In a Strange Country

The jury which sat in the big, glass-ceilinged criminal court in London's Old Bailey last week was like any other: nine men and three women bent on bringing in a just verdict. Looking at them as he made his final address, Britain's Attorney General Sir Lionel Heald was moved to remark: "You are like travelers in a strange country." The metaphor was apt: few stranger countries have been thrown open for exploration than the mind of John Reginald Halliday Christie, confessed murderer of seven women.

Across the jumble of benches Christie stood watching them, bald and spectacled, looking exactly like the 55-year-old, $23 a-week clerk he was. One of seven children, he had been spoiled by his mother, a talented musician, bullied by his father. Early in life sexual immaturity made him the butt of girl-friend jokes. In World War I he was wounded by a mustard-gas shell, lost his sight for five months and the power of speech for three years. Working as a clerk, he met and married Ethel Simpson, took a job as a postman but was caught opening mail and cashing postal orders, and went to jail for three months.

Then followed nine years of drifting from job to job, convictions for false pretenses, petty larceny, and once for hitting his landlady over the head with a cricket bat. A kindly Roman Catholic priest befriended him, tried to reunite him and his wife, but Christie stole the priest's car and went to jail again. After that the Christies went to live at 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill, a shabby London district. In World War II, Christie joined the Police War Reserve and earned two commendations for "efficient detection in crime.'' He took up photography, kept scores of pictures of himself, and obscene shots of pretty girls. He was known as a "polite little man."

Under the Floorboards. In 1949 the wife and baby of a neighbor were found strangled to death. Police charged husband Timothy Evans with the murder of the baby. Christie was the chief witness at the trial, and his evidence helped send Evans to the gallows. Last December Mrs. Christie disappeared. No one in the Notting Hill neighborhood paid much attention. Later, after Christie moved away, a new tenant found a woman's leg behind some wallpaper in the bathroom (TIME, April 16). A police search uncovered the trussed and strangled bodies of three women hidden in a sealed closet, another under the floorboards, the remains of at least two others in a buried garbage can in the backyard. The dead woman under the floorboards was Ethel Christie.

Scotland Yard began a search for Christie. A London bobby recognized him in a Putney street, arrested him. The state based its case against him solely on the murder of his wife. At the trial, instead of denying the murder, his attorneys enlarged upon his crimes. In the witness box Christie described the seven killings. Victim No. 1 was Austria-born Ruth Margaret Fuerst, met in a snack bar in 1943, brought home to No. 10 during his wife's absence. Said Christie, scratching his head and licking his lips: "Well, I strangled her. I seem to remember it ... I think I can say firmly that I did." Victim No. 2 was Muriel Eady, radio factory worker, met in 1944 and brought home to No. 10. "I think I must have strangled her."

With a Stocking. In the next five years Christie was not sure whether he had killed anyone. "I might have done," he murmured. Then in 1949 he became friendly, but "not intimate," with his neighbor Mrs. Beryl Evans, who was despondent over a coming baby and her husband's affair with a blonde. Christie turned the gas on, then. "I think I strangled her with a stocking." Later he removed the stocking, told her husband she had died. He denied strangling the baby.

Victim No. 4 was his wife, who had, he said, wakened him one night in a convulsive fit. He strangled her with a stocking. Victim No. 5 was Kathleen Maloney who, he said sadly, demanded money for his attentions to her; No. 6 was Rita Nelson, who was six months pregnant; No. 7 was Hectorina MacLennan, a young Scottish mother of two.

Said Christie: "I gassed the three women whose bodies were found in the alcove by getting them to sit in a deck chair in the kitchen between the table and the door. There is a gas pipe on the wall next to the window that at one time had been used for a gas bracket. The pipe had been plugged. I took the plug out and pushed a piece of rubber tubing over the pipe. I put a chink in the tube with a bulldog clip to stop the gas escaping. When they sat in the deck chair with the tube behind them, I took the clip off and let the fumes rise from the back of the deck chair. When they started to be overcome--that's when I must have strangled them."

Defense Lawyer: Had you any motive against these people?

Christie: No.

Lawyer: Or in the case of your wife had you any motive?

Christie: No.

Lawyer: Did you hate them or dislike them?

Christie: There was no reason, no sense.

The attorney mentioned Rita Nelson, with whom Christie had admitted sex relations. Said Christie: "I think I strangled her, that's when it must have happened. The intercourse, I mean." Medical evidence confirmed that he had sex relations with Victims 5, 6 and 7. The case for the defense had been made: Christie was that rare and unhappy human monster, a necrophile. With the evidence of a psychologist who swore that Christie's crimes were the result of "gross hysteria," the defense counsel aimed for a jury verdict of "Insane."

In the Precincts. But Defendant Christie had committed acts which did not sound at all like those of an insane man. He had altered the date on a letter written to his sister-in-law in order to conceal his wife's death. He had taken money from his wife's bank, by forging her signature, sold her wedding ring and watch. When his dog had scratched up the five-year-old skull of Muriel Eady, he had dropped it one night in a bombed-out house. Summed up Justice Finnemore:

"The abnormal are not necessarily insane." After four days of travel in that very strange borderland, the jury quickly returned to reality: "We find him guilty . . . That is the verdict of all of us." A clerk placed a black cap on the judge's bewigged head, and John Reginald Halliday Christie was sentenced "to suffer death by hanging" and to be "buried in the precincts of the prison."

By a coincidence, the cell block he was occupying in Pentonville Prison was the same one in which Timothy Evans had spent his last hours three years before. The Evans family was now demanding a reinvestigation of that sad trial. Had Evans actually strangled his own child? Might not the Evans baby have been Christie's eighth victim? At week's end, London newspapers were still insistently asking these questions, though during the trial Scotland Yard's chief inspector angrily brushed aside any suggestion that the Crown might have hanged an innocent man.

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