Evil Psychopaths, page 8
In the book, Holmes, born in 1861, describes being brought up in Gilmanton Academy, in New Hampshire where his lies and pranks resulted in punishment by his father. He also talks about the day that his interest in medical matters began. A gang of boys tried to frighten him by confronting him with a skeleton in a local doctor’s office. Rather than terrify him, of course, it made him resolve to pursue a career in medicine. He obtained a medical diploma from the University of Michigan and opened a medical practice. Around this time, he was involved in an insurance fraud, he admits in the book, helping someone to substitute a dead body for his own. Following that, he took a job in an asylum but it proved to be an experience that scarred him and haunted him for many years. Following that, he had moved to Chicago.
He claimed that the women who had stayed at his property had simply left, even going as far as saying that they had benefited from knowing a man such as him.
He told the story of one young woman, Minnie Williams. She had arrived at his door having had an abortion and feeling ashamed. She was suicidal, he claimed, and he took her in, engaging her to work as his secretary for a while. When her sister, Nettie, had arrived, Minnie had become jealous of her because she had fallen for Holmes, and struck her on the head with a stool, killing her. Holmes claimed to have helped Minnie put the body in a trunk, convey it to Lake Michigan and toss it in. Minnie had then left, he claimed and he had burned the items of clothing she had left behind.
He defended himself at his trial, the first murderer in United States criminal history to do so. His performance in court was described as ‘remarkable’ by one newspaper. He displayed the cool detachment of the psychopath immediately as he questioned candidates for jury service in his case. However, he still made mistakes, becoming too bogged down by detail and showing no emotion following a detailed description of the corpse of his so-called friend and business associate, Pitezel, by asking for a lunch-break. He spent the afternoon trying to prove that his associate’s death was suicide, but all the expert witnesses posited that he could not possibly have killed himself. Anyway, the chloroform that Holmes claimed Pitezel used to kill himself, had actually entered his body after death.
That evening, Holmes requested that his two legal representatives be reinstated. He realised, too late, that he was unable to defend the case properly.
In summing up, the Prosecution attorney described Holmes as ‘the most dangerous man in the world’.
He was convicted, unsurprisingly of the murder of Benjamin Pitezel and the judge sentenced him to death by hanging.
Holmes now decided to write a confession. It was not from a sense of remorse, however, but because he had been offered $10,000 for it by Hearst Newspapers. It appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer. He claimed to have murdered more than 100 people, attempting it would seem to make his mark as the world’s most notorious killer, but swiftly retracting that number and reducing it to twenty-seven.
His first murder, he said, had been of a former school-friend whom he had dispatched with a dose of laudanum, in order to make a claim against an insurance policy he had taken out on him. The second, however, had been an accident. He had killed a man in a fight over money he claimed had been owed to him. Following that, he had killed a few people whom he sold to a man who would then sell them on to medical schools. He was paid between $25 and $45 for each of them. When he lost contact with this dealer in bodies, he would bury the unclaimed victims in the floor of his offices. He explained the various methods he had used – beating to death, gassing in vaults and asphyxia. Many of these people died because there was something in it for Holmes, money or avoidance of exposure and he even had help sometimes. It was a miracle he avoided detection for so long. On one memorable occasion, he had attempted to kill three young women at the same time, using chloroform. They managed to escape and reported him to the police. He was arrested but, unbelievably, was not prosecuted.
He told the truth about the Williams sisters, how he had persuaded Minnie to give him several large sums of money. She and her sister had property in Texas and he wanted to get his hands on it. He persuaded her to get her sister Nettie to come to Chicago and she was killed immediately. He had told Minnie that her sister had changed her mind about visiting, and persuaded her to sign everything over to him. He then poisoned her and buried her in the cellar of another house that he owned. His efforts to blame her for the murder of her sister and of the Pitezel children he decribed as ‘the saddest and most heinous of my crimes’.
Regarding Pitezel, he said that he knew he was going to kill him from the first moment he met him. He won his confidence by showing kindness and consideration for him but meanwhile was showing him forged letters from Mrs Pitezel to her husband. Pitezel had drunk heavily and Holmes killed him while he was in a drunken stupour. While Pitezel was still alive, he lay him on his bed, tied him up, poured benzene over him and set fire to him. Pitezel came to and screamed for mercy, but he suffered an agonising death. When he was dead, Holmes cut the ropes from his body and poured chloroform into his stomach to make it look as if he died accidentally in an explosion. His aim was yet another insurance policy. True to character, Holmes described leaving the house ‘without the slightest feeling of remorse for my terrible acts’.
In a macabre aftermath, he is reported to have visited Pitezel’s grave some weeks after his interment, in the pretense of acquiring some samples for analysis. He claimed that he found cutting into the corpse with a knife ‘inordinately satisfying’.
His murders of the Pitezel children were even grimmer. He hid them away in a hotel for a week and then began by poisoning Howard. He then proceeded to cut the boy’s body up into pieces small enough to be put into a stove that he had purchased for just that purpose.
He took the girls to Chicago, Detroit and Toronto, letting them believe that they would be imminently reunited with their mother. He told them to climb into a large trunk and closed the lid on them, having drilled a small airhole so that they were able to breathe. He then pumped gas through the hole, killing them. He buried them in shallow graves, as ever taking pleasure in killing another human being. He had been like a father to them for eight years, but felt not an iota of remorse.
Even on the gallows in Philadelphia, on 17 May 1896, Holmes changed his story, claiming now that he had only killed two people. He tried to say more, but the trapdoor opened as he was in mid-sentence and this most remorseless of all killers plunged to his death. At least his death was not easy, faint consolation for his victims and their families – it took him fifteen minutes to die. At his own request, to deter body-snatchers, he was buried in cement, so that his body could not be dug up and dissected.
By the time he died, his Castle was no more. On 19 August 1895, a mysterious fire had destroyed it. A U.S. Post Office now occupies the site of the killing factory run by America’s first serial killer.
PART THREE: 20th Century British Psychopathic Killers
John Reginald Christie
It was a small Victorian house, built in the 1860s when the Notting Hill and North Kensington areas were undergoing development. Situated where the elevated dual carriageway, the Westway, runs today, number 10 Rillington Place was located in a row of three-storey terraced houses. The house was split into three flats, none of which had a bathroom. Instead, an outhouse in the garden was used by the occupants of all three flats and a washhouse was also located there for the use of tenants, but it was not always functioning.
Forty-year-old John Reginald Christie was a quiet little man, wth a receding reddish-ginger hair and pale blue eyes. His wife, Ethel, was a plump woman whom friends believed to be frightened of her husband. They seemed aloof as a couple, and many disliked the way they seemed to think they were better than their neighbours. For this reason, they kept very much to themselves.
Christie was originally from Yorkshire, coming from a strict upbringing in which his father was not afraid to beat his children. He would make them go for long walks, which were more like military marches than strolls in the countryside. He was a frail child, disliked by his father, but spoilt by his mother. His emasculation was reinforced by the fact that he had four sisters. He was a very private child with few friends and, while still young, developed a pathological abhorrence of dirt. As he got older, he began to take part in activities at his local church, joining the choir and eventually becoming a scoutmaster. He enjoyed wearing the uniform.
His relationship with his sisters became complex. As a young child he had been disturbed to see one of his sister’s legs up to the knee. He became attracted to these women who bossed him about, hating them at the same time for their dominance over him. It is likely that at this time he began to develop an antipathy towards all women, mainly because he felt he could not satisfy them. The nicknames given to him at school when his first attempts at lovemaking ended in failure did not help – ‘Reggie-No-Dick’ and ‘Can’t-Make-It-Christie’.
He was a signalman during the First World War and at one point lost his voice for three years following a hysterical reaction to an incident when a mustard gas shell knocked him unconscious. This, however, does not seem to have stopped him marrying Ethel in 1920.
His marriage was blighted by his impotence and he continued visiting prostitutes afterwards, as he had been doing since the age of nineteen. All they served to do, however, was to remind him of his inadequacy with the opposite sex.
His first brush with the law occurred after he became a postman in 1920. He stole some postal orders and went to prison for three months. His life really began to fall apart in 1924, when he was twenty-five. He was put on probation at the post office for charges of violence and there were whispers that he had been using prostitutes. He walked out on Ethel and travelled to London.
In 1928, he was back in prison, sentenced to nine months for theft. When he was released, he lived with a prostitute but when he hit her on the head with a cricket bat, he returned to jail for six months. A few years later, he was arrested again and sent back to prison for the theft of a car. During this time there were police reports regarding his violence towards women, however these could not be proved.
In 1933, he asked Ethel to move back in with him. On the shelf at thirty-five and feeling lonely, she readily agreed, travelling down to join him in London. Little did she know the kind of man he had become in the ten years they had been apart.
Christie had been an inveterate hypochondriac since he was a child. Following an accident in which he was hit by a car, he began an incredible series of visits to the doctor – 173 over fifteen years. It gave him an excuse to remain at home and complain about his many ailments.
He moved with Ethel into the ground floor flat at 10 Rillington Place in December 1938. They were pleased with the flat because, as it was on the ground floor, they would enjoy exclusive use of the garden. Christie, meanwhile, had signed up as a volunteer member of the War Reserve Police. Incredibly, they asked no questions about his criminal record. He was delighted to pick up his uniform at Harrow police station and served for four years. Unfortunately, however, he became a little too fanatical about the role and was soon known to his neighbours as the ‘Himmler of Rillington Place’.
Meanwhile, he continued to consort with other women, one of whom worked with him at the police station. When her husband returned from fighting overseas, he gave Christie a severe beating.
In April 1948, Timothy Evans and his pregnant wife, Beryl, moved into the top floor flat at 10 Rillington Place and six months later Beryl gave birth to a daughter, Geraldine. Evans was a diminutive, uneducated Welsh lorry driver of limited intelligence who was given to lying and self-aggrandising fantasies. He was a heavy drinker with a very bad temper and he and his wife often engaged in loud and sometimes violent arguments, mostly over Beryl’s inability to make ends meet. Evans’s low wages barely covered the rent and their bills. Matters were made worse in late 1949 when she informed her husband that she was pregnant again.
Beryl insisted immediately that she wanted an abortion, but Evans, a Roman Catholic, was against the idea. She took pills and did what she could to abort the baby, eventually confiding in Christie who, although he had absolutely no previous experience, told her that he knew how to carry out abortions, having learned how to do it during the war. He persuaded her to let him undertake the procedure, but it ended disastrously. When Evans came home later that day, 8 November 1949, he was horrified to learn from Christie that Beryl had died during the operation. Christie told Evans that he would dispose of her body down a nearby drain and that he would also find someone to look after Geraldine. He ordered Evans to leave London.
Christie later told the police that he saw Beryl leave with her baby around noon and never saw her again. Later, Timothy Evans came home and the Christies went out for the evening. Around midnight, he claimed, he and his wife heard a loud thump from above them. As the man in the second floor flat was away, it could only have come from the Evans flat on the third floor and it was followed by the sound of something heavy being dragged across the floor.
The following day, Christie told the police, Evans told him his wife had gone to Bristol and the day after that, he came home saying that he had packed in
his job and was selling up and moving to Bristol to join her.
Evans actually returned to Wales, coming back on 23 November to Rillington Place where, Christie claimed, he told him that Beryl had left him.
What had actually happened was that Christie had gone up to their flat after Evans had gone to work. Beryl laid a quilt on the floor in front of the fire and lay down on it. He may then have tried to gas her and she had panicked and begun to lash out at him. He took out a cord and strangled her. He then tried to have intercourse with her.
It was all too much for the uncomplicated Evans and he eventually went to a police station a few weeks later to tell the police that he had disposed of his wife’s body after she had taken something to make her abort her baby. He was afraid to bring Christie’s name into it and said that he had obtained the substance he had given her from a stranger. The police did not find the body down the drain outside the front door where he said he had put it, and in fact they could not see how one man, especially a small man like Evans, could have moved the extremely heavy manhole cover that took three of them to shift. They confronted him with this and he confessed that it had been Christie who had administered the abortion pills and put Beryl in the drain. Police searched the house at 10 Rillington Place but it was no more than half-hearted and they even failed to notice the human thigh bone that was being used to prop up the garden fence.
They found a stolen briefcase, however, which gave them an excuse to arrest Evans. Christie was questioned and he emphasised how much of a liar Evans was and how violent his marriage to Beryl had been.
There was still no sign of Beryl and a more thorough search of the property was carried out. Eventually, in the washhouse, they discovered her body and that of her daughter. They had been dead, it was estimated, for three weeks. During lengthy police interrogations Evans inexplicably confessed no fewer than four times to killing his wife.
At the trial, six weeks later, Christie denied that he had agreed to perform an abortion on Beryl and his testimony, plus Evans’s poor performance in the witness box, resulted in a guilty verdict. Timothy Evans was sentenced to death and hanged at Pentonville Prison on 9 March 1950.
Christie seemed to have got away with murder.
In late 1952, Ethel Christie suddenly disappeared. Christie told friends that she had moved back to Sheffield and that he was going to join her when he had settled their affairs in London. He gave up his job, sold all his furniture and rented out his flat to a couple. After they had stayed there just one night, however, they learned that the flat was, of course, not Christie’s to rent and were thrown out. The landlord rented the flat to a Jamaican immigrant named Beresford Brown. Tidying up the kitchen, one day, Brown peeled off some wallpaper and discovered a door leading to a pantry. Opening the door slightly, he shone a torch into the space beyond. There, to his horror, he saw the body of a woman, seated and hunched forward, clad only in bra, stockings and suspenders. He immediately called the police and when they arrived, they discovered another two women’s bodies. They were the bodies of three prostitutes that Christie had lured back to the house and killed while he lived there – Kathleen Maloney, Rita Nelson and Hectorina MacLennan. Searching the remainder of the flat, they found the remains of Ethel Christie under the floorboards of the living room. Christie had strangled her on 14 December 1952. She had been in poor health and Christie claimed later that he had merely put her out of her misery.
In the garden, another two women’s bodies were discovered – Austrian prostitute, Ruth Fuerst and a workmate of Christie’s whose catarrh he had promised he could cure with a special type of inhaler. Bringing her to the flat, he made her breathe in a concoction he had put in a jar. However, he had connected the jar to the gas supply. As she unknowingly breathed in the gas and weakened, he strangled her and as she died, had intercourse with her.
Christie’s impotence, it seemed, only dissipated when he had complete control over the woman with whom he was having sex. Of his first victim, he later said, ‘I remember as I gazed down at the still form of my first victim, experiencing a strange, peaceful thrill.’ It was a ‘thrill’ he would experience six times.
After wandering around London for several weeks, as the entire Metropolitan police force searched for him, Christie was finally arrested on Putney Bridge and confessed to the murders. He additionally admitted that he had killed Beryl Evans, but he never confessed to killing her baby, Geraldine. Nonetheless, many thought it highly unlikely that two stranglers could live in the same house.
On 15 July 1953, John Reginald Christie was hanged on the same gallows as Timothy Evans.
Debate about the execution of Evans raged on for years until in 1966 the Brabin Report concluded that Christie had killed Geraldine Evans and persuaded Timothy Evans not to go to the police. Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins awarded Evans a posthumous pardon in the case of Geraldine Evans. However, he has still not been declared innocent of the murder of his wife, for which he was not tried.
