John Christie
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John Reginald Halliday Christie (8 April 1899 - 15 July 1953) was a British rapist, serial killer and Necrophile. He is most infamous for committing two murders which another man, Timothy Evans, was wrongly convicted and hanged for. The controversy surrounding this miscarriage of justice was a major factor that contributed to the abolishment of captial punishment in the United Kingdom.
Biography edit
Christie was born in Yorkshire, England in 1899. He was unpopular at school and was bullied by his family. Throughout his life, he suffered from impotence, leading to many failed sexual encounters, though a post-mortem autopsy found no physical abnormalities with his genitals. He enlisted in the British army in 1916, and fought in World War I, during which he was the victim of a gas attack, which he claimed left him without the ability to speak loudly for the rest of his life due to a personality disorder that forced him to feign illness or injury for attention.
After marrying Ethel Simpson in 1920, Christie received several criminal convictions for theft, obtaining money on false pretences, "violent conduct" and hitting a woman over the head with a cricket bat, and began visiting prostitutes. He and his wife moved to the now-infamous 10 Rillington Place, where he lived until police began searching for him. He also began an affair with another woman, and was assaulted by her husband as a result.
On 24 August 1943, Christie invited munitions worker and occasional prostitute Ruth Fuerst to his house to have sex. After having sex with her, he strangled her to death with a length of rope and buried her in the garden.
At the end of the year, he tricked a co-worker named Muriel Eady into coming home with him by telling her he had created a chemical that could cure her bronchitis. Christie told her she had to inhale it for it to work, and she did so, not realising it was in fact coal gas, which rendered her unconscious. Christie then raped the unconscious woman and strangled her, before burying her body next to Fuerst' s.
In 1949, a man named Timothy Evans moved into Rillington Place, the block of flats that Christie lived in, along with his wife Beryl Evans, who gave birth to their daughter Geraldine shortly after. Soon after, Christie assaulted and strangled both of them. After the investigation was botched, with the police failing to notice human remains at Number 10 while searching after Evans blamed Christie for the murders, Evans was wrongly convicted for the murders and executed by hanging.
On the 14th of December 1952, Christie strangled his wife Ethel to death, and pawned her wedding ring and furniture to support himself. Soon after this, he killed three more women: Kathleen Maloney, Rita Nelson and Hectorina MacLennan. He killed all three in the same way: he invited them into Number 10, gassed them, and strangled them to death while raping them. As he continued to rape them as they were killed, he was accused by many of being a necrophile, although he himself denied this.
Christie later fraudulently sublet Number 10 to a couple, and ran away. However, after the landlord evicted the couple and placed another tenant in their place, the second tenant discovered the corpses of Maloney, Nelson and MacLennan in an alcove while attempting to install a radio set, and called the police. As it was obvious that Christie had killed them and then fled, a manhunt for him began. Christie was arrested on 31 March after a police officer recognised him, and eventually admitted to the killings of all his victims under questioning. He was convicted of murder after a plea of insanity was rejected by a psychiatrist, and was executed by hanging on 15 July 1953.