A warning to our viewers. What you are about to watch is a true story. The following program contains content that some viewers may find disturbing. Viewer discretion is strongly advised. March 24th, 1953. A cramped, rundown kitchen in Notting Hill, London. Barerisford Brown taps along the walls, searching for a solid spot to mount a bracket for his wireless radio.
The plaster sounds different here, hollow, empty. He tears at the faded wallpaper. Beneath it, a door papered over, concealed. Brown pulls it open and shines his flashlight into the darkness. What he sees sends him staggering backward. A woman naked from the waist up, sitting upright in a tiny al cove. Her back to him, her body wedged into the cramped space like something stored and forgotten.
She’s dead. Within the hour, police flood the address. 10 place. Officers pry the al cove fully open and the horror multiplies. Behind the first body, there’s a second, then a third. All women, all strangled, all positioned with disturbing care in that freezing cupboard, wrapped in blankets, their wrists bound, their faces covered.
The house reeks of death. Investigators move through the ground floor flat, searching for answers. In the front parlor, they notice loose floorboards. Beneath them, shallow earth. They begin to dig. A fourth body emerges, older, wrapped tight, hidden where someone once walked every single day.
Then they turn to the garden. A tiny patch of dirt no more than 16 by 14 ft. A human thigh bone props up the fence, visible in plain sight. Officers dig carefully. Bone surface. Fragments of clothing, teeth. Two skeletons buried for years in graves so shallow the garden itself had begun to give them up. Six women, six murders, one house.
And the man who lived here, a former police constable, a man neighbors trusted, a man who three years earlier stood in a courtroom and sent another man to the gallows for murder, has disappeared. But 10 place holds a secret far darker than six bodies. Because the murders being unearthed today are not the first committed within these walls.
The man now missing didn’t just kill. He framed an innocent man. He testified. He watched him hang. And then he kept killing. This is the story of Britain’s House of Horrors. This is the story of John Reginald Christie. What you’re about to hear is a true account of real murders. Some viewers may find the content deeply disturbing.
Viewer discretion is once again strongly advised. Welcome to the Shadow Files Crime Series. Tonight, we venture into a nightmare so evil it defies comprehension. Take a moment to hit subscribe, drop a like, and please let us know where you’re watching from. And now we begin. Before we understand the monster, we need to know the lives he stole.
Six women, each with a story, each with people who loved them, each who trusted the wrong man. Ruth Furst was 21 when she fled Austria in 1939, escaping Nazi occupied Europe for the promise of safety in London. She found work in a munitions factory, dangerous, exhausting labor supporting the war effort.
Tall, dark-haired, vibrant despite broken English that marked her as foreign. To survive, she occasionally worked as a prostitute. Ruth sent hopeful letters home about rebuilding her life after the war. In August 1943, the letters stopped. No one reported her missing. Just another displaced refugee lost in wartime chaos.
Murieliti was 32, unmarried, living with her elderly aunt in Putney. She worked in a factory, had a steady boyfriend, and was known for her kindness, but chronic bronchitis plagued her. She tried everything for relief. Then a c-orker named Rege Christy told her he had medical training from his time as a special constable.
He had a remedy that could cure her. On October 7th, 1944, Muriel visited his flat for treatment. Her aunt reported her missing. Police found nothing. Ethel Christy married John Reginald Christie in 1920 despite his criminal record. violence, theft, cruelty. For 32 years, she stood by him through prison sentences, unemployment, and his obsessive need for control.
Neighbors described her as mousy, possibly fearful. Last seen alive December 12th, 1952, watching television at her friend’s flat. Two days later, Christy told neighbors she’d gone to Sheffield. Ethel lay beneath her own floorboards while her husband sold her wedding ring and forged her signature. Kathleen Maloney was 26, an orphan who’d given birth to five children and surrendered them all because she had no way to care for them.
She worked the streets of Nodding Hill, drank to forget the life she couldn’t escape. In early 1953, she met Christy in a cafe. He seemed kind, offered conversation, warmth. She trusted him enough to go home with him. She died there, gassed, strangled, hidden in the kitchen al cove. Rita Nelson was 25 from Belfast, visiting her sister in London.
6 months pregnant, terrified, desperate. Abortion was illegal, but Rita needed help. Christy offered it. He told her he had medical knowledge, that he could solve her problem safely. On January 19th, 1953, she sat in his kitchen chair and inhaled what she believed was medicine. She became the first body sealed behind that kitchen wall.
Hectorina Mlennon was 26, engaged to Alex Baker. The young couple was homeless, sleeping rough, desperate for shelter. Christy met them in a cafe and offered his flat. A kind older man helping people in need, they thought. One morning, Hectorina stayed behind while Alex went to the labor exchange. She trusted Christy.
She was his last victim, strangled on March 6th, positioned carefully beside Kathleen and Rita in that freezing al cove. Ruth, Muriel, Ethel, Kathleen, Rita, Hectorina. Six women who trusted the wrong man. A man who’d been perfecting murder for a decade. a man who three years earlier had already sent an innocent person to the gallows for crimes he himself committed.
In April 1948, a young couple moved into the top floor flat at 10 Reington Place. Timothy Evans, 24, worked as a van driver. His wife Barl was just 19, a new mother struggling to adapt to the realities of marriage and parenthood. They were barely more than children themselves, uneducated, naive, utterly unprepared for adult life.
Timothy had an IQ of 70. He could barely read or write. He was prone to wild lies, violent outbursts, and drinking too much when the bills piled up. Barl wasn’t much better equipped. The couple fought constantly, screaming matches that echoed through the thin walls, arguments over money they didn’t have, over a future that seemed to be slipping away.
Downstairs, Rege Christy listened. By November 1949, the marriage was in crisis. Barl discovered she was pregnant again. She panicked. They could barely afford to survive as they were, let alone with another mouth to feed. Abortion was illegal in Britain, but Barl was desperate.
She talked about it openly to friends, to neighbors, and Christy, ever helpful, overheard. He had medical knowledge, he told her, from his time with the War Reserve police. He could help. On the morning of November 8th, Timothy left for work. Barl went downstairs to Christy’s flat. What happened next would be argued over for decades, but the forensic evidence tells a grim story.
Christy had prepared his method carefully. A rubber tube connected to the domestic gas supply, the smell of coal gas disguised with friars’s balsom. Barl sat in a chair, believing she was inhaling a medicinal remedy. Instead, she was breathing carbon monoxide. Within minutes, she was unconscious, helpless. Christy strangled her. He sexually assaulted her.
And when Timothy returned home that evening, Christy met him at the door with a story. The procedure went wrong, he said. Barl had died, septic poisoning, perhaps from all the remedies she’d been trying. They couldn’t go to the police. They’d both be charged with manslaughter. Christy convinced the terrified, simple-minded Timothy to help him move the body.
He’d dispose of it properly, Christy promised. Timothy, desperate and confused, believed him. Within days, Christy had convinced Timothy to flee to Wales to his aunt’s house, promising he would handle everything. On November 30th, Timothy Evans walked into a police station in Murther Vale and told officers he had disposed of his wife.
He said he’d put her body down the drain outside 10 Willington Place. Police investigated. The manhole cover required three officers to lift. The drain was empty. Confronted with this, Timothy changed his story. “It wasn’t him,” he said. “It was Christy. His neighbor had killed Barl during a botched abortion.” But the police didn’t believe him.
Christy was a former special constable. Articulate, respectable, credible. Timothy Evans was a known liar with a violent temper who could barely read. On December 2nd, officers searched the wash house in the back garden. Behind a pile of wood wrapped in a tablecloth and tied with cord, they found two bodies.
Both had been strangled, both hidden with care. Timothy Evans was arrested and brought back to London. During interrogation, he confessed multiple times in shifting versions that contain details only the police could have known. The confessions were inconsistent, confused, contradictory, but they were confessions nonetheless.
On January 11th, 1950, Timothy Evans stood trial at the Old Bailey. He was charged with both murders. The star witness for the crown was Reg Christy. Calm, detailed, believable. He described Timothy as a violent drunk. He testified about the loud arguments, the constant fighting. He never wavered. The defense was weak.
The evidence circumstantial, but the jury believed the former police officer over the stammering illiterate man in the dock. 40 minutes. That’s how long it took them to decide. Guilty. On March 9th, 1950, Timothy Evans was hanged at Pentville Prison. He maintained his innocence to the end, insisting that Christy had committed the murders.
Three years later, when police pulled six bodies from Christy’s flat, the whole world would realize Timothy Evans had been telling the truth. John Christie had sent an innocent man to the gallows. He testified in court, watched Timothy Evans hang for murders he himself committed, and then returned home and kept killing.
To understand how a man could commit such evil, you have to go back to the beginning. Christy would later describe the moment his pathology took root. An early memory, a Victorian wake in his family home. His grandfather’s corpse on a trestle table. The old man had been a terror, stern, impossible to please, quick to punish any perceived failure.
Christiey’s mother asked if he wanted to see the body. He did. Standing over his body, Christy felt the fear drain away. The man who had loomed over him, who had made him feel small and worthless, now lay silent, powerless, controlled. In its place, a strange, peaceful thrill. It was the first time death gave him what life never could, and it wouldn’t be the last.
He was born in 1899 in Halifax, Yorkshire into a household where cruelty was routine. His father was violent and unpredictable, quick to punish. His mother alternated between smothering affection and cold indifference. Christy grew up dominated by women, four older sisters who bossed, bullied, and controlled him.
He learned to resent them, to fear them, and eventually to hate them. As a young man, his first attempts at sex were humiliating failures. Word spread quickly. His peers nicknamed him Reggie no dick and can’t do it Christy. The shame festered. He would remain sexually dysfunctional for the rest of his life, impotent with most women, only able to perform with prostitutes or with partners he could completely dominate.
During the First World War, Christy served as a signal man. He claimed a mustard gas attack left him blind and mute for over three years. No medical records support this. Doctors who later examined him believed his muteness was psychological, a hysterical reaction to stress, not physical injury. Christy, it seemed, had learned to weaponize victimhood.
In 1920, he married Ethel Simpson. The marriage was sexless. Christy continued visiting prostitutes. He also began accumulating a criminal record. Theft as a postman, violent conduct, assaulting a woman with a cricket bat so savagely the magistrate called it a murderous attack. He served multiple prison sentences.
Ethel left him for 10 years. They lived apart. Then in 1933, Christy convinced her to come back. He promised to change. She believed him. In 1939, Christy joined the War Reserve Police. Somehow, the background check failed to catch his convictions. He was given a uniform, a badge, authority.
For 4 years, he patrolled Nodding Hill, stopping women on the street, following them, taking notes. Neighbors called him the Himmler of Willington Place. He resigned in 1943 after an affair with a colleagueu’s wife ended with her husband beating him unconscious. But by then Christy had already killed his first victim.
And he had perfected his method. He used a rubber tube connected to the domestic gas supply. Coal gas containing 15% carbon monoxide. He’d invite women to sit in a deck chair and inhale what he claimed was medical treatment for bronchitis, headaches, unwanted pregnancies. The smell of gas was disguised with friars’s balsom.
His victims believed they were breathing in a cure. Instead, within minutes, the carbon monoxide rendered them unconscious and helpless. That’s when Christy strangled them. Rope, stockings, cord wrapped around their throats. He raped them while they were dying. sometimes after they were already dead. Then came disposal. The first two he buried in the garden.
His wife went under the floorboards of the front parlor. The last three he wedged into a kitchen al cove and sealed behind wallpaper, their bodies preserved by the cold. He kept trophies, a tobacco tin filled with clumps of pubic hair, not all of which would match his known victims. For nearly a decade, Christy killed without detection.
Then in late 1952, something shifted. His wife, Ethel, became a problem. She knew too much, perhaps. Or maybe he simply tired of her. On December 14th, he strangled her in bed, claiming later that she was choking and he was helping her die. He told neighbors she’d gone to Sheffield. He forged her signature and emptied her bank account.
He sold her wedding ring for £210 shillings. He sold her watch. He sold every piece of furniture in the flat except a kitchen table, three chairs, and a filthy mattress on the floor. And then between January and March 1953, he killed three more women in rapid succession. Kathleen, Rita, Hectorina, all lured with promises of help.
All gassed, strangled, violated, all shoved into that freezing al cove and left to decay. On March 20th, Christy sublet the flat illegally to a desperate couple, pocketed 3 months rent, and vanished into London. The new tenants lasted less than 24 hours. The house rire of death. When the landlord discovered the scam and evicted them, the flat sat empty.
4 days later, Barerisford Brown tore down the wallpaper and John Christiey’s decade of murder came to an end. March 24th, 1953. Barerisford Brown had permission from the landlord to use the empty kitchen downstairs. He wanted to mount a bracket for his wireless radio. Simple enough. He tapped along the walls, listening for the solid thud that would tell him where to drill.
One section sounded different. Hollow, empty. Brown peeled back the wallpaper. Beneath it, a door papered over, concealed deliberately. He pulled it open and shined his flashlight into the darkness. A woman’s naked back, sitting upright, perfectly still. Brown stumbled backward and ran to call the police. Within hours, 10 place was swarming with officers.
They pried open the alcove fully and saw what Brown had missed in his panic. There wasn’t one body. There were three. The first woman sat slumped in the cramped space, her wrists bound in front of her with a handkerchief tied in a reef knot. She’d been strangled. Behind her, a second body, this one positioned upside down, head wrapped in a pillowcase, ankles tied together with a sock.
Reef knot. The third victim was also inverted. an electrical cord binding her ankles, a cloth covering her face, reef knot again. All three were partially clothed. All three showed signs of carbon monoxide poisoning. All three had been sexually assaulted. The pathologist determined they’d been dead between 4 and 12 weeks.
The gas had rendered them unconscious before strangulation finished the job. But the house wasn’t finished revealing its secrets. Officers noticed loose floorboards in the front parlor. They pried them up and began digging through the rubble beneath. A fourth body emerged, older wrapped tightly in a flannel blanket. Ethel Christy, dead 12 to 15 weeks.
She’d been lying beneath those boards while her husband walked over her, ate his meals, sold her belongings, and told neighbors she’d gone to Sheffield. Then investigators turned to the garden. It was tiny, barely 16 by 14 ft. And there, propping up the fence in plain sight, was a human thigh bone. Officers began to dig carefully, more bones surfaced, teeth, fragments of cloth.
A newspaper dated July 1943. Two complete skeletons were reconstructed, both female, both buried between 3 and 10 years. The identifications came quickly. The three women in the al cove were Kathleen Maloney, Rita Nelson, and Hectorina Mlennon, all killed within 8 weeks of each other.
Ethel Christy lay under the floorboards. The garden skeletons belong to Ruth Furest and Muriel Edy missing since 1943 and 1944. And then investigators found the tobacco tin inside. Four clumps of pubic hair. Three matched the women in the al cove, the fourth unaccounted for, a trophy from a victim never found. The question wasn’t just how many Christy had killed.
It was how many more were still missing. On March 25th, Christiey’s photograph appeared on the front page of every newspaper in Britain. Balding, high forehead, wire- rimmed glasses, quiet demeanor. The public was warned he was extremely dangerous, particularly to women. A nationwide manhunt began. For 6 days, Christy vanished.
He’d pawned his watch, spent his last few shillings, and taken to sleeping rough on parked benches in bombed out buildings, wandering the streets of London like a ghost. Then on the morning of March 31st, police constable Thomas Ledger was patrolling the embankment near Putney Bridge when he noticed a disheveled man leaning against the railing staring into the temps.
“What’s your name?” Ledger asked. “John Wington,” the man replied. “Take off your hat.” The man hesitated, then complied. The high balding forehead was unmistakable. “You’re Christy, aren’t you?” A pause, then a quiet. Yes, Christy was arrested without a struggle. In his pockets, officers found his identity card, a ration book, and something chilling.
An old newspaper clipping about the trial and execution of Timothy Evans. He’d been carrying it for 3 years. In custody, John Christy began to talk. He confessed to killing all six women found at Willington Place. He also admitted to murdering Barl Evans. But his confession to her death was strategic, calculated. He knew what admitting to certain crimes might help his insanity defense, and what admitting to others might destroy it.
His confessions were masterclasses in self-pity and deflection. Nothing, according to Christy, was his fault. His wife, Ethel, a mercy killing. He woke to find her choking in bed, convulsing, unable to breathe. She’d taken his sleeping pills, attempting suicide. He couldn’t bear her suffering, so he strangled her to end her pain.
An act of compassion, he insisted. The others, at first, he claimed accidents. Women who fell, hit their heads, strangled themselves in their own clothing. Then he changed his story. They attacked him, forced him to defend himself. Kathleen Maloney demanded money and threatened him. Rita Nelson was drunk and aggressive.
Hectorina Mlennon fought when he tried to make her leave. He blacked out. When he came to, they were dead. Every account contradicted the forensic evidence. When pathologists confirmed carbon monoxide poisoning, he changed his story again. Yes, he admitted he used gas, a rubber tube connected to the supply. He’d invite them to sit, to inhale what he said was medicine.
Once they were unconscious, he strangled them. And then he described something else, a peaceful thrill, he called it, the sense of power and control as he watched them die. He admitted to sexual contact with unconscious and dying women. He didn’t call it rape. He didn’t use the word murder, but that’s what it was. In Brixton Prison, Christy boasted to other inmates.
He compared himself to John George Haye, the acid bath murderer who’d killed six people. Christy wanted to match him. He hinted at more victims. When a prison doctor asked how many he’d killed, Christy replied, “I can’t say exactly. I might have done more.” On June 22nd, 1953, Christy stood trial at the Old Bailey, the same courtroom where Timothy Evans had been convicted. 3 years earlier.
He was charged only with the murder of his wife. It was the strongest case, the clearest evidence. His defense attorney entered a plea of insanity, describing Christy as mad as a March hair. But the prosecution called Dr. Mat, the prison psychiatrist. Christy, Mat testified, had a hysterical personality, a neurosis, not insanity.
He knew what he was doing. He knew it was wrong. Christy took the stand. He fidgeted constantly, pulling at his ear, rubbing his head, clasping and unclasping his hands. He described the murders in detail, but claimed his memory was poor. That much of it was a blur. When the prosecutor asked why he’d failed to mention Barl Evans in his initial confession, Christy replied, “It went clean out of my mind.
” The jury deliberated for 1 hour and 25 minutes. Guilty. Christy showed no emotion as the judge placed the black cap on his head and pronounced the death sentence. He refused to appeal. On July 15th, 1953, he was hanged at Pentville Prison by Albert Pierre Point, the same executioner who had hanged Timothy Evans on the same gallows 3 years earlier.
As Christy was being prepared for execution, he complained that his nose itched. Pierre Point replied, “It won’t bother you for long.” And then John Regginald Halliday Christy was gone. But the damage he’d done, the innocent man he’d murdered by proxy, the women whose lives he’d stolen, the questions that would haunt British justice for decades remained.
Christy’s execution should have closed the case. It didn’t. He had confessed to murdering Barl Evans, the same woman Timothy Evans had been hanged for killing three years earlier. If Christy killed Barl, then what about Timothy’s conviction? Had Britain executed an innocent man? The home secretary moved quickly to contain the scandal.
He commissioned an inquiry led by John Scott Henderson, a respected legal figure. The investigation was given 11 days. 11 days to review two trials, dozens of witnesses, years of evidence. The conclusion was swift and unequivocal. Timothy Evans was guilty. Christy’s confession to killing Barl was unreliable, likely fabricated to support his insanity defense.
The system, Henderson insisted, had worked correctly. The public didn’t believe it. Books were published. Campaigns launched. Parliamentary debates erupted. Journalists tore apart Henderson’s findings, exposing what he’d ignored. The evidence against the official story was damning. Police had missed a human femur bone propping up the garden fence during the Evans investigation.
It was there in plain sight while they searched for Barl’s body. Workmen testified that the wash house where the bodies were found had been in constant use on the days Evans claimed he’d hidden them there. It was physically impossible. Evans confessions were filled with language far beyond his intellectual capacity.
Words and phrases an illiterate man with an IQ of 70 would never use. And crucially, Evans had no motive. Christy, however, had a clear pattern. Gas, strangulation, sexual assault. It matched Barl’s death perfectly. And Christy had hinted at more victims. How many women had he killed that were never found? The pressure mounted.
In 1965, a second inquiry was launched. This one led by High Court Judge Sir Daniel Brabbin. It was thorough, methodical, unflinching. After months of investigation, Brabin reached a conclusion that split the difference. It was more probable than not that Timothy Evans had killed his wife, but he did not commit the second murder.
Christy had done that to silence a witness to Barl’s death. On October 18th, 1966, Timothy Evans was granted aostumous pardon. His remains were exumed from the prison grounds and returned to his family for proper burial. Decades later, his sisters received financial compensation for the miscarriage of justice.
But the pardon came 16 years too late. Timothy Evans had been dead since 1950. The case became a turning point. In 1965, Britain suspended capital punishment. In 1969, it was abolished permanently. The Evans tragedy had demonstrated what abolitionists had argued for years. The system could fail. And when it did, there was no taking back an execution.
Police incompetence had allowed Christy to murder four more women after Evans was hanged. A wrongful conviction had sent an innocent man to the gallows while the real killer walked free and kept killing. Some injustices can be corrected. Some mistakes can be undone, but you cannot resurrect the dead.
John Christy murdered at least eight people. But the true number may never be known. That tobacco tin with four clumps of pubic hair. Three matched the women in the al cove. The fourth has never been identified. When a prison doctor asked Christy how many women he’d killed, he replied, “I can’t say exactly.
I might have done more.” No systematic search was ever conducted for missing women during Christy’s active years, 1943 to 1953. As a war reserve constable, he had access to vulnerable women and inside knowledge of police investigations. He knew how to avoid detection. Some criminologists estimate his true victim count could be as high as 12 to 15.
We’ll never know. In 1970, 10 Willington Place was demolished. The street was renamed Rustin Close, an attempt to erase the infamy. The site was redeveloped. Today, a garden occupies the space where the building once stood. In 1971, a film was made. Richard Attenboroough as Christy, John Hurt as Timothy Evans.
preserving the horror for history. But what created John Christie, psychologists point to a pattern, an early association between death and power, dominance and control. A deep-seated hatred of women rooted in domination by his mother and sisters. He kept his victims close under floorboards in the garden behind kitchen walls.
He collected trophies. He revisited them. He was a necroile, a predator. a man who discovered that killing gave him the power he could never achieve in life and he nearly got away with it. If Barisford Brown hadn’t decided to hang a radio bracket on his wall, Christy might have kept killing.
The House of Horrors might never have been discovered. Timothy Evans name might never have been cleared. The bodies at 10 Place told a story of systematic evil, but the greatest horror was this. The system designed to stop monsters like John Christy had instead helped him kill. Justice delayed, justice denied. And for Timothy Evans, justice that came 16 years too late.
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