Hey, Girlfriends, it's Anna here. This is Bonus episode four, the final one, and this one's really special because it was recorded live at Wilderness Festival back in August. It's going to include a lot of discussion about murder and violence against women, and it's going to touch on the topic of abortion. But it's also really fascinating discussion about the ethics of true crime and the roles we all play as part of it.
So to the festival.
Hello, and welcome to our very first live podcast recording of The Girlfriends.
It is so great to be here at Wilderness Festival.
I've got a crick in my neck because I slept badly last night in a tent.
Awful, but it was so nice as well.
I'm Anna Sinfield and today I'm joined by Kate summer Scale, the author of The Peak Show, which is a true crime book about a set of eight shocking murders that
happened in London in the nineteen forties and fifties. The book deep dives on the serial killer John Christie, his female victims, and the circumstances that allowed him to go uncourt for so long and potentially caused another man to be hanged for his crime, but it also brings up lots of interesting questions about the impact and role of true crime reporting, which is basically what we're going to
be talking about today. So, without any further ado from the teams at Novel and iHeart Podcasts, this is the Girlfriend's Jail House Lawyer. Okay, So fans of the Girlfriends will know that our later series Your House Lawyer.
I wrestle with figuring out my role.
In reporting that story, and also, more broadly, with the ethics of true crime reporting, of turning something so kind of awful into a sense of like morbid entertainment. And I know that that's something that you've had to wrestle with yourself in your book The Peak Show, Kate. And so before we get a little too existential about our jobs, I was wondering if you could tell me first what drew you to this story out of all the grizzly murders in the world.
It felt as if I'd always dimly known about it,
like a horrible fairy tale. I saw the wax statue of reg Christie at the Madame Tusword's Chamber of Horrors when I was about eight, and I saw the film tenon Place on late night TV when I was in my teens, and I remembered it when there were the murders of several women in London in twenty twenty twenty one who had been killed by strangers, Sarah Everard among them, and I started thinking about that phenomenon, men who kill women who are strangers to them just because they are women,
And I started wondering why, and I remembered the Rillington Place story. I didn't even remember Red Christie's name at the time, but when I looked it up, I saw various parallels and echoes with the more recent crimes, and I thought that by studying him and his world, I could get a better sense of the connections between a culture, a society, and the violence it produces than by looking at my own time, which is almost too close up to see.
Yeah, I mean, when you looked at those crimes of before and compared them to the crimes that you had been experiencing in the early twenties, seeing these women murdered by strangers, did you feel like there was difference? Did you notice a difference between them or does it just feel like this sad trope of male violence has just continued in the same form.
I did notice more the similarities and the differences. He was not least Christie, I discovered, like Wayne Cousins, was serving as a policeman when he committed his first known murder. He was a reserve policeman during the Second World War, which was an amazing opportunity for catching women unawares and concealing crimes of violence.
So yes, I noticed the parallels, but it was.
Sort of easier to see at a distance in the fifties, the way that Christie's attitudes were so closely echoed in the press, in the police force, in the way that pathologists talked about the victims, and so it helt easier to understand him as a product of his society as well as of his individual life.
You brought up the press there, and a big part of your book focuses on this crime reporter called Harry Procter, and you say in the book, and I'm going to quote this, that he was successful because he didn't just tell a story, he infiltrated it.
He embedded himself.
I know that I lose myself in so many of the cases that I work on, and they're pretty kind of hardcore stories of people being killed or experiencing violence in some respect, Are you as obsessive about your stories as Harry Procter and me.
Yeah, I love the research more than any other part of the composition of a book. I mean, most of my research, because I write historical stories, is in archives, and so I'm going through old papers, witness statements, in police files, transcripts of trials, photographs, maps, floor plans, and I get completely lost in it. And it feels, you know,
as you literally are sort of touching the past. You're holding the same documents as the people who you're writing about and thinking about, and so I find it very, very absorbing.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know about you, But on my desk, my writing desk at home now, I've got a kind of really quite weird and perverse collection of belongings and things that have been owned by victims in some of my stories or their families, and I've been gifted them or you know, loaned them so that i can do my research, and it always feels so different holding you know, for example, I've got a version of a book that was owned by this woman called Heidi's Family in the
second series of the girlfriends. We identify this woman called Heidi who had been murdered, and I've got her dad's version of a book that was written about her murder. And it feels so strange to own that artifacts and to hold it in my hand. It feels different from the version that I had when it was just from the library. Do you feel strange touching the past in that way.
Yes, i'd have.
I mean maybe because they happened seventy years ago. I don't have so many objects in my possession, but they are just open to the public. It feels kind of miraculous that you can just order up these papers and artifacts sometimes and sort of be with them and touch them. And sometimes there are weird coincidences. I'll order a second hand book on the internet and when it arrives, open it and find it's sort of being inscribed to one
of the characters in the story. And then you feel part of actually a strangely close knit network or world, and you feel like you're sort of participating in it, albeit over time you're not their live, but the aspiration is to sort of be live, And in moments like that, you feel like it almost is unfolding in real time.
There's a line in your book that really stood out to me because it's been something I've been pulling my hair out a little bit over. Is you wrote being complicit in a culture that made morbid entertainment of women's bodies. I believe you were talking about the journalism of the time. But as a true crime writer today, do you think that's changed and what do you think your role is in that?
I think it's much more starkly visible.
In the nineteen fifties, the ways in which the tabloid press in particular, but also movies and posters and adverts entered women was so sort of glaringly sexualized and objectified, and for entertainment, you know, for pleasure, for male flecture principally, But of course there are versions of that now, but it's less in your face, so you kind of see it more clearly. And in fact, there were murders that took place in North London in twenty twenty near where
I live. Bieber Henry and Nicole Smallman, who sisters, were killed in a park. They were killed by a stranger who had a mission to kill a certain number of women, and afterwards the police circulated photographs of their bodies and talk about a peep show, talk about making a morbid entertainment. But the press does the same. A book like mine does that. It's trying to tell a story that will engage in gross script the reader and the subject is
the of these women. So there's some degree of complicity, but there are different ways of doing it. There are different ways of thinking and feeling about it and presenting it. And in fact, in my book, I made the decision to not include a photo section because there seemed no way of illustrating this book without having a sort of
gallery of victims mugshots. So that's sort of try to use Harry Procter in a way, who was also troubled by some of these issues and was the style crime reporter for one of the best selling tabloids in the country. Use him to help me think about what I'm doing and what we do and what we do as readers of true crime or listeners to through crime podcasts and so on, and to at least reflect on that as I go.
Yeah, well, I mean that was going to be one of my next questions was in Harry Potter's autobiography in relation to people criticizing his reporting, He says, it was tougher for me to do than for you to read it, So why the hell do we do it?
That sounds very defensive to me of Harry Procter.
It.
It's not a little I mean, I wouldn't do it unless I did enjoy it and find it rewarding and feel I was some gripped and learnt things by doing it. And he goes on in that passage to sort of he blames his editors for sending him out on these stories, and in fact, he did eventually have a nervous breakdown because they wouldn't take him off. So he blames his editors, He blames his bosses for sending him out on the stories,
and he blames his readers. He says, I only give it to you because you want it, you know, before you back through a moral outrage at me, you're the ones who want it. So it all sounds very troubled and defensive to me, as if he really he really is struggling with his role in this material and the ways in which he and many in Fleet Street carried out their inquiries at the time is quite shocking by today's standards, but that doesn't you know, it's still a it's all on a spectrum.
Yeah, I mean, obviously, as a true homewriter, I also am going to endorse that it's a good medium. But I do think that there are some genuine upsides to some of the stuff we do, and you point out some in your book. For example, some of the essays and works around Tim Evans, the man who was hanged prior to Christie's arrest, that helped move the needle on conversations around the death penalty. So like, actually that writing helped make a difference.
Yeah, And Harry Proctor was desperate to get Christy to confess to the murder of the little girl, one year old girl for which Tim Evans had hanged, And it wasn't just a search for justice this particular case, but also to expose the way that the justice system could malfunction and innocent people because there was capital punishment, could be sent to their deaths and so there was no
way of correcting the error. So the Evans case was really instrumental in getting the death penalty abolished in the nineteen sixties. It took that long, but Harry Propter was part of that push to expose the truth, and the government.
Was very keen to.
Move on and cover up this stuff because they wanted to defend the justice system, but also the existence of the death penalty, continuation of the death penalty, So it was quite a political story in those ways, but it also brought to light the reporting on the case, the publicity given to it also brought to light quite a lot of fractures and tensions in British society, and quite a lot of desperate practices, such as an awareness about illegal abortion and how dangerous it was and how desperate
single women often were when they became pregnant and this was their only recourse at back street abortion because Christy posed as and I think acted as a backstreet abortionist, and this was one of the means by which he lured women to his home, and so the vulnerability, it was a particularly dramatic manifestation of the danger of back street abortion. You wouldn't normally expect to be murdered, but it was a fairly risky procedure in which women did sometimes.
Die and were very easily exploited.
Yeah, I mean, both of those examples are examples of crime reporting that's actually making a difference.
It's having a cultural impact.
Do you think that crime reporting always needs to you know, the north Star needs we have an impact, We change things, we do something different.
I don't think you always know what the impact will be, So I don't think needs to be justified by that. I think stories are worth telling. Terrible events are worth exploring to find out where they come from, what form they take, how they manifest themselves. And also some stories very interested in the way that some of these terrible stories express the fears and fantasies, often the unspoken fears
and fantasies of a wider world. So as a writer, as a researcher, writing about crime feels like getting access to a kind of underground emotional life of a society.
Of a culture, as a nation.
You start to see the things that animate people, that scare them, that they fantasize about. And so there are lots of ways, not all of them practical, in where which a crime story, a story of violence can help us learn who we are and where we come from and how the world worked.
Well, that was one of the things that I thought was great about your book, because you really pointed the finger back at the audience at all of the kind of sickos in the room today who like to listen about murders and read about murders and grizzly things and the darkest parts of society, and you kind of say, why is it that you want to participate in this grizzly peep show? And there are examples of it in
the book as well. There was a group of women who tried to break in after it was kind of all boarded up, just because they presumably wanted to be in this place where so much darkness had happened to other women. And people want to know the worst details, don't they. Why do you think people are so obsessed with true crime?
Such a big question when I read about the women who tried to break in through the bay window at Tamorylington Place, and I thought war weird, you know, And then I thought, it's what I'm doing.
You're breaking into the window, breaking into the window and trying to get inside the house.
You know, it's not so different. And people clamored at the courthouses to see Christy, to see him, and it was remarked upon sometimes that a lot of them were women. And now true crime podcasts at two thirds of the audiences are women, so that as a route to why
are we so fascinated by it? I mean, one quite compelling idea to me is that there are stories that get told through these crimes that are not often aired, stories about domestic violence, about maratal unhappiness, about betrayal, about problems between parents and children, about unwanted pregnancies, that a lot of the domestic difficulty that many women kind of deal with it isn't aired so much in the pages of the press, and certainly didn't used to be in
the nineteen fifties, unless through a story of a violent crime. So it gives us access to things that we sort of know about or half know about, or want to talk about. Another thing would be that it's a kind of knowing your enemy impulse. Do you want to see the man who might kill you, or what that kind of man looks like, or what makes him, how to identify him, what circumstances the women who were killed by him found themselves in that that happened to them, So
a self protective instinct perhaps does at work as well. Also, I think there are just our own anger fear. Maybe even violent stories finds an outlet in thinking about and learning about these things, it can act as some kind of vent or self expression. Reading as well as writing, can be that kind of self express.
I get that. Okay, So now I've called your sickos.
I was just wondering if any of you had any questions for me or Kate, No pressure, Lovely over here, ll wait for the microphone.
We've got to get it on the podcast.
So dark stuff.
So do you have some sort of cleansing for yourself once you've done some detailed research and you've written the book to step away?
Do you need to do that at all? It feels a big relief.
Maybe this is the case for a writer, but with a story as intense as this, and I did work on it very intensely, partly because there was so much material, I needed to go fast to kind of keep it in my head, to keep the story straight. And there's a great relief in sharing it with other people, in the first instance, your editor, a publishing team, that it
stops being just yours. So publication is in itself a kind of lifting of the story from a private sphere into a public sphere, and people can read it converse with you about it. So something that has been internal conversations becomes something that can be talked about and that feels good, that feels really nice. I mean perhaps you're asking about during the process of writing. I think it feels like any job I need, you know, company, different
things going on. I don't feel that it's a particularly more difficult thing to bear than any other. It's something I'm interested in enjoy. I don't feel poisoned by it, you know. I don't feel I need to be cleansed as I go. I just need sort of light and shade, as anyone would doing things for fun instead of things that are intense and purposeful.
Yeah, I think in short, hate's made of strong stuff. I don need some cleansing after all of my shows any more questions? Got one over here just in front.
Hello. Do you when you go back to the start of your career to now, do you reflect on how it's perhaps shaped you as a person in your response to the world.
Well, I've had a big change of career in that I worked as a journalist for many years for newspapers.
I was an editor.
Rather than a writer, and I left to write a book which was successful Beyond my dreams and need to continue writing books and that's all I do. That's been a huge change because I get to decide what I do every day. I get to sort of follow my nose, follow my curiosity, and I miss the company of the newspaper office. It's quite a solitary work I do now, but I love being able to determine my own path all the time, and I'm sure that has changed me as a person and how I feel my place in the world.
I think we've got time, but one more question then I've got to wrap it up.
Hi, So you were talking about why people listen to true crime. Do you think that because in the media killers are kind of shown as like monsters and stuff. Do you think there's like a need to feel separated from those people. What are your thoughts on that.
Oh, I think totally yes.
And I really noticed in the coverage of Christie how eager the press was to sort of monster him, you know, to either talk about him as a psychopath, a word I find quite problematic, just the way you're saying, like, not like me, you know, a monster, a creature, and the desire to distance oneself from the murderer and to
be reassured that you're not that is. I think one of the pleasures of reading about crime, whether it's fictional or factual, and it's a totally understandable impulse, but one of its effects is to sort of say that this person has nothing to do with the society in which he lived, and I think there is more complicity than that.
I was eager neither to glamorize Christie as this sort of great serial killer, you know, cunning, but nor to distance him in the way that the press did at the time, and to make him so different, so kind of exceptional. And I could see he was in some ways. He wasn't exceptional. The things he ultimately did were, but his sort of fantasies and assumptions and prejudices were perfectly ordinary, I mean, frighteningly ordinary. And I'm sure it's shared across
the society. And I totally agree with you that one of the pleasures of especially like if you read a crime novel and you get to the end and you're one of the pleasures is it wasn't me, you know, knowing to do with me, So feelings of kind of unease or guilt are dispelled by the identification of the murderer and the assignment of blame.
Yeah.
On the Girlfriend's Joe House Lawyer, which is the podcast that's coming out at the moment, We've actually tried to go on the other side of kind of exploring.
What it means to be a villain.
We're trying to understand what happens when you fall in the in between, which is where all of us fall, I'm sorry to say, is we're neither perfect nor are we totally bad. And even the perpetrators that I actually spend time interviewing. I'm interviewing people who've been convicted of murder on the show, and it's realizing that they have passed.
That have led them up to that point.
And when you start to kind of try and stop seeing them just as monsters, but as people who are a product of their circumstances, it forces you to look inwards as well, which is a scary place to be looking.
Okay, well, that is a fun note to end on.
Look, that's all we've got time for today, So thank you so much, Kate.
This has been brilliant. Could everyone give her a big.
Run of a pause, So do make sure to pick up Kate's book, The Peak Show at All the usual spots and check out The Girlfriends wherever you get your podcasts, which is where you hear me. Thank you, Thank you so much to Kate and to Wilderness Festival for having me, and thank you for listening.
We've finally come to the end of season three.
The Girlfriends will return with a brand new season very soon, and I won't give you any spoilers, but let's just say I've heard some of it and you're in for one hell of a story. Plus, make sure you check out The Girlfriend's Spotlight two where you can hear more incredible stories of women winning.
That's it from me, so I'll see you soon.
The Girlfriend's Gelhouse Lawyer is produced by Novel for iHeart Podcasts. For more from Novel, visit novel dot Audio. The show is hosted by me Anna Sinfield and is written and produced by me and Lee Meyer, with additional production from Jaco Taivich and Michael Jinno. Our assistant produce is Madeline Parr. The editors are Georgia Moody and me Annasinfield. Production management from Sarie Houston, Joe Savage, and Charlotte Wolfe.
Our fact checker is Daniel Suleiman.
Music supervision by me Alis Infield, Lee Meyer, and Nicholas Alexander. Original music composed by Nicholas Alexander, Daniel Kempson and Louisa Gerstein. Story development by Nell Gray Andrews and Willard Foxton. Creative director of novel, Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan are executive producers for novel, and Katrina Norvell and Nicki Eator are the executive producers for iHeart Podcasts, and the marketing lead is Alison Cantor. Thanks also to Carry Lieberman and the whole team at WME