131. The Horrors of 10 Rillington Place: John Christie & Timothy Evans

SPEAKER_00 0:11

In 1950, the war had been over for five years, but London still looked, and in a lot of ways, felt, like a city at war. You could walk down any ordinary street lined with houses and suddenly come to an empty space where a building used to be. Bomb sites were scattered throughout the city. There were buildings with boarded-up windows and blackened walls, and whole sections of streets that had simply disappeared during the blitz. Coal smoke hung over the rooftops. In the winter, it mixed with London's famous fog until sometimes you could barely see down the street. You'd hear bicycle bells, milk bottles clinking on doorsteps in the morning, factory whistles, women talking across fences while they hung out the laundry, because life had to go on. But the war had nearly drained the country financially. Wages were low, goods were expensive, and there simply wasn't enough of everything to go around. Rationing didn't end when the war ended. Five years later, in 1950, British families were still carrying around ration books. Meat was rationed, so was butter, sugar, tea, cheese, and other everyday foods. Even if you could afford it, sometimes it just wasn't available. So people stretched everything. They saved bacon grease, mended clothes, handed things down, they reused jars, paper, string, or anything that might be useful later on. And having a job didn't necessarily mean you're doing well. A working class family could have a man going to work every single day, and still struggle to pay the rent, keep food on the table, and put a little money aside. Then there was another enormous problem: housing. German bombing had destroyed or damaged huge numbers of homes during the war. And now soldiers had come home, people were getting married, babies were being born, and there simply weren't enough houses for everybody. So families took whatever they could. Big Victorian houses that had originally been built for one family were divided up. One family might live upstairs and another downstairs. Sometimes several families lived under the same roof. You might share a kitchen, or you might share a toilet. You could hear the people above you walking across the floor. You could hear their baby crying. You could hear arguments through the walls. There wasn't much privacy. Narrow little street in Notting Hill that looked nothing like the Notting Hill people picture today. And while London was busy trying to rebuild itself after one of the deadliest wars the world had ever seen, something terrible was happening behind the walls of number 10 Rillington Place.

SPEAKER_02 3:33

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SPEAKER_01 5:36

Okay, so I have a very interesting story today. It's actually not a case out of the United States. And so we're traveling to Britain today. Okay. Timothy Evans was born on November 20th in 1924 in Murthyr, Tidfill, a coal mining town in South Wales. His father, Daniel Evans, walked out on his mother while she was still pregnant with him. And so he never actually had a chance to meet his dad. So his family consisted of his mother, Thomasina, and his older sister, Eileen. And then after his mother remarried in 1933, she would go on to have two daughters. And so he gained two younger half-sisters, Mary and Maureen. And he was pretty close to those sisters too. Okay. Timothy struggled from the time he was a toddler. He just had a really hard time learning to speak, as some kids do. I don't know if you know this, but my brother did not say his first word until he was almost four years old. And they'll look at him. Exactly. And so I want to preface this by saying a lot of people believe that he was really slow. Okay. And then others do not. And so you'll have to make your own. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 6:55

And Albert Einstein didn't speak until he was like four years old.

SPEAKER_01 6:59

Absolutely. I would even say he never learned to read and write very well. I think like comic books, that was about as far as it went for him. That of course will follow you for the rest of your life being illiterate. At eight years old, he had an accident that left him with tubercular veruca. Do you know what that is? I think a veruca is like a knot somewhere on your head. Well, this is it was actually on his foot and it never healed. So what it is is basically a large wart-like sore, and it's caused by tuberculosis getting into the wound. So it's definitely not a regular kind of a wart because those are caused by viruses. But somehow when he was eight years old and hurt his foot, that cut got infected with tuberculosis and turned into this really thick, crusty lesion and it just would not heal. And this was the early 30s, and doctors just didn't have much to treat it with. I think that's why it dragged on for so long. And I believe that had a lot to do with him not being able to read and write well because I he skipped a lot of school.

SPEAKER_02 8:12

Oh, because of the thing. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 8:14

Yeah. Because I was thinking, why would that have anything to do with that? I got you. I don't think it was that he was incapable, possibly. In many ways, he was like any other boy his age. He absolutely loved football, he loved boxing, goofing off with his friends, he loved comic books. And like I told you, his reading didn't really exceed that level. So he was actually a really good looking kid, I thought. But he had a real complex. You know, he has this big ugly wart, huge, ugly wart on his foot, and can't read and write. And kids can be so brutal.

SPEAKER_02 8:53

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:53

And so even though he had friends, they'll still make fun of you. Sure. Yeah. I think to fit in and to make himself more important than he actually felt, he would make up stories. Friends and family, they just knew that about him. Lying was just something he'd always done about small, harmless things, mostly to boost his own ego or self-image. Later, he quit school and he quit school really young, moved to London with his mother and stepfather in the mid-30s. They were having some kind of like a steel crisis. There just wasn't jobs available. And so they ended up having to go to London so that they could find work. And for a while, he worked as a painter and a decorator. Well, this should show you how young he was when he quit school because in 1937, after that, at just 13 years old, he went back to South Wales to work down in the coal mines.

SPEAKER_02 10:52

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_01 10:52

So it was sometime before 13.

SPEAKER_02 10:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:55

But he quit school. He stuck that out for a couple of years until he was about 15. But those were brutal physical conditions, and he did have that foot injury. And so it just got really hard for him to keep that up. So eventually he had to quit that and move back to London with his mother and stepfather and sisters.

SPEAKER_02 11:18

Okay. Did that thing not ever go away?

SPEAKER_01 11:21

No.

SPEAKER_02 11:22

Was he able to wear shoes? He could wear shoes.

SPEAKER_01 11:25

Okay. Yeah. So when he went back to London, this was about the time that the Second World War was breaking out in 1939. He turned 18 during that time. Also, his foot injury kept him from being able to serve in the military. And so, unlike most young men his age, he spent the war kind of shiftless and drifting through this string of low-wage manual labor type jobs. By his late teens and into his 20s, Tim developed a reputation as a drinker. He would steal every now and again. He had a short temper. He was, you know, the type they just lie.

SPEAKER_02 12:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:11

And so I guess you could say a show off. But also, one of his sisters would say he was a really big people pleaser. Just wanted to fit in so bad. And she said, like, he couldn't even he get away with lying to like me and my mom. But he would go out and try to lie to other people. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_02 12:32

So he was a liar, but he wasn't a good liar.

SPEAKER_01 12:34

He wasn't very good at it.

SPEAKER_02 12:35

He was he was he was told tall tales.

SPEAKER_01 12:38

Exactly. But in 1946, he did land a job as a lorry driver.

SPEAKER_02 12:43

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:44

It was really good for him because even though he couldn't read the signs and he couldn't read a map, he was able to memorize every single delivery route by heart perfectly.

SPEAKER_02 12:56

Hmm.

SPEAKER_01 12:57

So, and this is in London.

SPEAKER_02 12:59

Yeah, I don't think he was as slow as they thought.

SPEAKER_01 13:02

I don't think so either. I always, and I believe this about everybody, even people with disabilities. You can compensate, I think, for the things that you can't do. And I think when somebody has a deficit in one area, there's usually something in another area that you're exceptionally good at. And I've just sounds like his was his memory. Exactly. Yeah. So in January of 1947, Tim was living on St. Mark's Road, just around the corner from where his whole life would later fall apart. That month, some friends set him up on a blind date with a young woman named Beryl Susanna Thorley. And she was really pretty. Like I said, he was good looking too. He was older than her. I think I mentioned she was 17. See, she had been born on September 19th in 1929 in London to William and Elizabeth Thorley. She was the oldest of four children. She had three younger siblings, Peter, Basil, and Pat. The family was Jewish and Timothy's family was Catholic. So that did cause some conflict from time to time.

SPEAKER_02 14:14

That's uh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:15

But Beryl grew up right in the middle of the blitz. And so she and her siblings were evacuated out of London over and over again as kids to get away from all of the bombing. And they had a pretty, I feel like a pretty traumatic childhood. Beryl was known to have a very short fuse, but she was also really sweet and protective of her younger siblings. And she had a big circle of friends who adored her. Her best friends were a couple named Charles and Joan Vincent. Beryl's mother got really sick when she was about 15. And she left school about that time to go to work at this posh London hotel, which was a great opportunity for her because her family they were poor. But this hotel was called the Grove House Hotel. And shortly after that, her mother would pass away. And she grieved terribly over the passing of her mother. I don't think the kids were very close with their dad. He got remarried really quickly, actually, and the snooze-up mother didn't seem to care much for the kids, and it was just a rough situation. So then when she was 17, that's when she met Timothy on a blind date, and they hit it off. That their relationship kept going. And when he brought Beryl to meet his family, they absolutely adored her. His mother practically adopted her as one of their own. And his sisters, they treated her like a sister. They really loved her. And they were not the type to take his side over hers. I'll just say that. Beryl was a little higher maintenance than Tim, but they were genuinely happy together. Not everybody was happy about the relationship. Beryl's youngest brother, who was he was a child at the time, so keep that in mind. He says he was always wary of Tim, that he just he had a reputation for stealing and drinking. He just never fully trusted him and was not happy when they got married. He was very young. That's interesting. Do you know how old young he was? Um I think about eight when they got together. He was very young.

SPEAKER_02 16:38

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 16:39

But his other brother, who was older than him, was friends with Timothy. So in 1948, Barrel found out she was pregnant and she was ecstatic. She told her family she didn't care if it was a boy or a girl. She just, like many of us do, just wanted a healthy baby. And Tim was really excited too. He proposed to her, and they got married on September 20th in 1948. And this was the day after Beryl's 19th birthday. He was still working as a lorry driver, delivering to shops around London. They'd been living with his mother with the baby coming. They really wanted a place of their own. And so some those friends that I was telling you about earlier, Charles and Joan, they happened to see a fine in the window of a top floor flat in the slums of Nottingham, Notting Hill. You just do what you gotta do when you're young. My first place wasn't very glamorous.

SPEAKER_02 17:40

Yeah, and that's probably true for most of us.

SPEAKER_01 17:43

Exactly. So the address of this place was 10 Rillington Place. It was this skinny little soot-stained three-story house separated into three flats. On the ground floor, John Reginald Christie, this balding clerk in his late 40s, and his wife Ethel lived. And then Tim and Barrel, they would move to the top floor. There was also a man that lived in the middle part, but he was hardly ever there. Like Timothy and Beryl would have hardly ever seen him because he spent the majority of those few years in and out of the hospital. Okay. That October, on the 10th, Beryl gave birth to her daughter, and they named her Geraldine, and she was a cute baby. There's this picture, it shows Tim and Beryl, and then Tim's half-sister Mary, and they're holding Geraldine out in the little back garden, and they're just so cute. And that picture was taken by their neighbor, John Christie. So everybody was crazy about the baby, even the neighbors. Tim's mother, Thomasina, she helped as much as she could. She helped get them furniture on credit. They were supposed to pay for it, but she co-signed. Never a great idea.

SPEAKER_02 19:06

Did she end up paying for it?

SPEAKER_01 19:07

And she just but she tried to make sure that they had everything, but she didn't have a lot herself. Right. One of those situations. She stayed in constant contact though with Beryl while Tim worked. Like I said, they're very close to her too. But money was tight, and you know how money can cause problems. Tim, he was working, but it just wasn't enough. And Beryl had kept her hotel job for a little while after they married and moved in, but she did quit once she was getting close to having the baby. So that after the birth, she could stay home full-time, you know, with her daughter. That's when the real financial troubles hit. Tim's income just it wasn't much to begin with. And Beryl, she wasn't able to manage their finances, and they fought over Timothy's drinking, which got worse the more they fought.

SPEAKER_02 20:00

Yes, that cycle. It is, and that puts such a strain on the marriage.

SPEAKER_01 20:04

And some of the neighbors would say they saw the two of them actually become physically violent with one another. Their money problems turned into almost daily fights. And then Beryl, she wasn't so much of a housekeeper. Of course, they argued about the mess and they argued about his drinking. Oh, it was just a lot. And it was loud enough for the whole building and other neighbors to hear about it. Now, Beryl's family, especially her younger brother, blames it all.

SPEAKER_02 20:35

On Tim.

SPEAKER_01 20:36

On Tim. Yes. Says that he was an adulterous, abusive man with an explosive, dangerous temper who constantly beat on his sister. I'm sure that this was a tumultuous relationship, don't get me wrong.

SPEAKER_04 20:53

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 20:53

Now Timothy's family says today would be probably diagnosed as like neurodivergent and the misunderstood young man, like I said, wanted to please everybody, and who, even without much of an education, tried his best to support his family. They deny that he was a drunk and a wife beater, but admit that he had his issues, but that Beryl did too. And I will say that his family seems to have loved both of them and weren't willing to just take his side for everything. Some say they were physically violent with each other. Some say Beryl nagged him constantly. Others remembered him coming home drunk, hollering and yelling at her. Her brother says that he hit her. And then there are people who say they loved each other a lot. And I can say sometimes all of those things can be true.

SPEAKER_02 21:49

At the same time.

SPEAKER_01 21:50

At the same time.

SPEAKER_02 21:51

I think personally, and I when you grow up poor, you see probably a lot of this, whether you're in the flats of London or in the trailer park, Randolph County, right? You see, and young couples, they have they're very passionate. Whether it's in I was one of them. Okay. So whether it's in love or in fighting, everything is very big. Yes, and intense and explosive. So I can see all of that being true as well. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 22:19

And not that if he was hitting her, that was absolutely wrong. If she was hitting him, it was absolutely wrong. So after reading all these different accounts, the conclusion I've come to is that they did have a tumultuous marriage. To what degree? I just don't think we can know for sure. They were young. And I just feel like a lot of couples probably spend more time blaming each other for the problems, like I'm sure the money problems. She blamed him for drinking. He blamed her for not being able to manage their finances. Nobody wants to look at their own failures. Right. Of course. Then that would mean personal responsibility. Whatever was falling apart. In the marriage, everyone seemed to agree that Timothy adored his little girl. That he'd bring her home clothes, even though they couldn't afford it, and toys, even though they couldn't afford it. He'd pick them up on his delivery rounds and was just always showing her off and playing with her. But thank goodness for the Christie's downstairs, because so Mr. Christie was an ex-serviceman who served in World War One and later as a special constable during the Blitz. Timothy seems to have really looked up to him. And both he and Beryl became really close to John and Ethel. Really close, actually, because there wasn't an indoor bathroom. And they would have to go down. And every time they needed to use the toilet, they would have to go down through their apartment.

SPEAKER_02 23:49

Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_01 23:50

To get out. Because theirs was the ground floor.

SPEAKER_03 23:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:54

Which would be just so awkward. But anyway, they weren't just neighbors. They occasionally would watch the baby for them while they went out on a date. Or if she was really struggling by herself during the day, they would take Geraldine to their apartment. They didn't have any children.

SPEAKER_02 24:12

So that was kind of like probably their grandbaby or something.

SPEAKER_01 24:15

Absolutely. To them. And they knew that the couple was struggling and they really did try to help them. In fact, one time a bill collector came, Mr. Christie paid that bill for them.

SPEAKER_04 24:26

Oh.

SPEAKER_01 24:27

Now he did tell have a good talking too with Timothy. Like this is not going to be a regular occurrence, but he genuinely seemed to care about them. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:37

They didn't have a Dave Ramsey back then, but maybe he was the next best thing.

SPEAKER_01 24:42

Right. They're older, they're helpful and willing to lend a hand. Now, in the middle of 1949, Beryl would find out that she was pregnant again. And this time she was devastated. Oh. And honestly, I can understand why the thought of bringing another baby into that situation, into their home at that time, would be scary to her. Their finances were a mess. She and Timothy were constantly fighting. And although she clearly loved Geraldine, being a wife and a mother already seemed like more than she could keep up with. Beryl told Timothy that she wanted to have an abortion. Timothy, he was Roman Catholic. And initially he's like, absolutely not. We're not, no, this is against everything I believe in. And he genuinely didn't seem to understand why she felt so desperate. I think in his mind, he was like, We manage with Geraldine and we'll find a way to manage with this other baby too. And he tried to convince her that they could make this work. But Beryl was determined. And when Timothy realized that she was attempting these dangerous, potentially life-threatening home remedies to end the pregnancy herself. On November 14th, 1949, Timothy took a train to Wales. He took a train by himself to Wales. Back to where he was originally from in Myrtlevale. He stayed with his Aunt Violet and his uncle Cornelius Lynch. Obviously, his family, they're like, uh, where is Beryl? Where's Geraldine? And he told his aunt and uncle that Beryl and Geraldine had gone to Brighton to visit Beryl's father. But the longer he stayed in Wales, the more suspicious the family became. And remember, Timothy had a reputation, even within his own family, for lying.

SPEAKER_02 26:53

Oh, we lost right.

SPEAKER_01 26:54

Meanwhile, Timothy's mother, people are coming to ask her about money that Timothy owes them. She found out that he gotten rid of the furniture from the flat. And now her son had disappeared off to Wales while nobody seemed to know where his wife and baby were. So on November 29th, she wrote a letter to Timothy's aunt and uncle. It was pretty brutal. She said basically, I don't know what lies he's been telling you down there, but I have not seen Beryl or the baby for a month. She told them that the last thing Timothy had told her was that Beryl and Geraldine had gone to Brighton to see Beryl's father, but they had learned that it's not true. She wanted to know what Timothy had done with the furniture from the flat. And she said she was just embarrassed to be his mother and never wanted to see him again. The letter arrived the next morning on November 30th, and Timothy's aunt read it out loud to him at the breakfast table.

SPEAKER_02 27:59

Oh, well, she probably didn't realize what was in it by the time she started reading. I know.

SPEAKER_01 28:03

I'm like, can you just imagine like sitting there and hearing all that?

SPEAKER_02 28:08

And once she started reading it, I guess you gotta finish.

SPEAKER_01 28:11

Right. How awkward. Yeah. Ooh. And so after she'd finished reading the letter, Timothy gets up and he walks to the police station.

SPEAKER_03 28:22

Oh.

SPEAKER_01 28:22

And he says, I'm here to give myself up. I have disposed of my wife. He said he couldn't sleep and he needed to clear his conscience. So that definitely sounds like a confession, but he wasn't saying that he murdered her. He told the police that Beryl was about three months pregnant, was determined she was not going to have the baby, and had already started trying to end it herself. He told police that she bought a syringe and tablets and that he had warned her that she was going to make herself sick. But according to Timothy, after that, he met a man and this man had had told him he had something that could cause her to miscarry. He said the man gave him a bottle with some kind of a liquid in it. He gave Beryl the instructions and took the bottle, basically just gave it to her, and they hadn't talked about when she was going to take it or any of that. He said on November 8th, he left and went to work, like he always did. But that evening when he came home, Beryl was dead. Instead of calling a doctor or the police, he carried Beryl's body downstairs, went outside in front of their place, lifted the cover from the sewer drain, and put her body inside it. Then he made arrangements for Geraldine to go with family. But he was really vague about the baby. And then a few days later, he sold all of his things, sold her things, left London, and that's when he went to Wales. So of course, police, they immediately contact London and told them what Timothy had said. And so they sent officers to 10 Rillington Place and immediately check the fur the drain. That's where he says that she's at. So the idea that he just in the middle of the night, you know, done all of this, there that didn't happen. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:43

And he lies.

SPEAKER_01 30:44

And he does lie. So when confronted by that, Timothy told the police, let's see. Okay. When they confronted Timothy and told him the police had checked the drain and found nothing, he admitted that he lied and changed his story.

SPEAKER_02 31:03

I was gonna say, I bet he's now he's gonna give him another lie.

SPEAKER_01 31:06

In his second statement, he said he'd lied to protect his neighbor, John Christie. Timothy said Christie knew Beryl was desperate to end her pregnancy, and he told them that he knew how to perform an abortion and that there was this small chance she wasn't gonna survive. They held off for a while because of the risk, but eventually Beryl said that she wanted to let him do it. She was desperate. So Timothy went to work that morning after they agreed. And when he came home, Christy met him at the door and told him something had gone terribly wrong and that Beryl was dead.

SPEAKER_02 31:45

Imagine being John Christie and you've been so good to this neighbor, and now he's throwing you under the bus and making it look like you've done something. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 31:53

Timothy said he was horrified and immediately talked about going to the police, but he said John Christie discouraged him and told Timothy that if the police got involved, they were both going to be in trouble. He said Christy assured him that he was going to take care of Beryl's body. And he said Christy told him not to worry about the baby, that he knew a young couple in East Acton who wanted a child and would be happy to take Geraldine. Timothy said Christy encouraged him to leave London because it was going to look suspicious if he was there after Beryl and the baby disappear. So Timothy claimed that over the next couple of days he went to work as normal while Christy handled things. Then on Tuesday, November 10th, Christy told him that this couple from East Acton had come and gotten Geraldine. Now he had never seen this couple.

SPEAKER_02 32:51

He's just gonna give his baby to her.

SPEAKER_01 32:52

Right. So I guess he's just taking Christie's word for it, which is crazy. After this version, Timothy asked investigators to contact his mother and have her get Geraldine's address from the Christies. Of course, police are very eager to hear what John Christie has to say. He was a 55-year-old, quiet, soft-spoken man and more than willing to cooperate with investigators. He, of course, emphatically denies everything. He said he'd never offered to perform any kind of an abortion. He hadn't disposed of her body. He didn't know any couple in his acting, much less a couple that would agree to take the baby. Like you were saying, he couldn't understand why Timothy would make these accusations. Like we were saying, Timothy was a known liar. So Christie's wife pointed the finger back to Timothy. And they both had this story that there were obvious problems in that marriage. Everybody knew that. On the night of November 8th, the night Beryl was believed to have died. He and Ethel were in bed when they heard a loud thud coming from Evans's flat upstairs. They described hearing something that sounded like just something heavy being like dragged across the floor, moved across the floor. And then the next day or the next night, they saw Timothy downstairs and he was by himself. He had to come down through their apartment. And when they asked where Beryl and Geraldine were, Timothy told him she must have slipped out before they had and they hadn't got a chance to see her, but that she had gone to Bristol with the baby to see her family. So on December 2nd, police searched the property again. And this time, when searching the wash house behind the building, they found Beryl. She had been wrapped in a tablecloth. It had been tied and hidden behind some wood. And laying beside her was 19-month-old Geraldine. They had both been strangled to death. Police transferred Timothy to Nottinghill Police Station. At the station, Chief Inspector George Jennings confronted Timothy with what police had discovered. He was shown clothing and some other items associated with the murders. I forgot. Also, Beryl had been knocked in the head. So this time he was shown the clothing, some other items associated with the murders, and told that both Beryl and Geraldine had been strangled. And that Geraldine had been strangled with a man's tie. I'm thinking it must have still been around her neck. I never could find that anywhere, but somehow they knew that's what she had been strangled with. Okay. Jennings asked Timothy whether he was responsible for their deaths, and Timothy said yes, he was. Okay. And that evening he gave a third version of what had happened. He said that on November 8th, he and Beryl had gotten into a really big argument over money. He lost his temper and hit her and strangled her with a piece of rope. He said he temporarily hit her body in the empty flat just below him because remember, I was saying that neighbor was out a lot. Timothy said that he took Beryl's body down there. And then two days later, on November 10th, the baby wouldn't stop crying. Like he was trying her mama. Right. And they're telling what she had witnessed. And so he just couldn't take it anymore. And that's when he strangled Geraldine was two days later. And then placed both of their bodies in the wash house before he left London for Wales on November 14th. His formal statement that evening placed Beryl's body in the wash house on November 8th and Geraldine's in there on November 10th. And that lined up with what they were pretty much suspecting as far as the timeline goes.

SPEAKER_03 37:18

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 37:20

And with that, police definitely believe they had their killer. But once he had an attorney, oh he recanted. Sure. He told his attorney, Malcolm Morris, that he had not killed Beryl Geraldine. He went back to the story. He told police in Wales that John Christie was responsible for Beryl's death, that he must have killed Geraldine as well. He went on trial at the old Bailey's courthouse on January 11th, 1950. And although he had originally been charged with murdering both Beryl and Geraldine, the prosecutors chose to try him for Geraldine's murder so that they could retry him if they weren't found guilty. We see that all the time. And John Christie was one of the prosecution's most important witnesses, he and his wife, because of what they had heard. And they were witnesses to a lot of the violence between him and his wife for sure. The prosecution, their case was pretty straightforward. They had that admission. Timothy Evans was a liar, but he told the truth when he confessed to killing Beryl and Geraldine and the evidence lined up with everything. He went to the courthouse himself. I feel like if the neighbor was to have done it, why would you not say that in the first confession?

SPEAKER_02 38:40

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 38:42

It was just hard to get around them. Now, Timothy's defense attorney, Malcolm Morris, told the jury that he had confessed to the murders that he hadn't committed because he was afraid that the police were going to beat him. And so he told them what he thought they wanted to hear. And when he learned about the death of his daughter, he was so upset that he didn't care what happened to him. But he was not the real killer. When Christie took the witness stand, Morris, the lawyer, looked at him and said, I suggest to you that you are responsible for the murder of Mrs. Evans and the little girl. And all he could say was, No, didn't I not?

SPEAKER_02 39:28

I was gonna say, didn't the prosecution object to that?

SPEAKER_01 39:31

Oh yeah, oh yeah. And he said, Well, at the very least, you knew much more about their deaths than you're willing to admit. And Chrissy said, and this is a quote, that is a lie. He did admit though that Ethel had told him that Beryl was taking pills to try to end the pregnancy. So he knew she was desperate not to have another baby, but that was the extent of it. He said, I didn't have a relationship with her like that. Like I had a relationship with him, she had a relationship with her. We were both good to her and the baby. Right. But not in that way. Then Timothy took the stand. He told the jury that when he came home from work on November 8th, Beryl was dead. He's pretty much given like his second story. Basically, he says Christy met him, told him there was this problem, that she died during this botched abortion, but he was gonna take care of everything. Like he was gonna take care of the body. He said that he actually helped Christy carry her dead body into an empty flat in the house, that middle flat. After that, he says he never saw her body again and had had no idea like what happened. As for Geraldine, Timothy testified that Christie told him he would arrange for friends to look after the baby and that he had absolutely no idea that Geraldine was dead. Before it was time for the jury to decide whether Timothy was guilty or not, the defense did bring up the fact that John Christie had a criminal record. He had like a conviction for theft a long time ago. But they're like, okay, we don't care. It had been years ago. And obviously he wasn't that man anymore. He'd done a lot of good, he was an upstanding citizen at this point. At this point in his life. When the jury went out to deliberate, it took them 40 minutes to decide that Timothy Evans was guilty of murdering his little girl. When Timothy was asked whether he had anything to say before sentencing was passed, he simply answered, No, sir. The judge sentenced 25-year-old Timothy Evans to death by hanging. Just after the judge had sentenced him to die, John Christie actually broke down and sobbed. Like you could hear him crying. He'd been their neighbor.

SPEAKER_02 42:00

Right.

SPEAKER_01 42:01

According to the newspapers, when the Christies were leaving the courtroom, Thomasena, which is his mother, which I feel sorry for her too, because this is her her child. Right. And she turned to John Christie and screamed, murderer. Yeah. Ethel Christie yelled and said, He is not a murderer. He's a good man. Like, stop. But Timothy's mother said she knew what kind of man Timothy could be. He told lies. He did exaggerate. They knew his marriage to Beryl had been tumultuous, tumultuous, and the two of them fought like cats and dogs. They themselves had been very angry with him, but with all of his faults, they did not believe that he was capable of murdering Beryl and the baby. Timothy, though, was taken from Old Bailey and transferred to Pentonville prison. And Timothy, after he was sentenced to death, his attorneys appealed that conviction. But on February 20th in 1950, that appeal was dismissed. He spent his final weeks in the condemned cell. And during those weeks, he continued to say that he had not killed Beryl or Geraldine. Five days before his scheduled execution, Timothy was examined by a medical board. I think they always do that. And that just determines whether there any medical reason they should why they should stop the execution, which I don't understand that. I'm like, why are you checking their heart and stuff there? They're gonna be executed.

SPEAKER_02 43:37

It's crazy. Yeah, that is that is weird to me.

SPEAKER_01 43:39

The only one I agreed with is that one guy had like a pacemaker. And I'm like, you could take that out. Yeah, you know what I mean? Other than that, I don't understand. So during that examination, they went back over the statements that he'd made with police, and Timothy again tried to explain why he confessed. The medical board, though, found no reason to recommend a reprieve. So the execution remained scheduled for Thursday, March 9th. Two days before Timothy was to die, his family came to see him and his mother was there with his sisters. And Timothy asked if there was any hope that he was going to be saved. And she had to tell her son that they had done everything that they could that he needed to make peace with God at this point. Before that final visit ended, Timothy's older sister, Eileen, asked him, just point blank, tell me the truth. He said, like, I've told the truth. She always felt like at that point there was no reason for him to lie to her. We do know that happens all the time, though.

SPEAKER_02 44:48

Oh, yeah. We also know that families, even though you might know how your loved one is, you you always convince yourself that what they but they couldn't do this. Right. They're not that bad.

SPEAKER_01 45:00

Right. Because it is hard to believe, I'm sure. But that was the position he he maintained even as his execution approached. On the morning of March 9th, 1950, Timothy met with a priest before his execution. At nine in the morning, the executioner Albert Pairpoint and his assistant carried out the sentence and he was hanged. John and Ethel Christie went back home, and as far as the British justice system was concerned, the murders of Beryl and Geraldine Evans had been solved. Are you telling me it was not solved? In March of 1953, John Christie was living alone and Ethel was gone. On March 20th, Christy moved out of 10 Rillington Place. He had illegally rented his flat to another couple, but when the actual landlord found out about it, he made the couple leave and gave the tenant in the middle, which was Boriseford Brown, permission to use Christie's kitchen. And on March 24th, Brown went downstairs to try to do some repairs to the kitchen to kind of make it usable. So he decided that he wanted to put up some brackets for this wireless radio. But when he tried to do work on one side of the kitchen, there didn't seem to be a wall. The wallpaper was there, but like behind it, like he couldn't feel a wall. And so of course he pulls back the wallpaper to see like what in the world is going on. What kind of repairs am I actually, you know, gonna have to do here? And it revealed like when he pulled that back, he found this old pantry that had been sealed off. So of course he opens it, and when he did, there was this awful smell.

SPEAKER_02 46:56

Oh gosh. Was it his wife?

SPEAKER_01 46:58

He shines a light in there, and that is where he finds the body of a woman. She's partially clothed, and her lower half had been wrapped in a blanket. Brown backed away and, of course, would go straight to the police. And when officers arrived and started pulling away the rest of this makeshift wall, they realized that there were three women hidden inside that little kitchen alcove. What are you telling me right now? All three had been murdered only months before they were discovered. Well, actually, one had it was just a couple of weeks earlier.

SPEAKER_02 47:36

Now, here I have been taken up for Mr. Christie. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_01 47:40

I was playing him to that too.

SPEAKER_02 47:41

You did. You played me. Okay, go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 47:43

Scotland Yard, they're called in and they start their investigation, and they're of course taking the place apart now, which they should have done earlier on. Underneath the floorboards in the front room, they find another body.

SPEAKER_02 47:58

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_01 47:58

And it's Ethel Christie.

SPEAKER_02 48:00

I was wondering what happened to her because you said he was alone. Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01 48:04

She had been strangled. They believed she had been dead since December of 1952, about three months before the bodies in the kitchen were discovered. And the other women were all killed after her.

SPEAKER_03 48:17

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01 48:18

By that point, the Christie's marriage was fallen apart. John had been unemployed. They were struggling financially. And Ethel was reportedly gonna leave to go stay with some of her relatives. Who knows what she stumbled across. But then police moved their search outside in the little garden. And before they even started digging, they found there was a human thigh bone being used to prop up part of the garden fence.

SPEAKER_02 48:46

Oh my gosh. What?

SPEAKER_01 48:48

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 48:50

Nobody's gonna notice this thigh bone propping up the garden.

SPEAKER_01 48:53

And they didn't. They didn't. It had been there for like 10 years. Oh wait, what? Yes. This is nuts. They found the remains of two more women out back. So they had a serial killer. Yes. They knew they had a serial killer and it wasn't Timothy because he was dead. Right. And not only that, but had been executed largely in part from the testimony of the person that they're now suspecting is a serial killer.

SPEAKER_03 49:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 49:24

So Scotland Yard, of course, they're like, we gotta find this guy. In 1920, is when John Christie met and married Ethel Simpson. He would have been about 21 when they got married, and their marriage had problems pretty much from the beginning. Christie had sexual issues like impotence. And even after he was married, he just spent time with prostitutes. I don't know that she knew that, but she may have found it out. Early in the marriage, she suffered from a miscarriage, and so they never had any children. And after only a few years of marriage, they separated, lived apart for about 10 years.

SPEAKER_02 50:07

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 50:08

Yeah. During that time, Christy was constantly getting himself into trouble. Between 1923 and 1933, he was convicted of several crimes, including theft, obtaining money under false pretenses, assaulting a female, and stealing a car.

SPEAKER_02 50:26

So he wasn't just a thief.

SPEAKER_01 50:32

And he spent quite a bit of time in and out of prison. After that, he served as a constable.

SPEAKER_02 50:38

Oh my gosh, I forgot you said that.

SPEAKER_01 50:40

Like he when I say he was respected, like he genuinely was. So in 1934, after being separated for years, they decided to give their marriage another try. They got back together and moved to London. And from the outside, it really did look like he'd turned a new leaf. They settled into married life with each other. He had a great job, stayed out of trouble. And like I said, most of the people would have had no idea that he had any kind of a criminal past. Most people didn't know about all of those other things. Plus, he's this quiet, respectable looking man. I'm going to show you pictures of everybody, and had spent years, I don't know, just I feel like he was a manipulator.

SPEAKER_02 51:26

Yeah, obviously, man. So he was a good liar.

SPEAKER_01 51:30

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 51:30

So Timothy was a liar, not good at this guy. Obviously, he was good enough to have a lot of people fooled.

SPEAKER_01 51:36

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 51:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 51:38

And if you had met him, there was really not anything about him that would have made you think he was.

SPEAKER_02 51:44

That's the kind of thing that makes me not trust people. It's the kind of thing that makes me just suspicious of everybody. Everybody?

SPEAKER_01 51:50

Yeah. And in fact, a lot of people remembered his voice because he spoke very softly. He said that during World War I, he had been exposed to mustard gas. And that afterwards, he said that he was out of consciousness and went blind, but the people don't believe that's actually true. But he did say that it damaged, I guess, his voice. And so that's why he couldn't speak very loud. Christy was really good at, I guess, turning on that gentle, helpful, soft-spoken man when he needed to be. He loved giving people advice, especially about medical things.

SPEAKER_02 52:29

Yeah, and here I was comparing him to Dave Ramsey. I'm sorry, Dave.

SPEAKER_01 52:35

Even though he had absolutely no medical training, mind you, but he would like he loved to like, well, he sounds like me in that regard because I love giving medical advice. And during World War II, he even served as a War Reserve Constable. I told him I mentioned that. So if you met him during those years, you would not have suspected that he was a serial killer for sure. And I think Ethel believed that he was a changed man too. But he was a habitual liar. He continued visiting prostitutes, never stopped seeing prostitutes. And he had some very disturbing sexual interest that eventually became tied to all of this. And that quiet, harmless little man was not at all. And they left their baby with them. Oh, I don't like that. On the morning of March 31st, 1953, a police officer found him walking along the Thames near Putney Bridge and arrested him without incident. At first, he only admitted killing his wife, Ethel. He told police that on December 14th, 1952, she had attempted suicide. He claimed he found her in bed after she had taken an overdose of sleeping pills. And again, instead of calling police, getting her help, was a mercy killing because he just couldn't, it broke his heart to see her suffering. So what does he do instead? Strangles her and wraps her body in a blanket and ties it and carries her downstairs. Pulled up the floorboards in the front room, dug into the ground, and buried her. He altered the dates on some of her letters, like one particularly that she had sent to her sister to make it look like she's still alive. He'd forged signatures so that he could take money from her bank account. And he sold some of her things, like her clothes, her wedding ring and watch. And when her family started asking why they weren't hearing from her, he claimed that she was sick. And for months, the family was wondering, like, did she leave him? They just weren't sure. They knew it was odd, but they didn't imagine he would have killed her. Right. Once Chrissy admitted that he had murdered Ethel, police then were focused on the three other women they had found behind the kitchen wall. And he finally admitted that he was responsible for their deaths too. Now, in every single one of these cases, literally every single one, at first, he gives this story like he's the victim, actually. Yeah. He was just trying to defend himself. It's like an argument or a confrontation. Of course, they were going to come after him and it's just crazy. But anyway, but the thing was that all three women had carbon monoxide in their blood, and they all had been strangled and they had all been raped. Eventually, Christy would admit that there had been a method to what he was doing. The first of the three was Rita Nelson. She was 25 years old, originally from Belfast, and she was about six months pregnant, which is so sad. We don't know for sure exactly how they met, but according to several accounts, when Christy found out she was pregnant, he convinced her that he could help her terminate her pregnancy. So see, that guy was telling the truth about that. And that seems to be how he persuaded her to come home with him in January of 1953. This sounds terrifying. Once he got her into the kitchen, he had her sit down in a deck chair. Then he rigged up this piece of rubber tubing to a gas pipe in the kitchen. He kept the tubing like closed with a bulldog clip. And once she was sitting in the chair, Christy released the clip and allowed coal gas to escape. And apparently coal gas had a lot of carbon monoxide in it.

SPEAKER_02 56:44

Right. So that's how that got in their system. I was gonna, I was just wondering, like, what was that all about? But yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 56:51

So Rita breathed it in until she got drowsy and then lost consciousness. And that's when he would rape and strangle her to death. After she was dead, he wrapped her body and put it into that little alcove behind the kitchen wall. And then he covered it back up like nothing had happened. Then there was 26-year-old Kathleen Maloney. She had been an orphan who was raised in a convent home for children. As an adult, her life was pretty unstable. She had five children and was making money to support them through prostitution, unfortunately. And Kathleen wasn't actually a complete stranger to him. He had met her before. In fact, a few weeks earlier, Christy had gone with Kathleen and another woman to a room where he took nude pictures of the other woman while Kathleen was there. So when she saw him again, like out and about in early 1953, she already knew him. On the night she disappeared, and I'm sure she's used to creeps. I mean, just from what she's doing for a living. On the night she disappeared, Kathleen had been out drinking with another woman. So she was already intoxicated. And then at some point, Christy joined them and eventually Kathleen did leave with him. When he was first questioned about her body, he tried to make it sound like there was some confrontation. Like I said, he's the victim.

SPEAKER_02 58:25

He wants to paint it as self-defense.

SPEAKER_01 58:27

Yes. She wanted money from him and demanded 30 shillings and threatened him with a frying pan, came after him with a frying pan. And then his memory gets really foggy, and he's like, he must have temporarily lost his mind. Yeah. He just couldn't explain how she wound up dead. Then though he oh, he also said, This is my favorite, not my favorite. This is horrible, actually. But he said that she had made sexual advances towards him. And he that really disgusted him.

SPEAKER_02 59:00

Yeah. Do you remember when I did the Sean Patrick Gobel episode, the truck driver, serial killer? Yes. And he tried to say that girl had tried to make sexual advances at him and tried to do drugs in his truck. Like he's this fine upstanding guy. Like, so you murder them? Okay. Yeah. And you've been with prostitutes this whole time, and all of a sudden now you're a bit.

SPEAKER_01 59:21

Now you're yeah, just horrified. Yeah, it's crazy. But he said that she wanted him to use his influence with the landlord to help her find somewhere to live. And they had this confrontation, but Kathleen's body told what actually happened. She had been exposed to the carbon monoxide as well. She'd been strangled and she had been raped. After Kathleen was dead, he put her body into the kitchen wall as well. Was there a smell? Like had people noticed there was a smell there. There was a smell from time to time. Okay. There. So yeah. Hectorina was 26 years old. She was Scottish and the mother of two children. She and her boyfriend, Alex Baker, they knew Christy because they had been looking for somewhere to live. I don't think she had custody of her kids at that moment. I think she was wanting to get them back. They had actually spent time at his house because he let them stay there for a while temporarily, both of them. They were, of course, paying him, but then I guess there was some kind of a fallout with the boyfriend, and he made Christy made him leave. But on March 6th, he saw Hector Rina out in town, and she was without Alex, and he convinced her that she could come back to his place, freshen up, take a nap, get something to eat, and he brought her back to the house. Of course, he said there was a struggle. Hector Rina got upset. Listen to this one. He was trying to get her out of the kitchen away and get away, and he wanted to get away from her, but she started struggling with him, and some of her clothing tore. And he thought that perhaps some of Hector Rina's own clothes had got caught around her neck during the struggle, and that's how she died because all of a sudden she just went limp.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:14

Yeah. Okay, now I'm taking it back everything I said about him. He's not a good liar either. That's crazy.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:20

That is stupid. But the examination of her body showed she had been exposed to carbon monoxide. She had been deliberately strangled with a piece of cord, and eventually he admitted as much. He strangled and sexually assaulted her, just like the others, before putting her body into the wall with the other two women. And I actually think he simultaneously raped and strangled his victims. Yeah, because he actually admitted that the intercourse occurred around the time he was strangling them. Okay. Eventually, he also admitted killing the two women whose remains had been found buried in the garden. And like I said, those murders went back about 10 years. So the first woman was Ruth Furist. She was 21 years old when she was murdered. She was an Austrian and had come to Britain as a refugee before the war. She worked in a munitions factory, and according to some accounts, occasionally she did make money from prostitution. Chrissy said that he met her in a snack bar in 1943. At the time, Ethel was away from home. She was visiting relatives. So the ones I said before, all the ones in the wall had happened after Ethel's death. So these were before. He brought her back to their home. According to Christy, the two of them were in the bedroom together and had sex. And while they were having sex, he just strangled her to death and killed her. And afterwards, I guess he freaked out a little because Ethel was on her way home. And he's like, Oh crap, now I've got this body. And so he hid her body underneath the floorboards in the front room until Ethel got there with her brother. And when he had the chance, he took her body out to the wash house behind behind their house. He had started digging actually before Ethel got there, but when she got home, he stopped. But that night when she went to bed, he went outside and finished digging that grave. And that's where he buried her and where she stayed for almost 10 years.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:34

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:35

Muriel Edie knew Christy from work. They worked together at an ultra radio factory in Acton. So he did have ties to Acton. Muriel suffered from terrible bronchitis, and Christy told her that he knew of a treatment that could help her.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:54

Wait, is Acton what the name of this stuff that could cause?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:57

Acton is the name of the place where he told Timothy Evans that he knew a couple.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:05

Oh yes. Okay, I'm glad you reminded the baby.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:09

So he used that, that he had this treatment to get Muriel over to his house. And he made this homemade inhaler using this jar and tubing. He put balsam, like this fryer's balsam, inside the jar, and it gave off this really, you know, you know what that smells like. So it gave off this really strong medicinal smell. But there was another tube, and that one was connected to the home gas supply. Muriel sat down and started breathing through the apparatus, thinking she's inhaling something that might heal her bronchitis or help with her bronchitis so that she could continue working, but instead she's breathing that coal gas. So she continued breathing until she lost consciousness, and that's when she was raped and strangled. Then he buried her in the back garden near where he had already buried Ruth Furis. Now, years later, this is interesting because around the same time that they were searching during the Timothy Evans investigation, Christy's dog dug up part of her skull and Christy found it. And so he threw it into this bombed-out, like kind of damn partly damaged building nearby, and some kids found it there and gave it to the police, and no connection was made.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:35

Oh man.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:36

Between him and the skull. I bet they felt like idiots for that one. I'm sure. On April 27th, 1953, Christy confessed that he had killed Beryl Evans too. He claimed that she had come to him on the day she died asking him to please help her end her life because of the pregnancy. According to Christy, he used gas to make Beryl unconscious. He said he put it up in a hose through her into her apartment. Into her apartment, thinking he must have been in that second floor apartment and used it up. While she was unconscious, he attempted to have sex with her, but was unable. And then he strangled her. This was Christy's version, and there's no way to know what part of it is true. But he did emphatically deny killing Geraldine. While all of this was happening, Christy was meeting with his attorneys and being examined by these doctors and psychiatrists. His defense attorney, Derek Curtis Bennett, he's one of the better known criminal defense attorneys in Britain at the time. And he was trying to think of a way that he could keep him from being sentenced to death. So he was like, the only way we can do this is by pleading insanity. So his attorneys. Wanted the jury to look at his behavior as a whole.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:05

So on June 22nd, 1953, he went on trial at Old Bailey, which is the same place that Timothy Evans went on trial. The prosecution didn't try him for all seven women. They chose the murder of his wife, Ethel.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:21

They probably couldn't even put him on trial for barrels because the other guy's already been convicted and not for hers.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:27

He was only tried for Geraldine's. Oh, that's right.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:31

Okay, okay. But on this one, they've just charged him with ethels.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:35

With ethyls. So Chrissy pled not guilty by reason of insanity, but his defense chose to bring in all of the other murders.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:45

Oh my gracious. What? That's stupid.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:48

So they believed that the more murders he admitted to, the stronger his defense would be for insanity. So a lot of people believe that he gave false confessions. So Christie later claimed that he had gotten the impression from his defense that the more murders he admitted to, the stronger his defense, his insanity defense would be. So there was independent evidence connecting him, though, to several of these women. So keep that in mind. It does mean like we have to be careful about accepting every detail he gave because he's a liar too. And this is especially important, I think, when it comes to Beryl. Christy admitted killing her more than once and gave police a detailed account of how he claimed it happened. But he always denied killing Geraldine. Always said he didn't do that. So doctors are examining Christy to just determine whether he's insane or not. And of course, psychiatrists for the defense, you know how that goes, just back and forth. They all get paid. Exactly. But the prosecution's like, okay, he might be crazy, but he knew right from wrong because he knew enough to forge a check. He knew enough to alter dates on his on the wife's letters that she was sending to family. He knew enough to hide them beneath the floorboard. This is not legal insanity. And to testify at another man's trial for one of them. Exactly. The defense had to show that because of a mental disorder, he didn't understand what he was doing or didn't understand what he was doing was wrong. And I feel like the prosecution had plenty of evidence that he did definitely did understand. June 25th, after deliberating for about an hour and a half, John Christie was found guilty of murdering Ethel. He was sentenced to death by hanging. During his final days at Pentonville, Christie spent some of his time writing letters to relatives and friends who had contacted him. As the date of his execution approached, he still hoped for a stay of execution. In his final hours before the execution, he was given another opportunity to tell the complete truth about Geraldine, but he never took responsibility for her death. On July 15th, 1953, at 9 a.m., John Reginald Halliday, Christie, was executed at Pennonville Prison. The executioner was Albert Pairpoint, the same man who had hanged Timothy Evans just three years earlier. As he was preparing him to be executed, Christy complained that his nose was itching, and the hangman told him not to worry because it wouldn't bother him for long. He was 54 years old. His body was buried in an unmarked grave within the prison grounds, just like Evans. After Christie was executed, of course, so questions about Timothy Evans continued. Well, before the execution, the government did order an inquiry into Timothy's conviction. And that was conducted by a barrister named John Scott Henderson. And he reviewed the evidence, interviewed witnesses, and questioned Christy while he was still alive. He concluded that Timothy Evans had in fact killed Geraldine. He also believed that Timothy had probably killed Beryl, and the Christie's confession to Beryl's murder was unreliable. So that meant that Timothy's conviction stood. But over the next several years, journalists, lawyers, especially his sister, one of his sisters, Mary, really fought for him. Members of Parliament, and just people who were interested like we are in true crime, they continued questioning whether he'd received a fair trial. A lot of people were saying they felt like because of his mental delays that he was easier to. I don't know that I don't even think his sister really goes for that. I think she was just saying she believes that he probably was scared. They got a very quick confession out of him, and they think he probably was scared. He may have told the truth when he was like, I just didn't think anybody was gonna believe me. And of course, this case also became a growing debate over capital punishment, as you can imagine. But anyway, eventually in 1965, they did agree to have another look at the case. And so the second inquiry was ordered, and they went back through all the evidence surrounding the deaths of the mother and daughter, and they concluded that Timothy probably had not killed Gerald Dean, but believed that he probably had killed Meryl. And with that conclusion, though, Geraldine was who he had been convicted of murdering. And so on October 18th, 1966, they announced that he would receive a post-humous pardon. Queen Elizabeth granted that pardon, and his remove his remains were able to be moved then from the prison and reburied in St. Patrick's Roman Catholic Cemetery in Leighton Stone. But the pardon doesn't completely settle the question of who killed Beryl and Geraldine. In 2003, Timothy's surviving sisters received compensation for the miscarriage of justice. By then, an independent assessment of the case concluded that there was no implicating Timothy in Beryl's murder either, and that Beryl was probably killed by John Christie. But then her brother wrote this whole book on why he believes Timothy Evans absolutely was his sister's killer, and how he was abusive and mean to her, and how nice John Christie was to his sister, and how off again, he's a kid. So if he went over there, he probably was nice to him. Yeah, I don't know. At the end of the day, that investigation was really flawed.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:17

And so was he, so was Timothy Evans. His confessions were inconsistent. Obviously, he wasn't a perfect person. He lied and he changed his story. He made himself incredibly difficult for police to believe. But none of those things proved he was a murderer. And if they would have searched that place thoroughly, they would have found the bodies of two other women. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:42

And so or two or three.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:46

At the time they would have only found two. Two, okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:48

Because those would have been the two in the garden.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:50

The two in the garden. Yeah. And so John Christie went home and continued murdering women. So what do you think?

SPEAKER_02 1:15:00

I think John Christie did Geraldine and Beryl. You just talked about it a little bit. Unfortunately, for Timothy Evans, because he was a known liar, he made it worse on himself. Again, it might not make him a murderer, but how is anybody to know? So the lesson from there is we need to be people of integrity. Right. If you don't have any integrity, it might bite you in the butt later in anything. In a terrible way. In a terrible way. But yeah, I think John Christie, absolutely. Because one of the things is I think it was Evan's first story when he said John Christie said he knew a way to help terminate the pregnancy. And some of those details came up later that he actually did do those things with other women. So to me, that's pointing to that very first story was the real one. Right, right. So here's a question for you.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:54

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:54

Do you think his wife Ethel, do you think Evans, George Christie's wife, wasn't her name Ethel? Yes. Do you think she knew about you don't think she knew? And why do you think he killed her? Because she might have found out about it. I was wondering about that. I was I was wondering if she either found out. So who knows what she came upon? Or maybe she just caught him with a prostitute and got mad and then they caught and then he killed her. Who knows? But I yeah, I think she found out something.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:22

Oh yeah. What are the chances that two murderers would be living in the same flat? So I really don't I think Tim Timothy Evans was a flawed human being, but I don't think he was a murderer. I don't either. I don't either.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:39

Wow, that's crazy. Well, those were some hard times. Yes, they were.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:44

Now I'd like to remind you that it's a proven scientific fact that no one has ever been murdered in a war-stricken city while listening to hard times and true crimes. So keep yourself safe by downloading every single episode. Like, share, and subscribe, and tell everybody you know and a few people you don't to check us out. Till next time, goodbye.