CONTENT WARNING: murder, misogyny, violence against women and girls, abortion.
The best-selling true crime author discusses her latest book and how murder can reveal the lives of ordinary people and expose the underlying attitudes of wider society.
“Why murder?” I ask Summerscale. “It tears the veil on society,” she says, “it’s a shortcut to the emotional life of the past.”
The child of a diplomat, Summerscale cites her upbringing overseas as the motivation behind her interest in English history and its cultural impact.
The drive to write historical nonfiction, she says, stems from the fact that “crimes throw up a fantastic archive, detailing those who would have otherwise been lost to history.”
Summerscale’s work has been instrumental in the growing popularity of true crime as a genre. Her bestselling debut, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, explores themes of classism and the developing practices of crime investigation in the mid-1800s.
She says that the draw to true crime may in part be due to the “high drama and suspense of it all,” but there is also a less obvious attraction, whereby it can “unlock a landscape of domestic drama that’s often a bit taboo or under the radar,” like miscarriages, abortion, unhappy marriages, and coercive control.
Summerscale’s latest book, The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place, details the widely reported murders and sexual crimes committed by John Reginald Halliday Christie in Notting Hill during the mid-1900s.
Christie’s crimes “open up the world at that moment, and all the forgotten figures in that world.”
The book reframes how we might view the case, giving detailed accounts of the lives of Christie’s victims – all women – and the unfolding of his arrest and trial.
His victims were women who “lived on the periphery of society.” However, investigations into their deaths provide a glimpse into their lives: “We’ve got letters from their mothers, their lovers, their friends, their landladies, and you can see something of what they felt and what they aspired to.”
Christie killed eight women in total, including his wife Ethel, and was involved in several failed murder attempts as well. Most of his victims were either pregnant or had recently been pregnant at the time of their murder.
Amongst them was 25-year-old Rita Nelson from Belfast. Nelson had given birth in Ireland four years before her death, where she subsequently spent time in a psychiatric hospital. Nelson moved to London and met Christie whilst she was working in a café. After moving jobs, she was asked to leave when they suspected she was pregnant; she was six months gone.
Another was 26-year-old Kay Maloney, who engaged in sex work following her arrest for homelessness, causing her to fall pregnant numerous times. When Christie met Maloney, she was sleeping in a public toilet.
In the weeks leading to her death, Christie coaxed his victim with clothes, gifts and shelter. Summerscale suspects Christie could have lured Nelson and Maloney to Rillington Place with the false promise of abortion; he and his wife were rumoured to be abortionists.
At a time when being pregnant and unmarried rendered you virtually unemployable, illegal abortion would have been the only resort for both.
Christie went undetected for years. His neighbour, Timothy Evans, had been wrongly hanged for the murders of his wife and baby Beryl and Geraldine Evans. Upon his arrest, “commentators tried to distance themselves from Christie, labelling him as a ‘monster,’ when, really, he was acting out attitudes that were quite prevalent at that time.”
Summerscale acknowledges a level of social complicity; wider misogynistic attitudes which permitted Christie to target these women. Vulnerable, desperate, and living in poverty, these women had been neglected by wider society.
“It tears the veil on society, it’s a shortcut to the emotional life of the past.”
Kate Summerscale
We would hope that circumstances have improved in the last 80 years, and yet the National Audit Office (NAO) recently found that one in 12 women and girls are victims of violence each year, although the actual number is likely to be much higher.
As society continues to ask questions such as: “Why was she out so late?”, “What was she wearing?”, “Why was she alone?”, the burden of safety remains upon women.
The Peepshow meticulously dissects Christie’s murders, his arrest, and the subsequent trial, spanning from the early 1940s to the mid-1950s, as well as details of his early life. Summerscale provides a commentary on the oppressive attitudes of the society which shaped these women’s lives, and later, their deaths.
Investigative and thorough, Summerscale proposes new ways of looking at this widely reported case; the psychology behind someone like Christie; the emotions, aspirations, and hardships of his victims.
She also opens her readers’ eyes to the wider societal attitudes of the time, in which we may perceive chilling parallels to our current reality.
A powerful tool when used responsibly, true crime can break apart and dig deep into not only individual lives but also the collective attitudes which prevail under the surface.
Featured image by Robin Christian.