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Own the dream. My favorite murder Hello and welcome to My Favorite Murder. That's Georgia Hardstark.
00:01:59
That's Karen Kilgariff. And I'm Kate Winkler Dawson. And this is Tenfold More Wicked.
00:02:05
Aha. Yay. Yay! It's a crossover of a lifetime. Love it. So excited. Hey, we're so happy to have you here.
00:02:13
You are such a talented pro, and it's exciting to have you on this not-so-pro show of ours.
00:02:21
And it's a crossover, and also it's an inter-network crossover. First of its kind.
00:02:30
Amazing. So, Kate, get ready. I joined this network specifically for this moment.
00:02:36
to do this crossover. Nice. So that was it. I'll do this for three years as long as within that three years,
00:02:42
I can do a crossover. As long as you create and start a crossover series and I can do it.
00:02:48
It worked because I'm here. Kate believes in the secret and she's here to talk to you
00:02:53
about manifesting your dreams. I'm excited to be here. Thank you for asking me. We're thrilled to have you.
00:03:00
I mean, we're, you know, I think we've talked to you about this a lot of how impressed we are
00:03:04
that you're a real full-fledged historical true crime writer. And you've had tons of books,
00:03:10
amazing books that you've written. And you have a new book coming out. Do you want to tell us
00:03:15
about that a little bit before we go into the story? Sure. So if you've listened to Tenfold
00:03:20
More Wicked, the very first season was about a man named Edward Ruloff. And he was a psychopath
00:03:28
psychopath, who killed several people very close to him. And at the same time, he was this genius.
00:03:36
And so in the podcast, you hear all about him and how he almost got out of being hanged several
00:03:43
times and how pivotal this case was. There's a moment though in that show where he's shackled
00:03:50
like Hannibal Lecter to the floor of a prison. And there's a series of men who come in from all
00:03:56
different disciplines, decided to basically figure out why he was the way he was, why he was this
00:04:02
horrible criminal, but also brilliant at the same time. And so the book is not a rehashing of the
00:04:08
season because people have heard the season. It is really a deep dive into the criminal mind
00:04:12
and those moments where he manipulated everybody. And what that means today, this was 100 years
00:04:19
before the FBI did the same thing with Ted Bundy and Edmund Kemper and all of these really famous
00:04:24
people with psychopathy. So yeah, that comes out in October and there's pre-sales available now
00:04:30
and the audio book also. So it's very exciting. I, you know, Edward Ruloff, I've just, it's,
00:04:36
it's been a long journey with him. He was a book idea first and then a podcast and now a book. And,
00:04:42
and I feel like he, I'm going to be tethered to this man for the rest of my life.
00:04:47
Wouldn't it be funny when you Google his name now, your name, your name will always pop up.
00:04:51
For better or for worse. Correct. Yes. The book's called All That Is Wicked. And so please pre-order.
00:04:57
That means so much to us writers. It's a big deal. To book sales. Yeah. All That Is Wicked, a gilded age story of murder
00:05:04
and the race to decode the criminal mind. I mean, let's give that title its full weight.
00:05:11
That is my edit. Michelle Howery at Penguin Random House is all her. I am so bad at titles.
00:05:17
It is unreal. It is unreal. Do you have that subtitle memorized? No. Because that's quite...
00:05:24
No. And I don't for any of my books. That's my third book. And I don't remember.
00:05:29
And I don't... People have to tell me where the commas go. I don't think for somebody who's been a journalist for as long as I have, I'm a terrible copy
00:05:36
editor. I really am. Thank goodness for autocorrect. I feel like that's such an important thing to tell people because they're always like,
00:05:42
I can't write a book. I don't know. Like personally as well. I don't know where commas go.
00:05:46
And I don't know fucking Roman numerals very well. It's like, but you can still write a book.
00:05:52
That's not your part of the job. Roman numerals I don know How is that Have you ever had to write Roman numerals No That like a junior high trauma It is That your fear mind serving up anything that you will buy
00:06:07
That's like, sorry, if you can't do a Roman numeral list. Yeah. If you can't count from 100 backwards in Roman fucking numerals standing on your head,
00:06:16
then you don't deserve to write a... Then you better quit. That you're a fraud. I tell you, I type so much that my handwriting is horrific.
00:06:24
My hand cramps up after about one minute of writing by hand, and I can't remember how to do cursive.
00:06:30
My 12-year-old girls can write cursive better than I have. I feel like I'm recessing.
00:06:34
It's really horrible. I mean, add it to those things of things you won't need when you're older.
00:06:39
You know what I mean? Handwriting. Handwriting. That's as old as Edward Ruloff himself.
00:06:45
It's that historical and ancient. I'm trying to get my way out of typing, too. Now I'm just going to do all speech recognition, and that's it.
00:06:53
All I have to do is just lay there in my bed and just speak into the microphone and that's it.
00:06:59
There's nothing else. Just you're with your hands. Pet the dog and that's it. That's the goal.
00:07:03
What if the dog learns how to type and can take dictation? She's that smart. Then you've got a series of TikTok videos you can post and we're talking about content.
00:07:12
We're talking about producing content in every possible way, Kate Winkler-Dawson.
00:07:18
If you can get somebody on your team to train me to do that, I will absolutely do it.
00:07:23
TikTok. My kids know TikTok. I don't understand it one tiny little bit. I just know I have to watch
00:07:29
really silly videos every night at bedtime just to get them, just to have a talking point with
00:07:34
them sometimes. Absolutely. You're in a safe place because none of us right here in this
00:07:39
little circle understand. You know, ticker talk? No. No ticker talking? Okay. Well, good. We're in the same boat.
00:07:45
I get sent some videos by my niece. My thing is like the video itself is always entertaining,
00:07:50
but then it will immediately autoplay the next video, which nine times out of 10 is a
00:07:57
late teens, early 20s girl crying into her own camera. And it's so upsetting to me that I just,
00:08:05
I'm always like scrambling to get out of the app where I'm just like, please, I just wanted to watch
00:08:09
a duck follow a dog around or whatever the original video is. A duck? Well, which one's that? Send me a link to that one. Have you seen the monkey trying to
00:08:18
Give the duck a bath. That one is a classic. Classic. Yeah. Interspecies friends.
00:08:25
I can't. I don't think I could do a TikTok video. I don't. I'm sticking with podcasting.
00:08:29
That's about the end of my creativity is with podcasting. I mean, I think you're covering so much already.
00:08:35
Like you write books, the idea that you do anything else. Like you also are a professor.
00:08:43
The idea that you might feel pressure to do literally anything else is kind of funny to me.
00:08:47
because I... It's less than hilarious for me because I do feel pressure. I do feel pressure.
00:08:53
And I think part of it is when you have so many ideas in your head. The big key I told my students is
00:08:58
when they say, I don't know what I want to do or what genre I want to be in. And I found true crime just because it was...
00:09:03
I would take a break from doing other things and watch true crime. And finally, a friend said,
00:09:08
why don't you just do this sort of for a living? And so it doesn't feel like work to me.
00:09:13
The unfortunate thing for me is I have so many ideas. I have a little folder that is ideas that it's hard really to keep track of. And I have so many
00:09:21
listeners who send me this amazing, all these amazing suggestions for Tenfold that, you know,
00:09:27
I just have this database I'm never going to be able to get through of stuff. So it's an
00:09:30
embarrassment of riches is what I would say, which is wonderful, but it also is maddening
00:09:35
because I just want to do everything. And kind of know every story. I always have that feeling
00:09:40
when people send a suggestion or Georgia and I say that to each other all the time, it's like,
00:09:43
I've never heard of this. Like, how is this possible? Where it's like, right? Because there's a whole bunch of these stories.
00:09:50
There's a ton. Yeah, it's never ending. And especially where in the realm I work in,
00:09:55
I have a friend who runs an audio house for our university. And he and I were talking about true crime.
00:10:02
And he really prefers things. He wants to cover things from the 1980s up. And I am 1960s back.
00:10:09
The further back, the better. I mean, I have a tenfold season that is from 1766 that I'm trying to keep up with.
00:10:16
So the older, the better. And so, you know, I just, I think it's because I just don't want to,
00:10:22
I don't like dealing with live people. I prefer dead people. I really do. And it's easier also for these, for my stories, because they are pretty old.
00:10:31
And we're talking about a hundred, many of them are a hundred years or even older,
00:10:36
where I get family members who are wonderful, but they aren't so involved that it's just gut-wrenching and painful.
00:10:43
I stay away from those usually. I have families who understand the story because it's been a really big part of their lives
00:10:49
and they can feel the reverberations of what happens. But contemporary stories are too difficult for me.
00:10:55
They are for braver people than me, for sure. Yeah, it's very raw when it's, I mean, even in a couple generations close,
00:11:02
like even if you hadn't met the people it happened to, but your parent did. It's so raw.
00:11:09
There is a thing when Karen and I are about to do a story that's like from, there's no way that there's recent generations
00:11:16
who experienced the trauma and knew the people involved. It's kind of like, okay,
00:11:22
we can relax a little bit because we're not going to directly stir anyone's emotional pot with this story
00:11:30
because it's so old. Yeah. I mean, my buddy said when they did a story that the family of the victims were on top of it,
00:11:38
listening to every single episode and giving them feedback. And I was just saying, oh my gosh,
00:11:43
that would be a nightmare for me. I just, I don't think I, it would be really difficult for me to do.
00:11:47
So I give a lot of props for people who can do it, but I just, old, old, long dead people
00:11:53
who have been really really impacted you know but I get so much emotion out of the families that I do have because I do believe in trauma embedded in your DNA And I believe that things that happened in the past
00:12:05
in a lot of families just sort of, you know, continue on and on and on through the generations.
00:12:10
It's nice to have some answers and some clarity on some stories. So. Especially since it was only recently, and I mean, like maybe even beginning in the like late
00:12:20
80s, 90s, where people have started talking about things and talking about our family's not perfect,
00:12:26
like that fever cleaver kind of specter that's been hanging over so many families for so long,
00:12:32
at least American families, where it's like, you're supposed to be perfect. And if you're not,
00:12:36
shut your mouth. The idea that that's finally fading away and people can say, hey, I had this fucked up thing happen. And almost everyone else can go, yes, so did we.
00:12:46
It was just a different version. But like everyone has experienced familial trauma and
00:12:53
hardship in some way. Like it's all very relatable. There's just certain ones that are
00:12:59
really extreme. And I find what's interesting is with a lot of my stories is when I'll contact
00:13:04
family members, I'll go through Ancestry or I'll track them. I've gotten pretty good at tracking
00:13:09
people down. I talked to this woman one time. I emailed her and said, hey, I need to talk to you
00:13:13
about your great-uncle, great-great-uncle. And she said, yeah, let's talk. And I called her and I said, so this is what he did.
00:13:19
And she said, that is not what I thought you were talking to me about. She had never heard of the case.
00:13:25
It was not ever talked about. There is a generation and it stops. The story disappears and nobody knows anything about it.
00:13:33
For season two of Tenfold, that was true with the Burke and Hare story. Burke's relatives, the University of Scotland
00:13:40
were able to track them down. And Burke's relatives, one of the killer's relatives said, we knew his niece and that was it.
00:13:48
We had no idea who this guy was. So they really, really would stop any kind of discussion about the story.
00:13:55
And so people have this in their background and sometimes knowing more about it clarifies things.
00:14:01
Fascinating. Well, it is true probably a lot of generations blamed the family members of the killer or, you know what I mean?
00:14:11
where it's like you're shunned because you have this imperfect person in your family and this
00:14:17
murderer and psychopath. And it's like somehow, you know, everyone wants to pretend that they
00:14:22
don't have issues in their families as well that maybe aren't as extreme, but then the whole family
00:14:27
is shunned, you know? And so the great way to forget about it or not let that happen is to
00:14:32
pretend that it doesn't exist. Yeah, I agree. I agree. I think it gets buried and that's sad.
00:14:38
It's understandable, but it's also really sad, especially because a lot of the cases I deal with were very impactful in their time period.
00:14:45
They taught us something. It's things that we can relate to now. And to have those things buried and not want to talk about them is understandable on one end.
00:14:53
But I also love when I get a hold of family members who say, I've been wanting to talk about this because I see this happening now in our family, you know, for better or for worse.
00:15:03
And, you know, a lot of it is I end with, on Tenfold, I end with, you know, where has this story fit into the tapestry of your family?
00:15:12
Where do you see yourself in this story? And a lot of them say it's perseverance.
00:15:17
Our family has survived a lot of stuff. It's not just been this. It's been other things.
00:15:21
And that's nice to be reminded of sometimes. So I've been grateful for every family I've talked to.
00:15:26
It's been wonderful. Yeah, that's an amazing source and a kind of a grounding source for the story itself.
00:15:33
where it's like, this is real. These are real people. This really happened. This isn't a story
00:15:38
from the past. So what would you say your first true crime experience that made you realize that
00:15:45
you were very interested in this as opposed to something else? You know, I was a broadcast
00:15:51
journalist for a very, very long time. And I worked for CBS to be CBS in New York. And I worked
00:15:57
for ABC News Radio. And then I moved to San Francisco. And I was assigned a story to go live
00:16:02
from a place called Modesto, California, which is Central California. And there was a representative,
00:16:09
U.S. representative there named Gary Condit. I don't know if you know this name. Maybe you guys
00:16:14
have talked about it with Chandra Levy. And I covered that story. And that was a really,
00:16:20
really difficult story. Of course, we know that he was, it sounds like having an affair with her.
00:16:25
And he was digging in and would not admit to it. He was married. He was a really big name in Central
00:16:31
California. He was sort of a well-known congressman who had been in office for a very long time.
00:16:38
And he just wouldn't talk to the police and just simply said, I don't acknowledge anything except
00:16:42
she was an intern in my office. And she went missing. And later on, it was discovered after
00:16:48
his career was totally ruined, it was discovered that she had been killed by a serial killer who
00:16:53
had buried her in the park where she had gone jogging. So, you know, a side note to that is
00:16:58
me thinking in my head, obviously, it would be better for you to admit this affair and give this
00:17:04
woman's family some closure so they can move on and try to find her. But police were just so
00:17:10
derailed by him. He just seemed like such a likely suspect. So I was covering that case
00:17:15
in California. And I think that was really interesting to me. I saw the good and the bad,
00:17:20
I think, of what happens with crime reporting and with true crime, which is the good was I got to
00:17:26
know her family, Chandra Levy's family. And I got to really understand their pain and the lengths
00:17:32
that they were going. Nobody wants to talk about a missing child. And they were accepting so many
00:17:39
different interviews and they were allowing satellite trucks to park out front. We were
00:17:44
parked out front and to go inside. And so I think that that was great. But the negative side is,
00:17:50
you know we had I worked for a 24 news network and we were just reporting it 24 hours I mean we were there at six in the morning on a Saturday where nothing was happening And it was this insatiable need this machine that needed to be fed And that what made it
00:18:06
difficult for me. And of course, this fell into what we now call the missing white woman syndrome,
00:18:13
which was this beautiful young woman who's missing and supposedly somebody who is
00:18:18
not a typical victim and how outside the norm is this. And now we know how misguided that can be.
00:18:26
But it was that, I think that story really, I was there for a couple months and I put on about 20
00:18:30
pounds because I was staying at the Doubletree and they have those cookies. Do you know, have you
00:18:35
been at that? Yes. I mean, I'm not angling for an advertisement for Doubletree, but I would be
00:18:41
happy to do it because those chocolate chip cookies were the bomb. And I definitely put on
00:18:46
some big time weight thanks to that. Yes, they're very dangerous. So I was impacted multiple ways
00:18:53
by living in Modesto, California for a couple of years. So that really was the beginning for me.
00:18:57
And my mom has been a true crime fanatic for my entire life, as long as I can remember. And my
00:19:04
father was a criminal law professor at the University of Texas. And so it was just sort
00:19:08
of this natural thing for me to always be interested in. I just like a good story.
00:19:12
and true crime for me has this natural story arc where it makes sure people are invested
00:19:21
from the beginning of who the victim is. Why does this story really matter? Because everybody matters.
00:19:26
And then there is the inevitable trial, hopefully if the person's caught and then somebody changes by the end of the story.
00:19:34
There is some sort of a shift in someone's life by the end of the story. And that's a good story.
00:19:39
And I think that's what makes true crime appealing to a lot of people. Like sports. I love sports films, too. So it's the same sort of thing. There's something that happens. There's an event that changes people. And to me, that's a definition of a good story.
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Hello, hello. This is Malcolm Glabal from Smart Talks with IBM. Today, we're diving into a fascinating conversation with Stefano Pallard,
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It's more Scuderia Ferrari. I'm still working on rolling my R's. But what I was able to learn from Stefano was the importance of engaging the Tifosi,
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the Ferrari superfans in the digital age. Ferrari fans and superfans want to be part of something, want to belong to something.
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So they want to be part of a community, and ultimately they want to be part of a winning team.
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You've got Ferrari, which has a long history, design history. And now you're interacting in a kind of digital space.
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I'm curious how you balance those two traditions. When it comes to fan engagement, it's really digital technology and digital channels are enabled to create a deeper connection with our fans.
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To learn more about how Ferrari and IBM are using technology to build deeper connections with fans, visit ibm.com slash Ferrari.
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00:23:01
That's K-N-I-X.com. Code FLOW15. Wait, so now, Kate, you have a story to tell us today.
00:23:09
I do, and it's long and in-depth, so get ready. I expect very natural organic gasps from you.
00:23:16
Right. I love it. We're doing it that we knew when we've done it in the past, we knew the stories,
00:23:21
and this time we don't know what you're bringing. Yeah, I said, don't know. We're so excited.
00:23:25
You don't know either. No, I don't know. You're just like, I'm going to make it up.
00:23:27
I said, I told your producer, I told the producer, don't tell them. Please tell them not to Google.
00:23:33
I don't want you to Google anything. Yeah, perfect. And the midpoint of this, I'm going to take an unscientific poll with just the two of you
00:23:41
to see what you think. And then we'll see if you were right or wrong or whatever at the end.
00:23:46
Okay. Okay, we're playing Clue. I love it. Yes, I love it. So this is a story that comes from my first book,
00:23:53
which was called Death in the Air. Oh yeah. And Death in the Air was set in London in 1952.
00:24:00
won't get too much into it because I don't want to spoil anything, but the book is essentially
00:24:04
about the Great Smog of 1952 in London, where all of this pollution settled over the city
00:24:09
and killed about 12,000 people. And what the city was more concerned about was a killer
00:24:15
and who was on the loose. And we'll talk about that in a little bit. So here's the story. We'll start kind of from the beginning. It's the story of Timothy Evans.
00:24:24
And Timothy Evans has always been, as a case, has been held up as a pretty profound
00:24:29
example of a wrongful conviction. So I was involved with wrongful convictions because of my dad's
00:24:35
clinic. I told you my dad was a law professor at the University of Texas for about 37 years before
00:24:40
he died. And I moved down here right at the end of his death. And I had always intended to move
00:24:45
from New York back down to Austin, Texas. And before my dad died, he said, I would like you to
00:24:50
get involved with the clinic. And he started an actual innocence clinic where they investigate
00:24:55
wrongful convictions. So my dad was really into, you know, debunking junk science and
00:25:02
false confessions. So I've, I learned my whole life, I've just heard all about this stuff.
00:25:06
What was his name? Robert Dawson. His nickname was Mad Dog. Mad Dog Dawson. I don't know. I always made fun of him. I said, that's, you were not a mad dog,
00:25:16
but, but he was, he was, he was pretty good in court. So when I've talked about wrongful
00:25:22
conviction, my whole life, I've heard about the Timothy Evans case, which took place in London.
00:25:26
So here's the story, and then we can see where you guys land midway through. So it is 1948,
00:25:32
post-war London. The city's been blitzed, and they're in a post-war rebuild because the city's
00:25:39
been destroyed. The British government, which is at this point led by Winston Churchill,
00:25:45
who was a conservative, is bankrupt, but they're not telling anybody else, which is where the
00:25:50
pollution part of my book comes in because they are buying dirty coal and distributing dirty brown
00:25:56
nasty coal to the rest of people in London. And that's what's causing all of this pollution.
00:26:02
So London overall is pretty depressed. There are a lot of people who are unemployed. Of course,
00:26:08
many people were killed. There are women who have to turn to part-time sex work because their
00:26:14
husbands or their boyfriends, the fathers of the children have been killed. There are men who have
00:26:19
returned with their service revolvers. There's a lot of domestic violence, a lot of misery.
00:26:23
And of course, this isn't the case in every part of the city. But in a place that is now beautiful,
00:26:30
Notting Hill, Notting Hill was not a very pleasant place to be in the 1940s, in the late 1940s and
00:26:36
1950s. It was an area where the houses were poorly built. Generally, they were old Victorian houses
00:26:42
that were then turned into multiple, multiple flats. And, you know, rooms that used to be pretty lavish
00:26:49
were split down the middle, and they shoved as many people as they could into these rooms.
00:26:54
So in Notting Hill, in 1948, came a Welshman named Timothy Evans. He was 24, and he had just about a year and a half
00:27:04
to two years before met a young woman named Burl. And Burl was 19 years old, and they met and they fell in love very quickly,
00:27:11
and they got married very quickly and she got pregnant. And in 1948, they moved into an old Victorian house,
00:27:18
which was right next to this huge coal-fired power plant. So you have to picture this.
00:27:25
They're also really close to a tube station. So there's like soot and dust coming through from the coal plant
00:27:31
and there's the rumble of the train, which was an above-ground train right next to their flat.
00:27:37
This is not, everything's rattling and these are not well-built buildings to begin with.
00:27:41
So everything's shaking. And it's just, it's not aesthetically pleasing at all. And they're a young couple.
00:27:47
So he's a lorry driver, which would be truck driver in the US. He's a lorry driver.
00:27:52
And he's always just, Tim Evans has always just had a struggle keeping a job. He drank a lot.
00:27:58
He didn't serve in the war, but he did drink a lot. And he, and Burrell fought a lot, a lot, a lot.
00:28:04
They had some pretty violent fights. And when Geraldine, the little girl, was born, he seemed to be a pretty good father.
00:28:12
And within about six months or so, they're still living there, but there's accusations
00:28:17
of infidelity, and she gets pregnant. And she is not happy about this. And he's not particularly happy either, but he is Catholic, and she wants to have an abortion,
00:28:29
and he says no. And it has been a real problem between the two of them. So the couple down on the ground floor heard so many of their fights,
00:28:38
and Burl would try to go get a job, and they would volunteer to keep the little girl.
00:28:44
So people were trying to do their best to help out. So there is a time in 1948 where Timothy Evans decides to go home to Wales,
00:28:54
and he visits his family. And he hangs out with his family, and everything seems okay.
00:28:59
And then he ends up going to a police station in Wales, where he's from in Cardiff, and he says, I killed my wife and my daughter. They're in Notting Hill.
00:29:08
And that's it. He gives no explanation, nothing. So the police in Wales don't know what to do with
00:29:16
this. They called the Metropolitan Police at their Notting Hill division, and they say,
00:29:21
you guys need to send some officers over to 10 Rillington Place, which has later become a very,
00:29:26
very well-known address. And Timothy Evans, they press him, of course, and they say,
00:29:32
where is she? And where is the little girl? And he said, I took off one of those plates down the
00:29:40
sewer hole right in the middle of the street, right in front of my building. I pried open the
00:29:44
plate. I dumped their bodies down into the sewer. You'll find them there. So the police scurry over
00:29:49
there It takes three or four men strong metropolitan police officers to try to get this lit up And they having a hard time getting the lit up It sort of adhered down probably rust and you know all kinds of stuff So immediately the police are thinking can one guy who not really big actually do this Could he actually lift the lid by himself
00:30:11
carrying bodies in the middle of the night? And of course, he's not giving much of an explanation
00:30:16
anyway. So they finally get it open. They look down, nothing. There's no one there. Nothing's,
00:30:23
no bodies, nothing. So they go back to him and they say, what happened? And he said,
00:30:29
I've changed my mind. I did not do anything, actually. I did nothing. I don't know where
00:30:34
they are. I did nothing. So there are a lot of searches. There are searches in his flat.
00:30:41
They search more down in the sewer. They go into the back garden. And the back garden is
00:30:45
a mess. Of course, no indoor plumbing for bathrooms. The tenants in this building,
00:30:51
It was three floors. There's a middle floor, and then the Evans lived in the top floor.
00:30:57
And these three floors all shared one washroom, one laboratory, one bathroom. So there's two
00:31:03
little buildings in the back, and then a garden that is just wrecked, just stuff everywhere.
00:31:08
People have trashed it. Neighbors probably have dumped stuff in it. So they go and they search
00:31:13
the house, the flat, everywhere. They sort of search the garden, and they don't look in the
00:31:20
wash house. Inexplicably, I have no idea why they decided not to do that, but they didn't.
00:31:25
And they go back and report to the police in Wales. They say, hold him, but we can't find any
00:31:31
bodies. So a day or two goes by and the Notting Hill police get frustrated because they still feel
00:31:38
like something's happening. Her mom's worried. Everybody's worried about Burl and Geraldine.
00:31:44
So they say, go back again one more time. And they figure out that there was a bit of
00:31:48
miscommunication and that somebody should have searched. So we see where this is going. Somebody
00:31:53
should have gone to the wash house and they didn't. So they walk in and they find their bodies and
00:31:58
they're sort of wrapped up like mummified. And they had been there, it looks like for quite a
00:32:03
while, for a week or two. She had been missing for a little while. And, you know, he spent probably
00:32:09
about a week in Wales before he went to the police. So they are wrapped up. They're well
00:32:14
preserved, both of them, because it's very, very cold. It's, you know, late in the winter,
00:32:20
and it's very dry, and they've been, you know, wrapped up in kind of clothing and stuff. They
00:32:25
could tell that they had both been strangled with a necktie, okay? There was no sexual assault kit
00:32:33
done because they were married, and there was no need for that. It wouldn't prove anything
00:32:38
if there were sperm there anyway, from their point of view. And they arrest him, and they drag him
00:32:43
back from Wales to London, and he is denying it along the way. He's accusing everybody under the
00:32:50
sun. And he says, I didn't do it. I love them. And they start to put him on trial and they start
00:32:55
gathering character witnesses and witnesses who have seen things. There's a girlfriend that he's
00:33:00
been sleeping with, and there are people who on the street saw he and Burl fighting, and she was
00:33:06
fighting with him too. Up in the window, you could see a clear view from the street. She was walloping
00:33:10
him. He was hitting her. And this was a frequent occurrence. So the downstairs neighbor who was a
00:33:18
war reserve police officer, which is a really nice appointment during the war, his job was to go kind
00:33:24
of in and out of homes and check and warn people and take them to shelters and check and see if
00:33:28
anybody died during the blitz. He was a character witness because he was down on the bottom floor.
00:33:33
He could hear, he and his wife could hear everything and they babysat for Geraldine.
00:33:36
So it made sense that he was this character witness too. His family came in and tried to sort of defend him
00:33:42
and say that, you know, our son would never do this, that he loved his daughter, he loved his wife,
00:33:47
and they had problems and he drank a lot. But, you know, this is something that he would never do.
00:33:52
Nobody believes him and he is convicted and he is sentenced to hang. And he, you know, swings from the gallows.
00:34:00
So this is happening in 1949. There's almost no press around this. It's what they called a fish and chips murder, which is funny.
00:34:09
If you've been to London and you go to the street, you know, any of the street fairs and stuff,
00:34:12
you can get some fish and chips wrapped in newspaper in it. It was a real basic domestic violence.
00:34:17
And domestic violence was really, really prevalent, as was in that time period. And now women who are pregnant who are murdered.
00:34:27
I was just reading this just for this episode that I can't remember the statistic,
00:34:31
but I think it's something like women who are pregnant are twice as more likely to be murdered
00:34:35
as women of the same age who aren't. And there's a variety of reasons for that. But we know that women who are pregnant
00:34:40
or have just had given birth are at a much higher risk for mostly domestic violence.
00:34:47
It's like one of the top two or three reasons that women who are pregnant die. So this is, you know, they had a really big argument,
00:34:55
a constant argument over her getting an abortion. She didn't want another child.
00:35:00
And he was Catholic. He said no. So it was a lot, there was a lot of evidence against him and he was hanged.
00:35:06
So, you know, life kind of goes back to normal to the people at 10 Rillington Place.
00:35:12
But I want to go back a little bit because this is where the story takes a little bit of a turn.
00:35:17
You know, the police bungled this investigation at the very beginning. They were supposed to search the wash house pretty immediately.
00:35:22
And they didn't. There was a delay, blah, blah, blah. So when they finally get it together and they go to the wash house and they open up the door
00:35:28
and they see Burl and Geraldine and they pick them up. and they walk their bodies out.
00:35:33
They open up this gate and this gate is terrible. It's, everything's falling down.
00:35:37
It's a horrible garden, as I said before. And the police, when they open the gate,
00:35:42
they don't notice that there's this weird stick holding up the gate. And upon further examination years later,
00:35:49
they find out that that stick was actually a thigh bone. Oh. Whoa out of left field And Tim Evans wasn the one who put it there Okay He did not know and Beryl did not know and nobody knew that they were living with a serial killer
00:36:06
who had already killed two women and buried them in the backyard. It was that neighbor down below on the first floor.
00:36:12
It was a man named John Reginald Christie. The Army police guy? Yep, War Reserve police officer
00:36:17
who testified against him. He was the main character witness. And then I'll tell you something
00:36:25
because I was kind of mean and held something back. Timothy Evans, sorry, I do that a lot.
00:36:29
So Timothy Evans said, I think John Christie did it. He was my neighbor on the bottom floor.
00:36:35
I think he did it. I think he did it. And everybody just thought that was ridiculous
00:36:38
because John Christie was this, you know, a war reserve police officer and he had never really been in trouble that anyone knew.
00:36:45
He was married. They didn't have any children. And Christie just said, this guy's terrible.
00:36:49
He beats his wife and it made sense. It all made sense. Yeah, right. So John Christie, of course, has this incredible secret,
00:36:59
which is that there are two women buried in his backyard when they are carrying Geraldine and Burl Evans out of the wash house.
00:37:09
And that leg bone belonged to Meryl Eadie. And I'll tell you the stories in a little bit.
00:37:15
But we should go back because here is the unscientific poll with just the two of you.
00:37:21
Do we think, just at this point from what you know, do we think that it's possible that a serial killer could be living in the house and not be the one responsible for killing this man's wife and child after he recanted, knowing just what you know so far?
00:37:41
You mean to say, could a murder, an act of murder also be there when a murder takes place?
00:37:47
And he's not responsible. Two killers at the same time. And they're not working together. Two separate murderers living
00:37:53
in a small three-floor building in Notting Hill. I think at this time and place when it seems like
00:38:01
domestic violence is, and I mean, not that things have changed, but is so prevalent and there's so
00:38:08
much trauma in the city because of, you know, what just happened in World War II and everything
00:38:17
you've pointed out about her being pregnant again. There's a lot of drinking. But the thing
00:38:23
is, I don't know how these other women who are in the backyard died. There you go. So were they
00:38:29
strangled? Ah, look at that. Thank you. That's very detective-y of you. Yes. You sound like
00:38:36
Paul Holes. This is what Paul Holes would ask me, I think, this kind of thing. Yeah.
00:38:40
How are the other people? I'm Paul Holes. Yeah, there you go. The ultimate compliment. I was just
00:38:44
going to go, no. I'd say right off the bat with the information I have, I still think this was a
00:38:52
domestic murder. Here's what I was going to say. Now I'm going to try to observe as well as Georgia
00:38:58
just did and it'll be sad. But the one thing that didn't work for me is if that's the only,
00:39:05
if this basically back outhouse type of setup is the only place that an entire building of people
00:39:12
are using the restroom, how did those bodies not get found immediately after they were placed there?
00:39:18
Because that's however many, 9, 12, 16 people going in and out of that place and they're not
00:39:25
found. So to me, it was just like, it's not a smart, quote unquote, hiding place. They couldn't
00:39:31
have been there the entire time. Somebody else is involved who lives there because they're
00:39:37
controlling when and where those bodies are placed. So that- Can I have a- Yeah, go ahead. No, Georgia, you're good.
00:39:44
Georgia's like, can I argue that? I'm just going to let you guys talk for a little bit and then just point at me when you're ready.
00:39:50
Will you mute yourself real quick? No. I will say though, there were two bodies that we know of right now in that backyard and none of
00:39:59
those nine or whatever people found it. And also I think that the setup of outhouses back then,
00:40:06
there was a board and then there was an underneath. So it wasn't like they were just visible.
00:40:13
They were secluded, sort of, yes. Right. And then also, it is kind of a perfect place
00:40:18
because the smell of decomposition could be confused for the smell of an outhouse.
00:40:23
But more than that, they didn't know that there were two bodies in that backyard.
00:40:27
And so two more bodies, I feel like, could have gone undetected. Yeah, I think Timothy Evans' argument
00:40:34
was that he didn't have a key to that particular, to that washroom. So the setup of the house...
00:40:42
I'm going to need to see a blueprint of this washroom. I'm going to email it. So I can now make my argument.
00:40:47
Yeah, okay. So the setup of the house was that there was a man named Mr. Kushner
00:40:52
who lived in the middle floor. And then there were the Evans who were on the top floor
00:40:57
and then the Christies, he and his wife were on the bottom floor. So Christy kind of kept a pretty tight control
00:41:03
over that wash house and the outhouse too. And people didn't, there was a sink in the outhouse also.
00:41:08
So people didn't use the wash house very often. It was more of like a laundry place.
00:41:13
But Mr. Kushner had been in the hospital for three or four weeks. So he was out of that process.
00:41:21
So we're just left with the Christie's and John Christie did his wife's laundry and you're left with the Evans.
00:41:28
So there are theories that are befuddling to me that we'll talk about a little bit later
00:41:33
about how all that works. But let's get back to Georgia's very astute question about, I know, about how people died.
00:41:43
So let's just go back and talk about John Christie in general. He is, as on the realm for me of serial killers,
00:41:49
he is the creepiest of creepy. He's somebody who I think most people would not be surprised if he were a serial killer So he was born in Halifax England in 1899 and he was the sixth of a family of women So he was both mothered and I think demeaned at the same time
00:42:09
They were all very, everyone in his life was sort of overpowering to him. His dad was a tyrant.
00:42:16
He never said that he was abusive. John Reginald Christie, everybody called him Reg,
00:42:21
but I like to call him John Christie. Never said that his father was abusive, but it sounded like what we would now categorize as abusive.
00:42:29
Then they would call it Victorian era parenting. So lots of marching for miles and miles and miles and single file and lots of whipping and that sort of thing.
00:42:40
And so Christie had been under someone's thumb his whole life. The first time he saw some relief was at his grandfather's funeral.
00:42:50
And it was the first time that he had seen a dead body. Now, I don't know if you all have heard,
00:42:55
I've read this with a lot of different serial killers, that their first experience with a dead body
00:43:01
is what triggers some thoughts for them. This was Christy's grandfather, who sounded like a pretty terrible person.
00:43:07
And I think seeing this man who had terrorized him for a long time laying there defenseless,
00:43:15
it really sparked something in him. And I've read the same thing about Dennis Nielsen,
00:43:18
who was a serial killer in London in, I think, the late 80s. He said the same thing.
00:43:23
He saw his grandfather dead, and that was when he really became fascinated with the idea of death.
00:43:29
Have you heard that? Sorry, Dennis? Yes, well, I think because Dennis Nielsen is the one,
00:43:33
if I'm not mistaken, who was killing gay men. Right. And what's very strange is that these stories are really parallel.
00:43:39
He also lived in the top of like a three apartment thing. And Georgia, this is the guy that was putting people's bodies, he was boiling them and then putting them down the thing.
00:43:51
And they had, the plumber came because everything got gummed up. When you first started talking about this, I was like, this is not this, because that was the 70s, 80s.
00:44:00
But it's very parallel in that way. I don't remember hearing that ever. And that makes total, about the dead body, you know, it's like suddenly your power is gone.
00:44:09
This is the only way they can get power. And they realize, oh my God, that's dark.
00:44:14
This very strong, you know, this strong, powerful person has been reduced to a lifeless body.
00:44:21
And so this really sparked an interest in Christy with death and having power over somebody who was dead.
00:44:29
So Christy, through life, is never really well-liked. He's odd and not fun-odd. Like odd-odd.
00:44:36
Thank you for saying that. Yeah, not like you guys. Like an odd-odd. He had a personality where he was very acerbic.
00:44:45
He was on a soccer team, football team, and he would try to control things on the pitch all the time.
00:44:50
He would argue with the referee. He snitched on people at work. He was just sort of unpleasant.
00:44:56
He had no luck with women, which probably isn't a surprise. He was impotent to a point where he would try to sleep with a woman
00:45:06
and he earned the nickname Can't Do It Christy. and a couple of other ones that I know you guys would be fine with me saying,
00:45:14
but I'm not going to say. Really, he was really gone through the ringer, I think, as a young man.
00:45:20
And he really didn't have luck with women. He spoke very quietly, and this didn't really help when he served in World War I.
00:45:27
And he was a victim of mustard gas, where he lost his voice. So picture this person, balding, not really good skin texture,
00:45:40
He had really thick glasses. He had this sort of weird stare about him. He had a squeaky voice.
00:45:48
He barely spoke over a whisper. So with a better personality, he probably would have been just fine.
00:45:54
But because he was one of those, you know, meld into the wallpaper kind of people,
00:45:59
he just had an unpleasant reputation. He was a photographer, though, and he was a pretty good one.
00:46:04
And he was an animal lover. And he had a couple of ancient dogs that he doted after.
00:46:10
So he finally strikes some luck and he meets Ethel Simpson, who is a woman. He courts and they eventually get married.
00:46:19
He has a petty crime history. He works for a post office and steals checks. And he's never really done anything too serious until he leaves Ethel briefly and takes up with a woman who has a child.
00:46:35
And the child is acting out and Christy doesn't like that. and he gets an argument with this girlfriend
00:46:42
and he takes a cricket bat and whacks her in the head with it. Oh my God. Jesus Christ.
00:46:47
So he's arrested briefly. And then after he gets out of prison, he reunites with Ethel and she says,
00:46:53
okay, let's get married. And so they end up, I know. I mean, I think she just waited for him.
00:46:59
They tried to have children. They both really wanted children. She wasn't able to, she miscarried.
00:47:04
And, you know, I think he just accept, they both accepted that they weren't gonna have children
00:47:09
and they wanted to live in the city, he was hoping to get a better job. He had a hard time keeping jobs.
00:47:14
That was another thing is, you know, he was not the most pleasant person to be around
00:47:17
and he had a hard time keeping jobs. He just wasn't as reliable as he could have been.
00:47:24
But he ends up moving into, with Ethel in 1937 to 10 Rillington Place, which was, again, three rooms of flats.
00:47:33
It's an interesting building because it's an old Victorian house. So if you picture that,
00:47:38
He's got the ground floor where people are walking in and out of this area. It's supposed to be three floors, but you're walking through his living room to get to your flat on the second floor or the third floor.
00:47:50
So, Christy was physically weak. He complained of just about every ailment you could think of. And I say in the book, there's very few times, I love podcasting because I can show my personality.
00:48:00
a little bit. And I can't crack many jokes in a serious history nonfiction book, but he does
00:48:06
complain of a lot of things at the same time, aches and pains and flatulence, and everything
00:48:10
happens at the same time for him. So you can imagine that he's just this big of a mess of a
00:48:14
person who's just unpleasant all the time. So he ends up, you know, moving into 10 Rillington Place
00:48:21
and he becomes a war reserve police officer, which we talked about. He has affairs with various women
00:48:28
who they're not sex workers, but they're women. He clearly is supplementing their income
00:48:33
and they're his girlfriends. This happens a couple of times. It's unclear whether Ethel knows about this stuff or not,
00:48:39
but he becomes a war reserve police officer and does really well. And so police officers around London recognize who he is.
00:48:47
When Timothy Evans' trial comes up for murder, he has a certain amount of credibility because of that,
00:48:53
because he's got this great job. So he decides that he wants to woo this woman named Ruth first, who works at a musician's
00:49:02
factory. And Ruth is someone who is one of those women who needed to take some part-time sex work.
00:49:12
It's unclear whether or not that was the case or whether or not she just wanted to go on
00:49:16
a date with John Christie. But regardless, with all the men to choose from in London, even though John Christie is not someone I would say is this, you know, ideal, charming man, he probably presented as the least offensive of many options.
00:49:36
He's probably not going to hurt you. He's kind of wimpy. He doesn't have a strong personality.
00:49:41
This is someone who I think you would look at and say, I could trust him. He's creepy, but I can overpower him.
00:49:46
Yeah. So Ruth, she is 21 years old, and she goes back to Christy's flat with him.
00:49:52
Ethel goes away to her sister's house often. And when she goes, because it's a long train ride and it's kind of a bit of a journey,
00:50:00
she stays for a while. So he gets his flat alone for a couple of weeks at a time.
00:50:05
And she likes to go home often. So he brings Ruth home, and they have a drink, and she agrees to have sex with him.
00:50:14
And so they have sex. and in the middle of it, spontaneously, he has a rope and he takes the rope, which was like a
00:50:23
bed linen rope that had just naturally been lying there. He decides that he's going to strangle her.
00:50:28
So this seems out of the blue, but I'm not sure it really is because he had hired sex workers in
00:50:35
the past and had liked some sort of rough play. But generally speaking, with the exception of
00:50:41
cracking a woman over the head with a cricket bat, there had not been anything officially in his past
00:50:47
to show that he was really violent, very, very violent. And so when he strangles Ruth first,
00:50:53
I think it probably surprised him. And, you know, I think he panicked and he didn't really
00:50:58
know what to do. So the first thing that he did was he pulled up the floorboards
00:51:03
of their master bedroom and he put her body under the floorboards. Hello, beautiful.
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Code FLOW15. This is where things get really weird when it intertwined with Timothy Evans Now remember this is five years before Timothy Evans even moves into 10 Rollington Place He says what to himself what am I going to do And then he thinks the most logical place is for him to bury her in the garden in the back But he wants to be able to transport
00:54:13
her body and put the body somewhere in the meantime for just half a day while he can think, where in
00:54:19
the garden. What time should I do this? So in the dead of night, he carries her body and he stores
00:54:25
her where? In the bathhouse. In the wash house. Same place. Wash house. Same place. That's his
00:54:34
spot. That's his spot. Oh, shit. Okay. So now he's strangled and he puts her there. All right.
00:54:39
And how did Burl and Geraldine die? Strangulation. Yeah. All right. Here we go. So he, in the
00:54:49
plants, plants above her. And the only reason I know this is that the Museum of London had a
00:54:55
display, the Crime Museum, and they showed Ruth First's spinal cord when they recovered the body
00:55:03
and it had a tree that had grown through the spine. And it was like a certain kind of bush.
00:55:10
It was a bush, bushy tree. And, you know, I was able to identify the flowers. He had planted this
00:55:15
And he later said that he had planted stuff above her. So he now has gotten away with it.
00:55:21
This is the thing that he's thought about is, you know, can he kill a woman? Can he disable her?
00:55:26
He's always had problems with women. He's always had problems with impotence. So any questions so far?
00:55:33
I always ask my students that. Do we have any questions? You can raise your hand if you want.
00:55:38
No, we're with it. Yeah. My question is, whoa. Okay. Not technically a question, but that's okay.
00:55:45
Yeah. Okay. I don't know questions and I don't know Roman numerals. It's kind of my thing.
00:55:50
So he has 21-year-old Austrian, she's from Austria, munitions worker Ruth First in his back garden.
00:55:57
So he does something that we know a lot of serial killers do. He managed to find women
00:56:03
victims who are not looked after. So her family's in Austria. He knows that. She doesn't have any
00:56:10
family here. She's here to try to make a better life and, you know, to send money back to her
00:56:13
family. So nobody's looking for her. And her not showing up to work is not a problem because people
00:56:19
didn't show up all the time. You know, when you're in an era like this, in a post-war city like
00:56:25
London, people are flaking all the time. It's just not surprising. So nobody was alarmed.
00:56:30
So about a year later, he meets a woman at a different job. Remember, he's hopping from job
00:56:35
to job. He worked for a radio production factory. And in 1944, he meets a woman named Amelia Eadie.
00:56:43
So Muriel was not a sex worker. She, you know, had a full-time job and she didn't need anything from him.
00:56:51
She didn't particularly like him. Like she didn't want to date him. She had a boyfriend.
00:56:55
But, and this is where John Christie is really creative. She had a cough. And that cough was brought on by bronchitis
00:57:05
from the air pollution that was happening all the time. If you lived in London in the 30s or 40s or 50s and 60s too, you were subjected to air pollution there in overwhelming amounts.
00:57:18
And a lot of people had bronchitis. And you could see it like in the air. It's like pea soup, right?
00:57:24
And on the cover of your book, there's this incredible photo of this woman just swimming in this thick pollution.
00:57:33
I had no idea. It's awful. It looks actually similar to what we experienced today
00:57:38
because she has this like chiffon wrap across her face to block it, which is worthless.
00:57:43
You're not going to block air pollution like that. But it's a pretty photo and it's something that, yeah.
00:57:48
So that was everyday life for them. So Muriel constantly had a cough. And John Christie said,
00:57:57
you know, I have a certificate in first aid. Now, that made me chuckle at first.
00:58:02
It's apparently a big deal. I did not know it was a big deal. So it's a whole, it's not just, you know, taking a couple of hour class and, you know, CPR and that's it.
00:58:09
It's pretty intensive. And he has this certificate on his wall and he says, I have a cure for that.
00:58:15
So why don't you come back to my house? Of course, his wife was out of town. And why don't you come back to my house and I can give you a treatment for that.
00:58:21
And she was tired of the coughing. And I don't think that he came off as creepy all the time.
00:58:27
I think he saved up a bunch of charm and, you know, then distributed appropriately to women.
00:58:31
And so he got her back to the house and he offered her a drink and she said no. And he said, okay, well, let me tell you about this treatment.
00:58:39
And he sat her down in the kitchen and he said, you know, hold this jar, kind of like the Vicks Vapor Rub that you would inhale
00:58:46
and it would really help clear out your lungs, right? Or you would put it on your chest.
00:58:50
It was sort of a menthol type of smell. And it had a tube running from it that had sort of a mouthpiece.
00:58:56
So he told her, put this mouthpiece over your mouth and breathe this stuff in. And it smelled minty and she started to feel better.
00:59:03
What she didn't know was that there was another tube connected to the jar and it went straight to the tap, the gas tap on the back of his stove.
00:59:14
And later on with this method, he would add a bull clip so that it was really easy.
00:59:20
He would have the gas on, it would be cut off, he would release the bull clip. And then all of a sudden you have carbon monoxide gas going into that jar.
00:59:27
and it knocked her out and he had a pair of pantyhose and he sexually assaulted and then strangled her and killed her.
00:59:36
Diabolical. So he's basically also improving his, as they do, where like you were saying,
00:59:43
he could save up a little bit of his charm where it's like, well, he knew he had to get this thing.
00:59:47
So he's going to work as hard as he can and then he's also going to perfect his MO essentially.
00:59:54
Yeah, well, he, you know it so interesting He made it easy on himself He had never had manual strangulation He was never strong physically strong enough to do that So he would either use pantyhose or
01:00:05
well, I don't believe he used a necktie in any case, but you could say a necktie,
01:00:09
anything that rope, anything that you could use that would help him. He had poor hand grip. I mean,
01:00:15
just this man seemed afflicted with everything, which... It's also interesting that he didn't want to have a struggle.
01:00:21
Right. He wanted them to be knocked out. Because he had one with Ruth first. I'm pretty sure she fought back.
01:00:28
I mean, he didn't have any, nobody of course could examine him because he wasn't even a suspect
01:00:31
with his nails or anything. But so he did the same thing. He takes Muriel, he wraps her up.
01:00:37
He puts her in the outhouse for a couple of hours in the washroom for a couple of hours at the most.
01:00:41
And he digs in the middle of the night. He's digging and the neighbor asked him,
01:00:45
how are you doing? And he said, cheerio. I mean, digging a grave in his backyard,
01:00:50
there are walls surrounding the brick walls surrounding the garden. but they're not tall brick walls.
01:00:55
I mean, you could see over and see what he was doing. So he buries Muriel and plants things on top of her.
01:01:02
And he lives his life for quite a long time. Now, you know, based on what happens
01:01:08
between now and the next incident, so between 1944 and the next thing that happens is 1952.
01:01:16
What happens, right, that's a big gap. What happens over that time period is mysterious.
01:01:22
We know that he hired a lot of sex workers. We know that it is unlikely he killed other people
01:01:28
just because of what happens after this. He has a definite spot where he wants to keep people
01:01:33
and he doesn't seem to deviate from things. But I will say that Burl Evans and Geraldine Evans
01:01:39
move in with Timothy Evans four years after this happens, three to four years after this happens.
01:01:44
So he and his wife are living their lives and a big change happens after Timothy Evans is hanged.
01:01:50
And the change is called the Windrush. I was just talking to my students about this.
01:01:56
So the Windrush was a boat that brought over people from other colonies, from Caribbean colonies, who had fought in World War II on behalf of the British.
01:02:07
And they came over and were invited to come to become, I think, naturalized citizens.
01:02:11
When they came, they faced just incredible amounts of racism. But it's the history, partially the history of how London's as a city has such an amazing
01:02:22
population of Caribbean people there. So the demographic in Notting Hill changed completely between the time Timothy Evans
01:02:30
was executed in 49 to where the fog happens in 52. And instead of an old white man living on the second floor and a young couple living
01:02:41
on the third floor, they are now experiencing an influx of Caribbean workers who are living,
01:02:47
and it's something like 10 to 15 in that house in Rillington Place. This is maddening for Ethel
01:02:55
Christie, his wife, and John Christie is not particularly thrilled either. There are a lot
01:03:00
of conflicts with that many people. It doesn't matter where they're from. You're going to have
01:03:04
a lot of trash and that people were not respectful of each other's space, and it just drove the
01:03:11
Christie's crazy. So Ethel was- Also the amount of people coming through your living room,
01:03:16
not to be on John Christie's side, but that's a nightmare of just like you're basically the foyer.
01:03:23
Totally. Your living room. And one outhouse washroom for all of these people. So it was very, very difficult for
01:03:30
the Christie's and they dug in their heels. They did not want to leave. So this was their home.
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And of course, he's got two bodies in the backyard. He's not going to leave anytime soon.
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He's not going. He's committed. So John Christie sort of tries to deal with it, but Ethel is getting worse and worse.
01:03:48
She is upset. She has really bad arthritis as she ages. She's in her 50s when this happens.
01:03:54
And in 1952 comes the fog. That's part of my book. And the fog has shut down the whole city.
01:04:01
So essentially, there's so much air pollution in London because it's the most populated city in the world.
01:04:07
It's a very small city geographically. And it's at the bottom of a basin, the Thames River Valley Basin.
01:04:15
So that when this little, that's called an anticyclone, settled over the city, it caught like a lid on top of a jar.
01:04:22
It caught all this air pollution. And usually these blow out. You know, it's like every time you guys hear that we have like a red alert pollution day,
01:04:29
it's usually because there's a high pressure system that hangs over the city and it traps all the air pollution.
01:04:35
And then it goes away. There's another little pressure system that pushes it out.
01:04:38
That's not what happened. For five days, record-breaking air pollution was trapped in that
01:04:43
city. So all of public transit shut down. Everybody called out sick. And John Christie is now stuck in
01:04:52
the house with his wife, which my friend says is the worst case scenario for any serial killers to
01:04:58
be stuck in the house with your wife for five days. Yes. So he leaves. He walks to work and he quits.
01:05:04
He was at the UK's transit system, one of the departments, as sort of a clerk. He resigns for some reason.
01:05:11
We don't know why. I think he was planning something. So he returns home. He rented like a little photo studio flat kind of thing that he never told Ethel about.
01:05:24
He never told Ethel he was going to quit. He had women come, female models come, and he would photograph them in the nude,
01:05:32
and he would be in the nude. And, you know, he was really building up to something.
01:05:38
So three days after the fog, he wakes up in the middle of the night and Ethel is just kind of at her limit.
01:05:45
And he looks at her and he decides this is her day. And he kills her. He strangles her.
01:05:52
Oh, my God. From the front, too. He straddled her and strangled her from the front So he didn knock her out or do anything You know they had had problems because there were young women who kind of hung about He had some money and he was spreading the money around and she had tried to shoo all these women away
01:06:07
So he kills her, he kills his wife and he has to decide what to do. Because I know this sounds strange,
01:06:14
but this is not a big garden and he's pretty much out of room. He has two bodies back there.
01:06:21
His dog has dug up Muriel Eadie's skull and he took the skull in the middle of the night
01:06:27
and dumped it smartly, dumped it in a blitzed out house where there's no way anybody was ever gonna find it.
01:06:33
It was totally bombed and flattened out. And then of course the dog also dug up Ruth's leg bone,
01:06:42
her femur, and he used it to prop up this fence. So he takes Ethel's body and he pulls up the floorboards of the parlor
01:06:51
and he puts her under there and it's there she stays. He wrapped her up like a mummy.
01:06:56
It was early, early, it was December, mid-December. Very, very cold. Of course, you have to picture
01:07:02
these are not heated apartments except for coal fireplaces. So it was mummified.
01:07:08
It was not causing a massive smell immediately, not immediately. He takes a couple of keepsakes, her wedding ring,
01:07:14
because he needs to sell it because he's quit his job. And he takes a snippet of her hair.
01:07:21
He keeps trophies. We'll talk about that in a little bit. and he puts her under the floorboard
01:07:25
and he sleeps on top of the floorboard in the parlor to be close to her. So this was, you know, pretty terrifying, I think.
01:07:35
Later on, he would blame that she was having a seizure and this is what happened.
01:07:40
But, you know, it's pretty clear that he strangled her with, I think it was a pair of pantyhose.
01:07:45
So what comes in next is an interview with this man named Lynn Trevelyan, who was wonderful for me.
01:07:52
He was 101 when I interviewed him. Oh, my God. You interviewed 101? That's amazing.
01:07:57
Holy shit. He was great, except for one little thing I'll tell you about in a little bit.
01:08:01
He was 101? He was 101. He was 101, and I had to catch him at a certain time so that he was, you know, alert and everything.
01:08:10
And he was great, though. He was one of Winston Churchill's bodyguards, and he was amazing.
01:08:15
So this police officer is patrolling Notting Hill in 1952. and he is just a young cop and he is on the street
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and he sees somebody run out of a bakery with a tin of what they said biscuits, but for us would be cookies, a tin of biscuits.
01:08:33
And this guy is just booking it down the street and he runs into 10 Rillington Place.
01:08:38
And at 10 Rillington Place, he throws open the door and runs up the stairs and Lynn Trevelyan pursues him
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and catches him, drags him down the stairs, takes him to Notting Hill, throws him in the jail
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and they book him. And out of a courtesy, he decides he wants to go back because he knows
01:08:56
John Christie is a war reserve police officer. And Christie was there at the time. And I'm sure
01:09:00
was like, what the what? What's happening? This guy is getting chased down. So he goes back,
01:09:05
Trevelyan goes back, he knocks on the door, Christie opens the door and invites him inside.
01:09:10
And they're talking, kind of chatting as much as John Christie was really able to chat normally
01:09:15
with anybody. He was chatting and Trevelyan stops and he says, what's that smell?
01:09:22
and Christy said, we have Caribbean neighbors and their food and their cooking is god-awful,
01:09:29
and that's what that smell is. Okay, and he leaves, and later on, because the spoiler alert is,
01:09:37
Christy, of course, does get arrested. Lynn Trevelyan is assigned to watch him because
01:09:42
everybody who was arrested at that time was on a suicide watch, and so Trevelyan was assigned to
01:09:47
watch him. And Christy walked in and Trevelyan, you know, looked at him and Christy said,
01:09:52
you recognize me and, you know, you were in my flat. Trevelyan said, of course, I recognize you.
01:09:56
And he said, well, and he got this big smile on his face and he said, I guess, you know,
01:10:01
what that smell was. He said, you were standing right on top of my wife. And that's what I mean by next level serial killer gross. I mean, yeah, he's gleeful.
01:10:12
Yeah, it was really, he was so disconnected from any of his victims, even his wife, who was devoted to him for so long.
01:10:21
But to him, it was like a game he won. Like, he's basically telling this cop, I'm smarter than you.
01:10:27
Like, I got away with it. You walked away. You know, that's a classic psychopath move, right?
01:10:33
Yeah, and I will tell you that if, and this is nothing, I don't expect Lynn Trevelyan to have been able to pick up anything from that.
01:10:40
But if he had, three more people would have been alive because we still have three more bodies to get through.
01:10:46
Oh, my God. Yeah. And Trevelyan, you know, Lynn Trevelyan, when I talked to him about it,
01:10:50
he just said, I just couldn't even believe that that was what happened. But he didn't recognize it.
01:10:56
So anyway. Well, John Christie had the perfect cover. I mean, like, that's what they do, right?
01:11:02
So it's like, if you want to get away with stuff, it's a great idea to pick a profession or volunteer with something
01:11:09
where basically you can't be questioned. It's the police. These are the most trustworthy people.
01:11:15
I'm a priest. I am a pastor. I'm going to enter into these places where I am above questioning.
01:11:23
I'm actually the questioner. So don't worry about it, like that idea. All right, so we've all just had a little meeting
01:11:31
and decided that this is going to be because it must be because we're so enthralled with this, a two-parter.
01:11:37
We're only halfway through the story. So it's going to have to be a two-parter, right, Kate?
01:11:41
Yes, and good luck trying to cut me down to any amount of time on the story. As I said, I've written a whole book about this.
01:11:47
That's why we love you. No, I think it's a perfect cliffhanger. I love it. Yeah, so coming up, we can expect three more bodies and John Christie to get away with a lot of stuff.
01:11:57
We can also expect an incredible history momentary. making manhunt that overshadows a horrible air pollution disaster that was coming.
01:12:06
So we have a trial and a media blitz to look forward to in part two. I love it. Amazing.
01:12:13
Tenfold More Wicked, My Favorite Murder, The Crossover with Kate Winkler Dawson.
01:12:18
Bye. Elvis, do you want a cookie? This has been an Exactly Right production. Our senior producers are Hannah Kyle Crichton and Natalie Wren.
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