What is especially odd, among so much that is strange about this case, is that after killing two women (in 1943 and 1944) he killed no more – if one excepts Beryl Evans – for nine years. And then he killed four women in four months.
Why did he stop after Muriel Eady? Possibly because his wife was more or less permanently in the house. Or perhaps he found some partner who suited his peculiar sexual requirements. Perhaps his health, which was always poor, became his main preoccupation. He had been visiting Dr Odess since 1934 with a string of minor complaints, fibrositis being the most consistent and severe. Dr Odess said at Christie’s trial that he was ‘a nervous type … He had fits of crying, sobbing. He complained of insomnia, and headaches, and giddiness.’ He also suffered from diarrhoea, flatulence and amnesia.
After the war, Reg Christie became a clerk in a post-office savings bank, a job that lasted four years, until his previous convictions came to light. His next and final job was a clerical post with British Road Services.
Meanwhile, on 20 September 1947, Timothy Evans (who was now twenty-three) married Beryl Thorley, a pretty but dull eighteen-year-old telephonist working at Grosvenor House in Mayfair. Evans was a van driver, a thin and wiry Welshman (5 ft 5 1/2 in) with an uncertain temper, whose constitutional, tubercular weakness kept him in sanatoria when he was a boy and kept him out of National Service, from which he was rejected on medical grounds. Poorly educated and hardly able to read or write, he was nonetheless not illiterate. For he read comics, signed his own name, and must have had some understanding of the writing on the packages, receipts etc., which he handled in his job. He was not, as had been claimed, a pathetic ‘near mental defective’.
Beryl Thorley, who came from a respectable family and worked in upper-class surroundings, is unlikely to have married an idiot. The Tim Evans whom she met on a blind date must have been an attractive, sparky young Welshman – not too bright perhaps, but not a dim-witted lout either. He was also a bit of a braggart, a heavy drinker and a fantastic liar. A senior police officer thought him ‘quite worldly’.
For a while the young couple lived with Evans’s mother, Mrs Probert (she had remarried), in St Mark’s Road, and when Beryl learned she was pregnant the couple decided to move into a place of their own. This they did in March 1948, renting the two rooms on the top floor of 10 Rillington Place. The middle flat was occupied by a solitary, elderly man called Kitchener. The Christies lived on the ground floor.
Geraldine Evans was born on 10 October 1948.
A year passed without apparent incident, except that Mr and Mrs Evans often had rows, mainly about money but also about a blonde girl, Lucy, who came to stay for a few weeks in August. She was seventeen and a friend of Beryl. It is said that the two girls shared the marital bed while Evans slept on the kitchen floor. Before long Mrs Probert and a probation officer were involved: once Evans threatened to throw his wife out of a window. Eventually he walked out with Lucy, staying away for two nights before he returned to Beryl.
Then, in October 1949, Beryl told him she was expecting another baby.
It seems she decided to have an abortion, apparently reluctant to lose her figure and possibly her husband, as well as the extra money she earned through part-time work. Both the Christies knew of her intentions and advised her against the abortion. Evans himself was also opposed to the idea, as he explained in his first statement to the police:
She told me she was about three months gone. I said: ‘If you’re having a baby, well, you’ve had one. Another won’t make any difference.’ She then told me she was going to try and get rid of it. I turned round and told her not to be silly, that she’d make herself ill. Then she bought herself a syringe and started syringing herself. Then she said that didn’t work, and I said: ‘I’m glad it won’t work.’ Then she said she was going to buy some tablets. I don’t know what tablets she bought because she was always hiding them from me. She started to look very ill, and I told her to go and see a doctor, and she said she’d go when I was in work. But when I’d come home and ask her if she’d been, she’d always say she hadn’t. On the Sunday morning, that would be the sixth of November, she told me that if she couldn’t get rid of the baby she’d kill herself and our other baby, Geraldine. I told her she was talking silly. She never said no more about it then, but when I got up Monday morning to go to work she said she was going to see some woman to see if she could help her.
In his second statement Evans told a different story:
About a week before my wife died, Reg Christie … approached me and said: ‘I’d like to have a chat with you about your wife taking these tablets … If you and your wife had come to me in the first place I could have done it for you without any risk.’ I turned round and said: ‘Well, I didn’t think you knew anything about medical stuff.’ So he told me that he was training for a doctor before the war. Then he started showing me books and things on medical … He told me the stuff that he used one out of every ten would die with it. I told him I wasn’t interested. So I said goodnight to him and I went upstairs. When I got in, my wife started talking to me about it. She said that she had been speaking to Mr Christie and asked me if he had spoken to me … I told her she wasn’t to have anything to do with it. She turned round and told me to mind my own business and that she intended to get rid of it and she trusted Mr Christie … On the Monday evening [7 November] … my wife said that Mr Christie had made arrangements for the first thing Tuesday morning. I didn’t argue with her. I just washed and changed and went to the KPH [a pub] until ten o’clock. I came home and had supper and went to bed. She wanted to start an argument, but I just took no notice. Just after six I got up the following morning to go to work … I had a cup of tea and a smoke and she told me: ‘On your way down tell Mr Christie that everything is all right. If you don’t tell him, I’ll go down and tell him myself.’ So as I went down the stairs he came out to meet me and I said: ‘Everything is all right.’ Then I went to work.
In his first statement Evans had said that on the Monday he met a man at a transport café who gave him some ‘stuff’ in a bottle that would fix the matter of his wife’s pregnancy. He said that on the Tuesday when he returned from work at about 6.30 pm the lights were out and he found his wife, who had apparently taken the liquid ‘stuff’, dead on the bed. That night, he said, he put her body down a manhole or drain outside the house and got someone to look after the baby the next day. This statement was made on the afternoon of Wednesday, 30 November, to the Merthyr police in Wales. When they told him later that night that there was no body in the drain and that three men had been needed to lift the manhole cover, Evans then said: ‘I said that to protect a man named Christie. It’s not true about the man in the café either.’
He then made his second statement, the longest of the four he made, accusing Christie of causing his wife’s death in an attempt to carry out an abortion. Evans said: ‘When I came home in the evening [Tuesday] he was waiting for me at the bottom of the staircase. He said: ‘It’s bad news. It didn’t work.’ Christie allegedly refused to tell Evans what had happened except that Beryl had died about three o’clock and that her stomach was ‘septic poisoned’. Evans found his wife lying on the bed – ‘I could see that she was dead and that she had been bleeding from the mouth and nose and that she had been bleeding from the bottom part. She had a black skirt on and a check blouse and a kind of light blue jacket on.’
This story was repeated by Evans at his trial. He also said that about seven o’clock he helped Christie, who was ‘puffïng and blowing’, to carry Beryl’s body down the stairs and into Mr Kitchener’s kitchen, as the old man was away in hospital. According to Evans, Christie said he would dispose of the body ‘down one of the drains’ and would see about getting someone to look after the baby. This was done in Evans’s absence at work on the Thursday, when a ‘young couple from East Acton’ – so Christie informed him – took the baby away.
What actually happened on the Thursday (and from now on Christie’s and
Evans’s versions of events roughly tally) was that Evans was sacked from his job, although he told everyone he had left of his own accord. ‘He seemed extremely angry,’ said Christie at Evans’s trial. ‘Really wild.’ That evening, Evans told his mother that Beryl and the baby had gone to her father in Brighton.
On Friday the 11th, Evans visited a second-hand furniture dealer in Portobello Road, and went out drinking as well as to the pictures over the weekend. The Christies fed him on Sunday, and on Monday afternoon the furniture dealer bought and took away most of the Evans’s hire-purchase possessions, including the lino on the floor. Evans received £40. He then left Rillington Place, going again to the pictures and to various pubs before he caught the 12.55 am milk train from Paddington Station to Wales.
Early on Tuesday, 15 November, he arrived at the home of his aunt, Mrs Lynch, in Merthyr Vale. He told her and her husband that Beryl and Geraldine had gone to Brighton and would spend Christmas there. Apparently no further questions were asked and Evans idled about Merthyr for almost a week until, on Monday, 21 November, the day after his twenty-fifth birthday, when he returned to London.
His whereabouts on Monday and Tuesday are unknown, but he appeared at the door of 10 Rillington Place on Wednesday the 23rd and had a discussion on the doorstep with Christie, allegedly about the baby’s well-being. That night, Evans was back in Merthyr in South Wales.
By now his mother and her married daughters in St Mark’s Road were becoming anxious: they had heard neither from Beryl nor from Evans for over a fortnight. The Christies, when asked for information, said they knew nothing of Beryl, except that she had gone away with the baby. A telegram was sent on 29 November to Beryl’s father in Brighton and resulted in the disclosure that she was not there either.
On that same day Mrs Probert wrote to Mrs Lynch in reply to a recent letter from her sister-in-law saying that Tim had been in Merthyr for two weeks on his own and was jobless. Mrs Probert wrote:
I don’t know what lies Tim have told you down there I know nothing about him and I have not seen him for 3 weeks … There is some mystery about him you can tell him from me he don’t want to come to me I never want to see him again … He have put years on my life since last August [when Lucy lodged with the Evanses] … He is like his father no good to himself or anybody else … His name stinks up here everywhere I go people asking for him for money he owes them. I am ashamed to say he is my son.
At breakfast on the 30th, Mrs Lynch read this letter to Tim Evans, who was dismissive and made little comment. But after some thought, that afternoon at 3.10 pm he walked into Merthyr Vale police station and told an astonished DC Evans: ‘I want to give myself up. I have disposed of my wife.’ ‘What do you mean?’ enquired DC Evans. ‘I put her down the drain,’ said his namesake. ‘You realise what you’re saying?’ queried DC Evans. ‘Yes,’ Tim Evans replied. ‘I know what I’m saying. I can’t sleep, and want to get it off my chest.’
Evans then made his first statement – about his wife’s abortion attempts and the man in the café – in which neither himself nor Christie were implicated in Beryl’s death. The Welsh police telephoned London, and the manhole cover outside 10 Rillington Place was raised with great difficulty by three policemen and no body was found ‘down the drain’. When informed of this, Evans made his second statement, naming Christie as the abortionist and killer.
At Evans’s trial, Christie denied knowing about or assisting in any abortion, and no evidence was produced to refute this. He told the court that on Tuesday, 8 November: ‘I was in bed a lot of the time with the illness I had, which is enteritis and fibrositis in my back. I was in a great deal of pain and I rested as much as possible under doctor’s orders with a fire in the room day and night, and on Tuesday evening at about twenty-past five I went up to the doctor.’ Doctor Odess lived in nearby Colville Square. On the way back, Christie collected his wife at the local public library, where she had gone while he was seeing the doctor. The Christies went home and he went to bed ‘feeling pretty bad’ and his wife prepared some milk food for him. ‘As a matter of fact she slipped and fell and the milk food went over the bed, and I didn’t have it.’ About midnight, he said, they were both in bed when they were startled awake by a very loud thud. ‘We listened for a few seconds and didn’t hear anything, and I gradually knelt up in bed and looked through the window which overlooks the yard. It was very dark and I couldn’t see anything there, and so I went back and we laid down, and shortly after that I heard some movement which appeared to be upstairs … as though something heavy was being moved.’ Mrs Christie said in court it was ‘as if furniture was being moved about’.
There was no sign of Beryl or the baby on Wednesday, according to both the Christies, and when Evans returned that night at about half-past ten he told Mrs Christie, in answer to her question about the whereabouts of Beryl and the baby, ‘Oh, she’s gone away to Bristol.’ ‘Gone away to Bristol?’ queried Mrs Christie. ‘She never told me she was going.’ ‘She said she would write,’ Evans replied, adding: ‘She didn’t tell my mother either.’ None of this was ever contradicted or refuted by either of the Christies, by Dr Odess, or by any other witness at Evans’s trial, apart from Evans himself.
At Christie’s trial, Dr Odess said that his patient had had a severe attack of fibrositis that had lasted from 1 November to 27 December 1949, and he doubted whether Christie could lift a human being down two flights of stairs. He said: ‘At the time I was seeing him, he could hardly get off the chair sometimes. I had to help him up.’ He said later that Christie visited him on Tuesday the 8th complaining of enteritis, or diarrhoea, and again on the 12th when his fibrositis was so bad his back had to be strapped.
On 1 December 1949, the day after Evans made his first two statements, the police in Merthyr Tydfil and London pursued their enquiries by interviewing Mrs Lynch, Mrs Probert and Mr and Mrs Christie, who were questioned at some length and independently. The two rooms of Evans’s former flat were found to be empty, apart from a stolen briefcase and some newspaper cuttings about the ‘Torso Murder’ of Stanley Setty. The yard and garden, which were also examined, showed no signs of digging or disturbance.
In Merthyr Vale, Evans added some details to his second statement, saying he helped Christie to carry his wife’s body down the stairs and that he visited Christie on Tuesday the 15th.
Investigations in Brighton and Bristol concerning the whereabouts of Beryl and the baby drew a blank. She might have gone elsewhere, but Evans’s statements seemed to indicate that her body, if there was a body, was somewhere in or around the house at the end of the cul-de-sac. On the morning of Friday, 2 December a thorough search was made of 10 Rillington Place by Chief Inspector Jennings, accompanied by DCS Barratt. The door of the wash-house was found to be locked. Mrs Christie said the wash-house was not used as such, adding that the tap inside was used to swill out the slop-pail. The lock, she said, was faulty, and the door locked itself, though it could be opened with a piece of metal that pushed back the catch. She proceeded to do so. Christie was also present, with his hands pressing into the base of his back, suffering from an attack of fibrositis.
Under the sink, hidden by bits of wood, was a bundle wrapped in a green tablecloth and tied up with sash cord. Mrs Christie was invited by the police officers to explain its presence, even to touch the bundle. She did so and was mystified. The bundle was dragged out into the yard, the cord was untied, and Beryl’s naked feet flopped out. Baby Geraldine, with a striped tie knotted tightly around her neck, was found concealed by some kindling behind the door.
Dr Donald Teare, the Home Office pathologist who carried out the autopsies, established that both mother and daughter had been strangled – Geraldine by the tie and Beryl by what appeared from the abrasions on her neck to have been a rope. Clothed but without any knickers, she was more than three months pregnant, and the only evidence of interference was a slight bruise in her vagina and an old scar. She had evidently been struck in the face about twenty minutes befor
e she died – her right eye and upper lip were marked and swollen – and there were two bruises on the inner, upper part of her left leg.
Timothy Evans, ignorant of these discoveries, was brought to London that night and taken to Notting Hill police station. He was shown two piles of clothes, Beryl’s and Geraldine’s, as well as the tablecloth, a blanket in which Beryl had been wrapped, and the striped tie. He was told by CI Jennings that the bodies of both mother and daughter had been discovered in the wash-house that morning ‘and this clothing was found on them’. Both had been strangled, said Jennings. (It was disputed at Evans’s trial whether Jennings had also revealed the exact positions of the bodies and that they had been obscured by pieces of wood.)
As Jennings talked, Evans picked up some of the garments. He picked up the tie. Tears came to his eyes. If his first two statements were true, this was when he discovered that his baby was dead, and the manner of her death. It was also when he found out how Beryl had died and where her body had been put. Said Jennings: ‘I have reason to believe you were responsible for their deaths.’ ‘Yes,’ replied Timothy Evans.
He made a brief statement, his third. ‘She was incurring one debt after another,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t stand it any longer, so I strangled her with a piece of rope and took her down to the flat below the same night … I waited till the Christies had gone to bed, then I took her to the wash-house after midnight. This was on Tuesday, 8 November. On Thursday evening after I came home from work I strangled my baby in our bedroom with my tie, and later that night I took her down into the wash-house after the Christies had gone to bed.’
Murder of the Black Museum 1875-1975: The Dark Secrets Behind a Hundred Years of the Most Notorious Crimes in England Page 46