The Peepshow

In March 1953, London police discovered the bodies of three young women hidden in a wall at 10 Rillington Place, a dingy terrace house in Notting Hill. On searching the building, they found another body beneath the floorboards, then an array of human bones in the garden. They launched a nationwide manhunt for the tenant of the ground-floor flat, a softly spoken former policeman called Reg Christie. The story was an instant sensation. The star reporter Harry Procter chased after the scoop on Christie. The eminent crime writer Fryn Tennyson Jesse begged her editor to let her cover the case. To Harry and Fryn, Christie seemed a new kind of murderer: he was vacant, impersonal, a creature of a brutish post-war world. Christie liked to watch women, they discovered, and he liked to kill them. They realised that he might also have engineered a terrible miscarriage of justice. On Christie's evidence, another man had hanged three years earlier for a double murder in 10 Rillington Place. In this riveting true story, Kate Summerscale mines the archives to uncover the lives of Christie's victims, the tabloid frenzy that their deaths inspired, and the truth about what happened inside the house. What she finds sheds fascinating light on the origins of our fixation with true crime, and suggests a new solution to one of the most notorious cases of the century.