THE PEEPSHOW—Kate Summerscale

for the tenet of the ground floor flat. A softly spoken former policeman named reg Christie, Star reporter Harry Procter chases after the scoop. Celebrated crime writer Fern Tennys and Jesse begs to be assigned to the case. The story becomes an instant sensation and with the relentless rise of the tabloid press. The public watches on like never before. Who is reg Christie? Why did he choose to kill

those women and to keep their bodies near him? As Harry and Ferns start to learn the full horror of what went on at Rillington Place, they realized that Christy might also have engineered a terrible miscarage of justice in plain sight. In this riveting true story, Kate Summerscale minds the archives to uncover the lives of Christie's victims, the tabloid frenzy that their deaths inspired, and the truth about

what really happened inside that house. The book that we're featuring this evening is the peep Show The Murders at ten Rillington Place, with my special guest journalist and award winning author, Kate summer Scale. Welcome to the program and thank you very much for this interview. Kate summer Scale, Well, thank you, it's great to be here. Thank you so much,

and congratulations on this book. I know it came out previously in the UK, but we're talking about this American release of this book, ten reallyked in Place.

scoop on the Christie case. When the bodies of six women were discovered in this tiny terrace house in notting Hill, West London. The bodies were concealed in the crevices of the building in its garden, so there were three bodies behind the kitchen wall, one beneath the floorboards in the

front room. The bones of two further women in the backyard, and the tenant of the house, a man called Reg Christie, an apparently respectable, middle aged office worker, had gone on the run when Harry Proctor turned up at this street one foggy evening in nineteen fifty three to ask the police what was going on, And the real shock for Harry was that he realized he had been to this exact same address three years earlier and had interviewed Christie,

the man who the police were now seeking about another double murder in the very same house, for which another man eventually hanged. And this man, Timothy Evans, had at one point accused Christie of killing his wife and daughter, but the jury did not believe him and had Evans was put to death. Now that all these bodies had been found and the premises, and Christie was the chief suspect, it became obvious to some, including Harry, that he might

tim Evans might have been telling the truth. Christy might have committed this double murder of a woman and her baby daughter in nineteen forty nine. And worst of all, for Harry, he had himself that he prided himself on his journalistic prowess, missed the story he'd interviewed Christie. He like the jury had believed him to be innocent, and as a result, Christy had been left free to carry on killing.

and a quest for justice. He wanted to get Christy to confess to the murders, not only of the six women who had been found in the house that March, but of Beryl and Geraldine Evans, the woman and child killed three years earlier, because that confession would clear Tim Evans's name and be a sensational scoop for Harry's newspaper. So he went about trying to secure an exclusive with Christie.

Even while Christy was still on the run before the police had caught him, Harry still sort of set about making plans for how he could get a story and get it before and hear all his rivals and have

it himself. And to do this he went to the north of England, back down Christie's family and secured an interview with his brother Percy, and he persuaded Percy that if he signed an agreement that the story should go exclusively to the Sunday Pictorial, the Pictorial would pay all of Christie's defense costs and pay for psychiatrists to interview him to assess whether he was insane, to do everything possible to help him. This was a strange kind of pact with the devil that Harry was making. He was

undertaking to support Christie's defense. His paper would do that in return for a story that would ultimately condemn Christy as a man who had let another man hang in his place.

He was found by the Thames by a policeman. Christie sort of endorsed the agreement that his brother had made with the Pictorial and agreed to write his story while he was in Brixton Prison awaiting trial or Harry, so that the Pictorial could publish it as soon as the verdict was in.

to the notable British Trial series already, and she'd also published fiction, some of which drew on real crime story. So she was absolutely fascinated by true crime and in

particular by the psychology of murderers. And she was quite a pioneer in this field in writing essays that tackled and a psychological and unconscious motive as well as the nitty gritty of who done it and how, and so she was she read about Christie's the discovery of the bodies at ten Rillington Place and Christie's arrest in the papers, and again even before he was arrested, she was pleading with her editor at Notable British Trials to give her

the commission on this story because she wanted to be able to get a ticket to the Old Bailey trial of Christie and then to write. She wrote a long essay in which she considered his psychology and his methods and also try to unpack the mystery of whether he had indeed killed Tim Evans' wife and child. The main argument against that it would seem almost obvious that he had because these bodies have been found in the wash house behind his flat at ten Rillington Place in nineteen

forty nine. Yet the strange thing was Tim Evans, even though he'd accused Christie of being a murderer, had at another point made a very full and detailed confession to having murdered Beryl and Geraldine Evans himself. So it was a very perplexing case, and there were arguments on both side. Campaigners on both sides both Tim Evans innocence, but others others believed in his guilt and thought it was indeed a coincidence that these two stranglers had shared a house.

in England. So the police asked Christy about the women whose bodies had been found in his house that much. His first was really bizarre. He claimed that most of his victims had attacked him and he had killed them

in self defense. He's claimed that these women much younger than him, had forced their way into his house or refused to leave, had demanded sex, had got violent, and it was a really strange kind of reversal of what must really have happened, a straight kind of projection of what he'd done to them and framing it as what

they'd done to him. And the forensic evidence completely discredited these stories of his and in a couple of cases, including that of his wife Ethel, whose body was found beneath the floorboards in the front room, he claimed that he had carried out a mercy killing, that she had wanted to die and she had taken a lot of sleeping pills and then and because they didn't work, he'd

sort of finished the job for her. That this was not credible either, And it emerged after the very sophisticated and wide ranging forensic analysis of the bodies and the crime scene that the women, most of the women that had been found, had been gassed with carbon dioxide from the household the main pipes, and they'd been raped by Christie and then they'd been strangled. So his stories of being the victim of these sort of wild attacks by women was completely discredited.

the time of their deaths. This was a period when abortion was illegal in Britain, and backstreet abortions were relatively common. That are risky, dangerous to the life of the mother. The women who were impoverished, as many were this time, it was the almost impossible to bring up a child by oneself. So if they had given birth to this, to this unwonted child they would have had they would have been parted from it immediately, it would have been

taken into into care. So many women did seek out abortions because, you know, for financial reasons, they simply couldn't have. Unmarried women couldn't afford to raise children and read Christy. This may well be why he had this gassing device that he used on his victims as well. And there's an interesting question of whether his wife Ethel eventually one or of his victims, was complicit in this activity. It seems likely.

held a fascination for him. He talked about how he had been gassed as a soldier in the First World War. He was caught up in a mustard gas attack on the Western Front, and the effect of this was to he temporarily was blinded and lost his voice, and his voice didn't come back for six months and not fully for three years. Even now, even in his fifties. He spoke with a whisper and the doctors at the time

and thereafter concluded that this was a psychosomatic condition. It was a form of shell shop that he'd reacted to. The trauma of the gas attack by balling silent, So he sort of portrayed in fragments this his earlier life, but a lot of the statement is taken up. He also does describe the murders, but often in a very detached and vague way. As he said to the police it must have been me. It was almost as if

he was talking of a third person. And even in this confession for Harry, there's that tone of voice, rather distant, unemotional, slightly bewildered, as if he he is a spectator of

his own atrocities rather than the perpetrator. And weirdly, there's this thing that even when he was arrested, he insisted to the police on what a kind of moral, high minded, educated man he was, And in the statement for Harry, he goes to great lengths to impress upon him how sober he is, how he doesn't drink heavily, how he doesn't swear, how he's very fond of animals and even

rescued a cat once. Even as he's confessing to murder, he's still insisting on this image of himself as this upright, almost Victorian figure who has extremely high moral standards and disapproves of prostitution, disapproves of pubs and liquor. And so this kind of jarring disjunction between the acts he's admitting to and the persona that he stood it persists in presenting.

had consciously permitted it. It was not an act of momentary madness, and the evidence for this was that he made preparations to kill her. He had afterwards covered up the crime really quite deviously by sort of forging altering dates on letters, sending Christmas car to her family, saying I was so sorry Ethel can't write this herself as

she's got terrible rheumatism in her hands. Don't worry, I'm going to cook the Christmas dinner, and claiming to his neighbors that she was visiting her six sister, that she sent a telegram. So they were very, very elaborate cover up in the case of Ethel's death, which of course he didn't need to do in the case of the other women who nobody knew had even come to his house, nobody knew had died, so that seemed the easiest one to pin on him. And importantly this they guessed that

Christie Lawyers would claim insanity as a defense. It was the only possible defense because the evidence against him was so great, and Ethel's death was the one that most clearly was sort of rational, alculating, consider premeditated, and so it was the best one to use as to sort of rebut the claims of insanity. That was his lawyers claimed that he was mad when the case came to trial, and their main argument was really the horror of what

he'd done. The fact that he had had sex with these women's dead or unconscious bodies, is said, was a perversion so great that there was no other way of explaining it other than insanity. So that was the defense case.

journalism really boomed. There were lots more photographs used in papers, often a semi clad young women pin ups, which I think had been popularized in part during the war with sort of pilots and soldiers taking magazines with them, and now it became sort of part of the mainstream press, and the stories were, you know, sex and violence were big sellers of papers, and papers were huge, like more people read a newspaper in Britain in the nineteen fifties

than in any other country in the world, and there were eighty percent of people read a paper every day, and then when papers published several times a day, it was almost like a sort of live streaming situation where you'd get an afternoon paper that was updated a couple of hours later and then again and on an unfolding sensational case. Getting the latest news was the source of great appeal to readers, and journalists competed really fiercely to get to get their first, to get get their scoops.

As a result, there was quite a lot of money at Fleet Street. As somebody's worked in newspapers more recently. It was amazing to read and how Harry Procter would bury his contact about taking role, taking them in a rolls Royce to the Old Bailey for their trial, and the Daily Expresscott bought a helicopter to get it to the scenes of breaking news stories more quickly in its rivals.

So it was really, you know, it was quite unscrupulous, no expense spared, lots of money paid to informance as well, which has obviously potential for corruption and fictional fictional life of stories, but don't imagine it sounds like a very exciting and stressful life, heavy drinking, heavy smoking, absolutely relentless, long hours and fierce competition.

People were very anxious, the authorities were very anxious that this would mark the city when all the tourists came for the Queen's coronation in the summer of nineteen fifty three, and there was big public campaign to sort of clean up the streets, and this was popular, you know, in the tabloids as well as among the police. So there'd be these disapproving article about the women of the streets.

Harry joined in with that. He in particular track do I mean most of the women who sold sex on the streets of London were relatively boor and they could make a lot more money as prostitutes, and they could as shop girls or waitresses in cafes or similar. It was a time when most women's work was very poorly paid, much lower waveless than men, but prostitution was relatively well paid.

And Harry tracked down a ring of high class prostitutes, sort of an elite lot who worked in places like Mayfair, and he personated a punter, and he and a fellow journalist sort of work their way into one of these high class brothels. And then he wrote a great big expose and claimed that now that his identity and his ruse had got out, all the high class madams in London were quaking in their boots at being discovered by him. So he presented this as sort of doing his part

to rid the city of sex workers. But of course was also like a very exciting story for the Sunday Pictorial to splash across its pages, and the tone was pretty sort of excitable as well as disapproving, a familiar combination in the tabloid press.

Christy questions on Harry's behalf. Report back prompted Christy to write about certain subjects in the statement he was writing for. Harry and Roy Arthur also arranged for a psychiatrist called doctor Jack Hobson to come to the prison interviewed Christy and assess whether he was insane, and they chose a psychiatrist who they thought would be sympathetic to the defense.

Jack Hobson had recently testified in at least one other case of murder where he had managed to get the man the charges brought down to manslaughter or to an insanity defense had proved successful. So he was a known quantity as somebody who could convince the court that somebody

who committed a vicious murder might be insane. And Jack Hobson was a founding member of the Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishisment, so he had, you could say, a vested interest in using his expertise to help spare somebody the death penalty. And if they proved that Christy was insane, his sentence would be commuted and he would have be sent to the Broadmoor Hospital for Criminal lunatics

rather than banged at Pentonville. So this was, you know, he was carefully chosen, and indeed he did with caveats, but he did, after his interviews with Christie, agree that he could testify and court that Christy was insane.

client that his paper is paying for. So can you just tell us how he wrestled with this conundrum basically, with having this kind of information yet still being part of the funding this insanity defense for Reginald Christy.

his wife Ethel. The way Carrie sort of reconciled his you know, desperate hunt for a confession, you know pressure for a confession to these earlier murders was on the grounds that, as the psychiatrist Dr Hobson agreed, the more murders Christie confessed to, the more convincing his insanity defense might be. So that was the excuse for pressing him on Beryl Evans's death in particular, was as somebody said to Christie someone on the defense team, the more the merrier.

But if they're not, there's the numbers of his victims grew, the more he would look like an out of control madmen rather than a scheming murderer. And so that was I mean, to my mind, it seems like it wasn't really Harry's motive was to improve his chances of escaping the death penalty. His motive was to get the scoop, to get the record corrected. On Tim Evans having said that, I suppose it was. I don't think Harry was very comfortable with the death penalty himself. He wasn't a supporter

of it. And if Christy had been spared, maybe Harry would have got more access to him, Maybe there would have been more interviews, maybe he could have gone further and got more scoops. So perhaps he did want him to but he did want the defense to succeed, even if for fairly cynical reasons, rather than because he had any sort of feeling for Christie himself. All the evidences

he'd found him despicable. So yes, it was a morally complicated one to swing to sort of to sort of proceed as if he was doing something in pursuit of just for Harry, he was pursuing justice, but also supporting the defense of this serial killer while plotting to sort of get these other crimes pinned on him and trying to persuade him to confess to them. It's very sort of interesting mix of mix of motives and a real ethical quagmire really, as was the very fact of funding

his defense. I mean, in effect, Harry and the Sunday Pictorial were colluding with Christy. It an uncomfortable area I think for Harry.

he must have been mad. They applied the sort of insanity braining to that. But of course there were other arguments as to why Christie might have killed his wife, one being clear the way to killing other women, because it was after he killed Ethel in December nineteen fifty two that he went on a free and killed three other women in his flat in the next three months. And another reason for killing her might have been that she suspected him of the murders of Beryl and Geraldine Evans.

In nineteen forty nine, a lodger came forward, spoke to the press, also gave a very full statement to the police, which was not used and not made public again the police did not want to go there with anything touching on the Evans case. But this lodger claimed that Ethel had confided in her in nineteen fifty one that she thought her husband had something to do with the deaths of Beryl and Geraldine, and Ethel was very shaken by this thought because she had been extremely fond of the baby.

Ethel being unable to have children herself, loved having children around her and she used to babysit Geraldine Evans and even offered to adopt her when she realized that Tim and Beryl Evans marriage was in trouble.

of who might be able to get her in. From her a friend of her osteopaths, to Sir Norman Burkett, an extremely eminent lawyer who had served at the Nuremberg trials a few years earlier. She eventually succeeded in getting a seat and a seat for her secretary, Joan all throughout the trial, which in the event lasted four days. Frinn was going blind at the time. She was sixty five. She had cataracts. She was also ailing in other ways, and she was a morphine addict she had been since

she hit an accident in her twenties. Was treated the pain was treated with morphine, and she had a doctor come to her house in North London every day to inject her with morphine. So she needed her secretary's support. A secretary acted as her chauffeur as well, and she only learned for An, only learn a couple of days before the trial began that she definitely had a seat in the courtroom and she was thrilled.

country was agog for news about Christie. But it was also that Lionel Healed was appointed to lead the prosecution, I think because it was such a political case, because of the Evans angle, because Christie's prosecution and the discovery of his crimes raised a lot of misgivings and unease about the safety of the English legal system and whether an innocent man had been put to death, And a lot of what he did in court was to try to suppress any discussion of the Evans case, to insist

it was irrelevant to this one. So he was acting as a government agent in that sense, in that he was trying to keep a lid on that and to insist that the focus be only on the case against Christy for the murder of his wife, Ethel. And to this end he called a string of witnesses who testified to various events and acts that not only confirmed the time and lace of Ethel's death, but also Christie's efforts

to cover it up. And again, Hild was intent on showing how rationally Christy had been acting at this time because he knew the defense was going to try to argue otherwise. So Christie's lawyer, Curtis Bennett would sort of interrupt with questions about the Evans case and also with questions that he crossed Egamin people to try to raise doubts about Christie's sanity or to point out moments at

which he had behaved apparently irrationally. So that was the sort of dynamic for the first day and a half.

pretty rare, especially in terrible murder cases like this. So people were very surprised see Christy make his sort of faltering way to the stand and then speak about the crimes and answer questions from first his lawyer and then the prosecution lawyer about what had happened in Rillington place,

and he whispered from the stand. I mean, interestingly, he had been in the same same witness stand three years earlier as the chief witness for the prosecution of Tim Evans, the man convicted of the worders of his wife and child, and so he had whispered then. And he had come across as a rather frail and genteel figure. And here too he was sort of he had his round glasses, was balding, he was in a suit. He seemed very sort of tremulous and diffident to begin with, in the

way he spoke and address the court. After on the second day of his evidence, the prosecution arranged for a microphone to be fitted to the witness stand so that Christy could be heard better, and apparently the effect was transformational. He sounded much more assertive, and was even rather as if he was enjoying being in the limelight, as he was enjoying commanding the attention of this wrapped audience that was gathered before him, And he was as vague as ever.

He didn't deny the murders of Ethel or anyone else apart from the child Geraldine. By now he decided to confess to the killing of Beryl Evans on the grounds that them all the merrier, But he still denied killing the child, which was quite inexplicable. How should somebody have killed you know, their bodies had been found together, seemed extremely likely that the murder of one was not the murder of the other. But he he sort of distanced him, seemed as detached as he had to the police, to

the psychiatrist, to the prison officers. He just it was the kind of well, it must have been me. I must have done it, lots of I can't remember. When asked about specific assaults on women, and when he talked about the death of his wife, Ethel, he wept. He said how much he loved her, how he wanted her near him. This sort of played to the defense's argument that the murdering her was not a rational act, that

something must have come over him. Dr Jack Hobson, when he appeared to testify as the psychiatrist on truth Christie's behalf, he said he believed that Christie, on balance, was insane. He hadn't known what he was doing when he murdered these women, and he suggested quite lightly, but he brought up the shell shock that Christie had suffered in the

First World War. Christie's barrister shockingly brought up as a possible cause of his mental dislocation and breakdown that he had had to that he had been sharing his house with black people. They were recent immigrants from the West Indies, and Christie's landlord was himself a Jamaican, a Jamaican boxer, and there are plenty of evidence that both Christie and Effe were extremely racist and appalled at having to share

their house with these people who were not white. But it seems a very cynical and ugly maneuver for his lawyer to try to suggest that this was that this situation had put so much mental and emotional pressure on Christie that he'd been driven to murder.

This was where he would invite them to sit. It was set up in his kitchen, tiny kitchen at the back of the property, and the gas supply was nearby. So it was a close shocking moment when it was brought into the court because until then all the evidence had been heard orally or pictorially, and here it was like a solid piece of evidence, something real, almost living

from the crime scene. At Rillington Place, and for some, including the society photographer Cecil Beaton, who was in the courtroom watching, it seemed an emblem of the degradation not only of Christie's life, but the deprivation of the lives

of the women who he killed. This seemed kind of emblematic of how basic, rough and unlovely the living conditions were this section of society, and these crimes did one among other things, they did cause a stir for the for the poverty and desperation that they brought to light. Nearly all the women who found themselves in Christie's clutches had ended up there because they were desperate, whether it's because they were pregnant, as they were poor, because they

couldn't find housing. There was an acute housing shortage in London at the time, and so the case kind of opened a window on a very degraded section of society, not far from the center of London.

order to proclaim insanity. So his evidence was so strangely dissociated, detached, almost relaxed, but utterly unreliable, and nobody quite knew what they'd seen or what it meant, and whether the weirdness of his demeanor was evidence of insanity or just callousness.

I mean the idea of the psychopath, which recently been popularized by an American psychiatrist, Harley Cleckley during the Second World War, and so ideas of psychopathy of people who kind of had some sort of missing emotional capacity, who had sort of soulness, And this category in itself hovers

somewhere between sanity and insanity. So it was very difficult to know what to make of Christie and whether the extreme horror of the acts he carried out would persuade the jury that he must be insane because it was so ugly and inexplicable, or whether the insanity defense was a cunning and cynical way of escaping the death penalty

and he'd learn exactly what he was doing. As the prosecution lawyer said, evidence its sexual perversity is not evidence of insanity, and that was in a way what the jury had to consider, because Christie's lawyer was implying well, was claiming that the extreme nature of Christie's acts was in itself evidence of insanity.

about his madness. And when the Attorney General challenged the psychiatrist whether he would concur with that the defense characterization of Christian these ways, Hodman had to admit that no, he wouldn't. The kind of insanity he was describing was more more subtle and less pronounced than what Curtis Bennett

had been trying to portray. And this, I think was really decisive, the fact that the one defense witness apart from Christie himself, had in effect criticized or undermined the argument made by the attorney who had called him to the witness stand.

from the dock into the cells. There was a staircase leading directly from the dock all the way down the cells, two stories beneath where he would sit and wait for the van to take him to Pentonville Prison, the jail in North London where executions were carried out, and he knew he probably had a couple of weeks until the death sentence was enacted.

of stories from neighbors, family stories. You know, there were lots of surrounding stories that had not been It had not been possible to publish before the trial for fear of content at court, but there was now kind of nearly open season, and so that there was a lot

of material published at that time. And it was very interesting for me and heartening to read stories from women who had he had tried to assault, but who had one way or another resisted or outwitted him, because it gave us more information about how he operated, and much more sort of after all the vagueness that he brought to anything, here was some kind of reliable witnesses to what he'd actually done and how.

National Archives in London. And there are some things that appear in Harry's story that do not appear that look as if they're sort of embroideries that he's put in, as you know, was the way with many tabloid stories of that period. And I suppose he didn't really fear that Christy would contradict him if he sort of cited all the sort of commandments that had haunted him all his life and so on. That commandment is not mentioned

in Christie's statement. And so Harry procter, seasoned tabloid journalist, did he flammed it up a bit, you know, He's he gave a bit of you know, light and shade and drama for Christie's story, which in reality was delivered more in a sort of dead pan, almost deadened way

on the page. So Harry laive it up. He didn't invent any details though, that were not accurate in terms of the murders themselves, what Christy had confessed to, all the language that he'd used around those, it was all the kind of Pallas stuff about his background and so on.

That was slightly enhanced the facts of the case, who Harry conveyed scrupulously, including the facts about the Evans case, which, to Harry's intense frustration, he had still not been able to get Christy to confess to the murder of the baby. So he faithfully reported that that fact that Christie had not confessed to Eryl Evans, to Geraldine Evans murder.

The murders of Beryl and Geraldine Evans. But the British government really dragged their feet and releasing the transcript of Tim Evans trial because they did not want the scandal buss that would accrude and that the political capital that their enemies, those who wanted to abolish capital punishment, would make of this apparent miscarriage of justice. So she had to wait for many many months before before she could

see the transcripts of both trials. In the meantime, I mean, she'd been to the trial herself, so she had that to work with and many many newspaper stories about the case. But she also a set to interviewing all the main players in both cases. She invited to her home for lunch, police detectives, lawyers, pathologists, and the family. She went to meet the family of Tim Evans and she tried to psychiatrists,

people who worked in the prisons. So she tried to interview everyone connected to the case and to work out what had really happened, in particular with the Evans story, but also she was very interesting in what was going

on in read Christie's head. She eventually got the trial transcript then analyzed those and she was going blinder by the month, but her faithful secretary Joan acted as her She dictated to Joan, who typed up all her notes, and they eventually got the thing finished in nineteen fifty six, three years after Christie's trial, and it was published soon afterwards, and it was one hundred page essay, detailed forensic and

Brittan arrived at her judgment about what had happened. She believed that Christie had killed both Beryl and Geraldine Evans, and she admitted that she hadn't been able to solve every contradiction in the story, but she thought this was the the solution that best fitted the facts of the case and the psychology of those involved.

He said he wanted to do the lighter stuff, sort of human interest stories and interviews, but they were like, no way, you're too good on crime, we're not taking you off it. So they kept sending him on quite disturbing cases stories, and he finally sort of cracked when he was sent to a company to church a young woman whose twin children had been killed in a fire on a houseboat, and it was widely believed that this woman had herself have set fire to the boat in

order to run off with her lover. But Harry had to sort of in order to get her exclusive to rend her her accompany her to the funeral, and he'd finally like he'd had enough, and he walked out. He

was he had a nervous breakdown. He had two nervous breakdowns over the next few years, and eventually he was fired from the pictorial and he then proceeded to write a memoir of his life on Fleet Street, which was an important source for my book, My Telling of the Rillington Place story, in which he describes all the excitements, the humiliations, the things he's ashamed of having done as a reporter, the things he was proud of, and he talks about his bosses and the pressure that was put

on him and the atmosphere in Fleet Street at the time, and it really is quite the expose of practices in the journalistic world in England in the nineteen fifties.

suspended and Tim Evans was pardoned by the Queen. A public inquiry was set up to look into the case all over again, and that lasted for months. You know. Finally the Tim Evans name was cleared, although his sentence was ever overturned. It was just that he was pardoned and if Christy hadn't been, and of course there would still have been a possibility that we might have learned the truth about it from him at some point in

the future, but maybe not. So there's still a sort of eerie kind of unease over the cases, even though it seems that Tim Evans has been vindicated. And then I came across a document in the archives that suggested a new solution to what had happened that explains a

bit more about the relationship between the two men. It was a confession that Christy had made to prison guard as he was sitting in his cell beneath the old Bailey Wait after having been sentenced to death, and for the first and only time, he confessed to killing the baby Geraldine Evans. It might have been another lie, another bid for attention, but I think that he was finally

telling the truth. He felt he didn't have anything to lose and the brief account he gave quite casually to this guard was goes a long way to explaining why there were so many contradictions in Tim Evans's stories about what happened. And so it was very excited to find this document. And I then found some letters in the Home Office files that showed how for Lionel Heal, the Attorney General who prosecuted Christie, and a senior civil servant knew about this prison guard's memo and had decided not

to make it public. They pretty much denied its existence when something about it was leak to the press and it remained locked up, you know, in sealed archives or forty years and again it was a sort of it was a politically motivated cover up because dial or Healed was part of a Tory government that was in favor of retaining the death penalty and did not want anything that would help the labor MPs who were campaigning against it.