Some years later, Dr David Haler – who had carried out the post mortem on PC Miles – told the author David Yallop that the bullet that killed Miles was a large-calibre bullet of a size ranging between .32 and .38. The standard Metropolitan Police pistol at that time was a .32 Webley automatic.
What happened to the bullet that killed PC Miles? It was never produced as such in court. Nor was any forensic expert, or indeed any other ballistics expert, asked by the defence to examine and comment on all the bullets, the ammunition and the gun.
It has been alleged that one of the policemen involved in the later stages of the confrontation at the warehouse, situated on an adjacent roof, could have shot PC Miles by accident or mistake. Craig himself always seemed to believe that he had shot Miles. However, Yallop quotes him as saying years later: ‘What I’ve never been able to understand is how I shot him between the eyes when he was facing away from me and was going the wrong way.’
During the brief trial, Lord Goddard made over 250 interjections, most of them harmful by implication to the accused. As the jury retired, the foreman asked the judge if they could examine Fairfax’s jacket and waistcoat. Lord Goddard retorted: ‘You will remember you are not considering the wounding of Sergeant Fairfax. You are considering the murder of a policeman!’ He was still wearing the knuckle-duster, which he had put on his hand again towards the end of his summing-up. He now strongly smote the bench with it.
The all-male jury were out for seventy-five minutes, between 11.15 and 12.30 am. While they were out, Lord Goddard dealt with another case in which Craig and a sixteen-year-old grammar school boy, Norman Parsley, both masked, had robbed an elderly Croydon couple at gunpoint. Parsley was sentenced to four years in jail.
Craig and Bentley were both found guilty of the murder of PC Syd Miles, but in Bentley’s case the jury added a recommendation for mercy. Neither prisoner said anything when invited to speak before sentence was passed. Lord Goddard donned his black cap and formally sentenced Derek Bentley to death.
Christopher Craig was too young to hang – though he was, said the judge: ‘One of the most dangerous young criminals who has ever stood in that dock.’ He was sentenced to be detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure. ‘You are the more guilty of the two,’ said Lord Goddard. ‘Your heart was filled with hate, and you murdered a policeman without thought of his wife, his family or himself. And never once have you expressed a word of sorrow for what you have done.’
The Lord Chief Justice then asked DS Fairfax (recently promoted to detective sergeant), PCs McDonald and Harrison, as well as the Chief Inspector of Z Division, to step forward. He told them that their conduct was worthy of the highest commendation and that the thanks of all law-abiding citizens was their due.
Three weeks later, on 6 January 1953, before Bentley’s appeal was heard, it was announced that DS Fairfax had been awarded the George Cross, PC Harrison and PC McDonald George Medals, and PC Jaggs a BEM.
Bentley’s appeal was heard on 13 January and dismissed. Although the press were largely in favour of his execution – four policemen had been killed by villains in 1951 – there were widespread protests, petitions and expressions of outrage by some MPs and many others. But the Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, remained inflexible and did nothing.
Derek Bentley, aged nineteen, was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint and Harry Allen in Wandsworth Prison at 9 am on Wednesday, 28 January 1953, just over three months after the shooting of PC Miles.
Some 5,000 people demonstrated outside the prison, crying ‘Murder!’ and singing ‘Abide With Me’ when the hour struck. The notice of Bentley’s execution, hung on the prison gates, was torn down and smashed.
It was rumoured that Bentley wept as he was taken to be hanged. Pierrepoint would later categorically deny this, saying in his autobiography: ‘I did not shake hands with the prisoner on the afternoon before his death. I did not make any notes about him. The Governor of Wandsworth did not have to urge me to get on with my job. Bentley did not cry on the way to the scaffold.’
Steve Fielding, in his book Pierrepoint:A Family of Executioners, had more to say about the event:
Rising early, Albert tested the equipment and with everything in readiness [he and Harry Allen] returned to their room, where Albert was served his favourite prison breakfast of fried plaice and potatoes. At a few seconds to nine the hangmen approached the condemned cell and took their places next to the governor. ‘Good morning, Pierrepoint,’ the governor whispered. ‘I see that this has got to be done.’ ‘That’s all right, sir,’ Albert replied. Moments later the signal was given and they entered through the green cell door. Bentley got to his feet and as Harry took hold of his right arm, Albert fastened the wrist-strap. Bentley looked around confusedly as the door was thrown open leading to the drop.
At the Bentley home in Norbury, the clocks in the house had all been silenced. Mrs Bentley lay upstairs in bed, heavily sedated. In the living room sat Mr Bentley, his daughter Iris, and his youngest surviving son, Dennis, aged nine. Mr Bentley wore a wristwatch and he could not help glancing at it from time to time as the hour of his eldest son’s execution approached. At nine o’clock he suddenly rose from his chair and grabbed Dennis. ‘No one’s ever going to take my son away from me,’ he said and wept.
Christopher Craig spent ten-and-a-half years in prison and was released on licence in May 1963. He settled in Buckinghamshire, became an engineer and married in 1965 when he was twenty-eight. Lord Goddard died in May 1971, at the age of ninety-three.
Interviewed for a Thames TV programme called Thames Reports, Craig said in September 1991: ‘It was a conspiracy. Everybody knew at the time that if a policeman dies, somebody has to pay for it … The guns and things gave me a sort of security. I suppose it’s like a child with a dummy.’ He also said: ‘Fairfax’s evidence that, er, Bentley struggled and I shot at him from 6 ft is totally untrue … I fired at him from 39 ft at least, not 6 ft … I tried to shoot myself earlier in the incident, and I had the gun to my head, not my mouth, as people portrayed, but to my temple. And I just couldn’t do it … I had run out of ammunition. I threw the gun to my right and dived off the roof.’
Asked whether Bentley had ever said ‘Let him have it, Chris!’ Craig replied: ‘He didn’t say a word. I didn’t hear Bentley speak the whole time, even when Fairfax grabbed him by the shoulder, behind the lift … He was just taken away, meek and mildly … He didn’t say [those words] … If he had said it, I would have heard it … Everyone else seemed to hear it … All the police … It never was said.’
Craig volunteered to have a polygraph test, which the company’s managing director, Jeremy Barratt, conducted. Craig answered questions about salient points concerning what happened on the warehouse roof with a ‘Yes’ or a ‘No’. At the end of the test Mr Barrett said: ‘The machine doesn’t lie and neither do you.’
Bentley’s family tried for years to get the verdict on their son repealed, but to no avail. Mr Bentley died in July 1974 and his wife two years later. Iris Bentley struggled on alone. Dennis, who grew up to be a bitter, sullen young man, himself fell foul of the law more than once. In 1980, when he was thirty-eight, he was sentenced to a term of imprisonment for various driving offences. For forty years, Iris Bentley campaigned to get her brother’s conviction quashed. Wearing the bracelet he had given her on the eve of his execution, she wrote over 150,000 letters. Along the way she had sixteen operations for cancer. In 1993 she said: ‘I have undergone a lot of stress in my fight. There have been so many setbacks, so many disappointments, so much stress. But I am not the sort of person who gives in.’ She died of cancer in 1997. Four years earlier, in July 1993, Derek Bentley had been granted a royal pardon.
Before Derek Bentley died, he told his parents: ‘I didn’t kill anyone. So why are they killing me?’ In his last letter to them, someone wrote at his dictation: ‘I tell you what, Mum, the truth of this thing has got to come out one day.’
In July 1998, almost forty-six years after the t
rial, the Court of Appeal overturned the conviction of Derek Bentley. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Bingham, said that Lord Goddard had been ‘blatantly prejudiced’, had misdirected the jury, had never mentioned Bentley’s mental problems, had lavishly praised the police, and that his summing-up had pressurised the jury into convicting Bentley, who had been denied, he said, ‘that fair trial that is the birth-right of every British citizen’.
44
JOHN REGINALD CHRISTIE
THE MURDER OF MRS CHRISTIE, 1953
More has probably been written about the murders at 70 Rillington Place than about any other case investigated by the Metropolitan Police since the Whitechapel murders. At least six women were killed at Number 70. But what has caused the greatest argument is whether or not two murderers were at work at the same time in the same house. The undisputed fact is that a man who had already strangled two women was the chief witness for the prosecution at the trial of another man who lived in the same house and was alleged to have strangled his wife and child.
John Reginald Halliday Christie was a thin, bald, weak, neurotic, unlikeable person, a hypochondriac, a liar and one-time thief. One of seven children, five of whom were girls, he was born on 8 April 1898 in Yorkshire and brought up in Chester Street, Boothtown, on the edge of Halifax. His father was a carpet designer. As a child, Christie was often ill, often beaten by his father and known as a sissy at Halifax Secondary School, where he proved to be quite bright and sang in the school choir; he was also a boy scout and liked to do some gardening.
After leaving school when he was fifteen, he got a job with the Halifax police. He was sacked for petty pilfering, however, and then sacked for petty theft by the carpet factory that gave him his next job. He became a cinema operator at the Gem and then at the Victoria Hall cinema in Halifax, from where he was called up in April 1917 just after his nineteenth birthday. He served as a signalman with the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment and with the Notts and Derby Regiment in Flanders and France. Injured by an exploding mustard-gas shell, he was gassed twice, blinded for some months, and lost his voice, as he claimed, for over three years. Thereafter, he always spoke in low, uncertain tones. He was also short-sighted and wore glasses. His sex drive was apparently as feeble as his constitution – he had pneumonia when he was seventeen – and a girl who led him down a lover’s lane in Halifax dubbed him ‘Reggie-no-dick’ and ‘Can’t-do-it-Christie’.
He married Ethel Simpson Waddington in May 1920; they had no children. He moved from job to job, working as a cinema operator, a clerk and a postman, and in April 1921 he was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for stealing postal orders. Two years later, he was bound over for obtaining money by false pretences and put on twelve months’ probation for violence. Presumably disgruntled with the attentions of the law and the imperfections of his all but sexless marriage, he came to London in 1923, leaving his wife in Sheffield where she worked as a shorthand typist. The pattern of shiftlessness continued. He moved from place to place and job to job. In September 1924, he was given nine months’ hard labour at an Uxbridge court for theft.
Two months after this, Timothy John Evans was born in south Wales.
Christie then held down a clerical job for five years until, in May 1929, he was sentenced to six months’ hard labour for striking a woman with whom he was temporarily living with her son’s cricket-bat. His last sentence, in 1933, was three months for stealing a car. His wife visited him in prison and on his release came to live with him in London, ten years after their separation. Her presence gave him some stability, for it was twenty years before he was again charged with an offence – her murder. Their sex life, although it apparently revived for a time, was sporadic and eventually ceased.
In 1938, they rented three small rooms, the ground floor flat in 10 Rillington Place – at the time a seedy cul-de-sac near Ladbroke Grove underground station. Since demolished and rebuilt as a terrace of modern houses, the street, off St Mark’s Road, is now known as Ruston Mews.
Christie lived in Rillington Place for fifteen years, during which time seven women were murdered in the house. The first was Ruth Fuerst, a tall Austrian girl, aged twenty-one at the time of her death, who came to England in 1939 as a student nurse and was then employed in a wartime munitions factory in Davies Street, Mayfair. In 1939, Christie had begun to wear the dark-blue uniform and peaked cap of a special constable in the War Reserve Police. Based at Harrow Road police station, he patrolled the streets making sure black-out regulations were observed and law and order maintained. This he apparently did with a thoroughness that verged on the officious. Off duty one day, but still making enquiries about a man wanted for theft, he met Ruth Fuerst in a snack bar. As his wife was away in Sheffield, where she fled when the bombing became unbearable, he asked Miss Fuerst back to Rillington Place on two or three occasions. It was August 1943 and Christie was forty-five. He later declared:
She was very tall. Almost as tall as me, and I was 5 ft 9 in … One day … she undressed and wanted me to have intercourse with her. I got a telegram while she was there, saying that my wife was on her way home. The girl wanted us to team up together and go right away somewhere together. I would not do that. I got on to the bed and had intercourse with her. While I was having intercourse with her, I strangled her with a piece of rope. I remember urine and excreta coming away from her. She was completely naked … She had a leopard skin coat and I wrapped this around her. I took her from the bedroom into the front room and put her under the floorboards. I had to do that because of my wife coming back. I put the remainder of her clothing under the floorboards too. My wife came home in the evening; my brother-in-law, Mr Waddington, came with her. Mr Waddington went back home the next day and during the afternoon my wife went out. I think she was working at Osram’s. While she was out I picked the body up from under the floorboards and took it into the outhouse. Later in the day I dug a hole in the garden, and in the evening, when it was dark, about ten o’clock I should say, I put the body down the hole and covered it up quickly with earth. It was the right-hand side of the garden, about halfway along towards the rockery. My wife never knew. I told her I was going to the lavatory. The only lavatory is in the yard.
The outhouse served as a wash-house and lavatory and was situated outside the back door leading into the yard or garden.
That statement was made nearly ten years after the event it describes, and – like most of what Christie so cautiously said – has to be viewed with equal caution. The facts are that Ruth Fuerst was last seen on 24 August 1943 in her Notting Hill digs and that her skeleton was recovered in the area indicated by Christie in March 1953. There was no evidence to show how, in fact, she met her death.
Four months after the Austrian girl’s disappearance, Christie ceased to be a War Reserve constable because of his association with a married woman employed at Harrow Road police station. Her soldier husband, returning home on leave, assaulted Christie and cited him as co-respondent in the ensuing divorce case. Meanwhile Christie – whom everyone knew as ‘Reg’ – got a clerical job with Ultra Radio in Acton. There he met a small, stout woman, Muriel Eady, aged thirty-two, who worked in the canteen. She had a boyfriend, and the two of them used to visit the Christies in Rillington Place. Said Christie later:
On one occasion she came alone. I believe she complained of catarrh, and I said I thought I could help her. She came by appointment when my wife was out. I believe my wife was on holiday. I think I mixed some stuff up, some inhalants, Friar’s Balsam was one. She was in the kitchen, and at the time she was inhaling with a square scarf over her head. I remember now, it was in the bedroom. The liquid was in a square glass jar with a metal screw-top lid. I had made two holes in the lid and through one of the holes I put a rubber tube from the gas into the liquid. Through the other hole I put another rubber tube, about two feet long. This tube didn’t touch the liquid … She inhaled the stuff from the tube. I did it to make her dopey. She became sort of unconscious and I have a vague recollecti
on of getting a stocking and tying it round her neck. I am not too clear about this … It may have been the Austrian girl that I used the gas on. I don’t think it was both. I believe I had intercourse with her at the time I strangled her. I think I put her in the wash-house. That night I buried her in the garden on the right-hand side nearest the yard.
Last seen alive on 7 October 1944 at her Putney home, Muriel Eady’s skeleton was unearthed in the garden in March 1953. The cause of her death could not be established, but that same month the police discovered a square glass jar (but no lid) in the kitchen of Christie’s flat. They also found that a gas-pipe on the kitchen wall by the window had been stopped up with putty, and that one of the burners on the gas-stove, minus its top, was merely a nozzle.
Christie probably devised a method of gassing women visitors so that he could indulge his sexual whims with their immobile, unconscious bodies. This may have involved some form of masturbation rather than intercourse. For as the women were apparently willing, with the possible exception of Miss Eady, there was no need to gas them before a normal act of intercourse. None of his later victims died of carbon monoxide poisoning: the gas was used, it seems, only to incapacitate them.
Miss Fuerst and Miss Eady may not have been the only women so treated, but in their case strangling may have resulted when they panicked and resisted, or when they suddenly revived. Strangulation in the case of his last three victims may by then have become part of some masturbatory rite in which necrophilia was also involved. Christie’s statements probably ‘improved’ on what he did, making it more manly. Few men with unusual sexual tastes – and Christie was otherwise quite a prim and proper person who neither smoked nor drank – are willing to admit in detail the special tricks and techniques and practices by which they obtain ejaculation.
Murder of the Black Museum 1875-1975: The Dark Secrets Behind a Hundred Years of the Most Notorious Crimes in England Page 45