At its core, The Peepshow - The Murders at 10 Rillington Place by Kate Summerscale is about the crimes John Reginald Christie committed in the 1940s-1950s in London. Christie was a rapist and a serial killer found guilty of killing at least eight people at his home at 10 Rillington Place and was executed in 1953 by hanging.
Tragically, his neighbour Timothy Evans falsely confessed to murdering his wife Beryl Evans (the first body discovered) but despite recanting his confession and pleading his innocence a number of times afterwards, he was later hanged. 'Reg' Christie was a key prosecution witness in the case against his neighbour Timothy Evans, although it's now recognised Evans was innocent all along with Christie being responsible for the murders of Beryl Evans and her baby daughter.
In fact, that was my key takeaway from this book, that in 1969, the Labour Government finally abolished the death penalty for murder.
"The Rillington Place murders had helped bring an end to capital punishment in Britain, making Reg Christie the last serial killer to be put to death by the state." Chapter 16 Dust and RubbleKate Summerscale is a seasoned author, previous Booker Prize Judge and journalist for The Independent and The Daily Telegraph, and I was expecting her to provide an interesting overview of this case. Instead, The Peepshow was a disjointed account of a complicated true crime case with many moving parts.
Harry Procter was a prominent journalist at the time of the murders and was investigating the case, although in my opinion there was way too much information provided on his career and involvement that I found extraneous and boring.
The living conditions at 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill were covered in detail with multiple families living in the three-storey terraced house all sharing the one bathroom. Racism was unfortunately commonplace at the time and seemed to take the author off on a tangent quite frequently, along with other topics like abortions, loose women, the Queen's Coronation and even the Great Fog in 1952.
Christie buried bodies in their shared garden, behind a wallpaper covered kitchen alcove and beneath the floorboards in his ground floor flat. However the author posits whether his service in WWI and the fact he was injured in a mustard gas attack led to his vicious crimes, including gassing, raping and then strangling his victims. There's no excuse for savagery and Summerscale didn't make me care enough to understand any possible motive behind Christie's crimes.
Jumping forwards and backwards in time, this audiobook was narrated well by Nicola Walker, but it seemed to lack an overarching structure or purpose. Was Timothy Evans' innocence the focus? Or was it trying to understand the driver behind these crimes? Or was it the importance of journalism in reporting true crime?
In the past, true crime has been accused of giving too much air time to the perpetrators and overlooking the victims; rectified in books like The Five - The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold. Yet here the information about the victims seemed patchy and an afterthought and I never really got a sense of them or the impact of their murders.
This case caused a tabloid frenzy at the time, but if you're interested in the case and prefer a linear approach to true crime, I'd recommend checking out the Wikipedia page instead.
