How the Rillington Place murders turned Britain into a nation of ghouls

‘You never seem to get a good murder nowadays.’ With this ‘fretful complaint’ George Orwell imagined newspaper readers bemoaning the decline of the classic English murder. Gone were the ‘old domestic poisoning dramas’ – a solicitor or dentist killing his wife in a quiet suburban home – which made the perfect News of the World spread to curl up with after Sunday lunch. In their place was an altogether more brutish type of murder committed by ruthless serial killers.

Orwell was writing in 1946. Seven years later, one of the most notorious serial killers in British criminal history was hanged at Pentonville. His name was John Christie – ‘Reg’ to neighbours at his ground-floor flat in that ‘dingy little Victorian house of doom’, 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill. Christie had killed at least seven women, strangling them and subjecting all but one of them to sexual assault at the point of death, or just afterwards.