Although he bragged about his sexual conquests, Christie was known to have a very small penis. He found it difficult to fully satisfy women and became impotent at the thought of their rejection. He lost his voice for three years after being struck by a mustard-gas shell during service in the First World War. Psychiatrists believed this to be a hysterical reaction—an embedded fear that manifested itself in a hypochondriacal silence—caused by the horror of the trenches, the half-buried bodies in the sickening mud. Christie could have been the antihero of Wilfred Owen’s ‘The Dead-Beat.’
After leaving the army, Christie worked in an office and, in 1920, married Ethel Simpson Waddington. He used prostitutes to fulfil his sexual fantasies but they often taunted him with his lack of sexual prowess—it may have been on these visits that he lived out his erotic dream of an unconscious, malleable, and uncomplaining woman—who would lie ‘stupid like a cod, heavy like meat.’ Christie worked as a postman in Sheffield during the early years of his marriage but was caught stealing postal orders and sentenced to three years in prison. He returned to the Post Office to work but left after a violent episode.
In 1923, he moved alone to London to look for work but spent nine months in prison for theft. He moved in with a prostitute on his release and was imprisoned for a further six months after assaulting her with a cricket bat. After a further spell in prison for theft, and arrests but no convictions for assaulting women, in 1933, in an attempt to normalize his life, Christie asked his wife to join him in London. After a separation of ten years, Edith soon discovered that life with Christie was anything but normal. After a car accident, which may have been a form of self-assault, Christie’s hypochondria metastasized and he plagued doctors and hospitals with minor and imaginary ailments—malingering.
As World War Two began, Christie somehow managed to sign up as a War Reserve Police volunteer at Harrow Road Police Station, working there for four years. He could live out his fantasies of power and authority, of stalking and voyeurism. Like Fred West, he made a spy-hole in a door to watch sexual activity; like Kürten, he followed and befriended women; like Gein, he became eroticized by bodily trophies. And—like Ted Bundy 30 years later—he became something of a ladies’ man and was once caught and beaten by a jealous husband. Rather than risk a repeat thrashing—his pluck’s all gone—Christie decided to use his new home as his erotic space, his necrotic arena.
An archetypal Foucauldian poweroticist, Christie pretended to be a doctor, a medic, or to have license as a policeman to enact scientific disciplines—and so knowledge and domination—on his subjects (women) who became objects within the medicinal/control unconscious/power sexual act. If ‘sex is placed by power in a binary system: licit and illicit, permitted and forbidden,’[147] then Christie eventualized this binary system as thief/police husband/trick John/john.
In August 1943, with his wife away in Sheffield, Special Constable Christie met Ruth Fuerst in a local pub—the Elgin Arms or the Kensington Park Hotel. Ruth, 21, an Austrian by birth, worked in the James Bartle Western Iron Works on Lancaster Road behind Rillington Place. Ruth may have augmented her wages by working as a prostitute to pay for her single room. She visited Christie whenever his wife left for Sheffield. One night, Christie strangled her during sex claiming—as Fred West would about the death of Lucy Partington 30 years later—that Ruth wanted him to leave his wife for her. In West’s words he strangled her ‘when “she come the loving racket” and was threatening to tell Rose about their affair.’[148] Likewise, Christie—in fear of his wife discovering the affair—strangled Ruth in bed while having pre-, peri-, and post-mortem sex. Afterwards, he used her leopard-print coat to wrap her excrement and urine-stained body and, again like West’s first Cromwell Street murder, placed her under floorboards in the front parlour—West used the bathroom. Christie’s wife and her brother returned later that day unaware of what had occurred. Again, like West, when Christie had the opportunity, he removed the body and hid it in the garden washhouse. Unlike West, Christie’s wife knew nothing of his predilections and interrupted his plans to rebury the corpse. He had to wait until nightfall to dig a suitable hole in the garden, interred the body with a bundle of Ruth’s clothes, and burned other articles belonging to her. Later the next year, while gardening, he unearthed the skull and put it in the rubbish to go to the incinerator.
Christie, Gein, and West invested their ‘deepest and most complicated emotions—all [their] most difficult and disturbing thoughts—not in people, but in things. Places and things’[149]—so 10 Rillington Place, the Plainfield farmhouse, 25 Cromwell Street; Christie’s simulated medical apparatus, Gein’s skinufactured kitchenware and clothing, West’s tools, But whereas Bertrand, Gein, and West claimed to have a hazy recollection of events, Christie’s use of power as erotics caused an inner calm, he wrote in his memoirs, ‘I remember, as I gazed down at the still form of my first victim, experiencing a strange, peaceful thrill.’[150] Killing women by strangulation would be the only way Christie could achieve orgasm.
To his Notting Hill neighbours, Christie and his wife appeared a normal if somewhat private couple, they kept pets and Christie became involved in local sports activities and joined the local choir. But when his wife travelled north, Christie would seek opportunities to kill. After resigning his volunteer commission in the War Reserve Police, Christie started work at Ultra Radio Works in nearby Acton. In the firm’s canteen, he met 32-year-old Muriel Eady. Rather than re-enacting the opportunist lust murder of Ruth Fuerst, Christie carefully planned his next sex killing. With Edith visiting relatives in Sheffield, Christie invited Muriel to 10 Rillington Place in October 1944 in order to ‘cure’ the bronchitis from which she suffered. Muriel had been to tea on a number of occasions with Edith present.[151]
151
For further information on the life and crimes of John Christie, see John Eddowes,