeled off some wallpaper and discovered a door leading to a pantry. Opening the door slightly, he shone a torch into the space beyond. There, he saw the body of a woman, seated and hunched forward, clad only in bra, stockings and suspenders. He immediately called the police and, when they arrived, they discovered two more women’s bodies. They were the bodies of three prostitutes that Christie had lured back to the house and killed while he lived there – Kathleen Maloney, Rita Nelson and Hectorina MacLennan. Searching the remainder of the flat, under the floorboards of the living room they found the remains of Ethel Christie. Christie had strangled her on 14 December 1952. She had been in poor health and Christie later claimed that he merely put her out of her misery.
    In the garden, two more women’s bodies were