Friday, April 4, 2014

The Sensational Story of the Christie Case


Found - a sensationalist paperback The Christie Case (Gaywood Press, London circa 1958). A rare non-fiction pulp by Ronald Maxwell - one of the youngest journalists following the case. The book begins:

The Christie case was more than the stories below the headlines for me.It was the story behind the headlines and it took many sleepless nights and long-drawn days to unfold as I followed closely upon the greatest manhunt of modern days, culminating in the final arrest of a man named John Reginald Halliday Christie, in whose flat the partly clothed bodies of four women were found strangled. In the small garden behind the flat, there were uncovered the skeletons of more women, who were still not identified weeks after the discovery.

The story began when a coloured man named Beresford Brown decided to fix the wireless in the kitchen of the ground floor flat at number 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill, London W 11. That was on Tuesday, March 24, 1953. Beresford Brown intended to share the kitchen of the flat – which had recently been vacated by John Christie – with other tenants of this dingy, two storey house. By accident, the man tapped against the wall, and there was a hollow sound. It intrigued him. He tore away a strip of wallpaper and discovered a small hole in the partition which his action had exposed. Through the hole, in the small cavity inside, he saw a woman's leg. Shaken with horror, he looked closer. There, in the dark hollow, he could see well enough to distinguish the outline of a partly clothed body. In his brief glance it up in the fact that there were two bundles behind the body. 

… He ran excitedly into the street in search of the police, it was not difficult to find a constable in this part of the Royal Borough of Kensington... within minutes, the whole apparatus of Scotland Yard been set in motion in motion and the hunt had begun...

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