Who was John Christie, how many people did he kill and where is Rillington Place?
THE story of one of Britain's most notorious serial killers will be revisited in a BBC drama named after the street where is sick crimes took place.
Rillington Place, starring Tim Roth, details the shocking tale of John Christie's campaign of murder -- and the cover-up that led the the hanging of an innocent man.
When will Rillington Place be on?
The first episode of the new dark drama will air on BBC One on Tuesday 29 November at 9pm.
The three-part drama will then be shown on the following two Tuesdays, 6 December and 13 December.
It will begin in 1938 with Christie and wife Ethel moving into the notorious 10 Rillington Place -- scene of his sickening crimes.
Who was John Christie?
John Christie was born in West Riding, Yorkshire in 1899, the sixth in a family of seven children including five girls.
He served in the First World War, where a mustard gas attack resulted in him forming a speech impediment.
It is also thought to have led to neurological damage that may have contributed to his subsequent violent sexual urges and lifelong erectile dysfunction.
After serving in the war Christie embarked upon a life of theft, being convicted of stealing postal orders when he worked as a postman for which he served three months in prison.
A series of further theft and assault convictions saw him serve several stretches in jail, including six month's hard labour for assaulting a prostitute with a cricket bat.
He married Ethel Simpson shortly after he returned from the war, but she left him after four years, only returning after his final release from prison in 1933.
In 1937 they moved the the upstairs flat at 10 Rillington Place, before moving to the downstairs flat the following year.
It was this address that would forever be associated with Christie's campaign of terror.
Who were John Christie's victims?
All of Christie's victims were found at the address in Notting Hill, London.
Back then, Notting Hill was an incredibly run-down part of the capital.
Some of his victims were buried in the garden, while bodies were also hidden inside a gap in the kitchen that Christie papered over before moving out in 1953.
Ruth Fuerst (1943)
Christie claimed his first victim was Austrian munitions worker and part-time prostitute Ruth Fuerst.
The 21-year-old was first approached by Christie at a cafe in nearby Ladbroke Grove, he claimed.
He said he strangled Fuerst in a fit of rage during sex and hid her body under the floorboards of his living room.
Her body was later buried in the garden.
Muriel Eady (1944)
Christie's next victim was Muriel Eady, a 32-year-old colleague whose murder Christie delighted in carefully planning.
He tricked her into inhaling poisonous carbon monoxide after inviting her to 10 Rillington Place claiming he had a special inhaler to treat her bronchitis.
After she passed out he raped and strangled her to death, before burying her body in the garden.
Beryl and Geraldine Evans (1948)
The Evans family moved into the upstairs flat at 10 Rillington Place in 1948, where daughter Geraldine was born to Timothy and Beryl.
The following year Timothy reported that he had found his wife and child dead.
A post-mortem revealed that they had been strangled to death, and Evans told police Christie admitted to killing Beryl in a botched abortion.
However, police extracted a confession from Evans and cleared Christie of involvement.
After withdrawing his false confession, police went ahead and charged Evans with both murders anyway, with prosecutors even using Christie as a prosecution witness.
The jury found Evans guilty and after a failed appeal he was hanged on 9 March 1950.
The Evans case had a major part in the eventual abolition of capital punishment in the UK in 1965.
Ethel Christie (1952)
Christie strangled his wife Ethel in bed in December 1952 and spent subsequent weeks fobbing off concerned relatives by saying she had travelled to her native Sheffield.
He pawned her wedding ring days later and in the New Year he forged her signature to empty her bank account.
Kathleen Maloney, Rita Nelson and Hectorina MacLennan (all in 1953)
In the space of the following three months Christie murdered a further three women.
Maloney, a prostitute who worked in nearby Ladbroke Grove; Nelson, a visitor from Belfast who was seeing her sister; and McLennan, a woman who he let stay at Rillington place, were all poisoned by carbon monoxide.
As with Muriel Eady, he raped and strangled their unconscious bodies before hiding them in an area behind the kitchen wall which he covered with wallpaper.
Arrest and conviction
Christie moved out just after his final murder but caught the attention of his landlord, who discovered he was letting the flat out illegally.
Once the illegal tenants were evicted, the resident of the top floor, Beresford Brown, was permitted to use what was Christie's kitchen.
He made the shocking discovery of some of Christie's victims when he tried to place brackets on the kitchen wall, revealing the covered alcove.
A city-wide hunt for Christie was launched, and he was caught at a cafe near Putney Bridge a week later.
In his pocket was a newspaper clipping about Timothy Evans, the innocent man hanged three years earlier.
He was charged and convicted in June 1953, and on 15 July he was hanged.
What does 10 Rillington Place look like now?
The infamous address no longer exists, having been demolished in 1970.
The area where 10 Rillington Place sat is now surrounded by Ruston Mews, St Marks road and Lancaster Road.
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