When the author began investigating the case of a London serial killer in the 1940s and 50s, she found chilling echoes with current events – and was forced to confront her own fascination
ometimes, in the three years that I spent researching the murders at 10 Rillington Place, I wondered why I had chosen to immerse myself in such dark material. John Reginald Halliday Christie, an apparently respectable middle-aged office worker, was charged with murder in 1953, when the remains of six women were found in his dingy flat in Notting Hill, west London.
Los Angeles Times, the crime novelist Megan Abbott suggests that women turn to these tales because they unearth “the dark, messy stuff” of their lives: “domestic abuse, serial predation, sexual assault, troubled family lives, conflicted feelings about motherhood, the weight of trauma”, all “the taboo topics the culture as a whole represses”.A true crime narrative can be strangely comforting.
Jesse had led a troubled life. She described her mother as a cruel and capricious “fiend”, and her father, a clergyman, as a man whose sex life was “probably less well adjusted than anybody’s I have ever heard of”. When she was 24 she lost the fingers of her right hand to an aeroplane propeller, which left her feeling “most horribly mutilated”, and she developed a lifelong addiction to the morphine she was prescribed for the pain.
Timothy Evans, who had been charged with strangling his wife and one-year-old daughter, Geraldine, at 10 Rillington Place in 1949 In the newspaper reports of the Rillington Place murders, the victims were often presented as sexual objects. The tabloids described their “well-developed” and “scantily clad” bodies, as if inviting the reader to participate in Christie’s fantasies. I realised that to write about these women’s deaths at all was to risk replaying his peepshow. Perhaps even investigating their lives was an invasion of their privacy: they had not chosen to be part of this story.
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