The Peepshow: The Murders at Rillington Place

by Kate Summerscale

Overview

“A trove of thrilling material . . . skillfully examines the racism, sexism, economic privation and class prejudices that permeated postwar England . . . There’s so much to admire in this engaging, deeply researched book.” —The New York Times Book Review

“An absorbing portrait of post-WWII London.” —Booklist

*A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * Named a Best Book of 2024 by FT * Nominated for the Women's prize for nonfiction*

From the Edgar Award–winning author of The Haunting of Alma Fielding, the tale of two journalists competing to solve the notorious Christie murders in postwar London

In March 1953, London police discovered the bodies of three young women hidden in a wall at 10 Rillington Place, a dingy rowhouse in Notting Hill. On searching the building, they found another body beneath the floorboards, then an array of human bones in the garden. They launched a nationwide manhunt for the tenant of the ground-floor apartment, a softly spoken former policeman named Reg Christie. But they had already investigated a double murder at 10 Rillington Place three years before, and the killer was hanged. Did they get the wrong man?

The story was an instant sensation. The star reporter Harry Procter chased after the scoop on Christie. The eminent crime writer Fryn Tennyson Jesse begged her editor to let her cover the case. To Harry and Fryn, Christie seemed a new kind of murderer: he was vacant, impersonal, a creature of a brutish postwar world. Christie liked to watch women, they discovered, and he liked to kill them. They realized that he might also have engineered a terrible miscarriage of justice.

In this riveting true story, Kate Summerscale mines the archives to uncover the lives of Christie’s victims, the tabloid frenzy that their deaths inspired, and the truth about what happened inside the house. What she finds sheds fascinating light on the origins of our fixation with true crime—and suggests a new solution to one of the most notorious cases of the century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593653647
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/06/2025
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Kate Summerscale, formerly the literary editor of The Telegraph, is the author of The Book of Phobias and Manias and The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, a number one bestseller in the UK, which was translated into more than a dozen languages and won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction and the British Book Awards Book of the Year. Her first book, The Queen of Whale Cay, won a Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography Award, The Wicked Boy won the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime and The Haunting of Alma Fielding was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize. Summerscale lives in London.

Read an Excerpt

1

In the walls

In the evening of Tuesday 24 March 1953, Harry Procter, the star crime reporter of the Sunday Pictorial, drove over to a Victorian terrace in Notting Hill in which the bodies of three young women had been discovered. They were rumoured to have died accidentally, in botched back-street abortions, but Harry thought the story worth checking out anyway. He was used to working all hours, shuttling between his office in Fleet Street, crime scenes, pubs, courts and police stations. Over the past few years he had become known throughout Britain for his scoops and sensational exposés - 'Tell it to Harry Procter', people would say when they heard something outrageous. At thirty-six, after a decade and a half in Fleet Street, he looked like a weathered cherub. Harry drank, he smoked. He had tousled brown hair, pale skin, soft bags beneath his eyes.

Harry turned into Rillington Place, parked his car and switched off the headlights. The twenty small buildings in the cul-de-sac were lit by a single gas lamp, and the air was hazy with fog. Every few minutes, a Hammersmith & City Line train rumbled across a steel viaduct just out of sight above the roofs of the right-hand terrace. There were no railings outside the houses, no doorsteps, no plants, no trees. The chimney of a derelict factory rose over the high, blind wall that blocked the end of the street.

No 10 was the last building on the left, abutting the wall. Paint peeled from its sandstone portals, stains spread across its crumbling facade. A police constable stood guard at the front door, by a bay window hung with a dirty net curtain and a sagging sheet, while other officers moved in and out with tools and boxes. Neighbours peered from their windows, stepped from their houses to watch.

The police told Harry that the first body had been discovered that afternoon by a West Indian tenant who was cleaning the abandoned ground-floor kitchen. The lodger had torn a hole in the wallpaper as he tried to fix a shelf to the back wall, and in the shadows behind he saw what seemed to be the bare back of a white woman. He fetched a torch to make sure, then hurried with another tenant to a public telephone kiosk around the corner. The police came quickly. They ripped off the wallpaper, forced open a cracked piece of board that had been nailed to the wall and lifted out a body, only to find the corpse of another young woman beneath it, and behind that a third. The bodies at the back of the alcove were wrapped in cloth and smeared with earth and ashes.

The Criminal Investigation Department at New Scotland Yard despatched a squad of plainclothes detectives to North Kensington, and asked Dr Francis Camps, a well-known pathologist from the London Hospital in Whitechapel, to attend the crime scene. Camps was dining with the hospital's head of anatomy when he was summoned. In his dinner jacket and bow tie, he sped over to Rillington Place to inspect the bodies in the alcove, and then had them conveyed to Kensington mortuary, where he carried out post-mortems. Camps estimated that the women had been murdered within the past few weeks.

When the detectives searching the house pulled up the floorboards in the ground-floor front room, they discovered the corpse of a fourth woman. She was identified by a neighbour as Ethel Christie, a middle-aged housewife who had lived in the flat for fifteen years. Her husband, John Reginald Halliday Christie, had gone missing a few days earlier. Reg Christie was an accounts clerk and a former policeman, described by neighbours as the 'poshest' resident of the street. He immediately became the chief suspect in the murders.

Harry realised, with a shock, that he had not only been to 10 Rillington Place before, but had met the man the police were now seeking. Just over three years ago, as a reporter for the Daily Mail, he had been sent to interview Reg Christie when another tenant of the building was charged with the murders of his wife and child.

Back then, late one December evening in 1949, Harry had knocked at the front door of No 10. After a few minutes a balding, bespectacled figure opened the door a couple of inches and asked to see Harry's press card. The man peered at the card in the darkness, then gave a thin smile. 'I'm Mr Christie,' he said, holding out a clammy hand for Harry to shake. He led him down the communal hall and through a door into his kitchen. The walls of the house were thin, the floors uneven. There was no electricity in the property, so the rooms were lit with gas.

'Sit you down,' said Christie. He put a tin kettle on the stove. 'I know you reporters like something stronger,' he said, 'but I can only offer you tea.' He told Harry that his wife was asleep in the bedroom.

'You're a Yorkshireman, aren't you?' Christie asked, noticing Harry's accent. 'I was born in Yorkshire - many years ago, but you never forget the accent, do you?' There was no trace of the north in Christie's voice: he spoke with a genteel Cockney lilt.

Harry confirmed that he was from Leeds. Christie said that he had been born and brought up in Halifax, only twenty miles away.

Harry asked Christie about the murders of his neighbours. Christie said that he was happy to tell him what he had told the police. He and his wife had been friendly with the Evans family, who had rented the top-floor flat of No 10 for the past year. A few days ago, he had been horrified to learn that the bodies of Beryl Evans and her thirteen-month-old baby, Geraldine, had been found in a washhouse in the back yard, only a few feet away from where he and Harry were now sitting. Beryl's husband, Tim, had briefly accused Christie himself of killing her, but had since made a detailed confession to strangling both his wife and his daughter.

Christie told Harry that the upset had made him ill. He said that he hoped the killer would be punished.

He asked Harry: 'Who do you think murdered Mrs Evans and her baby?' He seemed nervy, Harry thought, almost ingratiating.

Harry saw Christie again a few weeks later, at Tim Evans's trial for murder at the Old Bailey. In court, Evans claimed that Reg had killed Beryl and Geraldine, but the jury did not believe him. There seemed no conceivable reason for Christie to have strangled another man's wife and child, nor for Evans to have made a false confession to their murders. Tim Evans, aged twenty-five, was convicted of murder and sentenced to death.

After the verdict, Harry found Christie in the lobby outside the courtroom, wiping tears from the lenses of his round, horn-rimmed spectacles. 'What a wicked man he is,' Christie had said to Harry, sadly.

The few crime reporters who attended the trial, recalled Harry, had considered it 'dull, sordid, unglamorous, dreary'. They dismissed Beryl and Geraldine Evans's killings as a 'fish and chippy' type of crime: a banal, vulgar, open-and-shut case of domestic violence that would quickly be forgotten.

But things looked different now. The latest discoveries at Rillington Place suggested that a serial killer of women was at large in London, and they also hinted at a terrible miscarriage of justice.

***

Harry had been inspired to become a reporter when, as a fifteen-year-old errand boy in a shoe shop in Leeds, he read Philip Gibbs's novel The Street of Adventure. He imagined newsmen racing for taxis as they investigated dastardly crimes, editors shouting into telephones, presses thundering in basements, vans speeding away with cargoes of crisply printed papers. He dreamed of working in Fleet Street.

One afternoon the shoe-shop manager caught him reading the book, for the umpteenth time, in the rat-ridden cellar that he was supposed to be sweeping. What did he think he was doing? his boss asked.

'I'm going to be an ace reporter,' declared Harry. 'One day you're going to see my name in big black letters across the front page of a national newspaper.'

Never before, the manager told him, had he had a lad in his shop whose head was filled with such rubbish. He fired him on the spot.

But Harry's mother encouraged his ambitions: she found the money to buy the youngest of her five children a typewriter and to sign him up for shorthand classes at night school. 'From now on you never go out without a pencil and some paper in your pocket,' she told Harry. 'Keep your eyes and ears open, write notes about everything you see. What interests you and me interests everybody, always remember that.'

Harry had only a basic education, but he was tenacious. He besieged local papers with stories, and then took to the road, sleeping in fields and hedgerows and hostels as he tried his luck as a reporter in different northern towns.

After a string of temporary jobs, Harry was hired back in Leeds by the Yorkshire Evening News. He learnt to work at speed, mentally composing a story as he investigated it so that he could dictate his copy straight down the line to the newspaper's typists: his mind, he said, was like a tape-recorder. And he was ruthless in getting a scoop. The novelist Keith Waterhouse, then working for the Evening News's rival, the Yorkshire Evening Post, remembered that Harry beat him to the phone when they were both covering an inquest. As Harry emerged from the kiosk, he ripped the handset out of its socket, and passed it to Waterhouse, saying: 'All yours.'

In 1935, Harry fell in love with Doreen Vater, a tiny young woman from a village east of Leeds. She was already pregnant when they married that winter. She gave birth to a son, Barrie, in the spring of 1936, and twin daughters, Phyllis and Patricia, the next year. Harry couldn't spend much time with his family - he would leave home after breakfast and return long after the children had gone to bed - but thanks to his success at the Evening News, he was able to rent and furnish a nice house for them in Leeds.

In 1939, Harry was offered a week's trial at the bestselling London tabloid, the Daily Mirror. In great excitement, he caught the train to King's Cross, rented a room above an Italian café in Bloomsbury and presented himself at the Mirror's offices off Fleet Street. His first story, about a watercress farmer who had taken his own life, did not impress the editor, but he was then sent to interview two very fat Australians on honeymoon in London. The photographer who accompanied him grumbled that they were on a fool's errand: there was no chance the editors would touch the story. But Harry was resolute. 'Not only will they touch it,' he said, 'they'll splash it.' His piece about the 'world's heaviest pair of newlyweds' filled that week's coveted centre spread. The Mirror offered Harry a permanent job, at nearly £10 a week, and he happily accepted.

By now the Procters had four children - the youngest, Valerie, was born in 1939 - and as soon as he could Harry moved the family down to a house in Beckenham, south-east of London. But Doreen suffered a stillbirth in 1940, when the neighbourhood was bombed by the Luftwaffe, and decided to move back to Leeds with the children. Harry rented a room for himself in Lincoln's Inn, a few minutes' walk from his office.

Editorial Reviews

"Riveting... Simultaneously revels in and criticizes the press’s shameless bravado in shaping the Christie murder investigation ... The author questions our own ambivalent complicity in the 'peepshow' of true-crime reportage ... Ms. Summerscale’s evocation of Christie’s purse-lipped, self-satisfaction and his bossy, neurotic pride relates British repression to obsession, prudishness to prurience." —Sara Lodge, Wall Street Journal

“Summerscale, the multiple-award-winning author of five previous books, brings a novelist’s eye and a sociologist’s understanding to a trove of thrilling material . . . peppered with eccentric figures and interesting asides . . . Summerscale gives equal time to Christie’s unfortunate victims, treating them as real people rather than pawns in someone else’s story. And she skillfully examines the racism, sexism, economic privation and class prejudices that permeated postwar England . . . There’s so much to admire in this engaging, deeply researched book.” —Sarah Lyall, New York Times Book Review

“Very good . . . persuasive social analysis, both historical and contemporary . . . Absorbing, authoritative and well researched.” —Chris Hewitt, Minnesota Star Tribune

“A gripping true crime tale that is an unflinching portrait of a postwar Britain riven with sexism and racism.” —FT, Best Books of 2024

“Summerscale revisits one of the most controversial murder cases in British history in this engrossing true crime page-turner . . . she introduces a few eyebrow-raising wrinkles to the publicly accepted narrative and paints a compassionate portrait of the victims. It’s a rigorous look at a still-potent tragedy.” —Publishers Weekly

“Exhaustively researched . . . the arrest of John Reginald Halliday Christie, his trial, and his eventual execution serve as a narrative clothesline upon which hang detailed biographies of the key players, set amid a racist and misogynistic society slowly emerging from the rubble of the Blitz . . . the haunting biographies of the victims themselves, their families, and their upbringings. The true heartbreak lies in its depiction of poverty-stricken young women who were sex workers or much-less-well-paid cleaners and domestic servants, some sleeping in public lavatories. The cruelty and indifference meted out to them strikes the reader as true crime.” —Kirkus

“Gripping, entertaining.”—BookPage

“An absorbing portrait of post-WWII London.” —Booklist

“Summerscale captures all the horrible fascination of Christie’s crimes, but also expertly situates them in their troubled post-war setting. The result is a gripping account of murder, misogyny and spectatorship that has implications well beyond the tragic orbit of the case itself. A haunting, thought-provoking, deeply unsettling book.” —Sarah Waters, author of Tipping the Velvet

“Once more, Kate Summerscale shatters our preconceptions of a classic crime.” —Val McDermid, author of Past Lying

“There are few authors whose work I look forward to as much as Kate Summerscale’s, and The Peepshow does not disappoint. It is a forensic reappraisal of a grimy episode in postwar British history; at once shocking, impeccably researched, lucidly written and always utterly compelling.” —Graeme Macrae Burnet, author of His Bloody Project

“Kate Summerscale’s multi-layered page-turner The Peepshow, which inverts the classic true crime structure, is masterful. The mystery is not who committed a series of murders in 1950s London but whether there had been a gross miscarriage of justice, as told through one tabloid reporter’s attempt to redeem himself by revealing it. It’s also an unflinching examination of the true crime industry—a look at the boundary between making visible the unseen and the exploitation of tragedy—and no one, not even the reader, escapes complicity.” —Becky Cooper, author of We Keep the Dead Close

“The Peepshow is a masterclass in true crime storytelling. Stark and compulsive it tells a story both of murder and those who write about it in a way that is as relevant now as it was in the 1950’s.” —Jennie Godfrey, author of the Sunday Times bestseller The List of Suspicious Things

“I blame The Peepshow for too many late nights, when I simply couldn't put it down. Horrifying, intriguing and entertaining in equal measure.” —Becky Holmes, author of Keanu Reeves Is Not in Love with You

“Quite apart from its superb pacing and prose, its deep social history, there is a brilliant strain of feminism.” —Laura Cumming, author of Thunderclap (via X/Twitter)

“The Peepshow is a savory story sure to keep readers up all night. Summerscale delivers a jewel in the true crime genre, one so thoroughly researched and deliciously British that for anyone to miss it would be to miss out on something masterful.” —Jax Miller, author of Hell in the Heartland

“A crystalline, compelling account of a notorious crime you think you know well . . . Seamlessly blends the pleasures of a good novel with the enlightenment of masterly reportage. A gem.”—Dominic Nolan, author of Vine Street

“Summerscale rebuilds the dark past with such captivating intelligence that she makes eyewitnesses of us all.” —Laurence Scott, author of Picnic Comma Lightening

“This intelligent and implacable account of a notorious post-war horror proves that no established memory of the past is definitive. The Peepshow is ruthless for truth, for previously unregarded details that expose the true horrors of a conflicted landscape, internal and external. This re-visioning of a dark London nightmare has the rigour and complexity of the best novels.” —Iain Sinclair, author of Pariah Genius

“Gripping as a thriller and supremely atmospheric, The Peepshow gazes inside the murder house of 10 Rillington Place and reveals, beyond that, the bombed-out post-war Britain that this sad, sordid, significant case both fascinated and reflected. Superb story-telling from the queen of true crime.” —Laura Thompson, author of Take Six Girls

“[One of] the best true crime writers working today . . . Summerscale has uncovered a wealth of information.” —Meaghan Walsh Gerard

From the Publisher

2025-02-15
A true-crime exploration of notorious London murders.

In the early 1950s, more than 80% of the British population subscribed to a newspaper. Nothing sold better than lurid stories, accompanied by photographs. When four women’s bodies were uncovered behind a bricked-up wall in a West London boardinghouse, the tabloids struck gold. Exhaustively researched, if woodenly written, the arrest of John Reginald Halliday Christie, his trial, and his eventual execution serve as a narrative clothesline upon which hang detailed biographies of the key players, set amid a racist and misogynistic society slowly emerging from the rubble of the Blitz. Christie and his motives remain opaque; after sexually assaulting and murdering one of his victims, he “had a cup of tea and went to bed.” The coverage of the trial by Harry Procter, a crime reporter for theSunday Pictorial, a newspaper that financed the defense, and Fryn Tennyson Jesse, suffering from morphine addiction and blindness, humanize the pressure brought to bear on journalists delivering the all-important “scoop.” Both used the trial for personal vindication while illustrating the media’s pandering to lurid spectacle. Sometimes, the abundance of detail detracts from the central focus. Do we need to know Cecil Beaton has a hangover when taking the Queen’s coronation photos? The book is more effective when detailing the hardship of working-class life, particularly in the haunting biographies of the victims themselves, their families, and their upbringings. The true heartbreak lies in its depiction of poverty-stricken young women who were sex workers or much-less-well-paid cleaners and domestic servants, some sleeping in public lavatories. The cruelty and indifference meted out to them strike the reader as true crime.

An exhaustive compendium of postwar misery.

Kirkus Reviews