7d • General discussion
"It wasn't me! It was Christie what done it!"
There are certain London addresses that survive demolition. Not physically — psychologically. The buildings go, the street changes, councils rename things in the optimistic belief that bureaucracy can cauterise memory, yet the old name persists like something overheard through a wall. 10 Rillington Place is one of those places. The address remains lodged in the imagination because what happened there feels inseparable from the rooms themselves.
The terrace in North Kensington was entirely ordinary: narrow lodging houses subdivided into cramped rented rooms where lives overlapped without ever truly connecting. Peeling wallpaper. Shared kitchens. Coal dust in corners. The exhausted atmosphere of post-war London, where people existed in close proximity while remaining fundamentally alone. In streets like that, nobody expected privacy, but neither did they expect revelation. People heard arguments through walls, smelt each other’s dinners, listened to coughing in adjacent rooms at night — and learned not to ask questions.
Into this atmosphere came John Christie.
What remains disturbing about Christie is his absolute lack of theatricality. He did not resemble a monster from fiction. No charisma. No menace visible at first glance. He looked like thousands of ageing men dissolving quietly into post-war urban life: thin, tired, bespectacled, perpetually apologetic. The sort of person shopkeepers forget seconds after serving him. That invisibility became his camouflage.
And inside 10 Rillington Place, he murdered women with methodical calm.
Most accounts concentrate on Christie himself, but the deeper tragedy may lie with Timothy Evans. Because Evans was not simply unlucky. He possessed precisely the kind of personality guaranteed to destroy itself once trapped inside a police investigation.
Evans was a storyteller. And not a good one, by all accounts.
He lied instinctively under pressure, the way frightened people often do. Small embellishments. Sudden revisions. Contradictions introduced because he sensed disbelief and tried frantically to repair it. He spoke before thinking, then altered details halfway through explanations. The more anxious he became, the less convincing he sounded. Some people possess an almost fatal inability to present themselves coherently once authority enters the room. Evans was one of them.
And Christie recognised this immediately.
The imbalance between the two men became catastrophic. Christie spoke softly, carefully, with an air of strained patience. Evans arrived already looking guilty — agitated, inarticulate, overwhelmed by his own panic. One man sounded controlled; the other sounded frightened. Institutions often mistake the first quality for innocence and the second for guilt.
After the deaths of Evans’s wife Beryl and their baby daughter Geraldine, Evans gave multiple conflicting statements. He confessed, retracted, revised. The police saw inconsistency; and therefore culpability.
But inconsistency is not evidence of murder. Often it is merely evidence of fear.
Christie remained calm enough to appear credible throughout.
That is what makes the case unbearable. A frightened man who talked too much encountered a predator who understood perfectly the advantages of silence.
In 1950, Evans was convicted and hanged for the murder of his wife and child. Three years later, police searching 10 Rillington Place discovered multiple bodies concealed within the property itself — hidden behind wallpaper, beneath floorboards, in the garden. Christie had been killing women while Evans went to the gallows insisting, however incoherently, that he was innocent.
The story later became the subject of 10 Rillington Place (1971), Richard Fleischer’s extraordinary film starring Richard Attenborough as Christie and John Hurt as Evans. What the film captures so brilliantly is not merely the horror of the murders but the psychological imbalance between the two men.
Attenborough plays Christie as almost airless — a man who seems to absorb himself into the wallpaper. Quiet, hesitant, perpetually mild. Nothing protrudes from him emotionally. Meanwhile, John Hurt’s Evans lives in a state of permanent panic, forever trying to explain himself out of danger through sheer force of speech. You watch him talk himself deeper into catastrophe scene by scene. Every sentence sounds like an attempt to stay afloat.
The house at Rillington Place no longer exists. But the case continues to disturb because it exposes something deeply unsettling about ordinary life. Not simply that evil can hide behind closed doors — that is obvious enough — but that institutions so often place their trust in performance. The composed man appears truthful. The frightened man appears guilty.
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"It wasn't me! It was Christie what done it!"
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