The Christie Case

[Stephen Thomas]

1971 footage of Rillington Place demolition.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiioCKL0pp4

[Ophelia]

Thank you for sharing that with us, Stewart. I wonder what happened after Christmas! .....

[Ophelia]

Anyone interested in the Christie case should check out the following website:-

https://www.10-rillington-place.co.uk

which contains a good deal of fascinating information.


SHERLOCK

Very interesting and informative site. Thank you!

[Sherlock]

It's a pity that the soundtrack has been lost from the clip of the demolition of Rillington Place, as it would have been interesting to hear the presenter's commentary.

I believe that the demolition took place immediately after the filming of 10 Rillington Place with Richard Attenborough, John Hurt and Judy Geeson in 1970. This is mentioned by Sir Richard Attenborough himself in his introduction to the DVD release of the film.

in the novel Thirteen Steps Down, Mix Cellini remarks that he had always wished that there had been a remake of the film with someone who looked rather more like Christie than Richard Attenborough.

I have always though that it would be a good idea to make another film about the case, perhaps this time with more ambiguity as to whether Christie or Evans was responsible for the murders of Beryl and Geraldine. Not sure who could be cast as Christie, though. Oddly enough, I've recently been watching DVDs of the 1970s comedy series It Ain't Half Hot, Mum, and I was struck by how much John Clegg who played Gunner Graham resembled Christie!!!

I believe that a stage verision of the case based on Ludovic Kennedy's book has also been produced, but I have not yet been able to see a production of it.

SHERLOCK

[Brickbat]

Believe what you heard

I wish to pay you the compliment of the following assumptions.
I assume that you are a full and complete product of the enlightenment. I will assume that you do not believe that the earth is flat, that Richard the Third was a nice guy, that the American government planned and orchestrated the World Trade Centre attacks or that the Moon landings were faked in a shed.
Once, these assumptions would have gone unstated and been taken for granted. Now it is by no means certain; it is, indeed, a compliment that I am paying you. I recognise the statistical possibility that it might well be untrue, since societies exist to advance all of these propositions.
But when does a society become a cult? And when does a cult become an army? When the worship of unreason claims enough believers, and the decent look away.
The difference between all irrational beliefs, good, bad or ugly, is merely one of degree. Flat-earthers are of exactly the same mind-set as creationists, and moon landing conspiracists play the same games with historical evidence as holocaust revisionists.
But if what they believe is so clearly bonkers, why do they believe it? We look instinctively for a hidden, ‘real’ reason, because we as rational people would always expect to find one in ourselves. In many cases it is obvious, but with something like the Richard the Third Society, where it’s so difficult to understand how anyone could be fussed either way, we are doubly curious because we still know there must be one. Not a reason to believe, necessarily, but a reason to want to.
Religions take over the world because they satisfy universal human needs (and deliberately target the needy), the Richard the Third society remains an eccentric clique because they target a minority and only a minority receive satisfaction from their claims. (Presumably the satisfaction of being renegades against the orthodoxy.) But in both cases emotional satisfaction, not rational deliberation, is the key.
A good example of how unreason can persist in the most rational of contexts through this ‘power of need’ is seen in a famous saga from the field of criminology.

When John Christie was found guilty of the murder of several women in his flat at 10 Rillington Place, London, in the nineteen-fifties, thoughts immediately returned to the case of Timothy John Evans, a former tenant hanged a few years earlier after the deaths of his wife and baby daughter. Immediately, committees were formed to re-examine the case, as Evans had explicitly accused Christie of committing the crimes, and the possibility of two stranglers operating independently in the same house at the same time was obviously too ridiculous to countenance.
Two singular personalities – broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy and writer Michael Eddowes – led the crusade to have Evans’s name cleared, each writing a book declaring Evans innocent. Kennedy’s, 10 Rillington Place, is still in print, was made into a film, and is now the officially sanctioned version of what actually took place.
A new inquiry found Evans innocent of the crime for which he was convicted (though still guilty of the other) thus he was granted a limited pardon. Regular calls are made, and in the current climate will surely prove ultimately successful, for Evans to be officially declared not guilty of both murders, on the grounds that he is plainly, obviously and undeniably innocent. The case is routinely cited as the single most terrible miscarriage of justice in British legal history.

There’s only one problem with this universally accepted account of the case: it is hogwash from start to finish. But what is most interesting is that it is so transparently hogwash. Just as Darwinism seemed obvious to Huxley after Darwin had discovered it, so it is impossible to come away from a reading of John Eddowes’s book The Two Killers of Rillington Place and not ask some pretty searching questions of oneself. Questions like: What on earth was I thinking when I read Kennedy’s book to have been convinced by it?
As Colin Wilson wrote: “After this book, it should be impossible for any sensible person to believe in the innocence of Tim Evans.” It should be, yes, it should be.
John Eddowes is, incidentally, the son of Michael Eddowes, and the only writer to have freely admitted that his father, the man who set in motion the Rillington Place bandwagon, was “mentally ill, a fantasist and a liar” obsessed with conspiracies (he published two nonsensical books on the Kennedy assassination). Ludovic Kennedy, too, seems to have an obsession with exposing miscarriages of justice that stretches beyond this single case and may have its roots in his personal experiences.
John’s book is totally lacking any of that bellowing passion that characterises the irrationalist. It is reasonable and calm. It patiently and devastatingly re-sifts the evidence, laying out the abundant evidence of Evans’s guilt, explaining inarguably why Christie could not possibly have been the killer and exposing the manifest weaknesses in Kennedy’s attempts to prove otherwise.
Then, as the coup-de-grace, he lists all the absurdities and impossibilities that would have to be true if Kennedy were right. This latter is the most damning, shaming section of all. For it shows that in being convinced by Kennedy as I and so many other readers were, we were not being swayed by his arguments, for they are clearly ridiculous. Neither did his evidence convince us, for he doesn’t actually have any, merely speculation supported at almost every point by wild conjecture, character assassination and crazed conspiracies. Instead, we were allowing ourselves to be convinced because we wanted to be.
Obviously, the implications of this are very serious indeed. Certainly they proved serious for John Eddowes, because legal pressure led to his book being withdrawn shortly after the paperback edition was issued.
So what are the needs served by the steadfast belief in Evans’s innocence that are so powerful they can make us, myself included, somehow read a book without actually reading it at all? Why has it gone beyond the cultish belief-level of, say, the Richard the Third Society, to become instead the orthodox explanation?
The answer, I think, lies in the fact that it meets not one need but several, and as with religion, these needs intertwine and support each-other, so that mere logic, and petty facts, are simply not enough to weaken them.
The most successful myths, therefore, are probably those that meet the greatest number of separate needs and are thus able to bring the largest numbers of people together (in a way that the cultier, fringe beliefs cannot.) There are doubtless many needs met by the Evans-Christie case; here are three of the biggest ones:

1. The appeal to common sense
Common sense tells us Evans’s innocence was obvious the second Christie was arrested. No further examination of the case was necessary, because it is simply obvious that two stranglers could not possibly have been at work in the same house at the same time. To think otherwise is insane.
Or is it? In the first place, to say that both were stranglers creates a greater sense of unity than is in fact warranted. Had all the victims died from poisoned darts fired from a blowpipe there might be some case to make along these lines. But Christie was a sex murderer who strangled with a rope as part of an elaborate rape ritual, Evans a domestic killer who killed his wife during a quarrel, and his daughter in a fit of panic with a tie. In every meaningful way the killings were utterly different; the fact that both men were stranglers, as impulsive killers like Evans so often are, is as relevant as the fact that neither were disc jockeys.
More importantly, for two killers to have been at large in the same place and time is not unlikely in the slightest. That it has only happened once in recorded history is a far greater surprise. Though counter-intuitive, simple application of probability theory supports the likelihood of such an event.

2. The lure of conspiracy and cover-up
We love to think that we live in a world where our leaders are constantly lying to us, trying to pull a fast one, cover up their tracks. It perversely makes us feel more powerful to believe wacky theories that blow the whistle on non-existent conspiracies. And when our crazy revisionism becomes the orthodox, as here, our victory is complete.
In truth, Kennedy’s book is at its most transparently flawed on the many occasions when he is forced to justify fantastic conjectures and inexplicable behaviours by suggesting criminal conspiracies. From the experts who examined the bodies, spoke at the trial and reinvestigated the case, to the policemen who took Evans’s statement, all were at best professionally incompetent (or charlatans, as he libellously and insultingly puts it) and often knowingly lying. Without these Roswell-style ravings, Kennedy’s case would collapse.
But this is not a presidential assassination. This is an ordinary, tragic, sordid domestic murder of the kind police in the post-war years were confronted with on a regular basis. If you are going to claim that it was a criminal conspiracy then the onus is on you to explain why. What possible reason could there be for regional policemen, for example, to be involved in a deliberate attempt to frame the man who did, after all, walk into their station unbidden and confess to a crime of which they had no previous knowledge? Kennedy’s book gives the impression that this simple question has never even occurred to him, any more than it did to me when I first read it.
And that’s the odd thing about conspiracy theories, and the mindset that conjures them. They start as limitations dictated, as no logical enquiry ever should be, by the necessity of reaching a preconceived conclusion: I have to conclude that Evans is innocent; therefore these men have to be liars.
But instead of being troubled by these obstacles, still less set straight by them; our theorist begins to enjoy this very aspect. Suddenly he is Woodward and Bernstein, following trails of deceit and subterfuge to the highest level. This explains the sense of intoxication clearly displayed by moon-landing conspiracists and their ilk: it is the illusory feeling of power that their arguments give them. And thus the conspiracies spread through the book like a forest fire and, far from being worried by their profusion, the writer sees each as further support for the others, or perhaps ceases even to notice them. The result is a house of cards; we need only remove one to bring down the whole.
As a general rule of thumb, while conspiracies do of course happen and we should never dismiss the suggestion without consideration, when a groundbreaking theory comes along in any field that requires conspiracy upon conspiracy in order to make internal sense we should approach it with extreme caution.
But the thought of heartless governments killing innocent citizens and trying to hide the fact appeals mightily to both our sense of self-importance and (in a political sense) our self-loathing. Children see conspiracies everywhere: when they have to go to bed early, when the teacher tells them off and it wasn’t their fault, when they don’t get picked for the football team. It’s never because they’ve been bad, or an honest mistake, or the fact that other kids are better. It is always a calculated personal affront. Some of us grow out of this kind of thing and some of us do not.

3. The appeal to ‘the greater good’
The Christie case has enormous emotional, political and polemical value in that it supposedly led to a miscarriage of justice in which an innocent man died. Thus it becomes co-opted as an illustration of the dangers of capital punishment, lifting them from the abstract to the concrete and strengthening the argument against legal killing. (Note, therefore, that the story does not support any moral objections to capital punishment per se, merely a subsidiary argument about potential for error.)
This need requires our myths be kept in place if their instructional value is sufficient to warrant their survival.
To give another example: why is the speech supposedly given by Chief Seattle to the white men who had come to steal his land in 1854 (“How can you buy or sell the sky?” etc) so endlessly quoted and re-quoted? Because it is commonly felt that our duty of repair to American Indians requires the wholesale swallowing of the myth of their innate ecological responsibility. It doesn’t matter that Indians were humans who behaved in their own best interests, as humans always do, and were simply not technologically advanced enough to do as much environmental damage as we are. Still less does it matter that Chief Seattle was a slave-owner and murderer whose only recorded comment that day had been to thank the white invaders for buying his land, or that the speech itself was written in 1971 for American television by a man called Ted. The myth is simply too necessary to be allowed to perish.

We have already seen DNA evidence prove the guilt of James Hanratty, the A6 murderer, whom I in common with many others was firmly convinced was innocent. With Evans proved guilty too it is tempting to feel that one of the core arguments against capital punishment is itself being eroded, and to thus resist exposing the truth about Evans and Christie on these grounds.
But establishing Evans’s guilt has no bearing whatsoever on ethical arguments against hanging; neither does it alter the fact that it is still possible for mistakes and miscarriages to happen. The risk of this happening remains exactly the same whether it has actually happened a million times, once, or never. Yet I repeatedly encounter the irrational conviction that the moral argument is weakened by the removal of concrete examples, and further that anyone who thinks Evans guilty must be using the claim as a front to push a pro-capital punishment agenda. How very revealing!
So here we see how one belief – that Evans is innocent – ends up satisfying a potent cocktail of ‘internal’ needs and beliefs, each strongly resistant to attack and all totally impervious to so blunt a weapon as evidential proof. Which is why fifteen years after John Eddowes’s book was published and suppressed the vast majority of educated, sensible people aware of the case continue to believe a version of events that has not merely been proved to be untrue but also, and this is far more scary, is obviously untrue, even by its own lights. So consumed are we with the wish to believe the central unifying myth, we will happily go along with dozens of internal falsehoods and inconsistencies. To see through this process means switching off our need to believe, and that’s not easy. We are blinded by desire.

Now it should be possible to leave this specific example of false belief and return to the wider irrational world, armed with a set of general principles. And indeed it seems to me that variations on the internal needs we detected in the Evans-Christie myth can be just as easily found in alternate belief systems.
Religion, for instance, begins as an attempt to understand the world based on the commonsensical (but wrong) intuitive belief that the world cannot appear uncaused. This matches the first need: the common sense desire to maintain that the ‘two stranglers’ hypothesis is obviously absurd a priori.
As with the conspiracists of step two, when we believe something and the prevailing wisdom runs against us we become angry. Like children, we refashion the world in all its complexities as a simple matter of them and us, and from this mire come sects, pressure groups, terrorism, and conspiracy theories. There is something extremely addictive about being the underdog when you are convinced your cause is right, especially if you also have friends who agree with you and an enemy that doesn’t want to listen.
When did a pressure group ever voluntarily disband when its original aims were met? What do they actually do? They suddenly discover a bunch more aims, because being a pressure group feels great and they would be lost without the kick of it. It is obvious that by far the noisiest and most belligerent minority groups in the western world tend to be those who have come closest to getting what they want. (Just as revolutions tend to occur in the first flush of confidence when conditions start to improve rather than when they are at their lowest ebb.) Being part of a righteous minority is a drug like few others, and it is no coincidence that the world’s most successful religions tend to be those that emerge from the greatest persecution and repression. (The ones that don’t remain loony cliques, popular only with vapid Hollywood celebrities and other show-offs.) Then, when such religions finally claw their way to a position of dominance, they display all of the petty and mean-minded cruelty that was once directed towards them, this time with the added incentive of a sense of historical grievance.
When you have this horrible, child-like certainty it must follow that all those who deviate from your belief do so not innocently but knowingly and wickedly, and pose a threat to its dominance in the myth-pool. Even to concede the possibility of alternatives is to fatally weaken one’s own, since it is built not in reasoned argument but in dogma. Hey presto: Salman Rushdie is sentenced to death, John Eddowes has his book pulled from the shelves, and unreason wins, aided by the tolerance and decency of its enemies.
By now, religion has long since ceased to be merely an account of life’s origins; it has evolved to satisfy other needs. For instance it reassures its adherents that they will live after death and that injustices will be rectified and punished. It also codifies social customs and laws, and becomes a tool of politics. It has been co-opted, just as the Evans case has been co-opted by those who oppose capital punishment. For these reasons, the central idea is no longer capable of question, since too much else of value is now thought to be dependent upon it, not least part of its adherents’ most basic sense of who they are.
Armed with Darwin or Eddowes it should be easy to return to those purely intuitive decisions that informed step one, and reverse them. But we can’t, because what had begun as a reasoned conclusion based on the evidence then available has become an unreasoning need, feeding appetites that are not intrinsic to it but which instead grew around it, like fungi on a rotten log.
Among the handwritten tributes left at the spot where Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh was murdered for daring to criticise Islam was one which read simply, “This far and no further”. Irrational beliefs should be tolerated until they become sufficiently confident to start making clear demonstrations of intolerance towards others. Then they must be tolerated no longer. Any person claiming responsibility over others on the basis of anything they hold to be true must not object to being asked to explain why. If all they have to back up their claims is an extremely old, extremely nasty book, or a set of needs and creeds that run contrary to established scientific fact, then the only place in the world for their point of view is as a private passion to be indulged behind closed doors and never imposed upon others.
We must become evangelists for reason.
But win or lose (and on the present showing, we’re going to lose), facts are always facts, so here are four good ones to see us into the next Dark Age:
1. The truth respects no minority interests.
2. Wanting something to be true does not make it so.
3. Timothy Evans was a murderer.
4. So was James Hanratty.

I would like to express my gratitude to John Eddowes for his time and assistance. Obviously it has not been possible in this piece to explain in detail his arguments or the flaws in Kennedy’s. For that reason I urge you to track down his brilliant book. Heroic publishers please note that John retains the rights to his work and is considering revising it for a new edition.

Matthew Coniam

[Sherlock]

I first read John Eddowes' book "The Two Killers of Rillington Place" when I borrowed a copy from my local library some years ago, and later obtained a second-hand copy of my own.

I must admit that after reading it for the first time, I was 99% convinced that Evans had in fact murdered Beryl and Geraldine, and that it was purely coinicidental that he happened to be sharing a house with a man who had already committed two murders.

Certainly, I feel that Ludovic Kennedy does tend to get carried away with his anti-death penalty stance in "10 Rillington Place" and tends to rely too much on conjecture.

My own feeling is that Evans was probably more violent and not as much of a harmless simpleton as Kennedy makes out. Therefore, it is quite possible, or even quite likely, that he did murder his wife and daughter, just as I believe that the DNA results show that it is quite possible, or even quite likely, that Hanratty did commit the A6 murders.

But still...........!

I think that if Evans did indeed murder his wife and daughter, Christie would almost certainly have known about it; I think that John Eddowes pointed this out in his book. Therefore, it may possibly have been in his interests to have helped Evans to cover up the murders so that his own would not be discovered. One point which Kennedy makes is how the bodies of Beryl and Geraldine remained in the wash house for three weeks without Christie's dog smelling them out. This suggests that Christie may at least have been aware that they were there, and may have helped Evans to put them there, although Eddowes suggests that Christie may have been unwilling to touch the bodies due the risk of fibre transfer which could implicate him.

I think it is quite possible that Christie did have a sexual interest in Beryl, and that he may indeed have suggested to Evans that he perform an abortion on her, but that Evans turned this down. It would appear that Christie had been in the habit of saying this to other women.

I do not feel that Ludovic Kennedy's book was particularly well-written, and that he relied to much on conjecture and on the emotional appeal of the case, but that need not mean that he was entirely wrong on all counts.

I also feel that John Eddowes' book was perhaps too scathing in its denunciation of Kennedy's work, but that need not mean that Eddowes was wrong on all counts either.

So where does the truth lie? Somewhere between the two accounts of the case perhaps? At the moment I am just not sure, and like the A6 murder I feel that this case will never be wrapped up to everyone's satisfaction.

As Molly Lefebure says in "Murder with a Difference"-

The confusing thing about both Evans and Christie is that although neither of them was capable of telling the truth in its entirety, neither of them lied a hundred per cent from start to finish. Parts of their statements are obviously fabricated, and parts unexpectedly ring of the truth.

Lefebure goes on to says that:-

Some people think that if Timothy Evans had not been hanged, but were stil alive, in prison, he could clear the mystery for us; but I feel he would merely be repeating today trhe words he repeated after his trial, "Christie done it", and we should be no nearer knowing what really happened than we are today.

I would tend to agree with this.

regards

SHERLOCK

[Sherlock]

Having considered the matter a little further, I feel that I am trying to say something similar to Molly Lefebure's observation on the ability of both Evans and Christie to lie or tell the truth.

I believe that both Kennedy and Eddowes have stated what they genuinely believe to be the truth concerning the case in each of their books, and that neither of them have set out to deliberately deceive the public in any way.

Both of their accounts contain a good deal that is valid, but each of them has been hampered in different ways; Kennedy by his passionate anti-death penalty stance which leads him to put too much emphasis on conjecture and to gloss over important matters such as the lack of carbon monoxide in Beryl's blood at the second post mortem when her body was exhumed, and Eddowes perhaps by his intense dislike of Kennedy's book, which can make him rather vitriolic at times, although this need not invalidate his arguments against the so-called "standard verison". At the same time, Kennedy may have been correct in his assumption that Christie killed both Beryl and Geraldine, although if this was so I do not think it was in quite the same way that Kennedy suggests.

I would have to say that I do not feel that Eddowes' book is entirely free from conjecture either; for example, I think he suggested that Evans kept the body of Geraldine hidden in his suitcase and placed it in the wash house when he briefly returned to Rillington Place from Wales and spoke to Christie. For all I know this may well be true, but as far as I know there is no evidence to support it, and I do not think that it has been suggested by anyone else, so at the moment it can only be a theory.

In short, I feel that neither Kennedy or Eddowes were entirely correct in their assumptions from start to finish, but at the same time neither were entirely wrong either.

I hope that this does not sound like a load of gibberish or that I am sitting on the fence, but that is as far as my thinking has taken me at the moment.

Incidently, if John Eddowes was to publish a revised edition of his book, I would certainly buy it.

regards
SHERLOCK

[a_baron]

I've done a lot of research on this case over the years, in the original files, and thought I'd made notes on the Windsor murder but I can't find them. Basically, after Christie was arrested some people remembered the murder of a young girl in Windsor. The boxer Sugar Ray Leonard had been staying at an hotel there and a man resembling Christie had been photographed in the crowd outside. For some reason the authorities thought he might have had something to do with the murder, and a disguised appeal was put out through major newspapers to find him. The man came forward and was eliminated; I think he was a businessman; his name was George Mason Black.

As I said, after the house of horrors came to light, some people remembered this and thought Christie was the man, but he was not.

One day I really do want to complete my bibliography of Evans & Christie. Incidentally, I'm one of those people who believe Evans murdered his wife, if not the baby too.

Check out too my own real life murder site:

http://www.ismichaelstoneguilty.info/

and

http://www.infotextmanuscripts.org/murder_one.html

[sdreid]

Hi Baron,

Do you mean Sugar Ray Robinson or was there another Sugar Ray Leonard? The SRL I'm familiar with likely wasn't even born yet?

[a_baron]

Yes, of course Sugar Ray Robinson! Check out this too!

http://www.infotextmanuscripts.org/stone-photo-appeal.html

[a_baron]

Excellent post - re "innocent" Evans check out too

http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=13187

one detail, Christie was tried only for the murder of his wife.

If you allow for the coincidence of two murderers living in the same house, there is not much to say about the innocence of Evans. The police were also very clever when they investigated Evans later cliaims. They split Christie and his wife up luring him to the police station on the pretext of taking a statement, and searched his flat while they did so.

http://www.infotextmanuscripts.org/stone-photo-appeal.html

[sdreid]

I tend to think that Evans was innocent. He didn't really have a motive where Christie did not to mention that this sort of violence was not in his character. I'm not saying that it is for sure that he didn't do it.

My view has nothing to do with the merits of the death penalty. Innocent people are killed in war all the time and it is considered acceptable as is the rare instance of it in the criminal system as far as I'm concerned. Besides, which is a greater injustice, convicting an innocent man and hanging him or locking him in a cage for 65 years?

[Sherlock]

Although I was aware that Christie had been asked whether he might have been responsible for the murder of the young girl at Windsor, I didn't know why he had been connected with this case, and it was interesting to find out.

My guess is that he probably did not commit this murder; as far as is known there was nothing in his past which might suggest he was capable of harming a child; this might also suggest that he did not murder Geraldine Evans, although this is by no means certain.

If Evans was indeed guilty of the murders of Beryl and Geraldine, which will probably never be known for certain, I would tend to agree with Molly Lefebure, who stated in her 1958 book Murder with a Difference:-

The wretched Timothy was no torch bearer by temperament, but since his death he has become a martyr for the abolitionists, a kind of "John Brown's body. I do not believe in total abolition, but I do not believe in hanging murderers of the Evans category; so, although I tend to think he was guilty, I do not get satisfaction out of the thought that he was hanged.

If Evans was guilty of the crimes for which he was executed, Beryl was probably killed in a moment of rage, and Geraldine out of either rage or desperation. Nowadays he would have been sentenced to life imprisonment, although I do not know how long he would actually have served; 10-15 years perhaps?

regards

SHERLOCK

[Sherlock]

It also occurs to me that the one murder for which Christie was tried and executed, that of his wife, was in fact atypical in that unlike his other known murders there was no discernable sexual motive; eg there was no evidence of intercourse at the time of death.

This might possibly suggest that could be influenced to commit murders in other ways; for example, Ethel's murder could have been a cold-blooded means of disposing of her, either to permit him to commit further crimes or to silence her if she knew something of his previous murders. Or he could have murdered her in a rage, as Ludovic Kennedy records in Ten Rillington Place that she sometimes taunted him about his impotence.

The fact that he claimed to have strangled her in bed is interesting; one wonders if he had attempted to have intercourse with her and and failed, and then killed her after she mocked as she lay beside him in bed.

The fact that he had been imprisoned for assaulting a woman with a cricket bat some years before could suggest that he was capable of violence on some occasions; at the same time, it is also interesting that , to quote Medical and Scientific Investigations in the Christie Case, when Ethel's body was discovered it was found that between the legs was a silk wool cotton mixture vest placed in a position as a diaper.

Similar diapers were found on the bodies of Kathleen Maloney and Rita Nelson, whose murders were sexual in nature. One wonders, therefore, why Christie placed a similat diaper on his wife after killing her?


regards
SHERLOCK

[sdreid]

I haven't read TRP but in same said film the the inference is that Mrs. Christie was murdered because Reg was afraid she was apt to spill the beans.