Episode Details

March 1953. Notting Hill, London.

When a new tenant began renovating the kitchen at 10 Rillington Place, he uncovered a hidden alcove concealed behind wallpaper. Inside were the bodies of three women, beginning the search for one of Britain’s most notorious serial killers: John Reginald Christie.

Quiet, soft-spoken, and outwardly respectable, Christie had lived at the cramped boarding house with his wife, Ethel. Behind its walls, however, he lured vulnerable women with promises of medical help, rendered them unconscious with domestic gas, and strangled them. Several bodies were hidden inside the house or buried in its small garden.

But the horror of Rillington Place had begun years earlier.

In 1949, Christie’s upstairs neighbor, Timothy Evans, was accused of murdering his wife, Beryl, and their infant daughter, Geraldine. Christie became a crucial witness for the prosecution. Evans was convicted of Geraldine’s murder and executed in 1950—while Christie remained free to kill again. The later discovery of Christie’s victims raised grave doubts about the conviction and turned the case into one of Britain’s most infamous miscarriages of justice.

After fleeing London, Christie was arrested, tried for the murder of his wife, and hanged in 1953. He confessed to several killings, but his shifting stories left enduring questions about exactly how many people died inside 10 Rillington Place—and whether an innocent man had been sent to the gallows for Christie’s crime.

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