The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers (43 page)

In October 2002, when Spreitzer was 41, he was among 140 of 159 Illinois death row inmates having their cases heard, influenced by the moratorium on capital punishment. Clemency was not granted to Spreitzer, but as Governor Ryan was leaving office in January 2003, he pardoned four of the 164 death row inmates and offered blanket clemency to the rest, including Edward Spreitzer. The families of the victims were outraged and vowed to fight for justice. Spreitzer may have at last won reprieve, but he faces life in prison with no parole.

John Christie was born in Halifax in Yorkshire in 1898 and as a child was abused by his father and dominated by his mother and sisters. His one happy childhood memory, at the age of eight, was seeing his grandfather’s body as it lay at rest in the family home; he felt powerful in front of the lifeless, helpless body of a man he had once feared. Christie attended Halifax Secondary School when he was 11, and was a very bright pupil. He was skilled at detailed work, and it was later found that he had an IQ of 128. He sang in the choir and became a boy scout but was unpopular among his peers. Upon leaving school in 1913, Christie became an assistant cinema projector. The cinema and photography were two interests that he would retain for the rest of his life.

By the time Christie reached puberty, he already associated sex with death, dominance and violent aggression, and this made him impotent unless he was in complete control. His first attempts at sex were failures, leaving him branded ‘Reggie-No-Dick’ and ‘Can’t-Do-It Christie’ throughout adolescence. He was a hypochondriac and suffered from a personality disorder; he would often exaggerate or feign illness to get attention.

Christie later joined the army and after his discharge met 22-year-old
Ethel Simpson. They were married on 10 May 1920. It was a dysfunctional marriage, with Christie sighting his impotence as a reason to visit prostitutes. Friends and neighbours said that his wife stayed with him out of fear. They separated after four years, when Christie moved to London.

Over the next decade, Christie was convicted for many petty criminal offences and served several terms of imprisonment. Christie and his wife reconciled after his release from one such sentence in November 1933, but he did not change his ways. He continued to seek out prostitutes to relieve his increasingly violent sexual urges, which now included necrophilia.

Christie and his wife lived in the ground-floor flat of 10 Rillington Place, in London’s Notting Hill, from December 1938. When war was declared in 1939, he applied to join the police force and was accepted, despite his criminal record. Assigned to Harrow Road police station, he enjoyed the respect that came with his position. Christie was both
hardworking
and efficient. He began an intimate relationship with a woman who worked at the police station whose husband was a serving soldier. The relationship lasted until December 1943, when Christie resigned from the police. The husband had caught Christie with his wife and beat him up. Following this incident, Christie started to invite women to his house while his wife was away visiting relatives.

One such woman was an Austrian girl named Ruth Fuerst, a tall, spirited 21-year-old with brown eyes and hair. Having taken a job in a munitions factory, she lived in a single room not far from Rillington Place. There is some evidence that she may also have earnt money from time to time as a prostitute. One day when they were in bed, Christie strangled her while they were having sex. He wrapped her in her leopardskin coat and put her under the floorboards in the front room, with the rest of her clothes. As soon as he was able, Christie removed the body from the house and placed it in the wash-house out the back. He started to dig in the garden, on the right-hand side, but was
interrupted by the return of Ethel, so they had a cup of tea together. He waited until she went to bed that night and then returned to his gruesome task. He placed the dead woman, with her clothes, into the hole, covered it with earth and went to bed. The next day, he straightened the garden and raked it over. He pulled up some of Ruth’s clothing and burnt it in an old dustbin. Months later, Christie accidentally unearthed her skull. He put it into the dustbin to be burnt with the other rubbish. Fuerst’s disappearance was reported to the police on 1 September, but her whereabouts remained a mystery.

In the company canteen of a radio firm where Christie was now employed, he met his second victim, Muriel Eady, 32, who worked in the assembly department. She lived with her aunt and had a steady boyfriend. She was short and heavily built, with dark brown hair. Christie often invited Muriel and her friend for tea, served by Ethel. Once, the foursome went to the movies together. Christie decided to lure her into his home so he could repeat what he had done to Ruth Fuerst. ‘I planned it all out very carefully,’ he later wrote.

In October 1944, Ethel went to Sheffield to visit relatives, giving Christie his opportunity. Christie had told Muriel that, due to his first-aid background from his time with the War Reserve, he had a remedy for the catarrh that she suffered from. She came over alone. This time, he would avoid a struggle. He had prepared himself. Christie told Muriel that he had a special kind of inhaler that would work quite well. Into a jar he had put some inhalant, disguised with the odour of Friar’s Balsam. He had made two holes in the top of the jar, one of which he used for a small hose that he ran to the gas supply. That tube ran into the liquid and another tube came out the other hole and did not touch the liquid, but was meant to keep the stuff from smelling like gas. According to his own account, after first giving her a cup of tea, he had Muriel sit on a kitchen chair with a scarf over her head to inhale his concoction. As Muriel breathed in, she inhaled carbon monoxide. In less than a minute, it weakened her, which gave
Christie the opportunity to strangle her with a stocking, having sex with her as he was strangling her. Christie once again experienced the peaceful thrill over the body of his victim. He then placed her in the communal wash-house while he dug a hole for her in the garden. He buried her, fully clothed, not far from the first grave. Later, digging around in the garden, he came across a broken femur bone, which he used to prop up the trellis.

It was later suggested that Christie was a necrophile, but others claim that any sexual activity always took place before his victims’ deaths. Necrophilia is defined as having sex with the unconscious or dead, and keeping them close – and Christie certainly kept the bodies of Ruth and Muriel nearby. There are three types of necrophile: violent, fantasy and romantic.

The violent types have an overpowering urge to be near a body, so they kill in order to achieve this. They may then keep the body around to sexually assault it again, or to visit it where they left it.

Fantasy necrophiles make death a central part of their erotic imagery. They may ask a lover to ‘play dead’ during a sexual act or take photos of that person looking dead, over which they can later masturbate. Christie apparently needed his victims to be unconscious, in a deathlike pose, if not actually dead.

The romantic types feel such a strong bond with their victims that they keep them around after death. They may not touch them again, but derive comfort from their proximity. It does not matter, in this case, whether Christie had sex with a dying woman or a corpse. He kept each one close by.

Some have argued that Christie killed his victims because he feared the consequences of his wife finding out, but such a motive would apply only to the first two cases, as his wife was to be his third victim. With the first one, he said that he strangled her while having intercourse and that as he pulled away from her, excrement and urine came out of her, which would indicate that she was dead before he was finished. So we can surmise that the dying women excited him. Perhaps the origin of this was a desire
to punish the girl who ridiculed him after a failed adolescent encounter. In any event, killing women made Christie feel peaceful and powerful.

In 1948, 10 Rillington Place was to be the subject of more drama and intrigue. The Christies had decided to take in lodgers and, as a result, Timothy Evans and his wife took up residence. Several months later, Beryl Evans gave birth to a daughter. She soon fell pregnant for a second time and tried many ways to abort the baby, allegedly seeking the help of Christie. What he actually did has never been made clear; in any event, Mrs Evans was dead when her husband returned home. Christie told Timothy Evans that the abortion techniques and blood poisoning had killed his wife. However, it was later suggested that Christie had strangled her. Christie said that they should not report the death to the police as they would both get into trouble and that he should leave the baby with friends and go back to Wales for a short time. But before he did so, they needed to hide the body – Christie told Evans he would hide it down a drain at the house.

While in Wales, Evans’s aunt confronted him about where his wife and daughter were. Having few mental resources to cope with all of this, it was not long before Evans arrived at the Merthyr Tydfil police station, telling police he had disposed of his wife by putting her down the drain. Police were not sure what to make of this. He had not actually confessed to killing anyone, but what he did say needed to be checked out.

Evans went on to explain that his wife was dead but that he had not killed her. Afraid that mentioning Christie, a former police officer, would only end up incriminating him, Evans claimed that a stranger had given him something to help his wife abort a baby. He had met a man, he said, who had given him some medication intended for spontaneous abortion. He allowed his wife to take the bottle from him, but he warned her not to use it. That day, however, when he returned from work, he found her dead. He attended to the baby and wondered what he should do. He was afraid that the police would think he had killed her.

The next morning, he said, he had put his wife’s body head first down the drain outside the front door. He then stayed home from work but later went in to give notice. He also made arrangements to have someone look after his child. He wanted someone to please find his wife and get this situation resolved.

While Evans waited in Wales, the police in London were notified. They went to the house to investigate. It became immediately apparent that something was amiss when it took three men to move the manhole cover. Evans could not have done this by himself, as he claimed. Once they had it raised, they could see that there was no body. Back in Merthyr, Evans was told of this discovery. He was amazed, but immediately changed his statement. He would now tell the truth.

He said that there was no stranger who had given him abortion pills. Rather, it had been his landlord, Christie, who had put Beryl Evans down the drain. Evans had claimed to have done it only to protect himself from Christie. He said that Christie had offered to help his wife abort the child, but warned that the concoction he used was dangerous and could kill her. She wanted to try it, so when Evans left for work on 8 November, his wife had gone to see Christie. The stuff she took had killed her. When Evans returned home, he found her bleeding from every orifice.

He had attended to the baby while Christie moved the body. Christie returned with the story that he had left her in a nieghbour’s flat for the time being. He would wait until dark to put the body down one of the drains. He then told Evans that he knew of some people who would take the baby. Evans was to give Christie all of the baby’s things. When Evans came home on Thursday, his child was gone. Christie had said he had taken care of everything. He told Evans to sell his furniture and leave, which he did.

As the investigation intensified, Evans added to his story. He admitted that he had helped Christie to carry his wife down to the other flat, but only because Christie could not do it on his
own. He also said he had visited Christie several weeks later to enquire after his daughter but was told it was too soon to see her. He wanted to find out the address of the couple who had taken his child. He wanted to know how she was.

The police investigated the house and garden at 10 Rillington Place, but their search was superficial. They failed to notice the human thighbone from one of Christie’s previous victims in the garden that propped up a fence, let alone do any digging, which may have revealed the bodies. What they did find in Evans’s mostly empty apartment was puzzling. Among a pile of papers by a window, there were clippings from the newspaper of a sensational torso murder, known as the Stanley Setty case. This was odd, since Evans did not read, but the apparent plant by someone else failed to register with anyone. It just looked incriminating. They also found a stolen briefcase.

Evans was arrested for the theft of the briefcase and brought back to London for further questioning. Christie was also summoned for an interview that lasted six hours. He knew exactly what to say and the police accepted him as one of their own. Another officer questioned Ethel Christie, who had been coached by her husband. Christie dismissed Evans’s accusations as ridiculous. The man was a known liar. He then went on to recount how violent the Evans’s marriage had been.

When Mrs Evans and the baby could not be located, the police searched the house again. They then went into the back yard and tried to get into the wash-house, but the door was stuck. Ethel Christie brought them a piece of metal to loosen it. Inside, it was dark. They noticed some wood standing against the sink. One of the officers reached behind it and felt something. They moved the wood and saw what appeared to be a package wrapped in a green tablecloth and tied up with cord. Ethel claimed she had never seen it before and did not know what it was. They pulled the package out further and untied the cord. A pair of feet slipped out, revealing the decaying corpse of Beryl Evans. Further searching produced the body of the baby, lying under some wood
behind the door. Both had been strangled. A man’s tie was still around the baby’s neck.

Dr Donald Teare, the Home Office pathologist, arrived to examine the bodies. He then took them to Kensington Mortuary. A post-mortem indicated that both had been dead about three weeks. Beryl had been bruised over the lip and right eye, as if she had been hit. She had been strangled with a cord of some kind, like a rope. There was no evidence that she had taken anything to induce an abortion but there was bruising inside her vagina. Unaccountably, the doctor neglected to take a vaginal swab to check for semen. Christie was asked to identify the clothing taken from the two corpses. He knew Beryl’s skirt and blouse, but claimed he did not know the tie that had been around the baby’s neck. He thought he might have seen it on Evans.