On 6 June 1953, four days after the coronation of the young Queen Elizabeth II, the residents of a quiet backstreet in London gave a grand street party with bunting and banners. The kerbstones were painted red, white and blue, and the buildings were draped with 750 Union Jacks. There were singing contests, a fancy-dress parade, a children’s party with jelly and blancmange and gifts for every child. ‘We want to give the kids the best time of their lives,’ said one resident, ‘especially since the bad publicity of this street must have had a terrible effect on their little minds.’ Bad publicity indeed: this street was Rillington Place, where, at number 10, at least seven women and a baby had been murdered. 

Barely a fortnight later, the man suspected of most or all of those murders stood in the dock at the Old Bailey. He was John Reginald Halliday Christie, generally known as ‘Reg’, a balding, bespectacled man, outwardly respectable and to all appearances thoroughly ordinary. His crimes, or some of them, had come to light after he had moved out of the building. Another tenant was putting up a shelf in what had been Christie’s kitchen and discovered that there was a hollow space behind the wall. Pulling back the wallpaper, he was shocked to see, by the light of his torch, ‘the bare back of a human being’. In fact, there were three human beings crammed into the space, all women, all very much dead. More horrific discoveries were to follow.

The story of the murders at 10 Rillington Place has been told many times: in a memorable film starring Richard Attenborough as Christie, in a play by Howard Brenton and in a long shelf of books. Indeed, by the mid-1950s there was already a substantial body of literature devoted to