EVIL PSYCHOPATHS (True Crime) (9 page)

Part Three: 20Th Century British Psychopathic Killers

John Reginald Christie

It was a small Victorian house, built in the 1860s when the Notting Hill and North Kensington areas were undergoing development. Situated where the elevated dual carriageway, the Westway, runs today, number 10 Rillington Place was located in a row of three-storey terraced houses. The house was split into three flats, none of which had a bathroom. Instead, an outhouse in the garden was used by the occupants of all three flats and a washhouse was also located there for the use of tenants, but it was not always functioning.

Forty-year-old John Reginald Christie was a quiet little man, wth a receding reddish-ginger hair and pale blue eyes. His wife, Ethel, was a plump woman whom friends believed to be frightened of her husband. They seemed aloof as a couple, and many disliked the way they seemed to think they were better than their neighbours. For this reason, they kept very much to themselves.

Christie was originally from Yorkshire, coming from a strict upbringing in which his father was not afraid to beat his children. He would make them go for long walks, which were more like military marches than strolls in the countryside. He was a frail child, disliked by his father, but spoilt by his mother. His emasculation was reinforced by the fact that he had four sisters. He was a very private child with few friends and, while still young, developed a pathological abhorrence of dirt. As he got older, he began to take part in activities at his local church, joining the choir and eventually becoming a scoutmaster. He enjoyed wearing the uniform.

His relationship with his sisters became complex. As a young child he had been disturbed to see one of his sister’s legs up to the knee. He became attracted to these women who bossed him about, hating them at the same time for their dominance over him. It is likely that at this time he began to develop an antipathy towards all women, mainly because he felt he could not satisfy them. The nicknames given to him at school when his first attempts at lovemaking ended in failure did not help – ‘Reggie-No-Dick’ and ‘Can’t-Make-It-Christie’.

He was a signalman during the First World War and at one point lost his voice for three years following a hysterical reaction to an incident when a mustard gas shell knocked him unconscious. This, however, does not seem to have stopped him marrying Ethel in 1920.

His marriage was blighted by his impotence and he continued visiting prostitutes afterwards, as he had been doing since the age of nineteen. All they served to do, however, was to remind him of his inadequacy with the opposite sex.

His first brush with the law occurred after he became a postman in 1920. He stole some postal orders and went to prison for three months. His life really began to fall apart in 1924, when he was twenty-five. He was put on probation at the post office for charges of violence and there were whispers that he had been using prostitutes. He walked out on Ethel and travelled to London.

In 1928, he was back in prison, sentenced to nine months for theft. When he was released, he lived with a prostitute but when he hit her on the head with a cricket bat, he returned to jail for six months. A few years later, he was arrested again and sent back to prison for the theft of a car. During this time there were police reports regarding his violence towards women, however these could not be proved.

In 1933, he asked Ethel to move back in with him. On the shelf at thirty-five and feeling lonely, she readily agreed, travelling down to join him in London. Little did she know the kind of man he had become in the ten years they had been apart.

Christie had been an inveterate hypochondriac since he was a child. Following an accident in which he was hit by a car, he began an incredible series of visits to the doctor – 173 over fifteen years. It gave him an excuse to remain at home and complain about his many ailments.

He moved with Ethel into the ground floor flat at 10 Rillington Place in December 1938. They were pleased with the flat because, as it was on the ground floor, they would enjoy exclusive use of the garden. Christie, meanwhile, had signed up as a volunteer member of the War Reserve Police. Incredibly, they asked no questions about his criminal record. He was delighted to pick up his uniform at Harrow police station and served for four years. Unfortunately, however, he became a little too fanatical about the role and was soon known to his neighbours as the ‘Himmler of Rillington Place’.

Meanwhile, he continued to consort with other women, one of whom worked with him at the police station. When her husband returned from fighting overseas, he gave Christie a severe beating.

In April 1948, Timothy Evans and his pregnant wife, Beryl, moved into the top floor flat at 10 Rillington Place and six months later Beryl gave birth to a daughter, Geraldine. Evans was a diminutive, uneducated Welsh lorry driver of limited intelligence who was given to lying and self-aggrandising fantasies. He was a heavy drinker with a very bad temper and he and his wife often engaged in loud and sometimes violent arguments, mostly over Beryl’s inability to make ends meet. Evans’s low wages barely covered the rent and their bills. Matters were made worse in late 1949 when she informed her husband that she was pregnant again.

Beryl insisted immediately that she wanted an abortion, but Evans, a Roman Catholic, was against the idea. She took pills and did what she could to abort the baby, eventually confiding in Christie who, although he had absolutely no previous experience, told her that he knew how to carry out abortions, having learned how to do it during the war. He persuaded her to let him undertake the procedure, but it ended disastrously. When Evans came home later that day, 8 November 1949, he was horrified to learn from Christie that Beryl had died during the operation. Christie told Evans that he would dispose of her body down a nearby drain and that he would also find someone to look after Geraldine. He ordered Evans to leave London.

Christie later told the police that he saw Beryl leave with her baby around noon and never saw her again. Later, Timothy Evans came home and the Christies went out for the evening. Around midnight, he claimed, he and his wife heard a loud thump from above them. As the man in the second floor flat was away, it could only have come from the Evans flat on the third floor and it was followed by the sound of something heavy being dragged across the floor.

The following day, Christie told the police, Evans told him his wife had gone to Bristol and the day after that, he came home saying that he had packed in

his job and was selling up and moving to Bristol to join her.

Evans actually returned to Wales, coming back on 23 November to Rillington Place where, Christie claimed, he told him that Beryl had left him.

What had actually happened was that Christie had gone up to their flat after Evans had gone to work. Beryl laid a quilt on the floor in front of the fire and lay down on it. He may then have tried to gas her and she had panicked and begun to lash out at him. He took out a cord and strangled her. He then tried to have intercourse with her.

It was all too much for the uncomplicated Evans and he eventually went to a police station a few weeks later to tell the police that he had disposed of his wife’s body after she had taken something to make her abort her baby. He was afraid to bring Christie’s name into it and said that he had obtained the substance he had given her from a stranger. The police did not find the body down the drain outside the front door where he said he had put it, and in fact they could not see how one man, especially a small man like Evans, could have moved the extremely heavy manhole cover that took three of them to shift. They confronted him with this and he confessed that it had been Christie who had administered the abortion pills and put Beryl in the drain. Police searched the house at 10 Rillington Place but it was no more than half-hearted and they even failed to notice the human thigh bone that was being used to prop up the garden fence.

They found a stolen briefcase, however, which gave them an excuse to arrest Evans. Christie was questioned and he emphasised how much of a liar Evans was and how violent his marriage to Beryl had been.

There was still no sign of Beryl and a more thorough search of the property was carried out. Eventually, in the washhouse, they discovered her body and that of her daughter. They had been dead, it was estimated, for three weeks. During lengthy police interrogations Evans inexplicably confessed no fewer than four times to killing his wife.

At the trial, six weeks later, Christie denied that he had agreed to perform an abortion on Beryl and his testimony, plus Evans’s poor performance in the witness box, resulted in a guilty verdict. Timothy Evans was sentenced to death and hanged at Pentonville Prison on 9 March 1950.

Christie seemed to have got away with murder.

In late 1952, Ethel Christie suddenly disappeared. Christie told friends that she had moved back to Sheffield and that he was going to join her when he had settled their affairs in London. He gave up his job, sold all his furniture and rented out his flat to a couple. After they had stayed there just one night, however, they learned that the flat was, of course, not Christie’s to rent and were thrown out. The landlord rented the flat to a Jamaican immigrant named Beresford Brown. Tidying up the kitchen, one day, Brown peeled off some wallpaper and discovered a door leading to a pantry. Opening the door slightly, he shone a torch into the space beyond. There, to his horror, he saw the body of a woman, seated and hunched forward, clad only in bra, stockings and suspenders. He immediately called the police and when they arrived, they discovered another two women’s bodies. They were the bodies of three prostitutes that Christie had lured back to the house and killed while he lived there – Kathleen Maloney, Rita Nelson and Hectorina MacLennan. Searching the remainder of the flat, they found the remains of Ethel Christie under the floorboards of the living room. Christie had strangled her on 14 December 1952. She had been in poor health and Christie claimed later that he had merely put her out of her misery.

In the garden, another two women’s bodies were discovered – Austrian prostitute, Ruth Fuerst and a workmate of Christie’s whose catarrh he had promised he could cure with a special type of inhaler. Bringing her to the flat, he made her breathe in a concoction he had put in a jar. However, he had connected the jar to the gas supply. As she unknowingly breathed in the gas and weakened, he strangled her and as she died, had intercourse with her.

Christie’s impotence, it seemed, only dissipated when he had complete control over the woman with whom he was having sex. Of his first victim, he later said, ‘I remember as I gazed down at the still form of my first victim, experiencing a strange, peaceful thrill.’ It was a ‘thrill’ he would experience six times.

After wandering around London for several weeks, as the entire Metropolitan police force searched for him, Christie was finally arrested on Putney Bridge and confessed to the murders. He additionally admitted that he had killed Beryl Evans, but he never confessed to killing her baby, Geraldine. Nonetheless, many thought it highly unlikely that two stranglers could live in the same house.

On 15 July 1953, John Reginald Christie was hanged on the same gallows as Timothy Evans.

Debate about the execution of Evans raged on for years until in 1966 the Brabin Report concluded that Christie had killed Geraldine Evans and persuaded Timothy Evans not to go to the police. Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins awarded Evans a posthumous pardon in the case of Geraldine Evans. However, he has still not been declared innocent of the murder of his wife, for which he was not tried.

John George Haigh

The Acid-Bath Murderer

Was he really insane or was his bloodlust – the drinking of a glass of each of his victims’ blood – merely a story made up in order to make them think he was mad and allow him to get away with murder?

The court did not believe he was mad and he went to the gallows on 10 August 1949, sentenced to death for the murders of six people, although he, himself, claimed to have killed nine. Mostly, he killed for personal gain, making money from selling his victims’ possessions or houses, but one doctor described him as suffering from ‘the most rare and terrible paranoia of all the “egocentric” paranoias – the “ambitious” or “mystical’ paranoia, through which he saw himself as omnipotent and even guided by an outside force, possibly divine’. In this condition, he was uninterested in sex, the sexual urge being sublimated into self-worship. He believed himself to be untouchable.

In fact, John Haigh was absolutely certain that the law could not touch him for the murders he committed for the simple reason that the bodies no longer existed. He had dissolved them in baths of acid.

When Haigh was assessed medically, his upbringing came under a great deal of scrutiny and it undoubtedly had a great bearing on the man and the killer that he would become. He was born in 1909 and spent almost the first twenty-four years of his life in Outwood in Yorkshire. His parents were members of the strict religious sect, the Plymouth Brethren, and Haigh was, therefore, not allowed to participate in sport or entertainment when he was young and he was certainly not allowed to have any friends. So strict was his father in his beliefs that he built a ten feet-high fence around the garden to shield the family from the outside world. Like another murderer, John Reginald Christie, he developed a hatred for dirt.

John Haigh Sr had a bluish mark on his forehead that he described to his son as the Devil’s brand, telling him that he had been given it because he had sinned and that if John Jr sinned, he would be similarly marked. He told him that his mother remained unmarked because she was an angel and Haigh had something of a mother-fixation as a result. Throughout his childhood, however, he lived in terror of sinning and receiving the Devil’s brand, staying awake at night, praying that the mark would not appear on his face. Eventually, he realised that it was all a con to make him behave.

He was a solitary child but had a great love of music, joining the choir at Wakefield Cathedral. He began to move away from his parents’ religion but claims to have meditated on the bleeding Christ he saw in portraits at the cathedral and that his longing for blood began there.

In 1934, aged twenty-five, he married a woman he had only met a few months previously, but the marriage ended after just four months as he was arrested for fraud and sent to prison. Released from prison, he went into business, but when his partner died in an accident, he decided that his future lay in the south. He moved to London.

He found work as a secretary/chauffeur for an amusement park owned by William McSwan, rapidly becoming a close friend, meeting McSwan’s parents and sharing an interest in fast cars and flashy clothes with him. A year later, however, he moved on but it would not be the last the McSwans would see of him.

He set up a fake solicitor’s business and began to defraud people by creating phoney estates to be liquidated and company shares to be sold that he did not own. He was soon found out, however, and went to prison for four years. On his release, he went back in again for twenty-one months for theft. He vowed never to go back to prison and decided that the best way to make substantial sums of money instead of the piddling sums of which he had so far managed to defraud people, was to fleece rich old women. A method was developing in his head and he did some experiments while working in the prison’s tin shop. He worked with sulphuric acid to test its powers for dissolving things, trying it out successfully on mice and finding that they dissolved in thirty minutes.

Released again from prison, Haigh worked as an accountant and looked like marrying again, to Barbara Stephens, daughter of the owner of the company he was working for. Of course, he was still married to his first wife, but that was irrelevant.

Haigh always presented a car crash in which he was involved in 1944 as a turning point in his murderous career. He suffered a head injury and blood from it went into his mouth. He wrote later that it took him back to dreams he had about blood when he was a child. He wrote about ‘a forest of crucifixes’ that became trees with blood dripping from their branches. A man was going to each tree and catching the blood which he then gave to Haigh to drink. That year, he killed for the first time.

His victim would be his old friend, William McSwan, whom he bumped into again. Later writing that he had needed blood, Haigh hit McSwan on the head with a length of pipe at his workroom at 79 Gloucester Street on 9 September 1944. He then cut the unconscious man’s throat. Putting a cup against the wound, he filled it with blood and drank it.

But how to dispose of the body? He remembered that in his workroom he had a quantity of sulphuric acid. He obtained a forty-gallon oil-drum and squeezed McSwan’s body into it. He then poured the acid into it until the body was fully covered. He locked the room for the night and went home.

When he opened the drum a couple of days later, all that remained of his victim was a black, evil-smelling sludge that he disposed of down a drain, scooping out the congealed lumps that lay at the bottom, and then washing out the drum.

There was no body and, consequently, he reasoned, he could not be tried for murder.

He now began the process of getting his hands on McSwan’s money and possessions. He first persuaded the dead man’s parents that their son had run away to Scotland to avoid military service, faking postcards from William to them. Meanwhile, he also improved his method of killing, fashioning a mask to prevent his being affected by the acid fumes and a pump to get the acid into the drum more efficiently.

Two months later, he killed William McSwan’s parents, using the same length of pipe, drinking their blood and stuffing them into drums filled with acid. He told their landlady that they had gone to America and had their mail redirected to his address, including letters containing Mr. McSwan’s pension. He then sold their properties, using forged documentation. He made £6,000 from their murders and did it all so well that they were never reported missing and their deaths only became apparent when he confessed in 1949.

It was now 1945 and he was living in the Onslow Court Hotel in Kensington, an establishment much favoured by wealthy widows, just the type of prey that Haigh was looking for. In the meantime, he later claimed, he killed a young man by the name of Max but no one by that name was ever reported missing and it is not known if this claim was a self-aggrandising attempt by Haigh.

He had developed a serious gambling habit and by the end of 1947 had spent just about all the McSwan money. It was time to kill again.

He read an advert in the newspaper offering a house for sale. It had been placed by a well-off couple, fifty-two-year-old Dr Archibald Henderson and his forty-one-year-old wife Rose. He could not afford it, but befriended the couple anyway, playing piano for them and spending time in their company. Around this time, he began renting premises in Crawley from a company called Hustlea Products, moving his work materials there from Gloucester Street.

On 12 February 1948, he shot Dr Henderson in the head with his own gun, stolen by Haigh. Leaving the dead man in his storeroom in Crawley, he returned to Rose Henderson and told her that her husband had been taken ill. When she went into the storeroom, he shot her, too. He then claims he drank their blood before dissolving them in acid.

He was becoming careless, however, or perhaps he just felt invincible. Amongst the filthy sludge he dumped in the yard was Dr Henderson’s foot, still intact.

He paid the couple’s hotel bill next day and took possession of their dog. He also took possession of a property they owned and sold it. He sold his girlfriend some of Rose Henderson’s clothes and one of her handbags was purchased by a Mrs Olive Durand-Deacon, a wealthy widow who lived at the Onslow Court. He wrote to Mrs Henderson’s brother, Arnold Burlin, and told him that the couple had emigrated

to South Africa. Burlin had been tempted to report them missing, but Haigh concocted a story that the doctor had performed an illegal abortion and could be in trouble.

He claimed later that he next killed a girl called Mary from Eastbourne, but as with Max, his earlier claim, no evidence has ever been found that she ever existed.

He was tired of his car, a Lagonda, and reported it stolen. He had actually crashed it over a cliff. When an unidentified body was found a month later in the vicinity of the place where he had crashed it, no link with the car was made, even after his later confession. He bought a new Avis.

He had soon gambled away most of the money he had earned from the murder of the Hendersons and in the first few months of 1949, began a search for another victim.

Mrs Durand-Deacon, to whom he had sold Rose Henderson’s handbag, had approached him with a business idea involving false fingernails. To discuss the matter further, he invited her to Crawley where, as usual, he put a bullet in her head and bathed her in acid. Haigh told people that she had failed to arrive for the appointment. But one of her friends at the Onslow Court Hotel reported her disappearance to the police and a photograph and description of her was issued. Haigh was questioned, and when detectives learned of his unpaid bills at the hotel, they became suspicious. When they checked criminal records, they discovered that he had been in prison several times for fraud, forgery, obtaining money by false pretences, and theft. He was questioned again and it was noticed that he wore gloves at all times and was a compulsive hand-washer, due to his lifelong hatred for dirt. They checked the Crawley premises where, he told them, he performed what was known as ‘conversion work’ – an industrial practice in which industrial materials were broken down in acid. They found all of his equipment and, crucially, a briefcase bearing the initials ‘J.G.H.’ There were documents relating to Dr Henderson as well as the McSwans. They also found a .38 Enfield revolver that had been fired recently and a dry-cleaning receipt for a Persian lamb coat that had belonged to Mrs Durand-Deacon. They learned that Haigh had recently pawned items of the missing woman’s jewellery in Horsham.

As they searched the yard outside his workshop, they were puzzled by the sludge he had poured there. A doctor involved in the search noticed something about the size of a grape amongst it. It was a human gallstone. They found three more, as well as part of a human foot, eighteen pieces of human bone, dentures, the plastic handle of a red bag and a lipstick container.

Haigh was arrested but remained chillingly calm throughout. He was convinced he would be sent to Broadmoor, the hospital for the criminally insane – especially when he laid it on thick about the drinking of his victims’ blood – and would then be released in a few years. He told them everything, confessing in full to the murders he had committed and gilding the lily with a few others he probably did not commit. By his account, he killed nine people – the police charged him with killing six.

Haigh underwent a number of tests to decide whether or not he was insane but to his great disappointment, he was found to be fit to stand trial and, on 18 July 1949, he stood in the dock.

There was little doubt about the verdict and it took the jury only fifteen minutes to find him guilty of murder. On 6 August, he was executed at Wandsworth prison after donating his clothes to Madame Tussauds and allowing them to make a death mask of his face. He also gave them instructions that the wax model’s trousers should always be immaculately creased, the hair neatly parted and its shirt-cuffs showing just below the sleeve of his jacket. Given his fear of dirt, it has to be hoped that he also ordered them to dust it frequently.