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And I'm John. And this is Morbid. So, you guys might have noticed that that was not Ash? Not Ash at all.
Not even a little bit. We have John on the podcast today. Hi, everybody. Yeah, it's that John.
Husband John. So, Ash is out this week, very unexpectedly, very quickly. It all happened in like an instant because she has COVID. She's doing fine.
She's doing okay. But I did not think it was really cool of me to be like, all right, sit down and listen to the story and react to me now. So, she's getting the rest that she needs. And, you know, I happen to have this guy just hanging around my house.
I've been asked a couple of hundred times to come on the podcast. And I said, if I come on the podcast, I will ruin the podcast. So, I'm not going to come on the podcast. But Ash had to go and get the COVID.
Get the Rona. Get the Rona. She had to do it. So, here we are.
He was a hero in that moment. Because he's not lying when he's been asked a million times. I'm like, come on. Just come on with me.
Just one. Just one. He's like, no. It's not that I didn't want to come on.
I just figured I probably wouldn't be very good at it. And I don't think I'll be very good at it. So, let's everyone lower your standards a little bit for the next hour or so. It's going to be great.
I know it is. And you don't have to worry because this, you know, it kind of worked out because this is my case today. So, you didn't have to research a crime case today. I've not researched since college.
I feel like I'm in a fourth grade class about to give a geography presentation. I'm very nervous. You're going to do great. And here we go.
Just picture the entire class in their underwear. Right. Because it's just me. No, that works.
Just picture me in my underwear and it'll be fine. Okay. Is it helping? A little bit.
Okay, cool. All right. So, we're going to jump right into it today because I don't want to make John have to speak too much. Yeah, I mean, 75% of the people are now gone.
No way. High to the other 25%. Everybody's here. Everybody's psyched for this.
And this is a gnarly one today. Serial killer. Probably not. It's weird because I think a lot of people don't know the serial killer.
Our UK listeners might know the serial killer better than anyone else will. His name is John Christie. Don't know him. So, not only do we have a serial killer, we have a serial killer named John.
I'm going to have blind reactions because I have no idea what is coming right now. And that's kind of great for this whole thing. That's what we do here. Let's do it.
Let's go. So, we're going to talk about John Reginald Halliday Christie. Again, you don't know him. Don't know him.
A lot of names there. A lot of names. A lot of serial killers have a lot of names. It seems to be kind of the trend.
But he was born in Yorkshire, England. And I always forget whether the UK listeners want me to say Yorkshire or Yorkshire. I think it's Yorkshire. I feel it.
I feel good about it. So, I'm going to go with it. Across the pond. Yeah, hopefully I didn't disappoint you.
He was born on April 8th, 1898 to Ernest John Christie and Mary Hannah Halliday. So, there's where all those names came from. Okay. We got the John, we got the Christie, we got the Halliday.
Don't know where the original came from. I already forgot most of those names. So, we're off to a great start. Don't worry about it.
We can just call him like Jackass from now on. Well, I remember John. It's the other ones I don't remember. Well, he was the sixth of seven children and he was the only boy.
That's rough and also familiar with the household of women. Yeah, John can relate to that part of John, but that's probably where it is, I would say. I don't know. I hope.
Well, we'll see what other similarities there are. Well, his father was very cold, very unavailable, and a harsh disciplinarian. Yikes. Okay.
His mother was a very overprotective mother who was like her only boy, but she was overprotective to like a fault. Okay. Like borderlining on like an Oedipus-y kind of thing. My mom also only had one boy.
That's true. But I love your mom. It stops there. Yeah, I don't think so.
She did good. So I'm going to give that to her. But his sisters, on the other hand, like kind of ate him alive. Half.
Okay. Is this an intervention? It's not an intervention, I promise. So here's where we're going to deviate pretty harshly.
We're going to take like a hairpin turn. Before people I know start coming through the door. Don't worry. This is the hairpin turn coming, right?
Even worse, he started to become sexually frustrated and confused around his many sisters. Okay. That's why we see that hairpin. We're good.
That is beyond a hairpin. So officially, you can sit tight now. We're good. We're good.
It's not about you. I feel way more relaxed. Here we are. So he hated them because of this.
He hated them because they dominated him and they pushed him around. But at the same time, he was like weirdly sexually attracted to them, but couldn't act on it, obviously. Yeah. So this began a long...
Are you just myself in the chair right now? It's uncomfortable already. I got to go. I feel like it's that like Spongebob meme where he's like, all right, I'm going to head out.
I'm going to head out. Yeah. So he was having a time. This began a long life of him being sexually sadistic and absolutely hating women.
And of course, everyone would blame it on his overprotective mother and his quote unquote domineering sisters. But in reality, it's just him being a shithead. Yeah, I would say so. Yeah.
He was unfortunately very smart. He had an IQ of 128. He was a very good student. Wow.
So he was really doing that damn thing at least. But he didn't have many friends and was considered kind of weird. He was at the very least bullied slightly. He was bullied at least.
He had a really large forehead, which comes back later. That's the only reason I'm laughing right now. School kids are just the worst no matter what. Yeah, it's rough.
It's mean. And trust me, I was bullied. I know how it is. But this guy at the end of it, you're like, all right, that's fine.
And the big forehead thing comes back. That's the reason. Okay. It was exceedingly large.
And normally that's not something to bully someone over, of course, but this guy sucks, obviously. Sure. Now, according to this book that I was using to research this, one of the books, it's John Christie, The True Story About the Willington Strangler by Jack Rosewood. At eight years old, John's grandfather passed away.
This was a strange thing because his grandfather was reportedly like a giant dick. He was mean. He was not grandfatherly at all. In fact, John was very afraid of him.
But his parents allowed young John at eight years old to view his grandfather's body at the wake. Normally this would just be like a moment of accepting death, understanding what's going on. But for John, it made him realize that this man couldn't hurt him anymore. And he was not to be feared anymore.
That was the first thing that came to mind. He was like, wow, he's dead. He can't hurt me anymore. So this started his obsession with viewing corpses.
Yeah, he started to hang out around graveyards. Rotten.com. Rotten.com, which that's the thing. It's like if it stopped there, if it was just because we all went on rotten.com, we've talked about it so many times on the podcast.
I'm like, where's my rotten.com? Like we all did that. We were all morbidly curious. Of course.
But this started a whole thing where you'd hang around graveyards and actually tried to peek into broken crypts, which like again, we got to just like take something into our computer and look at it and then click it and be gone. Exactly. Which is like, wow, how desensitized. That's a lot of effort for him to go and find some corpses.
And hanging around a graveyard and being like interested in it, I get, because like I love graveyards. I find them like weirdly calming. He's still like eight years old at this point. He's eight.
So that's like a different thing. It's a red flag. I would say so. It's like a very, very deep maroon flag.
And according to the book, he was especially drawn to the crypts that contained children. Oh my goodness. Yeah. All of this made him happy.
It made him calm. This is a bad connection to make to death and corpses, I would say, at a very young age. I don't think that corpses and death should make you like go screaming and running. Like that's probably an unhealthy way to look at it, but like they shouldn't really make you happy at eight years old.
I mean, I'd rather have my eight year old scream and run. Yeah. I feel like that's better. I'd be like, oh, dive into more.
Yeah. Like this makes me calm. I don't know about that. As you wind down this evening, let number seven prime forever serum be your secret to aging at the speed of a glacier, helping to pause the visible signs of skin aging.
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It's been busy with work. It's been busy with family. The kids are in summer camps. They're doing sports.
We're running here. We're running there. We got doctor's appointments. We got all kinds of stuff.
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So he was doing, like, you know, very natural, like, normal things to do as a young child. He joined the Boy Scouts. He eventually became a Scoutmaster. And he became a Scoutmaster, like, really early, I guess, like, earlier than you normally do.
Okay. But he really liked the power that came from that and the power of the uniform and all that. And I was thinking about it. You were a Boy Scout.
I was. Were your Scoutmasters power-hungry, to your knowledge? No. No?
Well, Scoutmasters, so there was kids that were Scoutmasters? Yeah, maybe I'm using the wrong term. They were, like, the lead. They were, like...
I don't know if I made it that far into Boy Scouts. Yeah, I'm probably using the wrong term. Our, like, leaders were just, like, parents of the kids. Okay, that makes sense.
And my mom was actually a leader of one of our Boy Scout groups. She later told me that it just made the house smell like dirt and farts. Yeah, she told me that, too. Because it was just, like, piling in 15 boys that are, like, 10 years old.
Your poor mom. She was a trooper, man. She's a saint. It really is.
I don't remember kids being leaders. My memory's also terrible. That might have happened, or... I'm probably just wrong.
I mean, probably... It was also, like, 100 years ago in England, so it could just be a different... Yeah, it could just be different. So maybe it's, like, the higher-ranking Scout that has, like, some kind of authority over the other Scouts.
Right. Almost like a camp counselor. Yeah, yeah, I get it. I think that's essentially what he became, and I think he got, like, a newer uniform because of it, and he was like, ooh-hoo, check me out.
Right. So this need for power probably came from the relentless bullying he was enduring. Sure. He was teased, as he got, like we said, he was teased about, like, the big forehead situation, and then as he got older, he got teased about the fact that he was, what they said was he was impotent.
Okay. Now, he could not complete sexual acts, and apparently word got around, and it was just, like, a feeding frenzy of people being like, oh, my God, you can't, like... And it said it was when he was, like, 15 and 16, which I was like, whoa, can everybody step back for a second? You're children.
I don't know. I feel like that's pretty young to be making fun of, like, people's sexual prowess. Yeah. I don't know.
Maybe that's just me. No, I'm there. I'm there. I'm with you.
Now, this kind of bullying, the inadequacy he was feeling about the impotence, and the fact that he was raised by a very overprotective mother, any cold, neglectful father, definitely created some other issues in his life and in his mind. He was a severe hypochondriac, for one. He was constantly inventing ailments and insisting that he had every little thing that came around. He was doing it for attention.
It was all attention-grabbing. He was looking for people to fawn over him and pay attention to him. He thought people would pity him if he had things like random diseases. Emotional manipulation made him feel powerful, and it allowed him to become the victim on the outside, but remain the power player on the inside.
Yeah, and kind of take the spotlight off of his other problems that were... Exactly. ...causing at least rumors or worse in town. And by all accounts, he was not a problem in the military, he didn't have any black spots on his record, he was not dishonorably discharged or anything, no disciplinary actions, but when he came home, and it seemed like it was pretty uneventful, like he just went through it, he came back, but when he came home, he had this harrowing tale that surprised everyone.
He told his friends and family that he had been involved in a traumatizing mustard gas attack, which was a thing, obviously, that happened. Many soldiers came back with PTSD from it and tons of issues, but he said he had been blinded from it. Okay. But like, he could see.
Right. Like, later he can see. Yeah, just an odd thing that, even if it did happen, because why would you believe otherwise? Yeah.
To have that as a side effect, that could pretty easily be disproven. That's the thing. And he also said he could only, he had what they called, they actually documented it as hysterical muteness, because he could only speak to a whisper. Yeah.
And it lasted, this hysterical muteness that they documented this as, it lasted three fucking years. I mean, war is crazy, man. I would not know that that could happen to somebody coming back from that type of experience. And who knows, like you're saying, maybe physically, this was not like he wasn't physically blinded in a clinical term.
Right. But there is like a thing called hysterical blindness, that when you go through trauma, it can happen. Right. So maybe it happened, who knows?
The blindness was never confirmed to be or documented to be clinically true, but I wouldn't say that it's something that could have happened. Absolutely. But people around him at the time believed this was all for attention, because they said it very much lined up with who he was. But again, World War I.
Yeah. Like, I know that this story's going to turn, and I'm not going to want to defend this person. No, you're definitely not. But right now, he's just coming back from war.
Yeah. Defending the country, or helping allies. Like, it's just, why are we not giving him the benefit of the doubt right now? Yeah.
And you know what? Later, you'll find out why. No, I know. But right now, he's only guilty of being excited around courses.
Exactly. Exactly. And see, this is why it's good that you don't know the story, because you're going to hear it exactly how it needs to be heard, which is like, what is wrong here? And then you're like, oh.
At this moment in time, I'm okay with John. You're okay with John. All right. I can't wait until we get a little further into this.
So here we go. May 10th, 1920. So we're in the 20s. The Roaring 20s.
Here we go. He married a woman named Ethel Simpson Waddington. Of course he did. Yeah, Ethel, you know.
So this marriage went sour from the start. Okay. For one, he was impotent, which is not like, you know, people get through that. But he hadn't been forthcoming with this information before marrying Ethel.
He's a bad husband. And remember, he has not been in trouble thus far with the law. Correct. He has not been like a petty thief, which we see in a lot of these things.
Usually we see when, like, you know, when they turn into something like he turned into. You see, like, in his youth, he would, like, steal shit. He would get in trouble in school. Sure.
All these little things that sometimes don't have us. Yeah, exactly. He didn't really have any of that in his background. So he marries Ethel.
He's kind of a shitty husband. I didn't find anything that was documented that he, like, physically abused her or anything. But who knows? When you find out who he is, you're like, that probably happened.
So he just wasn't good at being a husband? He was just shitty. It's hard to believe that he was probably physically abusing her, too, and it probably just isn't documented. Right.
Because why would it be in the 20s? Sure. So during the marriage, he got a job as a postman. But he couldn't just hold down a job without doing some shit to gain negative attention because he is an attention person.
So he began stealing out of nowhere. Just began stealing packages and began stealing, like, the money from the postage. He was caught really quickly. And as a result, he went to prison for three months because of this.
Wow. Yeah. During this time, Ethel had a miscarriage, too. So this was not a great time in that marriage.
Yeah, this is... And again, we don't know what happened there. It's going downhill very quickly. It's going to go really downhill really quickly.
I don't know why I was expecting this anywhere else. Sorry I didn't fill you in on what the podcast is about. Yeah, what is this about again? Yeah, this is called Morbid.
Oh, okay. It's not going to be a happy ending. So two years later, he also got probation for something violent that we don't have the details about, but it involved money and theft, and there was some kind of violence involved. Okay.
So he got probation for that. He served 12 months probation, and he followed this up with two more larceny charges and nine more months of prison time. So suddenly, he's, like, just stacking up that prison time. Yeah.
This is around the time when he left his wife, Ethel, just up in the locker. And then he moved to London by himself. At this point, he's 29 years old, and he's back in prison for theft for nine months. Then he moves in with a woman named Maude, and he goes back to prison for six months.
And this time, he got hard labor. He was sentenced to hard labor for assaulting her. Oh, man. This is why I believe that.
Even though we don't have, I can find actual documented things that said that he heard Ethel. I am sure he heard Ethel. Yeah, what are the chances that this was the first time he did that? Exactly.
And also, he didn't just assault her. He beat her in the head with a cricket bat. And then he was charged with grievous bodily harm, and he claimed he was only testing out the bat. Why?
Tested playing cricket? Yeah, that's why. What kind of... You just come out and are like, officers.
I was testing out the bat. I don't see what the problem is. Like, what? You think they're going to be like, oh, good sir.
I'm sorry. Yeah, it's like, how's the bat? Would you recommend I get one? Exactly.
It's like, you beat your wife over the head with it, you evil fuck. My God. So in 1933, he stole a priest's car, which is very odd. Apparently, they were kind of friends, and he stole his car.
And he got three more months in prison. This guy is just not afraid of prison. Yeah, he's just like, he's spending summers in prison at this point. Especially after the hard labor stint.
That's what I'm saying, too. I figured they were like, dude, all right, like, it seems like you like prison. Yeah. Let's turn it up a notch.
Let's make it not a great place for you. And he's like, ah, just bring it on. Yeah, he's loving it. No one's seeing a pattern here or thinking maybe they should tack on some fucking years to these sentences.
Like, they're just like, yeah, it seems like he's on a great path, I guess. Like, maybe, so no one's looking at these past charges back to back to back to back and be like, I think we need to keep him in here longer. Right. Like, just to see.
So in the same year, 1933, he suddenly asked Ethel to move to London and take him back. Now she agreed, and she moved back in with him. Oh, Ethel. I know, poor Ethel.
Now, John and Ethel lived at 10 Rillington Place. And in 1937, they were still married, but he was now visiting sex workers. He was still cheating on her. And after all, you know, he was having these violent sexual urges, too, which no one knew about.
And Ethel was not complying with what he needed. And he was abusing these poor sex workers. And then he would just come home to his wife. So, like, he's a literal monster.
And at this point, his sexual proclivities were getting darker. He was becoming interested in necrophilia. Oh, yeah. And he would force sex workers to play dead.
Sure. Yeah. So he's, at this point, he's having this, he's probably, he's still being a shitty husband. He's doing all this shit to get in trouble with the law.
And he also has this totally other separate life where he's, like, violently abusing sex workers by his wife's back. Now, in 1939, he enlisted in World War II. Okay. Now, he was given the job of a war reserve police officer.
Okay. And that's wild, considering he had been in prison every other month for the past few years before that. I'm not really sure what happened here. Desperate times call for desperate measures, I guess.
I guess so. For four years, he worked as constable. And this is when shit gets really dark. He started using his power as a police officer to stalk women, basically.
He would follow them, take diligent, really creepy notes about their every move, their appearances, document what they were doing, where they were, when he could find them, when they were alone. Later, they found a ton of these in his home, and it was horrific. He was basically in trolling mode, which is what BTK used to call it. Now, he also had an affair with a married woman at this point, while he was married to Ethel.
This was when he was working at the police station, and her husband eventually caught them and beat the shit out of him. Good. Yeah. It's like, that's a yay.
That is fabulous. We finally have a positive here. He abruptly resigned from this job in 1943 and took another job as a clerk at the radio factory, which is, like, a very different kind of situation. There's nothing that says why he resigned, but maybe it was getting the shit beat out of him by a random husband, and he was like, maybe I should take this down a notch.
I don't know. This is when he began telling people that his time in the military had given him the medical knowledge to perform abortions. Oh, my God. Which was illegal in the UK at this time.
So, this is when we bring his first victim into play. This was 1943. Her name was Ruth Fierst. She was 21 years old.
She was Austrian. She was working on the side as a sex worker at the time, but was also working at a munitions factory, which is, like, military weapons. John Christie claimed they met at a pub, and he said he brought her home to the house he shared with Ethel, by the way. She was out at the time.
And he said he strangled her during sex. He said he first put her body under the fucking floorboards in their home, but later he moved her and buried her body in the garden in the backyard. Now, this one, he claimed, was not planned, very impulsive. Now, of course, with John, this excited him.
And so he planned his next one immediately. Because although this was impulsive, he's now excited about it. Yeah. So, his second victim occurred on November 8th, 1944.
Her name was Muriel Amelia Eadie. She was his co-worker at the radio factory, actually. She was 32 years old, and she was constantly suffering from chest infections and bronchitis. So, he used this because he liked to prey on people.
Like, he would find anybody's weakness and prey on it. And he told her he could help her feel better. He was like, oh, my God, I happen to have this homemade cure for bronchitis and chest infections. So, he brought her back to his empty home, because Ethel was out again, and he gave her what he was like, nebulizer treatment, essentially.
Right. He had a tube that was connected to a jar, and it was connected to her mouth, and then there was another tube that was behind her. This tube behind her was hooked up to a gas line. Oh, I knew that was coming.
Yeah. So, she unknowingly inhaled carbon monoxide. So, she passed out because he just poisoned her. And once she was out, he strangled her and raped her at the same time.
Okay. Yeah. She died while this was happening. I would like to just officially get off the seesaw and get off of the John train.
I had a feeling, like, get out of there really quick. It's not a great place to be. That is just very difficult to hear. Yeah.
He's a really bad one. So, he buried her in the same garden as Ruth. Now, 1948, this is when he met Beryl Evans. Now, she and her husband found out that she was pregnant with their second child, and they were unable to care for another baby.
They already had one daughter, a baby named Geraldine, and they weren't really even able to care for Geraldine. They were very, their finances were very strained. They had a very tumultuous relationship. They were not in any position to have one child.
Okay. They fought constantly. There had been infidelity. The entire situation was a mess.
So, Beryl was panicked about another child, and she was looking to terminate the pregnancy. They happened to live in the flat above John Christie and Ethel. So, she told them about her issue one day. She just happened to be talking to them, and she was like, I don't know what to do.
And John told her, well, I can help you. I can help you procure this abortion if you need it. So, November 8th, 1948, Timothy, her husband, came home to find his wife and child not at home. So, he asked his neighbors if they had seen them, and John told him that he, he was like, you know what, Beryl had come to me.
She came to terminate the pregnancy, but because she had tried several at-home methods before this, because she had, she had tried to terminate the pregnancy herself at home. Okay. He said, because she had done that, she went septic, and she died during the procedure I tried to do. Timothy had a very low IQ of only 70.
He accepted this as fact. He prayed on them mainly because of that. He knew that he was going to take whatever he told him, and he was just going to go with it. Oh, man.
And he convinced him to not press charges, because he told him it wasn't his fault. It was an accident. I was trying to help her. She was the one who did this.
It wasn't me. So, and he told him, you know what, well, you go, why don't you go to your parents' house, go live with your parents for a little while, grieve, figure out what's going to happen. I have this loving couple who's going to take care of baby Geraldine for you. Oh, no.
Yeah. But Timothy's family, when he went back to them, were very confused by all this. And rightfully so. Of course.
This is a strange story to tell. His mother, especially, was not buying this casual medical malpractice that he was selling. So she was like, wait, what happened now? Like, tell me the story again.
He went over it again with her in more detail, explaining exactly how John had told him Beryl died. And she was like, no. Like, we just request maybe some police presence there. Yeah.
Even if this is how that happened, why are we just going with it? Yeah. Why are we just taking your word for it? We need a third party here.
Exactly. So she convinced him to report it, and they did report what happened on November 30th. Now, Timothy thought that John had honestly tried to help them. Like, he fully convinced him.
Like, he was just trying to help us. He had our best interest in mind. So he felt like a weird loyalty to him. So he told the police that it was him, that he had given Beryl abortion pills and accidentally killed her himself.
Oh, no. He told them he hid her body in a sewer drain because he was scared. Wait, what? Yes.
But when they went to look, they didn't find her because he didn't do that. Why would he do that? He still has a daughter. I know.
So I think it's like him just panicking, I guess, and not knowing. And if, you know, he thought this guy was doing him a favor, he's trying to take it off him a little bit. He has a weird loyalty. There's a lot here to it, for sure.
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So they go, they look. They don't find your body where he says it's going to be. So they come back and they're like, we're not really convinced that this is the real story. So like, can you tell us the truth?
And he broke down and told them about John Christie. So he was like, that wasn't the real story. Actually, this was the real story. So they're like, okay.
So December 2nd, 1949, they searched Burlington Place because they're like, if it was John Christie, we have to go search this apartment. And after using a piece of metal, so like Ethel came out and was like, hello, officers. She gave them a piece of metal to use to pry open the shed in the back garden because they couldn't get it open. So she was like offering them like, sure.
I mean, she doesn't know there's two women buried in the garden. Exactly. So she's like, sure. Well, when they did this, the smell was unbelievable.
I could only imagine. And this isn't even what you're thinking. This is, so they're smelling decomposition immediately. And there, they found in the shed, the bodies of Beryl and baby Geraldine.
Oh, no. When they found them, Beryl was wrapped in a tablecloth. Oh, where did you get me into? I know, I'm sorry.
I could just be like watching Stranger Things and just in my own world right now. I know. I brought you into this. You dragged me up here.
I apologize. I love you. I thought you and Ash did like fun podcasts or something. I'm not a listener, so I don't really know what you guys do.
Well, you're wearing a weirdo shirt right now. I know. Isn't it weird that I'm actually wearing a weirdo shirt? I put this on not knowing I was going to be doing this tonight.
I guess that's the podcast, right? But yeah, here I am. Yeah, here we are. This is a rough one.
I know. We're doing this right before bed, too. I know. It's like great timing.
Yeah. I actually don't listen to the podcast after a certain time for that reason. And some people listen to it to fall asleep. I know.
I know. And congratulations to them. But if it hits about six o'clock, I'm out. Yeah, I get it.
No offense. It just messes up my dreams. Honestly, we don't like to record it at night because of that, too. So it's an experience for both of us.
Yeah, all right. This will be the one night that our youngest sleeps. Yeah, exactly. She's been up all night for multiple nights in a row, but she'll just sleep like a baby tonight, and I'll just be staring at the ceiling with my eyes wide open.
Just thinking about John Grisky. Just wondering why you couldn't do like a fun little podcast about fried dough or something. Fried dough. What a great podcast.
Fried dough. i haven't had it in a long time i know this is our podcast about fried dough i mean there's podcasts about everything i don't know if you know that i bet if we look although probably not a fried dough podcast i don't know if we look hard enough we might be able to find one would you listen email in do you want to hear a john's fried dough podcast hey if you want to hear it let's do it let's go if we can eat fried dough while doing it i'm down uh so you know back to this let's get back on track let's go back to this terrible terrible thing so when they found barrel she was wrapped in a tablecloth she was bound the tablecloth was bound with cording and she was initially hidden under the sink oh my goodness and there was wood planks that were like leaned up against the sink kind of hiding her yeah when they found baby geraldine on the other side of the room she still had a man's necktie wrapped around her god yeah i know i'm sorry for that um they didn't know it yet but on november 8th 1948 john christie had knocked a barrel out using his famous gas and he had raped her and strangled her at the same time which would become his mo and she died during this process um but police were honing in on timothy at this point for obvious reasons he's the spouse he had already lied it doesn't making that impossible decision yeah and then it led to all of this just heartbreaking and it gets more heartbreaking with the timothy story it really does uh and he had changed his story a few times at this point so they were really honing in on him because they remind me again they already have a daughter right that's geraldine oh geraldine okay i wasn't sure if that was like the unborn baby now this poor guy so he doesn't have a daughter anymore no now after the first story he told he said he killed so this is after that first story he told he then went back and said he killed beryl because of financial issues they were strained and they got a fight and that's the way it happened this confession happened but what we don't know is what led to this confession we don't know how he got here right because he went from i did it it was an accident i gave her these abortion pills and they killed her i hit her in the sewer drain they're like no you didn't sure and then he went and said you know what john christie did it he admitted to me then when they found the bodies suddenly it turned into i killed her because financial reasons yeah now we don't know what led to this confession a lot of people have a lot of feelings what might have led to this confession remember he had an iq of 70 and he had told the police john christie was the one who did it why now is he suddenly claiming responsibility coerced maybe sure possibly now there's also a lot of police misconduct that we find out later in this case that might make you think about it a little more shocking now christie was questioned and he denied everything which is wild to me because i'm like um it's in the shed but okay right now this was i will say this garden area was a communal area so i think it allowed them to be like well maybe this is okay the shed too maybe he can use it now he also made ethel lie for him so ethel kind of gave him an alibi that wasn't okay but she told police she and she also told police she was like i went into that laundry shed every day multiple times a day but somehow i never smelled anything which they were like i don't know about that how big is this laundry shed it's just like a little shed like a little garden do you think this was like a holding place he was eventually going to bury them in the garden or possibly possibly because he does he's really messy with this stuff and it just doesn't make sense that ethel would have been in and out of that garden shed and maybe that's just part of the alibi when i wonder that's the thing i wonder she was lying for him because she was like well if he did this to them he could do it to me and i'm right and it's not like at this time she was gonna get a lot of help if she told anybody she's already willing to lie about where he was why not just take it a step further and say i go in there all the time like the bodies aren't there yeah so i think she was really trying to save herself here which i you know it's a hard decision to have to make now the police believed this they're like okay sure yeah you didn't smell it so they put timothy on trial so timothy's trial was at old bailey which i've had a lot of cases that have had trials at old bailey lately i don't know what it is maybe it's like bailey who's telling me like cases to do i don't know she just wants her name on the podcast she's like she's like i'm a legend so timothy was charged with murder only for barrel at the time because that was the only one who he had confessed to had killed so initially he was that was what they were gonna charge him with it's very strange yeah i mean they found together what are we doing but trials at old bailey could take like hours like literally it's a very different kind of situation there um but yeah so as soon as the charges went through he suddenly recanted the entire thing his confession that he gave that he killed her for financial reasons he recanted it as soon as the charges went through didn't see that coming and suddenly i figured he just was like what else do i have to live for like might as well just throw me away yes which i couldn't say i would blame him right i mean you just lost everything but no he recanted it and he said it was a coerced confession that it wasn't given you know and by any wholesome means and he said no john chrissy did it he admitted that's the story that really happened no one believed him so the trial continued and he went to trial january 11th 1950 and they changed it and they only put him on trial for the murder of geraldine now now i know you're like wait what like he confessed to barrel right but they said the baby's murder was so specifically horrendous because it's a baby that they wanted to put him behind bars for it they're like this is the one we want to put him away for like who cares about barrel right like let's only worry about this if he had confessed to murdering barrel then they believe that he had definitely killed geraldine as well it's not like somebody else killed geraldine and he had to kill barrel i would agree with that so they also were worried that if they only went after him for barrel it could be argued that these two fought a lot and maybe she had provoked him into killing her this is an actual thought process yeah but obviously a baby can't knowingly provoke anyone into murdering them there's no words i really had no idea what to say there it's it's wild like the thought process back then especially when it came to women was like a real wild situation it was just like yes this woman probably just provoked him into murdering her but the baby couldn't have done that so let's that's a surefire one now christy was a star witness for the prosecution john christy the man that timothy had said actually murdered barrel like what something tells me he was like really good in his testimony yeah he was a great witness and the prosecution was led by a man named christmas humphreys love it yep uh they literally had the man who timothy had said multiple times was the real killer as the fucking star witness they had him narrate the entire thing they're like tell us what happened john and he was like well sit down everybody i can tell you now ethel was also put on the stand and even though she had told police that she'd gone into that laundry shed a few times a few million times and never noticed that smell now on the stand under oath she testified she never went into that laundry shed not even once boom not even once this was never brought up so this happened she was like no i never went in there the fact that on record she said she went in there a million times and never smelled it it was never brought up that those are two very conflicting statements yeah so they just they knew what they wanted and they were just plowing straight ahead yep that's exactly what it was and it's like that's a perfect example of it because it's like it's well documented what she said in that police report she gave an interview she said something completely different than what she said on the stand and not that's not ethel's fault it's just she i think she was abused i think she was scared when she gave that initial statement and then she probably realized i'm sitting under oath i have to be truthful yeah no that all makes sense i can't imagine john is sitting there very politely asking for an alibi and this is how we're going to do things exactly i'm sure he was very threatening and scary in that moment yeah and she felt like she didn't have another can't blame her at all but the fact that they just gloss over it is inexcusable yeah and i do wonder too like because when you read about ethel and you're like i feel like she wanted to get out of there she wanted to help but she just didn't know how and i wonder if she did that under oath to make it something that they should have latched on to like she was and there's witnesses and there's people of the law there maybe she just felt a little more confident to say something it sounds like she might have been an abused yeah i think she was individual yeah so so i think she was trying i think it was kind of a call for help on the stand yeah absolutely no one helped her so timothy was represented by freeborough stack or free excuse me freeborough slack and company that was the name of the law firm sweet uh and they sucked in case you were wondering they slacked how slack did on this whole thing slack was very right they didn't look into john christie at all didn't look at his background didn't look at anything they just assumed timothy was guilty his own representation and they just like went about it like he was they were like let's just like go through the motions this guy's guilty i don't know what to tell you i mean you know there's less work now apparently another witness that was brought onto the stand was a carpenter or like um a contractor that did work at the flats the related place um he was the one who actually pulled certainly he pulled like wood out of the floor and like replaced it and he had actually pulled the wood that was used to hide barrels oh yeah he had pulled that wood up so they brought him on the stand to talk about like the kind of wood when he was there you know we need dates we just want to know when this wood was pulled up so we can tell whether she was there at this certain time or not sure he couldn't get dates right and just went with whatever the police told him to say he was like oh that date matches okay sure that one then he said he had not taken the wood out of the floors on the 11th but literally receipts showed that he had not done it until after the 14th which was long after the murders so that means john went into that shed after the murders before the bodies were found oh boy so it all just pointed to john still even when they were trying to fuck it up weirdly that one piece of evidence the timesheet that showed this work and when it was done was lost from evidence oh man what are the chances they just couldn't find it so weird it's so weird when very vital and like case changing evidence just disappears yeah evidence that would just make you start your investigation from scratch yeah it's so weird it happens um it happens sometimes and it's a very strange phenomenon it's just a coincidence it's very weird now john chrissy's appearance on the stand just charmed the jury he charmed the pants off of him he was a great actor out there the judge literally presented this to the jury when he was like okay now go deliberate he presented it like timothy was guilty before they were even sent to prison he was like go deliberate like don't take too long man this man this murderous man go tell us whether he's guilty or not your choices are murder or murder guilty or guilty now they only took 40 minutes to deliberate um timothy evans was found guilty and he maintained his innocence to the very end he appealed but he lost oh no he was hanged on march 9th 1950 oh and when was the trial again the trial was january 11th 1950 oh so it was a quick process very quick and that happened back then especially at old bailey and just in that time period yeah it's not like nowadays very quick turnaround so like when you were sentenced to when you were hanged was like boom boom it was weeks oh man yeah we'll get back to that because his family did get some kind of like a little bit of justice for him i'd say okay so december 6th 1952 john resigned from the radio factory december 14th 1952 ethel disappeared oh yep can't say i'm shocked unfortunately no unfortunately now what we find out is that john had strangled her while she was in bed sleeping this guy is strangling what is going on he really is then he hid her under the floorboards at their house he literally buried her under the floorboards in the living room of their house he sold her wedding ring for money immediately after yeah now neighbors began complaining about strong bad odors coming from the property so he started using really strong cleaning fluids and just being like yeah i don't know it's so weird pretty strong yeah so everybody's like all you would smell is like decomp and bleach like coming from that house but nobody no red flag there none now january 26th 1953 he forged ethel's signature on documents to completely empty the money out of her bank account yeah yeah just thinking about the beginning of this podcast i'm like oh so far so good yeah you're like i don't know john doesn't seem like he's a bad guy yeah he's a bad guy but he wouldn't have been the only person so many people thought he wasn't a bad guy and then and it seemed like for most of his like youth life he wasn't a bad guy or he wasn't showing it at least it really all of a sudden just like happened he just went wild so no one's looking for ethel well that's a perfect perfect little segue because people were looking for ethel they were like where is she ethel must have some friends there she does a lot of the neighbors like co-workers maybe yeah like people loved ethel so people were asking where she was and john would just tell people that she either moved he would tell varying stories she either moved back home or she was visiting relatives which he did often so that was an easy one for him to say because that's why he was allowed he was able to get women back to his home because she was gone a lot visiting relatives so he told relatives of hers he couldn't tell them that she was visiting relatives he told them that she was very sick and she couldn't even gather the strength to speak or write to them yeah yep now we come to his sixth victim at this point this was rita nelson who was a 25 year old from ireland she was blonde she was gorgeous she was very sweet she was an artist she just seemed like a cool lady she was pregnant and the father had come on alina yeah i'm sorry i know she was heavy i know it i told you i told you this is a very heavy one i told you this i don't know if you said it was this heavy i mean i don't know how to accurately convey the heavy the heavy level of it down with unborn children it's it's bad yeah it's a bad one it is he's a bad guy but she was depressed and she was wanting to terminate the pregnancy because she couldn't care for this child by herself but she didn't know what to do now january 19th 1953 she had come to london to visit her sister and they were out at a pub they're talking about you know like what's going on in her life when she met john chrissy he was sitting at the bar and he heard her talking about her pregnancy and the issues surrounding it and he told her he could help her terminate the pregnancy safely so he brought her back to his home the gas knocked her out and he raped her while strangling her to death my god this is just it gets worse is there maybe like a child is waking up i need to attend to or is the doorbell ringing it's not i did not order food at like midnight no i did not now he left her dead body on the floor with the cord still around her neck and went to bed what is going on i feel so uncomfortable i know i apologize i get it now yeah i wasn't gonna make that my uber's hair joke but i get it now i need to leave yeah the vicinity immediately see you're so uncomfortable you have you have the ash vibes right now usually this is where ash is like oh man i'm out i just can't i can't handle yeah the pregnant i can't handle the pregnant i can't handle the sexual violence yeah it's just too much it is it really this is a really bad guy i just want to this is a really bad guy he's a really really awful person yeah he's a dick you can say it he's a fucking asshole you can say anything you want trust me part of the part of it is that we roasted these motherfuckers no he actually slept while her body was laying on the kitchen floor like went to bed when he woke up in the morning he figured he couldn't use the garden anymore because people were probably gonna wonder why he got digging holes in the garden and the floorboards were taken out by ethel because he put ethel in the floorboards so he hid her body behind a cupboard in the kitchen where there was a pantry wow he had put a cloth around her head and tied the cord around it and placed her upside down in a pantry behind a cupboard i mean at this point i can only imagine the only people coming into his home are potential victims he's not like having a poker night with his friends or something no i don't see that at all february 1953 he meets kathleen maloney she's 26 years old she's a mother of five with a troubled childhood uh they knew each other because she was a sex worker and he had actually been involved with a friend of hers at one point she'd been around him several times and she'd not been harmed so she was probably trusting him At least slightly. She had seen him around her friend. She wasn't worried.
Her friend wasn't worried. He met her in a Notting Hill pub and told her he had a flat to rent. And she was looking for somewhere to rent. So he was like, oh, do you want to come see it?
She was psyched. Don't go see it. And she went back with him. Now, she had been drinking a little, so he used the gas on her immediately because he was able to take control pretty quickly.
Then he put a rope around her neck and he raped her while strangling her to death. Like Rita before her, he left her in the kitchen overnight while he slept. But he propped her up in a kitchen chair. Oh, this coward.
Yeah, he truly is. And the next morning, she was hidden in the pantry behind the cupboard with a pillowcase around her head. Apparently, according to the book, he had also thrown dirt and ash on her, which he hadn't done to any of the other ones. We're not sure what the symbolism was there or why he did that.
But he was not done. Where's the family members of these people? Are these people being reported missing? Some of them are.
A lot of them are. And then some of them were kind of like distanced from their family because they were doing sex work. And especially at that time, it was something that I'm sure a lot of family members were pulling away from them because he preyed on people who he knew he wouldn't have a lot of trouble hiding them. At this point, I'm just hoping his house isn't very big and he runs out of real estate.
Honestly, because it doesn't seem like anyone else is going to stop him at this point. No, no. The next victim was 26-year-old Hectorina McLennan. She was homeless.
So he's preying on people who are in bad states here. She and her boyfriend, Alex, were desperate just for somewhere to stay or even just even for a night. And John prayed on this. They'd run into John at a pub and it took a few times of seeing him at a pub, talking to him.
Finally, he asked, you know, do you want to stay with me while you're looking for a place? And they were so thankful and they agreed. Don't mind that smell. Yeah, well, that's the thing.
But they get there and they were like, what the fuck? Because John's place was also disgusting. It was dirty. The smell was unable to be.
I can only imagine it wasn't this wonderful home to go into. They left after a couple of days. They're like, no. Now you think, OK, good.