DEATH IN THE AIR-Kate Winkler Dawson

December fifth of nineteen fifty two was different. It was a type that held the city hostage for five long days. Mass transit ground to a halt, criminals roam the streets, and twelve thousand people died that same month. There was another killer at large in London, John Reginald Christie, who murdered at least six women in a braided narrative that draws on extensive interviews, never before published material, and archival research.

Dawson captivatingly recounts the intersecting stories of these two killers and their long standing impact on modern history. The book they were featuring this evening is Death in the Air, The True Story of a serial killer, the Great London Smog, and the Strangling of a City, with my special guest, documentary filmmaker, author, and journalist Kate Winkler Dawson. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for agreeing to this interview. Kate Winkler Dawson, Thanks Dan, I'm really happy

to be here. Thank you very much. This is an incredible story. Of course, I had not heard anything about the London smog, and I'm sure our audience will be excited to hear this incredible tale, the intersection of two incredible killers, John Reginald Christy and the London Smog. I just mentioned that you were a documentary filmmaker. Please tell us about your background in filmmaking before we talk about a little bit about the origins of this book.

part documentary with another filmmaker for ABC Nightline. And so I've sort of when I've worked for different television network, so Fox News Channel, I've worked for WCBS television, ABC Network Radio. I've always done both long form and short form journalism projects, and of course those do include documentaries. And so when I was in San Francisco with Fox News Channel, I was assigned to work on the Gary Condit case, which I'm assuming many people in your audience

would would remember. Dan, Do you remember the Gary Condit case from you know, two thousand and one. So I think that was probably the case I've spent the most

time on. And of course that was a US congressman who's was having it was married and having an affair with his intern, and then she went missing and he fell under suspicion, and so this was, you know, a pretty deep dive for me into working on a longer project and also just sort of the day to day grind of working for a twenty four hour news channel on really gathering the visuals and the sources for a

crime story. And I think that case really got me hooked on true crime and true crime tailor, and so that sort of extended. I've done, you know, sports documentaries, I've done various I did the one I did for Nightline was on the rise and fall of UH dot Coms in San Francisco. So I have, you know, as any news producer would, I've had a bil lot of varying experiences, but true crime is certainly what is interested me the most, which is why I've pursued this in books.

So the thing that's interesting, I think, at least about being a documentary producer and television producer and then turning and pivoting your career to write about these these things and books is of course it's so different, And people ask me, how do you go from you know, being involved with documentaries and writing these very short sentences for television broadcasts, so then you know, constructing an entire book

that's long form. And I think that I found that my love of documentaries and my love of visuals and my appreciation and understanding of visuals have served me very well, particularly with this book, because it's not easy turning the smog into a boogeyman. And that's what you have to do when you're writing a book. You have to, you know,

take this this thing. For me, in my case, of course, it was pollution and describe it in such a way that you know, somebody should be able to close their eyes and really smell it and feel it and taste it and understand what it feels like to have you know, smoke particles burn the inside of your throat, and you know, all of the sensory things that come with being caught in a five day long smog have to come across

in the page. And so I think that my work with documentaries really helped me in that sense.

a criminal defense attorney. Tell us a little bit about this work with the Texas Board for Actual Innocence And if your father was an influence at all on how much of an influence as a criminal defense attorney.

in the country, for thirty seven years. And he started several different types of clinics for students to come and gain experience sort of this real life experience, and one of them before he died, was the what they called the Actual Innocence Clinic, and it was it's was run under a nonprofit that was separate from the university called

the Texas Center for Actual Innocence. So my father had this sort of dream of really delving into these cases, these claims from prisoners, which which you know, the nonprofit organization received hundreds and then thousands of letters when it really started of claims of actual innocence from prisoners. And so my dad and I would talk about it quite a lot. And you know, I grew up talking about law. I've got a couple of cops in my family. I've

got a couple of attorneys in my family. And my father and I always debated, you know, law, and he worked particularly in juvenile justice, so he would work to create laws that would help protect privacy for juveniles, but also you know, kind of create strict guidelines. And so there was always a lot to debate in our house. And when I became a journalist, there was even more

to debate, and so he and I would talk. We would talk quite a lot about you know, law and order and what's right and what's wrong, and what laws are working in one art. And so when he started this clinic, I was really intrigued and we talked about

a lot. But unfortunately, when he started the clinic, he was sort of in the downward slide of dying of lung cancer, and so he never lived to see an exoneration, which is what he really wanted to see the most, was the clinic actually and achieve an exoneration, and we ended up achieving two, which was wonderful, but it was after he died, So before he died, he and I talked, and he said, you know, I would like you to become involved in the clinic as much as you can.

And at this point, I was still living in New York. I was not moved back to Austin, Texas. I was at WCBS in New York. I was teaching full time Fordham University, and so I had quite a full life, and you know, I was making documentaries. But I said, sure, you know, if I end up back in Austin, I'll come and help. And then when he died, I came back to Austin and I just never left. I wanted

to build my life here. And I started teaching at the University of Texas School of Journalism as an adjunct professor. And I spoke to my boss and I said, listen, I think that there's a really good collaboration between the School of Journalism and the actual nessent clinic at the law school. I think that I, as a journalist someone who's teaching other young journalists, I think we can join the young journalists together with the young law school students

and we can all teach together. Because I think that there are many things that journalists can teach law students and lawyers quite frankly, about how to speak with people, how to interview people, you know, I think people putting people at ease, which sometimes attorneys aren't so great at doing. And so we started this collaboration and it was really really positive. There was a case already in the works

when I got there. I didn't have anything to do is except that consulted somewhat on the media aspect of it.

But we had an exoneration of two men a few years after my father died, who were in prison for twelve years for a murder that they didn't commit, and because of our clinic's work, they were released, and so that was a really it was very bittersweet, I think for me, because my father would have been thrilled and this book, this book is very bittersweet for me because I think it would have been I think I'm very proud of the book the way it is now, but for some reason, I feel like it would have had

even more depth had he been alive, and he and I would have really been able to hash things out because I know, Dan, you and I talked about this briefly offline, that there are a lot of nuances and intricacies with this case, and it's a wrongful conviction case in the book, and so I think it would have been a very live, we probably year long discussion with my father had he lived.

a fascinating complex story. So as you do, you set this story in nineteen fifty two in the winter in London, and London being the most populous city in the world at that time, and also you talk about the state of energy at that time, how people, what energy sources there were, and that's of course was coal, but you talk about the specific type of coal, the coal that wealthier people might use, in the coal that the everyday

not so wealthy person used. So tell us a little bit about nineteen fifty two in the winter and the confluence of events. As you talk about, there had been pasted environmental type disasters a fog like this, but this was unique. So tell us about what was happening in the winter of nineteen fifty two in London.

became too expensive. So that's the switch to coal. And there were pieces of coal that used to wash up onto the shore of the sea and England and people collect them, and it was this really brown, nasty, soft, crumbly coal. And you had to burn four times the amount of coal of this brown coal to get the warmth from a quarter of the amount of black coal.

So if we fast forward now to nineteen fifty two, you have a city that has experienced hundreds of years of smog because it's, as you said before, it's the world's most populous city. It is the world's most industrialized city at the time. So you have in the area forty which is an awful lot for a small city like London, forty coal fueled power plants pumping out pollution around the clock in a in a very small space right of London. Then you have more than eight million

people burning this cheap coal. So they were they're sort of if we're gonna keep it very simple, there were two types of coal but the quote unquote clean coal, which we know there's no such thing as clean coal, but the black coal that has the very high carbon content that you can burn and it, you know, puts off quite a lot of heat and not as much smoke as smoke, there's still a lot of toxins, there's

still a lot of sulfur dioxide and smoke particles. But compared to the other stuff, the cheap stuff you were referring to was this brown coal that they nicknamed nutty slack in a very low carbon content, high moisture content, and you had to burn an awful lot of it, and most of it was brown dust with little bits, little nuts of coal, and when it burned, it sparked

and smoked and put off very little heat. So you can imagine how much coal of this brown coal you had to put onto your fireplace to create warmth a lot. So what happened is this perfect storm in nineteen fifty two, the first week of nineteen fifty two, it was the coldest week of the year that they have experienced, and you have more than eight million people stoking a fire coal fireplace, and you've got forty power plants churning out

all sorts of particles and pollution. The city had just a few months earlier suspended permanently suspended its electric tram system and replaced it with those beautiful red double decker buses that people who are not so much except their diesel fueled. And so there's coming off of that, and so there's this incredible combination of pollutions from all these

different sources. And here comes on the fifth of December a anti cyclone, which is a fancy word for a high pressure system that floats over London and stops right over the city. And this anti cyclone creates a lid. It's a weather current and it creates a lid over the city that traps the air from the ground to this cloud cover and creates a smog. This is pretty common, it's common everywhere. And what happens is when this air is trapped, any pollution that is in the air also

becomes trapped. It's really not allowed outside into the atmosphere. All it takes is a little wind, a low pressure system to come in and push away this high pressure system and open the lid. And that normally would happen. It would be you know, a few hours, or it would be a day or two at the very most, and then the system would go. This one lasted five days, no win mil on all of the weather reports that

I looked at zero wind for five days. So there's a litter of the city, no wind, nowhere to go, and the most polluted city in the world, with all of these people burning more and more cold because it's really cold. And so by the end there were thousands of people who died and continued to die from December of nineteen fifty two all the way until March. And

that was I think a conservative cutoff for sure. I think that probably there were many many meat for years, people whose lives were shortened or died, you know, within the year. But just to create some sort of a cutoff, the scientists in the government had said, let's, you know, make it this first week of March. So by the

end the government had admitted that four thousand people died. However, about forty fifty years later, a group of scientist from Cornebigie Carnegie Mellon suggested and then confirmed that it was an additional eight thousand, So a total of twelve thousand people died, which made it four thousand, made it Dan the world's deadliest air pollution disaster. But of course twelve

thousand is a phenomenal number. So it was at a crisis that the British government and the British public and the British press never recognized as a crisis.

the most dramatic. So I went into this considering it to be an investigation but thinking that, you know, I was going to agree with everyone else, and we'll talk about what everybody else things happened a little bit later, and I don't necessarily agree, And I know, Dan, you

want to talk a little bit about that. So let's start with John Reginald Christy, a quiet and assuming man who had a rough go of it early in life, had some major embarrassments with women early on, and it created, you know, a kind of a bitter, angry, resentful man who figured out a way to really really get that

anger out. And it started really in nineteen forty three with him when he met a woman in the middle of the war and he was a war reserve policeman and looked moderately handsome in a uniform and he carried on an affair with her in notting Hill. And at the time, notting Hill was one of the worst areas of London. It's very posh now, but it was a horrible place. And Tim Rillington Place was smack in the

middle of notting Hill. So there was a lot of prostitution, a lot of gambling, a lot of crime, a lot of petty theft, a lot of murders, and the police in notting Hill particularly were undermanned overpowered much of the time, and so John Reginald Christy was not such a bad catch as a as a man in that area. He wasn't he didn't appear to be sleazy, he didn't appear to be violent. He had money he offered to pay for drinks, and so he carried on an affair with

a woman. Then he met named Ruth first and in the middle of having relations, he thought that it would be fun to strangle her, and that's what he did.

And I think that that triggered him and he really figured out that this was a method of murder that he enjoyed, and so he buried her in the backyard in forty three, and the next year he met another woman named Muriel Edie and the same thing happened, except what he becomes very interesting as a serial killer because of his method, which I've never heard of this before. And I was fascinated with William here and William Burke, you know, the famous Brews from Scotland. I'm very interested

in cases with I think a unique killing style. And what Christy did was this next woman in nineteen forty four. It's really should be noted because in nineteen forty four he meets Muriel Edie and she's a cough, kind of an asthmatic cough from the fogs that are happening constantly. And he says, listen, I have a certificate in first aid, which is very common in the UK to carry, you know, for somebody to be certified and in first aid. And he says, I can treat you, and I have a

cure for that, and just come to my house. And my wife is away, and his wife, Ethel, would frequently visit her sister out of town in Sheffield, and so he would have the flat to himself quite a bit, and he said, come over, I can help you take

care of that cough. And so she came over. She trusted him, and she came over and he sat her down in a chair in the kitchen and he had a glass jar that he put kind of like almost like a smelling salt, like a balsam friar kind of perfume, and that was in, you know, with with this in this jar, and it created a scent, a very small, strong smelling scent, and he had her breathe at in and at the same time he had a tube that was connected to his gas caps, so coal gas was

being pumped into this glass jar while she was breathing in you know, this sweet smelling stuff that would have that she would have thought was calming. She was also bringing me in coal gas, which completely disabled her. And you know, he assaulted her and then he strangled her with a pair of pantyhose. So he had became sort of very good at this m O and I thought it was an interesting MO. He didn't do anything for

several years. So he took both bodies. He buried him both in the backyard, and he says and there's no evidence that he killed anyone up until nineteen forty nine. So in nineteen forty nine, he and his wife are living into Rilington place. He is still frequenting prostitutes, which is something he always did, and they're on the ground floor and a young couple moves in in nineteen forty nine.

The man is named Timothy Evans. He's Welsh, and he has a wife named Burl, and they're both you know, Burl is nineteen and Timothy is in his early twenties. And then they have a little girl who is at the time, I think she was about eight months old or so, and later on when she made the headlines, she was thirteen months old and her name was Geraldine. And they moved into the top floor in the third floor of a really narrow, windy staircase up Tim Rilington Place,

and they have a really tumultuous relationship. He drinks a lot, he is violent, he's i would say, probably your typical abusive husband. He seems like a really good father. Ethel and John Christy don't particularly care for him. They like Burle and they like the little girl quite a lot. And Ethel actually watches Geraldine when Burle goes out to do some part time work, but just generally stay out of Timothy Evans way. They think he's a ruffian. And

there are an awful lot of arguments over infidelity. And about a year after they moved in, the Burrel and Geraldine go missing and nobody knows where they are. And at the time they were the only ones. These two families are the only ones living in the building. So the Christie's, who have no children are on the ground floor and tim and Burrel and Geraldine are on the top floor, and there's no one in between. There was an elderly man who went into the hospital and so

his flat was empty at the time. So Burrell and geraldineo missing Timothy Evans, the husband, goes to his home in Wales and spends time with his family there and makes up a few lies about where his family is.

our building. Go look right now. So the Welsh police, of course, are are in a frantic panic to find these two people who they've never heard of, and they called a notting Hill police department and notting Hill, you know, brings over some men and they try to get this drain lid in front of ten Rillington Place up, which happens to be right in front of John Christy's window, and it will not come up. It's essentially rusted clothes and they cannot, for the life of them get it up.

And it takes three or four men with kind of crowbars to get this up finally, and the Welsh police officer says, you're full of it. This never happened. You didn't do this. They're not down there and you couldn't have gotten this lid up if you tried. So what's going on? And so Timothy Evans just never has any real answers. He confessed, he said I did it, and then as a police are frantically looking for this wife

and his little girl. You know, Timothy Evans kind of continues to make up these stories, which is part of his character. It's just what he's always done. He's always been this sort of bombastic, puff out the chest, get in a lot of fights, get drunk. But he loves his little girl and he can occasionally be a good man and a good friend. So he's an unreliable source.

And the I think one of the tragedies of this case is while they were searching, you know, they talked to John Christie, who they don't know is a serial killer at the time. He's got two women buried in the backyard, and he is he and his wife say, listen, this is a really bad guy. He was really mean.

He's having an affairs. He threatened to kill Burle and you know, we wouldn't be surprised if he was involved with this, with this somehow, But we don't know where Burle and Geraldine are, and so not to get to to you know, intricate with the book, I know, if we already done that already, but uh, you know, the police go searching and they look for Burle and Geraldine, and they managed to walk right past a large piece of evidence that would connect John Christy to being a

serial killer, which is when you know, Christy buried these two women. They turned into skeletons eventually, and his dog dug in the backyard and dug up a bone from one of the women. It was a femur bone, and he found it and Christy picked it up and strapped it to a fence, the part of a sense that was falling down. So the police, while looking for two murdered people, walked right past the femur bone of a

murder victim from you know, seven years earlier. And it was just a real Keystone cops feeling about this investication. Everybody was supposed to look in the wash house where the bodies were eventually found, and nobody ended up doing it for several days because there was a miscommunication and

so it became quite quite a mess. And essentially, just to kind of get down to the end of it, they asked John Christy to testify and be kind of a character with witness and to testify against Timothy Evans in his murder trial because he can found And then he recanted, and then he confessed, and then he recanted, and he finally said John Christy is the one who did it. My neighbor did it, and no one believed him because John Christy was a Respective War Reserve police

officer and nobody had any reason to doubt him. So John Christy testified against Timothy Evans. Timothy Evans was convicted and he went to the gallows saying, I didn't do it.

John Christy did it. I didn't do it, and he was hanged and that was the end of that case until bodies turned up at tim Millington place three years later, and the public and the press put it together very quickly that this was the same house where Timothy Evans supposedly killed his wife and his little girl and put them in the washhouse, and no one believed that two killers could live at the same address at the same time.

So it became a very, very controversial case. And you know, one of the great things about this case is that it's not just a weirdo serial killer, because, believe me, I've read enough about serial killers to be bored by many of them, and John Christy as a person is not as a serial killer, is not a boring one at all. I thought he was really fascinating. But this

case changed British law. It became a case that was one of the major reasons, if not the main reason, that the UK abolished the definalty in the nineteen sixties is because of this wrongful conviction.

don't cover the stuff that you're thinking of. I think one of the largest issues with forensics was that there was no rape kit done on Burl So, you know, initially and and and quite literally in the paperwork and the police interviews that I read, you know when when later on a judge was and who was in charge of an inquiry trying to decide if there was a wrongful execution here, you know, asked the police officers, listen, you know, why didn't you do a rape kit John

Christie's emo. We later find out a sexual assault and then killing. You know, maybe a rape kit might have might have shown something. Now this is of course decades before DNA, but it would have least shown, you know that that if there was semen there, it would have at least shown that there was some type of MO

connecting Christy. And they didn't do it because the police officers said that, you know that the detective told one of the police officers and the pathologists, Hey, the husband confessed, no worries, save your money, we don't need to do it. And so we don't know if there was any kind of sexual assault. There wasn't anything consistent with sexual assault.

On the other hand, there were claims that she had tried to have an abortion, so there was some you know, injuries that were consistent with that, but could have also maybe been consistent with sex assault, but there was no evidence one way or the other. So unfortunately, with circumstantial evidence, some of it it's sort of, you know, it cancels itself out. So, you know, we on the one hand, you've got some injuries that could have been attributed to

an abortion. On the other hand, there were injuries that could have been attributed to a sexual assault. And she was pregnant at the time with a little boy. So you know, all of this creates a big mess. They really dropped the ball, and so I think that that was part of it. Later on, John Christie confessed to killing Burle and Geraldine, which I don't even remotely believe his confession. It was so factually ridiculous and inaccurate it

could have never happened. Number one and number two, his attorney asked him to confess to everything under the sun. If JFK had happened during that time period, he would have confessed to shooting JFK. I mean, honestly, he wanted an insanity plead. That's what he wanted. That's the only thing that was going to save his life. And his attorney actually tried to get him to confess to the murder of a little girl when he wasn't even in the area at the time, and he said, no, I

don't kill kids. And I think that that is another for me one of there were two major points Stan. I think that if you take if you say that there's no sexual assault evidence on Burle, that takes away ninety percent of Christy's motive, with the exception of killing his wife. That was his main emma, right, there was a sexual assault any killing, and so if he didn't

sexually assault her, then to me, there's already doubt. One of the things I had was I have a couple of friends who are really, really wonderful pathologists, and they looked at some of the crime scene photos, including you know Burl's photo, and it very clearly the photos very clearly show and the pathology's report really clearly says that she was punched in the face so hard that her lip touched the top of her nose. It's a big punch. But here's the key. Twenty minutes before she was killed.

They estimated twenty minutes, and I thought, okay, well, well, ninety fifties pathologists know that. So I sent it to, you know, my friends who were a pathologist, and they said, yeah, that looks really consistent with the plotting. And so if you think logically, do you think that Burl Evans is going to let John Crete puncher in the faith, which he's never done before to anybody else, puncher in the face, and then twenty minutes later strangle her and kill her.

I mean it just to me, doesn't make any sense an abusive husband, I think absolutely, because that's happened before. So it's a mess. This case, Stan is a mess. I mean, there are so many different pieces of evidence that are confusing and contradictory, but I think that's just one of the things that makes it so fascinating.

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a pathological liar. Let's talk about Let's go back, because you do to the state of London five days later, and what the press, how the press depicted this disaster, and how you say that no one was announcing this except or no one was concerned, or especially the people were concerned, were the undertakers and not the politicians and not other people you might have thought of. So tell us about what happens after this fog finally lifts in London.

who died in the hospitals and in the homes. But there was no centralized computer system for hospitals, so there was no real way for doctors to find out how many hospitals, how many intakes there were at each hospital. There was just no coordination. But the undertakers and the

morticians and the florists knew something was wrong. And the reason was very quickly they started running within weeks, they started running out of funeral reefs, and they started running out of plots and coffins, and it became a real problem. And so those were the people who actually alerted the public first. There was nowhere, you know, they started running out of areas to bury people.

And so I think, you know that this was sort of part of living in a city that is literally shell shocked from World War Two. I mean, you have to think it's the government's bankrupt. They can't afford to rebuild many of the buildings that have already been bombed. So you know, Rosemary and her friends are playing hide and go seek and bombed out buildings with shattered glass and you know, metal and broken cold cupboards, and it's

kind of an incredible scene. And then there's a lot of unemployment and like I said before, a lot of violence. So Era London is not an easy city to live in at the time, and so after the fog, there was no public outcry, there was no outcry in parliament. And you know, John Reginald Christy, the serial killer, was at the time unknown as a serial killer. He was just another person caught in a fog. So when the December tenth came and the fog had blown away, things

went relatively back to normal. Where it became concerning, and I don't think concerning enough certainly, but where it became very concerning was within several weeks the Ministry of Health began releasing numbers of how many people died. They had compiled all of these numbers from the hospitals they had asked for anecdotal evidence, and they started putting together, you know, the numbers, and it was something like twelve hundred the

first week died, fourteen hundred the second week died. So it's incredibly large numbers, even for a huge city like London, and still it was backpage news. It was incredible because you're talking about a city that had just been bombed seven years earlier, you know, and was really struggling all ready, and I think they just wanted to get on with it. So where I became alarmed myself was when I began

this book. The research really was on this log I didn't know anything about John Reginald Christy, I didn't think about serial killers. I really was exploring the idea of doing this narrative nonfiction book on the Great Smog of nineteen fifty two, and I needed characters, and I identified one who was a politician for the Labor government named Norman Dodds. And I began searching, probably about three or

four months into this research. I began searching the newspaper archives, and so I looked at the New York Times archives for nineteen fifty three, so beginning the month after the smag happened, and I looked in the London Times, in the Evening Standard, at any newspaper essentially that existed in nineteen fifty two or nineteen fifty three, and I was

searching for Norman Dodds and his speeches in Parliament. I was searching for any article that talked about the fog, and I was finding very little, but still some information in January fifty three, in February fifty three, and it all came to a halt in March of nineteen fifty three because John Reginald Christy went on the run and the bodies started coming out of the house and the police converged and in all this house of cards that he had built all fell down, and all of a

sudden the beast of Rillington Place became known, and the public panicked, and the press loved it, of course, and it just sucked away any news that could have been attributed to the fog, any attention that politicians, that the public and the press could have put towards the fog. Of this was incredible disaster, and it was virtually ignored, and the press was so fixated on and honestly, why wouldn't they be, because it's a morbid, weird, scary story.

And as we know now, I think that sixty five years later, we are still as a public and the press consumed by strange, weird stories. Beginning time a politician tweets something, you know that seems strange or inappropriate or you know, attention getting. We are constantly distracted and our attentions turned away from subjects that we really need to pay attention to. And so Dan, that's exactly what happened. We have a salacious headline grabbing story like John Christy,

which is newsworthy. I'm not saying it wasn't. Certainly I would have picked it up. If the New York Post was around at the time, I would have absolutely wanted to read about, you know, one body, two body, three bodies being pulled out of the House of Horse. On the other hand, that left very little space for stories,

and the fog was a very real story. And you know, finally these stories collide in Parliament when they're simultaneously debating air pollution alongside the death penalty, because there's now panic that that the government has executed the wrong man. So these stories kind of have a climax at the same time, which is in the summer of nineteen fifty three, and like, what's going to happen with both of these Are we

going to have clean air in the UK? Are we going to continue to have the death penalty, did they execute the wrong man? And and John Christie while he's in prison. It just virtually every sound the man made while he was in prison was documented, and he finally got the tension he wanted. He had always wanted this kind of attention, and he finally got it.

a dead body. I was fascinated with it. And when he killed Ruth First in nineteen forty three, who was his first victim, it was spontaneous. I mean, I certainly believe him when he said it wasn't planned. I think it was a spontaneous thing that happened, and he realized

that it was a thrill for him. And then he makes these, you know, as any serial killer who wants attention would, he makes these very you know, ludicrous, grand statements and about you know, the beauty of a corpse and that living body could never be as beautiful as a corpse, which I think mostly was the was the benefit was for the benefit of the public. And also, you know, an even more disturbing and even more disturbing

development that comes out of journalism was checkbook journalism. So there was a reporter who paid for John Christie's defense, and in exchange, Christy wrote several very extensive confessions. So that's where this came from. And of course this is the problem you run into you pay for somebody's confession. There's the expectation that it's going to be pretty dramatic, and Christy really made it dramatic. I don't know how

reliable it is. I mean it's sort of like HH Holmes, how how reliable is HH Holmes or anyone when they confess. But but you know, he really didn't have much reason to lie about certain details. And I and I think that he, you know, like anyone who lives through World War One and World War two, saw death, but I think he saw it certainly as a type of beauty.

And it's just when you have a sick mind, it just you know, you just never know where that sort of fascination, how it's going to manifest itself.

admission in a mission. And it's what it seems to be characterized by by Christy as well.

he had some pretty some pretty incredible claims. He told the police officer who's in my book, Lynn Trevillion, that his wife was actually an abortionist and that's why the women were there, but he refused to say that in his confession because he said it would have You know, I've done damage to Ethel's reputation. So that is the

problem with this case. And as an investigator sixty five years later, I sure, I'm certain I feel the same way that the Metropolitan Police must have in nineteen fifty two and before in nineteen forty nine, dealing with both of these men who are just habitual, prolific wiars. And you know that is the problem is there are of course, false confessions are very common, and so it makes it even more difficult to figure out who's right and is wrong. You have to go on evidence. So okay, great, let's

see all the circumstantial evidence. And then of course we find out that the police didn't do a very good job gathering evidence and there were a lot of missteps. So then you're left with two executed people. And so this is the way that this lays out dam which I find is so fascinating. So you've got the majority of the public who thought that Timothy Evans was he

was initially convicted of killing Geraldine. They didn't put him on trial for killing his wife because they thought if they put her, This prosecutor thought if they put him on trial for killing Burle, that perhaps that they the defense could turn Burrel into a not very nice woman and there would be empathy and he would get off scot free. But there's no way he could wiggle around, you know, killing his girls, his little girl. So he was put on trial for killing Geraldine, and that's what

he was convicted of. So, you know, in the sixties there was a judge who Justice Braben, who was told to please go and look at this case again. The family insisted. There was a very famous book written in later a famous movie called Tim Rillington Place that you know, professes that Timothy Evans was innocent, and Justin Spraben looked at all the evidence and concluded that he thought John Christie killed the little girl, but didn't kill the wife.

He thought Timothy Evans killed his own wife and the two worked together. Does that make any sense? What's I mean? That made no sense to me. But what happened is because he said, because the judge Braved said, listen, I don't think that he actually killed a little girl. Timothy Evans was exonerated from murdering Geraldine, not from murdering his wife. But he was exonerated officially because he was never convicted

of murdering his wife, only of the little girl. So he was his body was exhumed and he was buried. He was exhumed from a prison graveyard and he was buried in a Catholic graveyard. And you know, then about ten years ago his half sister filed another claim and there was a panel in the UK finally exonerated Evans of all charges. And I believe they were given some sort of monetary stipend, you know, for wrongful execution. But my goodness, there was just so many different opinions and

I just think it's presumptuous to know anything. I think it's a fifty to fifty shot. I have no idea. I think most of the evidence points towards Timothy Evans. But I think that there's just no It's incredible that somebody could make a declarative statement that one of these men did it while the other one didn't.

So I don't know. On the other hand, I completely understand why John Christy might have confessed to killing Timothy Evans. I mean, I'm sorry to confessing to Burrell and Geraldine's murder because he was trying to get in insanity plea, and he never mentioned before his attorney suggested doing this. He never mentioned their murders, he never mentioned being involved. So I'm apt to believe John Christy over Timothy Evans. I also just cannot It's hard to picture either one

of them killing a little girl. But there's just no motivation for John Christy to kill Geraldine. I just can't. I can't see. I could see Timothy Evans panicking and killing his own child, but I can't see John Christy doing it. Think there were churches they could have dropped her off and she would have been perfectly safe. So I I just think there's so many big question marks in the case. And again it's confusing. So Burrell and Geraldine,

here's one of the more confusing points. Burrell and Geraldine were found in a wash house in the back of the garden. This is a wash house where John Christy kept some of his victims. The key is he kept them in there for very very brief periods of time and then he buried him and and Geraldine were kept in there for several weeks until they were finally until they were finally discovered. And that's not John Christie's m

he would have never done that. On the other hand, what are the chances of two killers hiding bodies in the exact same place? And then on the other other hand, well, how many places are you going to really hide a body? I mean, this wash house seems like one of the better options. So you can see Dan mike conundrum.

And so when he finally killed her, and he put her under the forwards of the front parlor and continued to live in the flat. She did not have very many friends, and she had one really good friend who was the neighbor next door, and he kept making excuses to various people, and this neighbor was really the only one who kind of pressed him because she would see Ethel frequently, and then all of a sudden, Ethel's disappeared.

And then of course he's doing really odd things like you know, putting down lie that that will cover up the smell, and I mean, you know, I mean, he's a strange man to begin with. So he said that she was traveling back to go see her sister, and then people would her sister. Ethel's sister would send Christmas cards and Christmas gifts, and Christy would write notes saying that Ethel had arthritis in her hands. He would write notes on you know, Ethel's behalf quote unquote and send

him back. So he was really he was working on a cover up, which to me, of course means sociopath and that psychopath because he was he was actively covering up his cards. He knew the difference between right and law.

there was a big audience for it. You have some things to say about in conclusion to what you again parallels to what's happening today, or maybe you can tell us what your some of your ideas are about in conclusion what this has basically got you to conclude about again the environmental disaster, and it's again I guess ability to happen ever again, well, I mean.

today is a horribly polluted city. I mean, they regularly break their pollution their allotment for pollution levels, and you know, and certainly in our country there's always talk about what's happening now with the EPA, who might be taking over the e p A, shutting down coal plants and shutting

down cold jobs. And so I certainly think that there are themes from the book that resonate wrongful conviction is a very strong theme holding a government accountable for you know, wrongful doings and for promoting a fuel that that they know kills. I think that that is something that certainly, I think people contemporary readers can understand that. Certainly, for me, the biggest red flag is you have two very different killers in this book, and that happens, you know, alongside

the same time period. So you've got, you know, a fog that kids kill twelve thousand people, and then you have a serial killer who killed six maybe eight, And why was one leading the headlines and the other wasn't? Why are six to eight people in their lives more interesting than the lives of twelve thousand people At the time, it was four thousand people, that was the no number. That's an extraordinary amount of people to have died in

just a few months from one air pollution disaster. And so that really, what I think is so interesting is what that says about society and what we value just you know, like, look, now, it's the types of stories that get the most hits on the internet. It's certainly not about air pollution. I don't even know if it's

about police brutality, about crime, about education. I mean, certainly, you know, we are all aware of the types of stories that get more attention, and it's very frustrating because it's just it's a repetition of what's happened in the past. Is these sort of you know, really relacious, juicy, needy stories that just bury the things that the subjects that really really matter to us, slight, clean air, clean water,

and and and our health. And so, you know, I want that to be a takeaway that we do need to demand from the press, and and and as part of the you know, members of the public, we have to demand that that we want to read the whole array of stories that affect our lives, not just the ones that are going to get the most hits on the internet.

Between December fifth and about the first week of March, twelve thousand people died, so that was included in the interim report of a fairly powerful committee that eventually the committee recommended to some pretty sweeping, big sweeping changes of

how coal was utilized in London. Later on, but the government went and demanded that the Ministry of Statistics changed that number and roll it back so that the official cutoff time was December thirty first, not March, but December, leaving four thousand being the official total of fog related deaths. And then this chart that had once said twelve thousand

dead from the smog, it said four thousand dead. And then the last portion of the chart was eight thousand attributed to a influenza epidemic, and that was an epidemic that never happened. It was fabricated by the British government. Absolutely, there's no mention of it. There's no you know, hospital records of it. The World Health Organization never talked about it.

Eight thousand dead you know, from the flu in London would have made huge news and instead this little chart got buried and so the number has been left at four thousand for you know, sixty something years. So it's pretty incredible that we are now, just in the past decade finding out the real toll and how many people

have still remain sick. And you know, there have been studies based completely on the Great Smog of nineteen fifty two women who were pregnant at the time, little children at the time, and charted how their health has developed since this moog, and the news was not good as you can imagine, And it's just an extreme example of what could happen, you know, when you have a government that's not willing to take responsibility, you know, for the health of its citizens.