Houses of Death (True Crime)

by Gordon Kerr

  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 Welshman of limited intelligence, who worked as a lorry driver. He and his wife often engaged in loud and sometimes violent arguments, mostly over Beryl’s inability to make ends meet. 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, however, confided in Christie and, although he had absolutely no previous experience, he 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 carry out the procedure, but it ended disastrously. When Evans came home later that day, 8 November 1949, Christie informed him that Beryl had died during the operation. Christie told Evans that he would dispose of the body down a nearby drain and that he would also find someone to look after the baby, Geraldine. He told Evans to leave London.

  Evans returned to Wales, but 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. The police did not find the body down the drain where Evans said he had put it, but when they searched the wash house at 10 Rillington Place, they found the bodies of both Beryl and baby Geraldine. Evans inexplicably confessed to killing his wife no fewer than four times during lengthy police interrogations.

  At Evans’s 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.

  In late 1952, Ethel Christie suddenly disappeared. Christie told friends that she had moved back to Sheffield and 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 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, 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 two more 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, under the floorboards of the living room they found the remains of Ethel Christie. Christie had strangled her on 14 December 1952. She had been in poor health and Christie later claimed that he merely put her out of her misery.

  In the garden, two more 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 together in a jar. However, he had connected the jar to the gas supply. As his victim, unknowingly, breathed in the gas and weakened, he strangled her and, as he strangled her, he 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 police 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 officially declared innocent of the murder of his wife, for which he was never tried.

  Ed Gein

  Gein's Farm, Plainfield, Wisconsin, USA

  Ed Gein is regarded by many as the most notorious serial killer of all time. The shocking reality of his crimes mean they will forever be emblazoned on the history books. The butcher of Plainfield was as disturbed and as dangerous as they come. Today, the site where the Gein family farm stood is all but empty. The house itself has long gone, but souvenir hunters still regularly pillage it for bits and pieces of memorabilia to sell on the Internet.

  On 17 November 1957, following a robbery at the hardware store in Plainfield, Wisconsin, in which she worked, Bernice Worden disappeared. Police discovered that the last customer in the store had been Ed Gein, a local man who lived alone in a ramshackle, dilapidated old farmhouse in a desolated location on the outskirts of the small town. They travelled out to the gloomy farm to interview Gein. What they found when they arrived would shock and horrify the nation.

  The first thing they noticed was the stench. Decomposing rubbish and rotten junk covered every space, work-surface and littered the floor to the extent that it was difficult to walk. The local sheriff, Arthur Schley, was making his way gingerly through the room with a torch when he felt something brush against him, something hanging from the ceiling beams. He shone his torch upwards into the dark to see a large carcass, hanging upside down, decapitated, the ribcage sliced open and the insides gutted, just like you would a deer, something common to this area where hunting was a popular activity. But this was no deer, the policeman quickly realised to his horror. It was the body of the missing woman, Bernice Worden, who had been shot dead at close range with a .22-calibre rifle. That was not all they found in this charnel house, however.

  The bed in Gein’s small bedroom had bizarre decorations on each of the four corner posts – human skulls. Gein’s home also held more horrors: skin had been used to make a lampshade and to upholster the seats of chairs; sliced off women’s breasts were being used as cup holders; human skullcaps were being used as soup bowls; a human heart lay in a saucepan on the cooker; the pull of a window shade was a pair of human lips. There was a mammary vest made of woman’s skin; a belt made from human nipples; socks made from human flesh and a box of human vulvas which Gein later admitted to wearing. Finally, they found a suit made entirely of human skin.

  At 39 years old, Ed Gein had taken the death of his mother, Augusta, in 1945 pretty badly. His late father had been less than useless and his mother was a strict Lutheran who read Ed and his older brother passages from the Old Testament, to keep them on the straight and narrow. She lectured them that women were wicked and to be avoided at all costs. But there was little chance of Ed being led astray. He had always been a strange boy, laughing randomly at his own private jokes and being bullied for his slightly effeminate manner. He was a loner, as Augusta would not let him make friends but his attachment to her grew into an unhealthy one, a fact commented on by his brother, who was gradually moving away from the kind of life Augusta wanted for him. One day in 1944, during a forest fire, Henry was found dead and, although it was speculated that Ed probably dispatched him, foul play was not suggested at the time.

  When Augusta died, following a series of strokes, Ed was left completely alone. He boarded up his mother’s rooms − the upstairs, downstairs parlour and living room − keeping them as a shrine to her memory. He took up residence in the kitchen and a small room off it, which became his bedroom. Here, he spent his time reading about Nazi atroci
ties, south sea cannibals and, eerily, anatomy. His neighbours, (some of whom he did odd jobs for), spread nasty rumours about him. Some young boys who visited the farm saw shrunken heads, but their parents dismissed the story as childish fantasy. Nonetheless, he was known as ‘Weird Ed’.

  His favourite hobby was visiting the local cemetery. There, he would dig up the graves of recently buried middle-aged women who looked like his mother. He would drag the bodies home, skin them and tan the skin from which he would make the macabre objects that cluttered his rooms.

  Following Augusta’s death, Ed decided that he wanted to have a sex change. It was for this reason that he wore the suit made of women’s skin, so he could pretend to be his mother rather than have to go through with the operation.

  They estimated that Ed had carved up 15 bodies at the farmhouse. Coincidentally, Wisconsin Police had noticed an increase in the 1940s and 1950s in the number of people who had disappeared. An eight-year-old girl, Georgia Weckler, vanished on her way home from school in 1947; in 1952, two hunters stopped for a drink in Plainfield − neither Victor Travis or Ray Burgess were ever seen again. In 1953, Evelyn Hartley was babysitting when she disappeared, leaving her shoes, glasses and bloodstains behind. In the winter of 1954, Plainfield tavern-keeper Mary Hogan disappeared from her bar − again a trail of blood was left behind in the car park. Ed Gein had killed them all.

  Gein was found to be mentally incompetent and unfit to be tried for first-degree murder and was committed to the Central State Hospital in Waupun, Wisconsin. Ten years later, however, he was deemed competent to stand trial for the murder of Bernice Worden and was, finally, found guilty of first-degree murder. However, he was judged to have been insane at the time of the crime and was later found not guilty by reason of insanity. They sent him back to hospital where he happily spent the remainder of his life. On 26 July 1984, he lost a long battle with cancer and died. He was buried in Plainfield cemetery next to his mother and close to all the graves he had robbed years before.

  After he was convicted, Ed Gein’s farm went up in flames. Plainfield’s fire department took the call and attended the fire, but it was too late. Perhaps they failed to deal with the incident with a great deal of urgency, given who the fire chief was. His name was Frank Worden and he was the son of Bernice Worden, one of weird Ed’s unfortunate victims.

  Holloway Prison

  London Borough of Islington, England

  Holloway Prison, in London, is the largest women's prison in Europe. It is most famous as the place where - until the abolition of the death penalty in 1965 - condemned women were sent to be executed. On 13 July 1954, Ruth Ellis, the last, and consequently the most famous womAn to be executed in the UK, was hung in the condemned cell at Holloway.

  Holloway Prison was opened in October 1852 as the City of London House of Correction, with 436 cells – 283 for men, 60 for females and 62 for juveniles. There were also 18 punishment cells, 14 reception cells for new arrivals and 14 workrooms where good inmates made use of their incarceration. In 1882, 340 cells were added, and a hospital wing was added a year or so later. It served as London’s main prison and also catered for remand prisoners, the most famous of whom was the playwright and poet, Oscar Wilde. Suffragettes who were sent to prison ended up in Holloway.

  With the ending of the punishment of transportation and the demolition of Newgate prison to make way for the Old Bailey in 1903, more space was needed for women prisoners in London, and Holloway provided the ideal solution. It was designated an all-woman jail with capacity for 949 women prisoners, rising to over 1,000 two years later.

  Most notably, Holloway became the venue for the execution of women condemned to death. Among these were the only women ever to be sentenced to death in Britain for spying. Swedish national, Eva de Bournonville, was convicted during the World War I. She was reprieved, however, and served only six years in prison. Dorothy Pamela O’Grady was lucky enough to be reprieved just two days before her death sentence was due to be carried out. She had been accused of cutting a telephone wire on the Isle of Wight and being seen in areas prohibited to the public. She served 14 years in Holloway.

  A total of 47 women arrived in Holloway’s condemned cell from 1903 until the death penalty was abolished in 1965, although 40 of these women were eventually reprieved. Of these, 27 had killed their own children.

  Following the closure of Newgate, where execution of women prisoners had traditionally taken place, an execution shed was constructed at Holloway. Inside was the gallows, which had the capacity to hang two prisoners at the same time, side by side. Beneath the gallows was an empty cell that acted as the pit into which the hanged woman would drop when the trapdoor was released. Later, a fairly spacious condemned suite was built on the prison’s first floor, consisting of five cells. One of these was a visiting cell in which a glass partition segregated the prisoner from visitors. There was also a bathroom and a day cell. The lights burned 24-hours a day and two wardresses kept a constant watch on the condemned woman.

  The day cell had a wardrobe on one wall and this concealed the door that led through to the anteroom to the execution chamber. Executions always took place at 9am and afterwards bodies were removed to a cell adjacent to the ‘drop’ cell where a postmortem examination would be carried out. The women’s bodies were then laid to rest in unmarked graves in the prison grounds at lunchtime on the same day.

  Between 1903 and 1955 – the year that the hanging of women stopped, although it was not formally abolished for another ten years – five women were executed at Holloway. These included the last double hanging of women in the UK, that of Amelia Sach and Annie Walters, in 1903. They were convicted of ‘baby farming’. This was the practice of taking in a child for payment, usually where it had been born out of wedlock. Sach offered her service for around £25 to £30 ($50 - $60) and her customers were most often servants who had been impregnated by their bosses. Unknown to her customers, however, once the babies had been delivered to Sach, they were collected by Walters, who poisoned them. Unfortunately, Walters’ landlord happened to be a policeman and the pair were arrested after his suspicions had been aroused. Not before dozens of babies had died, however.

  On 9 January, 1923, 20 years later, 28-year-old Edith Jessie Thompson was hanged at Holloway, exactly the same time as her lover Frederick Bywaters was meeting his maker at Pentonville Prison, just 0.8km (0.5 miles) away. She died, in spite of a clamour by the public for a reprieve, while another woman, 36-year-old Daisy Wright saw her sentence for the murder of her daughter commuted.

  Another 18 women passed through Holloway’s condemned cell during the next

  21 years, all of them being reprieved. Then, in 1953, a 53-year-old Greek Cypriot woman, Styllou Pantopiou Christofi, arrived in the condemned suite.

  Christofi had come to Britain to stay with her son, Stavros, who was working in Britain and had married a German girl, called Hella Bleicher. Unfortunately, Styllou and Hella never hit it off, and Styllou eventually hit her daughter-in-law on the head with a heavy ash pan and then strangled her, before setting fire to the body. The resulting fire got out of hand, however, and when the house threatened to burn down with her three grandchildren in it, Styllou had no alternative but to call for help. The police found the partly burned body of Hella in the kitchen and Styllou was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. She was hung, by Albert Pierrepoint, on 13 December 1954.

  After an absence of female executions for 21 years, until that of Styllou Christofi, another came along just seven months later. Ruth Ellis had fallen out with her boyfriend, David Blakely, over the Easter holiday and had lain in wait for him outside the Magdala public house in Hampstead. When he emerged, she pumped five bullets into him. After a huge public outcry, both in Britain and internationally, she was hanged on 13 July.

  Although one more woman, Freda Rumbold, convicted of killing her husband, would spend time in the condemned cell at Holloway Prison, Ruth Ellis would be the last woman to be walk through the wardrobe
on the wall of her cell to meet the hangman.

  Alcatraz

  San Francisco Bay, USA

  Alcatraz has played host to some of America's most infamous criminals, including gangsters Al Capone and Alvin Karpis. Alcatraz, or 'The Rock', was perfectly suited to purpose as a high-security prison. Surrounded by treacherous, icy-cold waters and marauding sharks. Life inside the prison was tough, but many of the challenges facing an Alcatraz escapee were far, far tougher.

  We know it simply as ‘The Rock’. A small island in the middle of San Francisco Bay that was the toughest prison in the US from 1934 to 1963, a prison from which, it is claimed, no one ever escaped and lived to tell the tale. But when Alcatraz opened its doors, in 1934, to some 300 of the worst criminals in the US, it had already enjoyed a long and interesting history.

  It was first visited by a European in 1775. Juan de Ayala, a naval officer on board the San Carlos, the first European ship to enter the bay, named the island ‘La Isla de los Alcatraces’, which translated means ‘Island of the Pelicans’. It was the discovery of gold in California and the start of the ‘gold rush’, in 1848, that really opened up the area and the bay was suddenly flooded with ships. The rocky Alcatraz was a danger to these ships and it was decided that the American west coast’s first lighthouse should be built on the island. Its light was switched on for the first time in the summer of 1853. That lighthouse lasted until 1909, when a concrete tower with an automated rotating beacon replaced it.

  Alcatraz was first owned, in 1846, by rancher Julian Workman, who was given the island by his friend, Pio Pico, the last Mexican governor of Alta California. Later that year, John C Fremont paid Workman $5,000 (£2,500) for it, and this was followed by a legal struggle during which the US wrestled control of the island. Following the Mexican-American War, and with the gold rush making California an attractive proposition, the island was fortified and a garrison was placed on it. The American Civil War saw it being used as a prison for Confederate sympathizers and its total suitability for this purpose − isolated with 1.6km (1 mile) of current-churned, icy water between it and the land − encouraged the US army to decide, in 1907, to designate Alcatraz as its western military prison. Construction on its large cellblock was begun and it opened for business in 1912, with a maximum capacity of 302.