The Strangler of Notting Hill

London's Notting Hill is a down-at-heels section of shabby streets and seedy tenements close by fashionable Kensington. In one of its dead-end streets sits a mouldering Georgian house that holds a distinction all its own. Three years ago No. 10 Rillington Place became known as "The Murder House." Beryl Evans and her 14-month-old daughter were cruelly strangled there; her husband, Tim Evans, went to the gallows for the crime. Last week, with a decisiveness that sent shivers of fascinated horror down the spine of London, No. 10 Rillington Place renewed its lease on notoriety.

Hole in the Wallpaper. A Jamaican moved into a flat formerly occupied by a quiet, well-dressed chap named John Reginald Halliday Christie. Scouting about for a place to install a bathtub, he accidentally poked through a piece of wallpaper in the kitchen. A woman's leg fell out through the opening. He ran into the street shouting murder.

The bobbies came, dragged out the body of a woman, then poked deeper into the dark space, and found two more bodies trussed in blankets. The men from Scotland Yard came next morning, pulled up some suspiciously loose floorboards, and found a fourth body. All the women had been subjected to what the Yard called "uncontrollable, passionate outbursts," and then strangled with cord or rope. One, a woman of 54, turned out to be Ethel Christie, wife of the man who just vacated the flat. She had been dead for four months. The others proved to be a tall, shapely, Irish girl who worked as a waitress in a cheap truckers' cafe, a young Scottish mother of two, and a convent-educated girl who was six months pregnant when she died.

At this point, the Yard began to express some curiosity about John Christie. Most everybody remembered him--a thin, high-domed fellow who wore horn-rimmed glasses, worked somewhere as a trucking clerk, liked to take photographs of Netting Hill kiddies in the streets and Notting Hill chippies in their bareskins. "Always so polite and neatly dressed," said Mrs. Rose Bangle. ". . . Never passed a lady in the street without raising his hat." Checking back, the police found that John Christie had been the principal government witness in the case of his tenant-predecessor Tim Evans; near the end of his trial, in fact, Tim had recanted his confession and insisted that John Christie had committed the murders.

A Pile of Bones. Englishmen took in the gruesome details of the latest crime avidly, but with a practiced palate--it was, both in its profusion of corpses and in certain other characteristics, so very like London. Chicago had its quick rub-out with the .45 slug rubbed in garlic, New York its cement-festooned body in the East River, Paris its crime passionnel. But the sex sadist given to mutilation and multiple murders is a London specialty--there had been, for example, Jack the Ripper, the most storied of all, with at least six corpses in 1888; the Blackout Killer of 1942 (with four victims); the Vampire, who killed at least nine between 1944 and 1949, and ceremoniously drank a glass of each victim's blood. Now there was the Strangler of Notting Hill.

If the traditional pattern still applied, there were almost certainly more bodies somewhere. At No. 10 Rillington Place, police in shirtsleeves ripped at the floor and wallboards of the Christie flat, poked in hallways and cellar, dug into the adjoining garden. Under a forsythia bush that had just come to bloom they dug up a buried ashcan and in it found a pile of human bones--all that was left of a fifth victim. A day later they found the bones of a sixth.

Looking for Christie. The Yard put every available detective in London on the case, combed cheap rooming houses for suspects. In keeping with the strict English law which forbids police or press to use a suspect's name until he is charged, the police did not say whom they might be after. They were, of course, interested in finding John Christie for any light he could shed on the case. This week a bobby arrested him on the street. "It is believed," explained Scotland Yard, "that he may be able to help police in their inquiries."

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