Like West and Gein, Christie feared violent physical confrontation and sought a method to incapacitate his victim. West would knock the women unconscious and then bind them with packing tape, Gein shot his victims and then strung them up. Christie constructed an inhaler, an appliance made from a jar filled with Friar’s Balsam (a non-prescription inhalent), and a cut length of hosepipe leading to the gas supply, the balsam disguised the smell. After a cup of tea, Muriel inhaled the mixture. The coal gas contained 15% carbon monoxide and soon made Muriel dizzy, weakening her enough for Christie to use a stocking to strangle her and had intercourse with her as she died. Afterwards, he carried her body to the washhouse, dug a grave, and buried her in the garden close to the body of Ruth Fuerst. Again, while gardening a little later, he uncovered a femur and—in a manner Fred West would have approved of—he used it to jack up the garden trellis. Like Gein and West, Christie took something from the bodies as a power trophy, a sexual and hierophantic fetish, a means of reliving the erotic and necrotic event, relieving the tension, and re-enlivening his fantasies.
Six years later, on 14 December 1952, Christie killed his wife. While she was asleep, he strangled her with a stocking. After three days, he wrapped her in a blanket and buried her under the floorboard in the front parlour. Later, he would tell police he had killed her as an act of mercy as she asphyxiated in a suicide attempt, driven to it by the new West Indian neighbours. Christie wrote to her relatives explaining that Ethel had been invalided by rheumatism; he told neighbours she had moved back to Sheffield or was living in Birmingham. He pawned her jewellery, sold the furniture, and illegally withdrew funds from her bank account. With his wife dead, Christie’s lust murders increased and intensified.
When caught, Christie—despite his meticulous planning and obsessive-compulsive traits—appeared confused as to the order of the killings. Police and forensic evidence suggest that he killed 25-year-old Rita Nelson soon after the death of his wife. At some point towards the end of January 1953, Christie claimed the six-month pregnant Rita verbally abused him in the street, threatening to go to the police and have him arrested for violence if he did not pay her 30 shillings. He then attested she barged into his house, attempted to assault him with a frying pan, and that he grabbed her and knocked her to the floor. According to Christie (in a similar manner to Bertrand, Gein, and West) he had blacked out and, on regaining consciousness, found that he had strangled her with a rope. He retired for the night. The next morning, he cleaned away the excrement, urine, and blood, and placed the body in a cupboard. The police and Christie’s biographer Ludovic Kennedy theorized that he met her in a local pub. Rita asked him to abort her unwanted child and he invited her back to the house to perform the operation.
A week before he strangled his wife, Christie had met 26-year-old prostitute Kathleen Maloney and had taken pornographic photographs of her and her friend. In February, soon after strangling and raping Rita Nelson, Christie met Kathleen in the San Remo café on Lancaster Road. Again he claimed he had no memory of killing her and that he found the body and stored it in the cupboard next to Rita. He later admitted using a device similar to the gas/balsam inhaler to render her unconscious before strangling and raping her. He appeared to be gaining some epistemological furtherance to the biomechanics of death by placing a diaper under her to soak up the blood, excrement, and urine. Rather than fit her into the cupboard, he left the corpse sitting in a chair and had breakfast with it the next morning before covering the body in a blanket, fitting a pillowcase over the head, and then entombing it in the cupboard under dirt and dust from the garden.
Christie boasted about his medical prowess in the local pubs and cafés, and propositioned a few women promising cures for migraine, asthma, and offering backstreet abortions. On the 6th of March 1953, Christie met 26-year-old Hectorina McLennan, she lived with her boyfriend in an unfurnished flat near to Rillington Place. Christie, being the good neighbour, invited her around for tea. He later admitted to police that he had struggled with her, ripped off her clothes, and she had passed out. But police discovered he had used gas, strangled her, and raped her as she died. Hectorina joined Rita and Kathleen in the cupboard. Both 10 Rillington Place and 25 Cromwell Road became necrophiliac spaces, dead rooms within the living space, similar to Gregor Schenider’s Totes Haus UR (The Dead House), in which rooms are made smaller to incorporate other rooms invisible to the viewer. There are rooms called Last Hole, Totally Insulated Guest Room, The Smallest Wank, Large Wank and Love nest. Crawl spaces are littered with clothing, a deflated sex dolls, magazines. Schneider had started work on Haus UR, the forerunner to The Dead House, in 1985, at a time when the Wests’ Cromwell Road house held similar uncanny and hidden rooms and bodies.
Christie moved out of 10 Rillington Place two weeks later. The new resident discovered the bodies while fixing a bracket to the wall and inadvertently breaking through it. Police later unearthed the bodies of Ruth, Muriel, and Edith in the garden.
Four years earlier, in 1949 they had found another two bodies, those of Beryl Evans and her 13-month-old baby Geraldine, both of whom had been strangled and wrapped in blankets. They had lived in the top floor flat of 10 Rillington Place and Beryl’s husband and Geraldine’s father Timothy Evans had been hanged for their murders on the 9th of March 1950, Christie giving evidence for the prosecution. The autopsy team had found evidence of vaginal bruising and attempts at post-mortem sexual intercourse with Beryl’s body but this was not presented to the court. Commentators disagree on what really happened, and there are various theories as to who murdered Beryl and Geraldine.
Of the six bodies discovered in the house, three had been gassed, strangled and sexually assaulted peri-and/or post-mortem. Two of the bodies found in the garden were identified as the missing persons Ruth Fuerts and Muriel Eady, but their skeletons◦– dispersed around the garden—could offer no more forensic evidence. The remains of Edith Christie showed that she had been strangled but not gassed or sexually assaulted. Charged only with the murder of his wife, the court and jury found John Reginald Halliday Christie guilty of murder. Albert Pierrepoint—the UK’s official executioner—hanged him on July 15 1953. ‘That scum you sent last night soon died. Hooray!’
While searching the house, police discovered a tobacco tin holding a collection of female pubic hair—only one batch matched that found on the bodies in the cupboard. Colin Wilson wrote, ‘John Christie killed girls for sexual purposes—he seems to have been impotent if the woman was conscious—and walled them up in a cupboard in his kitchen. The cupboard is somehow a symbol of this type of crime—the place where skeletons are hidden by people who are anxious to appear normal and respectable.’[152] He went on to argue that, ‘It became clear at the trial that Christie was a necrophile; a woman had to be dead—or at least unconscious—before he could achieve an erection… the crimes were the outcome of the conflict between the craving for ‘primacy’—the desire to be a ‘somebody’—and his total lack of sexual self-confidence.’[153] Christie, Gein, and later West, strived for primacy and privacy, primacy over their sexual objects and privacy from the social. Gein disinterred bodies and then reinterred them in his farmhouse. West buried bodies in small holes dug to snugly fit the de-articulated corpses. Christie abandoned the garden for a cupboard, an ‘intimate space, space that is not open to just anybody.’[154] For Christie, Gein, and West, their confined spaces (drawers, wardrobes, cupboards, etc,) were ‘centers of order that protect(ed) the entire house against uncurbed disorder.’[155] They used these spaces to protect their conscious minds from what they had done. These homicidal necrophiles created arenas in which they could kill without putting themselves at risk. All were inadequate men, cowards, stripped of any empathetic conscience.