The Peep Show: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place

In London, 1953, the crime that became “the most notorious crime scene in twentieth-century Britain” was the discovery of several corpses of women hidden in the wall and garden at 10 Rillington Place. The murderer, Reginald Christie, had killed his wife and at least seven other women, who he strangled and then raped. Two years before, Timothy Evans, Christie’s upstairs neighbor, had been executed for killing his wife, Beryl, and their 1-year-old daughter, Geraldine, at the same address. But during the investigation of Christie’s crimes, many doubts were raised as to whether Evans had been innocent and Christie the true murderer of Beryl and Geraldine.

In The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place, 2024, Kate Summerscale has done extensive research to not only learn the truth about happened, but also to learn more information about the victims – who they were and how their deaths continued to haunt their families. This book is my choice for the category True Crime for the 2025 Nonfiction Reader Challenge.

The title is a reference to a quote from the novel that had inspired the journalist Harry Procter to become a journalist. Summerscale writes, “For reporters, [Philip] Gibbs wrote in The Street of Adventure, ‘everything in life is but a peep-show’; they, as the observers, felt like ‘the only real people in the world’.” Procter’s work investigating both the Evans and the Christie cases is referenced throughout the book through his notes and newspaper articles. He became convinced that Evans had been not guilty of murder, and had been unjustly executed.

There was no doubt at the time, or in the years since, that Christie was guilty of the murders he was charged with. But there continues to be disagreement about who was guilty of the murders of Beryl and Geraldine Evans.

The book is divided into three parts, which focus on the background to Christie and his murders, the trial and tabloid frenzy, and the continuing questions about Evans’s guilt. However, at times the book seems a bit disorganized, because it moves around among the case itself, Christie’s life, the journalists, and the victims. It is not chronological or thematic. In addition to the focus on Procter, there is information about the input of Fryn Tennyson Jesse, a journalist, author and criminologist who came to believe that both Evans and Christie were responsible for the murders ascribed to Evans, and Rosalind Wilkinson, a social researcher who was compiling a survey of prostitutes in London at the time of the crimes.

Each of Christie’s victims (except his wife) were prostitutes or poor working women who made extra money through sex work. But through Wilkinson’s research, we learn the extent of poverty and desperation in various areas of London in the post WWII years, and why these women often preferred the independence and earnings of the sex work.

Christie eventually confessed to the murder of Beryl Evans (but then denied it and then confessed again), but he never admitted to killing her child. Evans was charged only with Geraldine’s murder since in British law, a defendant can only be charged with one murder at a time. The prosecutor decided that it would be easier to prosecute Evans for his baby’s murder since there could be no motive. So if Christie had murdered the baby, then Evans would have been found to be unjustly executed, which would have served the agenda of the anti-capital punishment movement of the time (but work against the government agenda).

The aspects that made the investigation into Evans’s case so confusing is that he first confessed to the murder of his wife, then shortly afterward recanted his confession, then said that he knew Christie did it, then said that she had died during a botched abortion that Christie supposedly performed. The resulting impacts of these problems would be too detailed and complicated to relate in a book review, but by the end Summerscale presents evidence she found recently that is a believable answer to the questions. She writes,

    “In the vast repository of material on the Evans and Christie cases at the National Archives in    London, I came across a document that suggested a different solution to the mystery of Beryl and Geraldine’s murders. I also found a handful of other papers in the archive – an exchange of letters between the Attorney-General and a senior civil servant – that showed how this document had been suppressed.”

The information that follows makes a satisfying conclusion to the issues raised in the book.

The Peepshow includes a map of London in 1953 with a focus on the area of Rillington Place, the layout of Christie's ground floor apartment, and - at the end - reference notes for each chapter and an index.